{"id":16333,"date":"2021-08-13T11:37:53","date_gmt":"2021-08-13T15:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=16333"},"modified":"2021-08-14T15:39:39","modified_gmt":"2021-08-14T19:39:39","slug":"nixons-gold-treachery-made-me-a-cynic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/13\/nixons-gold-treachery-made-me-a-cynic\/","title":{"rendered":"Nixon’s Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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American Institute for Economic Research<\/a>, August 13, 2021<\/h3>\n

Nixon\u2019s Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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\"JamesJames Bovard<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease honoring its pledge to pay gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. Nixon declared he was taking \u201caction necessary to defend the dollar<\/a> against the speculators.\u201d But there was no way to defend the dollar against politicians.<\/strong> Nixon touted his default as therapy for his tormented fellow citizens, promising it would \u201chelp us snap out of the self-doubt, the self-disparagement that saps our energy and erodes our confidence in ourselves.\u201d Nixon wrapped his decree with lofty political rhetoric, appealing to the nation\u2019s \u201cgreatest ideals\u201d and promising a \u201cnew prosperity\u201d that \u201cbefits a great people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The dollar thus became a fiat currency \u2013 something which possessed value solely because politicians said so. Nixon spurred the Federal Reserve to create an artificial boom to boost his reelection campaign. To suppress the damage from a flood of new money, he imposed wage and price controls, making it a crime to raise prices without government permission.<\/p>\n

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$1.40 an hour, 10 hours a day, all the peach fuzz I took home. Bovard photo<\/p><\/div>\n

At that time, I was working in a peach orchard in rural Virginia for 10 hours a day, reaping $1.40 an hour and all the peach fuzz I could take home on my arms and neck. Nixon\u2019s wage controls doomed any chance of getting that raise to $1.45 an hour. But no loss \u2013 I was leaving that job soon to go back to high school. I was 15 at that time and an avid coin collector. I soaked up the rage at the reckless federal policies that permeated Coin News <\/em>and other numismatic publications.\u00a0 \u201cGovernment as scoundrel\u201d was the theme of many editorials and articles I read in those periodicals in the following months and years.<\/strong> I had no savvy on economics but my gut sense told me something was profoundly amiss. Nixon\u2019s decree spurred my reading and researching.<\/p>\n

Nixon\u2019s gold default was also a landmark for America\u2019s rising economic and political illiteracy.<\/strong> In the era of this nation\u2019s birth, currency was often recognized as a character issue \u2013 specifically, the contemptible character of politicians. Shortly before the 1787 Constitutional Convention, George Washington warned that unsecured paper money will \u201cruin commerce,<\/a> oppress the honest<\/a>, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.\u201d The Coinage Age of 1792 established gold and silver as the foundation for the nation\u2019s currency and authorized a death penalty for anyone who debased the nation\u2019s gold or silver coins.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, politicians later exempted themselves from penalties for debasing the currency. In 1933, the U.S. had the largest gold reserves of any nation in the world. But fear of devaluation spurred a panic, which President Franklin Roosevelt exploited to seize people\u2019s gold. FDR denounced anyone who refused to turn in their gold as a \u201choarder<\/a>.\u201d Any citizen caught with more than $100 in gold coins faced ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine. (The penalty was not as harsh the Soviet Union\u2019s death penalty for anyone caught \u201choarding\u201d wheat from a collective farm.)<\/p>\n

FDR asserted that banning private ownership of gold was necessary to give government \u201cfreedom of action\u201d \u2013 which he quickly exploited by devaluing the dollar by 59% with a decree raising the value of gold from $20 an ounce to $35 an ounce. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau hailed the gold policy as part of the administration\u2019s \u201cplans for a restoration of public confidence<\/a>,\u201d but the de facto default on government debts set the precedent for boundless federal arbitrariness for the rest of the decade. FDR tried every trick to drive up prices, foolishly confident that a mere change in numerical prices would spawn prosperity. The resulting inflation was invoked in the early 1940s to help justify imposing payroll tax withholding.<\/p>\n

