Originally posted on Thursday, December 5th, 2013
This cartoon cleverly presents the tension between the proponents of the classical gold standard and the prairie populists demanding “the free coinage of silver.”
Image courtesy of authentichistory.com via BigThink.com
In the mouth of the “silver dog with the golden tail” is a bone, labeled Election.
The 1896 election, which the gold standard champion, McKinley, won, was colorful. It has been the subject of previous, and will be the subject of future, writings here.
That said, the key takeaway is that monetary policy has a long and rich history as a political issue, including very specifically a highly charged presidential campaign issue. Monetary policy then was, as it were, privatized out of politics and turned into an hermetic issue left to specialists and experts.
The results of fiduciary management of monetary policy by highly credentialed experts, however, has proven, in practice, far inferior to the results obtained by a classical gold standard. And there is popular ferment being felt in Washington for popularly elected officials to reassert authority over appointed, insular, officials.
It is not unlikely, then, that next issues of monetary policy will reenter the electoral process itself, first in the presidential primaries and then in the general election of 2016. With the bone, once again, being contested by “good money” vs. “easy money” proponents for the prize of Election.
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