Comments about ‘What others say: Gold isn't the answer’

A rational piece. Gold is nothing more than another means of measuring the exchange of value for goods and services. It is just a shiny metal that someone long ago thought was pretty and it acquired an inflated, but ultimately useless, role in society. Its value is based on emotion.

Glenn Beck and his 9/12 Tea-Party listeners are the only one's pushing for this.

But then again,
come to think of it...they control the GOP right now.

Is the value of gold based on more or less emotion than the value of unbacked paper currency? The gold standard is currently untenable, but it is precisely because gold is so valuable. If a gold standard were adopted its price would soar and all industries who currently use gold would suffer. Gold has real value, it hasn't been inflated, our paper money supply has.

Gold has no more value than paper money. It has not intrinsic value... just what people think it is worth. Just like any thing else traded. And as an actively traded commodity, I would love to see how the average American family would lhandle having their income (and buying power) rise and fall based on the whims of speculative investors. It would be chaos.

I can see it now... "I am sorry mam... milk is up 3 percent today because the markets for gold us down...." yeah, that is going to work.

Gold doesn't have much practical value. 90% of it's use is purely for investments and most of the rest is for vanity adornments.

No other species has a practical use for it. It's fiat too!

But pause for a moment, and suppose you had millions of bushels to sell [wheat], …no matter what amount, ...you are left with nothing morethan a pile of gold, what good would it do you?
You could not eat it, drink it, wear it, or carry it off where you could have something to eat.
The time will come that gold will hold no comparison in value to a bushel of wheat.
Gold is not to be compared with it in value.
….Gold is good for nothing, only as men value it. It is no better than a piece of iron, a piece of limestone, or a piece of sandstone, and it is not half so good as the soil from which we raise our wheat, and other necessaries of life. The children of men love it, they lust after it, are greedy for it, and are ready to destroy themselves, and those around them, over whom they have any influence, to gain it” (Journal of Discourses, 1:, p.250).

As others have alluded to, nothing on earth has intrinsic value. Value is a human construct and, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

If we thought gold was ugly and lead was beautiful, gold would simply be an industrial metal, useful for its physical properties.