Joe Mullin has a piece up at Ars Technica about Edward Snowden’s more politically charged IRC chats under the alias
haha did you see ron paul at the latest bailout hearings
he brought up the gold standard
He’s so dramy.
asked if there had been any discussion about that
Got a link?
no
Ahh gold standard.. it’ll never happen, harder to manipulate.
That’s kind of a selling point.
No it’s not
hahahahhahaah you actually like the gold standard you dumb baby
I suppose if you’re a fan of runaway inflation and leverage
In another conversation, Snowden expressed complacency about the idea of Depression levels of unemployment writing “Almost everyone was self-employed prior to 1900. Why is 12% empoyment so terrifying?”
The answer, in case you’re wondering, is that the modern-day economy does not allow for a large share of the population to be employed in small-scale agriculture. But Snowden’s willingness to admit that his general approach would leave the government unable to respond effectively to otherwise remediable episodes of mass unemployment is refreshing. I note that as ever with the goldbug people there’s a resort to the unsubstantiated argument that metal-based currency would be systematically less inflationary than U.S. dollars. There is simply no reason to believe this. The price of gold has declined about 35 percent since its peak in late 2011, which would have meant enormous inflation in a gold-backed economy. The difference is whether inflationary or disinflationary episodes are going to be a matter of public policy or a matter of random chance driven by global gold discoveries and various sources of demand.
