Gold Standard

The war could not have been financed under the old gold standard.

Years before the English currency school made it famous, Americans were arguing for one hundred percent reserves, and some wanted banking abolished outright.

Mark Thornton, Ryan McMaken, Kevin Duffy, and JP Cortez close out the 2026 New Mexico Mises Circle by taking audience questions on gold, silver, Bitcoin, investing in China, the fate of the dollar, and the ballooning national debt.

Mark Thornton uses Austrian theory to explain where money came from — Menger's bottom-up origin of money — and why gold makes for sound money and smaller government.

Kevin Duffy reads gold's bull market through an Austrian investor's lens — America's "imperial bubble" and the gold demand driving it from a rising East.

JP Cortez argues fiat money is a hidden theft, and that the fix is a bottom-up, state-level push to remove the taxes and rules that stop Americans from freely choosing gold and silver.

Ryan McMaken shows how seizing control of money was central to building the modern state — a centuries-long project that culminated in World War I destroying the gold standard.

Economic, political, and academic elites have declared gold to be a “barbarous relic,” but in the end gold always is the best choice for money. More than a century of the Fed's paper-based inflation is all the proof we need.

For the past few years, we have seen claims that the BRICS countries were going to develop a gold-based trading currency and push the dollar from its reserve currency perch. However, none of the economies of these countries can operate with a currency as good as gold.

Deflate the dollars, or redefine the dollar’s weight—or some blend of the two.