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"    Hey, have you noticed Ron Paul is this close to actually mattering? And not on the fun stuff he&amp;#039;s for \u2014 like ending the wars, or legalizing drugs \u2014 but on the biggest drag of all: the gold standard. Which, I know, is not the ball anyone&amp;#039;s eye is on \u2014 who would care about that when you can talk about bombs or bongs? But it&amp;#039;s about to bite, and hard. Look (as the president would say): We dropped the gold standard in the first place \u2014 along with every other country still on it \u2014 because it was making the Great Depression worse. If you&amp;#039;re on a gold standard, you have to guarantee your money is convertible to gold. That means your central bank sets its interest rates according to how much gold is on hand. If you happen to be losing gold, you have to raise interest rates, reduce the amount of money in circulation, so you can stay on the gold standard.  If \u2014 just suppose \u2014 you&amp;#039;re in an economic downturn, and people are pulling a bunch of gold out of the banks, then you raise interest rates and reduce the amount of money in circulation, which keeps you on the gold standard... but also is exactly the opposite of the monetary policy you want when people are losing their jobs. It stops economic activity dead. In other words, this modern crying-out for a gold standard in the midst of an economic crisis is of a piece with all the other claims that we ought to adopt policies not because they will help, but because they&amp;#039;re painful, and we deserve pain, don&amp;#039;t we? We&amp;#039;ve been very, very naughty, or we must have been, to get into this kind of trouble, and we need to punish ourselves. Or at least, Ron Paul needs to punish you. And trust me, this will hurt you more than it hurts him. The GOP isn&amp;#039;t yet going to go for a gold standard. But they might go for the next-worst thing: Under pressure from Paul, they might go for plank-stripping the Fed of its mandate to look at jobs when setting monetary policy, and instructing it to look at the price level alone. Paul likes this idea because he hates inflation. But all you young folks out there carrying record-level college debt should beware: you want a little inflation \u2014 you want the money you have to pay back to be a little cheaper than the money you borrowed. If there&amp;#039;s deflation, which there would be under a punishing Paul policy, you&amp;#039;ll have to pay back that debt in money that&amp;#039;s more expensive than what you borrowed.  In other words, if Ron Paul got his way, you&amp;#039;d beallowed to buy weed. You just couldn&amp;#039;t afford it. --Eric Rauchway is a professor of history at UC-Davis and the author, most recently, of The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a12713/ron-paul-gold-standard-bad-6654238/>