Hmmm...

Glenn Beck. What to do about Glenn Beck?

I've listened to his radio show for weeks now, and truly enjoy the humor and format... it's top-notch in that respect. I especially like the way they rip apart critical or opposition statements with nothing but rational, objective commentary and mountains of laughter.

I've never enjoyed the TV show though... it is far too confined to the Fox News format of 20-second sound bites and way too many commercials. Just too much like any other Fox program, i guess...

Now he has a news blog, called The Blaze. This is conservative-point-of-view only, mind you... nothing objective or middle-of-the-road here, and that is fine by me. They promise nothing else... but the videos are good and the insight is less than flattering for most liberals in the news today. Well, I added The Blaze to my list of Bund Favorites, and if you haven't seen it... check it out. I don't think Beck is a contributor (not of articles anyway... he pays for the site), but I believe Stu is, and Stu is damn funny.

Speaking of Glenn Beck...

I'd swear the man reads our blog.

In the past, Ryan and I have fought over whether or not Beck is too religious on his show. He is very religious... but even I would allow the man to do and say what he will, when he is paying the bills for the programing. None the less, as soon as we have that "beef" about his religion, Beck addresses the issue on the next day's show.

Lately, though, he seems to be doing a lot of harping on the Federal government's removal of the gold standard as one of the "progressive" errors of our history. He has nothing but disdain for FDR (among other Presidents), and routinely points to FDR's removal of gold currency as "Federal seizure" of American commodity assets.

Can we discuss this? Or will this be seen as more revisionism by Titus, a barely-reformed pinko-commie liberal?

Why are there so many repeated calls by "conservative" pundits to go back to the gold standard? Beck is not alone here... Mike Church used this as a rally call for years, as did Wilkow and Savage (although I haven't been able to listen to these guys in quite a while).

Just because the Fed used to regulate the price of gold (a hold-over from pre-WWI... not something you can blame FDR with) didn't mean that global gold prices didn't rise in times of economic hardship. In fact, actual value prices for gold in 1933 made the currency (gold coins) still in reserve or in circulation so much more valuable than their face value that people wouldn't (actually, COULDN'T) spend the money without taking a loss. That means that a significant amount of American dollars were not being used because to use them would cost the spender money... and the spenders in this case were banks that kept the gold on deposit against hard times, when customers could still come in and demand payment in gold.

The Federal Reserve needed the flexibility to print money for the purpose of deficit spending, and it couldn't do this while we were tied to the gold standard. Had we stayed on the gold standard beyond the Roosevelt era, we'd have been broke before the end of 1942 and could not have waged a winning campaign against the Axis powers.

After WWII, most industrialized nations fixed their currency value to the US Dollar, which was fixed to a $35/oz gold price... regardless of how much gold was in reserve. The larger the US economy grew, the less gold we had to back it with. There came a point where our money in circulation was greater than all the gold that had ever been mined in all of human history, at which point we could no longer sustain the gold standard (1971) and Nixon had to take us off the Bretton-Woods system, ending nearly a century of Federally-fixed gold prices.

How does Beck, or any other "conservative" pundit, defend a call for a return to the gold standard, knowing that it is (number one) impossible to achieve, with a current total of $8.3 trillion in circulation or deposit across the globe (more than all the gold currently on deposit everywhere), and (number two) counter to the very system advocated by such Presidents as Reagan himself... who understood that artificial price fixing and over-regulation of commodity-based value assets hurts America's economic engine more than it would ever help us? Stabilizing the value of the dollar is one thing, but it works both ways. the value of a dollar won't ever fall completely when backed by gold... but it won't reach the heights it has since 1972, either, because the cheaper gold gets in a strong economy, the less value to a dollar bill.

So, if I am going to work towards getting that vaunted "conservative" label that Ryan said I couldn't claim with my opinions right now, can someone explain to me what the reasoning is behind this plank in the conservative platform?