There will be a lot written about the fact that the Republican shooter in Arizona wanted a return to the gold standard. The gold standard is a big thing amoung teabaggy 2nd Ammendment Republican gun nuts. Glen Beck has made some great money by telling the morons who follow him to hoard gold.
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon makes the case that the love of gold among whack-job Republicans has no basis in any intellectual arguments about money supply at all – but is based on shallow emotion.
Most people who have warm and fuzzy feelings when they hear the words “gold standard” get them for reasons that have no pragmatic or intellectual backing whatsoever. I’d say there are two major appeals of this silly obsession:
1) Gold has an old timey feel, and teabaggers love that. In fairy tales and the Bible, people use gold as currency. As we all know, these kinds of fantasies and myths are more real to teabaggers than actual reality.
2) It satisfies their need to believe in a higher, absolute authority. Just like the obsession with believing the Constitution and Bible are non-ambiguous documents that just so happen to agree with everything wingnuts do, and cannot be crossed by mere people, they like to believe that gold is a currency that has intrinsic value that puts it outside the scary world of social constructs and arbitrariness. You get the same obsession, by the way, with English-only thinking. The hope is that there is something solid and unchanging that has value and meaning outside of what humans imbue in it, a sort of final authority they can put their faith in.
The actual effect of having a gold standard has little or no bearing on this. Gold is appealing to the teabagger masses on a strictly emotional level. In fact, one of the major problems with teabaggery in general is that it doesn’t truck with logic or pragmatism, but instead is a bunch of easily manipulated emotional responses. It’s about nostalgia, and pretending you’re “tough” because you automatically prefer other people to suffer, even if you have to pay for it. Which is why, for instance, they oppose health care reform even if it saves money, even though they think of themselves as “fiscally conservative”. They’ll spend more money to make sure some people don’t have health insurance. They need that to shore up a self-image as a bunch of hard asses.
Never assume logic with teabaggers when the more available answer is a knee-jerk emotional response to nostalgia or sadism.