When Nixon slammed the gold window shut so Congress could keep writing blank checks for Vietnam and the Great Society, it wasn't just some monetary technicality. It was the moment America broke its word to the world and broke something fundamental in us too. Suddenly money wasn't something you earned through sweat or innovation anymore. It became something politicians and bankers could conjure from thin air whenever they wanted another war, another corporate bailout, another vote-buying scheme.
Fast forward fifty years and smell the rot. That same fiscal recklessness Congress spending like drunken sailors while pretending deficits don't matter has bled into every pore of society. Why wouldn't it? When BlackRock scoops up entire neighborhoods with Fed-printed cash while your kid can't afford a studio apartment, people notice. When Tyson jacks up chicken prices to record profits while diners can't afford bacon, people feel it. And when some indie blogger slaps a paywall on their life's work because OpenAI vacuumed their words to train ChatGPT? That's the same disease wearing digital clothes.
We're all living in Nixon's hangover. The "us vs us" chaos you see Discord servers demanding your phone number, small sites gatekeeping against bots, everyone scrambling to monetize scraps that's what happens when trust evaporates. Just like the dollar became Monopoly money after '71, everything feels devalued now. Your labor? Worth less each year. Your creativity? Someone's AI training fuel. Your neighborhood? A BlackRock asset on a spreadsheet.
And Washington's still at it! Printing trillions to "save the economy" while inflation eats your paycheck alive. Passing trillion-dollar "infrastructure bills" that somehow leave bridges crumbling but defense contractors swimming in cash. It's the same old shell game: socialize the losses, privatize the gains. The factory worker paying $8 for eggs understands this. The nurse getting lectured about "wage spirals" while hospital CEOs pocket millions understands this. The teenager locking down their Discord because bots keep spamming scams? They understand this.
Weimar happened when money became meaningless. 1971 happened when promises became meaningless. What you're seeing now the suspicion, the barriers, the every-man-for-himself hustle is what bubbles up when people realize the whole system's running on fumes. The diner owner charging $18 for a burger isn't greedy. The blogger blocking AI scrapers isn't a Luddite. They're just building levees against a flood Washington started with a printing press half a century ago.
The tragedy is that we're all knee-deep in the same muddy water, throwing sandbags at each other while the real architects of this mess the political grifters, the Fed bankers, the extraction-engine capitalists watch dry-eyed from their high ground. Until we stop accepting their counterfeit money and their counterfeit promises, we'll keep drowning in this rigged game. The gold window didn't just close in '71. The whole damn social contract rusted shut.
19th-century factory towns sucked dick. Child labor, no safety nets, cholera outbreaks. Yeah, not exactly Disneyland. But that's not the argument. The gold standard didn't cause those horrors. Unchecked capitalism and shitty labor laws did. What gold did do was force a brutal honesty. You couldn't fake prosperity. If you wanted a war or a welfare program, you either taxed people directly or found the gold to pay for it. No printing press to hide the pain. Nixon's 1971 move didn't just detach the dollar from gold. It detached political accountability from fiscal reality. Every fucking crisis since '71 gets "solved" the same way: print, borrow, and kick the can. Gold didn't prevent recessions; it prevented this: a system where elites privatize gains but socialize losses. Your grandpa's $0.25/hour wage in 1950 bought 10 loaves of bread. Your $15/hour today buys 3 loaves. Your 401k inflates, your rent explodes, and Washington shrugs: "Inflation's transitory, bro!"
Gold "terrible"? Tell that to the single mom paying 40% of her paycheck to rent a BlackRock-owned apartment. Why's BlackRock her landlord? Because fiat made debt cheaper than dirt. They borrowed billions at 0% from the Fed, bought entire neighborhoods, and jacked rents. Under gold? Interest rates would've spiked, crushing their leveraged bets. But nah. We got "QE Infinity" instead. Today's policy is literally cronyism with extra steps: print to bail out banks which causes inflated assets which squeezes workers. Rinse. Repeat.
