I like Ralph Benko. Ralph Benko often makes important arguments on behalf of the gold standard. But when he tries to force everything in the universe to be interpreted through the lens of it you know you have met an ideologue who has become unhinged from reality. Which is why Forbes is a good place for him.
His latest screed here is a mere flight of fantasy, imagining Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the closing of the gold window in 1971. Had he presented it as such, it would have entertained and illumined, even pleased. Instead, its talk of correlation only annoys, the way a chart reader plots two things on a graph and yells 'See! See! They both go up together!' Against Benko, Pat Buchanan may be forgiven for ignoring what didn't exist, just as Nixon's enemies ignored it, except in the fever camps of utopianism.
Benko makes Thomas Paine's opinions about gold a prophecy reaching 200 years into the future where gold becomes Nemesis and the end of Bretton Woods Hubris. Covering up Watergate? Well, simply an instrumental little detail:
"The House Judiciary Committee’s charges and the Connally indictment uncannily fulfill a prophecy by Tom Paine. ... Connally was acquitted on the charges of graft and perjury. Later he underwent bankruptcy before dying in semi-disgrace. Nixon resigned rather than undergoing impeachment, also living out his life in disgraced political exile. The spirit of Paine’s declaration was fulfilled in both cases. Connally and Nixon engineered this violation, abandoning the good, precious-metal, money contemplated by the Constitution. Nemesis followed hubris. The closing of the 'gold window' was based, by Connolly, on deeply wrong premises. It was sold to the public, by Nixon, on deeply false promises."
Methinks Tom Paine himself would be a little embarrassed at the almost religious regard with which some of his present day followers come to what he has left behind for us on paper.
He'd probably call them Burkeans.
