In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.

The Iraq War is largely about oil.

All taxes are a drag on economic growth. It's only a question of degree.

I was a fairly good amateur musician, and I was an average professional. But the one thing I saw was that the big band business was fading.

These days, even out of office, I still read economic reports.

The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism toward the gold standard.

What an ideology is is a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to, to exist you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not.