Wow. That was eloquent, and coherent, and depressing. I'd be grateful for someone to counter with something less dismal. Good things are still happening in the world. A positive future remains possible -- but we have to be able to imagine it to bring it into being.
They'd have to physically steal gold from people, and people would notice that. Or they could mine more gold, but that's hard. Or they could publicly and officially change the exchange rate (of dollars to gold), and people would notice that politicians make it go down, the same way that people notice when politicians make taxes go up (they notice way more than when prices other than taxes go up).
With the current system, they (the central bank) can just increase some people's numbers in some spreadsheets, and the effects are extremely indirect. Nominally this is in exchange for assets of equal value so the situation returns the normal after some time, but that hasn't been happening - the amount of money created this way has not been decreasing at any meaningful rate.
> And it would be impossible to bail out those bonds when they defaulted
Well the US hasn't defaulted so changing how a default works wouldn't really affect the trajectory we took. And a default would be pretty catastrophic either way.
Well the US isn't on the gold standard. If it was on the gold standard then it would have defaulted. That's why it moved off the gold standard.
Actually, by moving off the gold standard, it defaulted on dollars (at the time a kind of gold bond) rather than defaulting on dollar-denominated government bonds.
Nixon didn't abandon gold because economists suddenly discovered some brilliant new theory. He did it because the math had already sentenced the system to death. By August '71, Fort Knox was down to its last $11 billion in gold while foreign governments held at least $33 billion in paper dollars screaming for redemption. That's not a liquidity problem. That's a corpse with rigor mortis. And that's just the official tally; the real killer was the eurodollar market, that offshore shadow banking system nobody wanted to talk about, where another $50-70 billion in unredeemable IOUs were sloshing around. Meanwhile, Washington was drowning in $400 billion of federal debt with inflation hitting 6% which was a death spiral where every new bond issuance needed higher interest rates to attract suckers, which only accelerated the bleed-out. France wasn't just cashing checks; they were sending battleships to haul away physical gold while the Fed played musical chairs with reserves. Default wasn't a choice. It was inevitable. Nixon just picked how to default: either formally welch on bond payments (catastrophic) or slam the gold window shut (disguised catastrophe). He chose the quiet betrayal, letting the dollar become pure fiat so Congress could keep funding Vietnam and welfare programs without taxing a soul. That's the original sin. Not just breaking gold's back, but breaking the link between spending and accountability. Fast forward to today: $35 trillion in debt, BRICS nations stockpiling gold while ditching dollars, and your grocery bill doubling not because of "supply chains" but because we've spent fifty years printing to paper over every bad bet. Nixon didn't save the economy. He gave politicians a credit card with no limit and told your grandchildren to pick up the tab.
It didn't have enough gold to pay its bonds, so it could either keep the integrity of the dollars intact while defaulting on the bonds, or keep the integrity of the bonds (as measured in dollars) intact while defaulting on the dollars. The latter option allowed it to last a while longer before anyone would notice.
This choice was made some decades before the official day on which the gold standard ended. By 1971, it had already printed dollars to pay its bonds and didn't have nearly enough gold for foreign countries to be able to withdraw all their gold.
You're goddamn right corruption existed under gold. Nobody's claiming it was some purity paradise. But here's the difference: gold didn't enable systemic looting on a planetary scale. Gold didn't prevent sin. it prevented the industrialization of sin. The robber barons were sharks in a pond. Today's fiat-enabled oligarchs are gods reshaping reality. When you can print the fucking rules, accountability evaporates. That's why Nixon's 1971 decision wasn't just policy. It was an engraved invitation for the largest wealth transfer in human history.
