Social conservatives often decry the evaporation of “family values” or some other type of moral criterion as the seed of all of our present problems. Progressives, on the other hand, point out the growing income gap and the declining purchasing power of American laborers as a moral failure.

A monumental issue, one that I believe underlies any discussion of moral values, is the corruption of economic value through inflation and reckless government monetary policy happening outside of any democratic process.

Having lived our whole lives under a fiat currency, our generation tends to forget that at certain points in this nation’s history, American money was backed by a fixed amount of gold. The exact amount of gold and the exchangeability varied over time, but in 1971 Nixon removed us from any connection to a reserve of gold whatsoever. Gold and/or silver as currency have the whole history of human exchange to suggest that they maintain value in and of themselves over time. Fiat paper money, on the other hand, is entirely an abstract idea, based on confidence in the American economy.

Perhaps the more crucial point here is that having a fiat currency allows the Federal Reserve to print money at will and the government no longer finds itself constrained by a spending limit dictated by governmental reserves of gold. The Founding Fathers were well aware of the nature of fiat money due to several episodes of its issue in the colonies. For this reason the constitution specifies that only gold and silver can be currency.

This disconnect from an actual value inherent in money, combined with economic theories that hold moderate government debt as a healthy economic variable, have over the last several decades led us to the position that we now find ourselves in. Not only are we straddled with a debt that threatens to equal our gross domestic product, but the value of currency in terms of goods steadily, and without fail, erodes over time as more money is created to fund government largesse.

The whole point of moral codes is that they find expression in individual agents. Constant inflation erodes individual moral potential by constantly, and without fail, chipping away at whatever bit of agency an individual can accumulate in the form of currency, which is embodied economic potential.

Therefore, to avoid one’s savings dwindling to nil, the moral actor is forced to buy into the inflationary economy at large, seeking speculative interest-bearing opportunities instead of the old-fashioned method of growing one’s savings over time. His or her entire moral imperative is undercut proportionally to the debasement of currency occurring constantly in the unelected Federal Reserve and the concomitant deficit spending of our government.

We can’t truly value things in the moral sense unless we have a true sense of their relative difficulty to bring into existence, and thus their economic value. The speculative world we live in gives individuals no genuine way to gauge value, and it is no small wonder that we find ourselves carried on a sea of uncertainty.

Returning to a gold standard would limit social welfare spending to what is actually affordable. It would render impossible the current form of accounting that allows politicians to creatively reallocate funds to hide bloated expenditures – for unnecessary wars, crony-ist concessions to vested interests and other wasteful and dishonest expenditures.

It’s not a question of whether social welfare is right; any moral code worthy of the name protects the weak and the infirm. The real question is: if we took away the government’s ability to recklessly spend and devalue our currency, wouldn’t that leave more value and agency in the hands of actors that have been proven to be trustworthy in carrying out this mission, such as charities, mutual aid societies and insurance agencies?

Gavin Beeker is a Collegian Columnist. He can be reached at [email protected].