commentary32: "Gold bugs are a noisy and undisciplined rabble, a cantankerous collection of misfits, malcontents, treasure hunters and dilettantes. In the former Soviet Union, most of us would have been locked up in psychiatric hospitals. For the most part amateurs self-taught on the subject of gold and money, we are something of an intellectual militia. We have no institutional framework, just a loose string of websites and commentators who periodically publish rants of mixed quality under the banner of GATA. We have no doctrine, beyond a conviction that real money is gold and fiat money is fraud. We have no following, beyond the mildly curious and the already converted.
Contemporary Austrians, by contrast, are honors graduates of the School of Couth. They are the anointed heirs of a school of economic analysis articulated by an extraordinary collection of great thinkers, importantly including Ludwig von Mises (1891-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). Austrian economics, with its emphasis on individual choice as the foundation of economic inquiry, is truth serum, an antidote to the poison of Keynesian ideology that has, over the past 80 years, succeeded in driving gold out of our currency, honesty out of our public discourse, and individual liberty out of our politics. Contemporary Austrians have a well-developed institutional structure, a secular monastery dedicated to keeping alive the flame of economic truth, in the form of the Ludwig von Mises Institute (www.mises.org). They have their own hierophants, in the person of learned academics and commentators who publish papers and exchange ideas on Austrian themes. They have a substantial following, and have earned a well-deserved respectability for their sound thinking and their decorous manner.
Most gold bugs subscribe, to one degree or another, to Austrian teachings,"
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