Greed and corruption absolutely festered under the gold standard. Boss Tweed embezzled a fortune from New York City coffers, Vanderbilt strong-armed railroads, and Rockefeller crushed competitors with predatory pricing. But here's the huge distinction: gold acted like a leash on a rabid dog. It didn't kill the beast, but it kept it from devouring the whole goddamn village. When robber barons got too greedy in the 1800s, their schemes imploded under gold's brutal discipline. Jay Cooke's bank collapsed in 1873? No Fed stepped in with trillions in printed cash to resurrect his corpse. Markets purged the rot, losers ate shit, and the system reset in years. Not decades of zombie corporations propped up by cheap debt. Corruption back then was like a bar fight: bloody, ugly, but contained. Tweed stole existing gold coins. He couldn't order the Treasury to mint him a fresh fortune overnight.
Vanderbilt couldn't borrow billions at 0% interest from a central bank to buy every competitor; he had to convince investors with real profits, not financialized vapor. Fast-forward to today: fiat didn't invent greed. It weaponized it. LBJ funded Vietnam and the Great Society without raising taxes because the printer go brrr. BlackRock gobbles neighborhoods with Fed-subsidized debt while renters bleed. Tyson jacks food prices 20%, blames "inflation," and pockets record profits because fiat decouples prices from real value. Banks peddle toxic mortgages knowing the Fed will bail them out. Politicians pass $6T "stimulus" bills while your paycheck buys less bread than a 1950s factory worker's. That's the cancer Nixon unleashed in '71. Not corruption itself, but its metastasis into a globalized, systemic looting operation where elites privatize gains, socialize losses, and inflation becomes a tax on the powerless. Gold didn't stop crooks. It stopped crooks from becoming untouchable gods. The 1800s proved humans will always be greedy. Fiat just gave them the universe's credit card and told your grandkids to foot the bill.
Lately I've had to resort to buying avocados from Costco in those little plastic cups because whole avocados in many supermarkets in my region have started to spoil too quickly. Sad.
until people learn money, the concept, nothing will change. and that in turn will hardly happen while the bad guys own childhood (compulsory schooling).
Fast forward fifty years and smell the rot. That same fiscal recklessness Congress spending like drunken sailors while pretending deficits don't matter has bled into every pore of society. Why wouldn't it? When BlackRock scoops up entire neighborhoods with Fed-printed cash while your kid can't afford a studio apartment, people notice. When Tyson jacks up chicken prices to record profits while diners can't afford bacon, people feel it. And when some indie blogger slaps a paywall on their life's work because OpenAI vacuumed their words to train ChatGPT? That's the same disease wearing digital clothes.
We're all living in Nixon's hangover. The "us vs us" chaos you see Discord servers demanding your phone number, small sites gatekeeping against bots, everyone scrambling to monetize scraps that's what happens when trust evaporates. Just like the dollar became Monopoly money after '71, everything feels devalued now. Your labor? Worth less each year. Your creativity? Someone's AI training fuel. Your neighborhood? A BlackRock asset on a spreadsheet.
And Washington's still at it! Printing trillions to "save the economy" while inflation eats your paycheck alive. Passing trillion-dollar "infrastructure bills" that somehow leave bridges crumbling but defense contractors swimming in cash. It's the same old shell game: socialize the losses, privatize the gains. The factory worker paying $8 for eggs understands this. The nurse getting lectured about "wage spirals" while hospital CEOs pocket millions understands this. The teenager locking down their Discord because bots keep spamming scams? They understand this.
Weimar happened when money became meaningless. 1971 happened when promises became meaningless. What you're seeing now the suspicion, the barriers, the every-man-for-himself hustle is what bubbles up when people realize the whole system's running on fumes. The diner owner charging $18 for a burger isn't greedy. The blogger blocking AI scrapers isn't a Luddite. They're just building levees against a flood Washington started with a printing press half a century ago.
The tragedy is that we're all knee-deep in the same muddy water, throwing sandbags at each other while the real architects of this mess the political grifters, the Fed bankers, the extraction-engine capitalists watch dry-eyed from their high ground. Until we stop accepting their counterfeit money and their counterfeit promises, we'll keep drowning in this rigged game. The gold window didn't just close in '71. The whole damn social contract rusted shut.