Foreword
How is it that a book about gold, indeed a book that advocates a return to a gold standard, can sound so, well, reasonable?
Maybe it’s because its author, Paul Nathan, is a very reasonable man. He’s no gold bug. As far as I know he doesn’t live in a fallout shelter. In fact he’s an extraordinarily successful investor who came through the market crash of 2008–2009 smelling like a rose. You don’t do that by being unreasonable.
Maybe it’s also because there’s nothing so unreasonable about gold. Maybe it’s because what’s unreasonable is saying that money ought to be just whipped up at the whims of government and not attached in any way to something of objective value—like gold.
From 1935 to 1975 it was illegal for Americans to own gold. The only exception was jewelry or dental fillings—relegating generations of Americans to the status of refugees or prisoners of war, reduced to hiding wealth in and about their bodies.
Gold is vilified by the political class and its servants in the profession of economics. The most famous economist of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, called gold a “barbaric relic.” Many scholars blame the gold standard of the years between the world wars for causing the Great Depression.
Yet I can’t think of a single politician or economist who would turn down a bar of gold if you offered it to him. Indeed, every government in the world—the same governments whose printing presses churn out so much paper—all hoard gold for themselves.
The height ...
