Gold...por Alan Greenspan

"(...) 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. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold …

The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against gold. 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."

Alan Greenspan, "Gold and Economic Freedom," Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, (Livro de Ayn Rand)

PS: Como é habitual, a parte fundamental sobre como é a criação monetária (inflação quantitativa) que está na origem dos ciclos económicos (o grande "insight" miseseano) não é mencionada, ficando-se pelos males da inflação de preços, mas já não é nada mau.