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Morality of using gold and silver as money

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Freedom4Me73986 Posted: Wed, Jun 22 2011 9:56 PM

Is it more moral to use gold and silver as money than it is to use paper? I believe fiat currency is immoral and anti-philosophical. How would you make a moral case for gold as opposed to an efficiency case?

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Gman1944 replied on Wed, Jun 22 2011 11:09 PM

Gold's been the choice of money by the market time and again throughout history, i.e. It's proven to be the most marketable commodity and so has been chosen as a common medium of exchange by freely acting people.  To not allow a society to use the money it would have otherwise chosen, but rather imposing on them a fiat currency, it denies your economic freedom, and therein your freedom period.

Also, the institution of a fiat currency allows those in charge of the money supply to manipulate the value of money and enables them to plan the economy, lowering the standards of living of all the people in the society, and in the case of the US dollar, the world.
 

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Merlin replied on Thu, Jun 23 2011 3:48 AM

The only moral argument I can think of in monetary matters is the abolition of legal tender laws. I relay can’t see how one could advocate gold on moral grounds, though it’s easy to advocate freedom to use whatever one likes on moral grounds.

The Regression theorem is a memetic equivalent of the Theory of Evolution. To say that the former precludes the free emergence of fiat currencies makes no more sense that to hold that the latter precludes the natural emergence of multicellular organisms.
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J.R.M. replied on Fri, Jun 24 2011 6:12 PM

As Merlin said, you can make a moral case for abolition of legal tender laws, but gold is just a metal.  There is nothing more moral about it than paper.  In fact if freely acting individuals decided that paper money was their exchange medium of choice, it would be immoral to try to force gold on them.

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