In the mid-1960s, the dollar was under pressure from perennial federal deficit spending and President Lyndon Johnson responded by eliminating all the silver in new dimes and quarters. After severing the dollar\u2019s link to silver, LBJ demanded that the Federal Reserve pump up the economy. He even summoned Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin to his Texas ranch and \u201cphysically beat him, he slammed him against the wall, and said, \u2018Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam<\/a>, and you won\u2019t print the money I need,’\u201d according to Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher. Since LBJ didn\u2019t murder Martin at his ranch, the media could continue to portray the Federal Reserve as \u201cindependent\u201d of political control. The Fed accommodated LBJ sufficiently that the inflation rate more than tripled between 1964 to 1968, rising from 1.3% to 4.3%. The rising inflation set the scene for Nixon\u2019s gold repudiation.<\/p>\n

FDR\u2019s prohibition on private gold ownership contained a loophole for rare coins with numismatic value. Luckily, the feds did not vigorously police that exemption. By 1973, I was buying Mexican and French gold pieces to save and to sell to high school classmates and others. After I got laid off from a construction job in the summer of 1974, I saw it as a sign from God (or at least from the market) that I should buy more gold. I liquidated most of my coin collection and put all my available cash into gold and also took out a consumer finance loan at 18% to purchase even more. That interest rate was the gauge of my blind confidence. I had been closely following gold prices and was convinced a price spike was coming. Nixon\u2019s resignation in August did wonders for the price of gold.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t get rich but made enough to help cover my costs for sporadically attending Virginia Tech, with some money left over to pay for my first literary strikeouts. Though Nixon assured the nation in 1971 that \u201cthe effect of this action\u2026 will be to stabilize the dollar,\u201d the \u201cNixon Shock\u201d was \u201cfollowed by a decade of one of the worst inflations of American history and the most stagnant economy since the Great Depression. The price of gold rose to $800 from $35,\u201d as Lewis Lehrman noted. Americans have suffered 570% inflation<\/strong><\/a> since Nixon \u201cstabilized\u201d<\/strong> the dollar.<\/p>\n

Nixon\u2019s gold decree and other policies helped me recognize that politicians are far more perfidious than the media portrays. If the government would intentionally destroy the value of the currency, I wondered what else it was undermining<\/strong>. The Watergate scandal provided further evidence of \u201cpolitician\u201d as synonym for \u201cdamn rascal.\u201d The dissolution of the Vietnam War clinched the case as Americans learned how presidents had conned the nation into a pointless Asian bloodbath. Gas shortages and gas lines beginning in late 1973 confirmed that any cadre of \u201cbest and brightest\u201d in Washington was an optical illusion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fifty years after Nixon\u2019s betrayal, America is again facing rapidly increasing inflation. The Biden administration is embracing almost boundless deficit spending in its quest to throw unrestricted free money at any non-millionaire who might vote for Democratic candidates. Most of the fawning media coverage on Biden policies is as economically illiterate as the cheerleaders for Nixon\u2019s chicanery long ago. If the government continues on this path, it is only a question of time until fresh debacles result. But from the economic wreckage, a new generation of cynics may arise who do a far better job of putting politicians back on a leash.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

American Institute for Economic Research, August 13, 2021 Nixon\u2019s Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic James Bovard Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease honoring its pledge to pay gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. Nixon declared he was taking \u201caction […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2966,53,504,202,2437,2435,2964,710,473,2967,927,2965,121,291],"class_list":["post-16333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-default","tag-federal-reserve","tag-franklin-roosevelt","tag-fraud","tag-george-washington","tag-gold","tag-henry-morgenthau","tag-inflation","tag-lyndon-johnson","tag-peach-picking","tag-richard-nixon","tag-scoundrel","tag-vietnam","tag-watergate"],"yoast_head":"\nNixon's Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/13\/nixons-gold-treachery-made-me-a-cynic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nixon's Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic - James Bovard\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"American Institute for Economic Research, August 13, 2021 Nixon\u2019s Gold Treachery Made Me a Cynic James Bovard Fifty years ago, on August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. government would cease honoring its pledge to pay gold to redeem the dollars held by foreign central banks. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16333"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16344,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16333\/revisions\/16344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}