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"So, Newt Gingrich\u2014surging in South Carolina against Romney and always surging with brilliant ideas\u2014has endorsed a return to the gold standard, saying on Tuesday that as president he would appoint a \"commission on gold to look at the whole concept of how do we get back to hard money.\"\n\nGingrich may just be making a play for Ron Paulites, but in GQ's January issue, Wells Tower explained why the gold standard is a fantastically dumb remedy for our nation's economic woes:\n\nYou'd have a hard time packing a phone booth with econ Ph.D.'s who think the gold standard isn't disastrous nonsense. The assortment of plagues a return to gold would inflict on our economy, experts say, is too vast to itemize here, so let's do something simple. Let's just imagine for a second where you'd be right now if the dollar were still yoked to gold. If you squint and are drunk, it looks pretty great.Picture it: In the past decade, gold's ascendancy would have jacked the dollar up 500 percent compared with, say, the euro. Boosh\u2014slam dunk! Superpower! Face! Though wait, hold on: What if you're a bright-eyed young entrepreneur who owns a factory that makes, say, bald-eagle flagpole toppers? Your competitor in China, who used to pay the stiffs in his beak-polishing department $6 a day, now gets them for $1 a day. His $60 bootleg of your Thrifty Patriot model now goes for ten bucks. Who wants to pay a 500 percent premium for your bona fide made-in-America eagle? Nobody. Everybody buys them from the Chinese guy. You lay off your employees and file bankruptcy. Your wife ditches you for a comparatively wealthy Zimbabwean roofer. You kill yourself. Everybody kills themselves. America ceases to push the envelope and run this planet."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/so-newt-gingrich---youd-have>