was the gold standard a scam?

How did it work with those gold miners in the day of the gold standard?  Since Americans weren't allowed to keep their gold I guess they had to sell it to the gummint for whatever the dollar price it was set at by law.  Maybe when they were using it for money it wasn't in so big an amount as they had to give it up.  As I recall because of the hassle of moving stuff over the rockies prices were were high.  Inserting "how much did an egg cost the forty niners" into the google machine, I get anywhere from a buck to ninety bucks, quite a lot by today's standards.  I imagine everybody on the Easter egg hunt was packing heat.

I guess the miner would step into the assayer's office and he would weigh it and then print out the appropriate bucks?  More likely wrote some script which made its way back to the mint, but I like the idea of the little press with probably a crank, a bottle of green ink on the deck beside it.

So anyway that is an even exchange.  The gummint gets the gold and the miner gets whatever the gummint says it is worth in greenbacks.  So if they discovered a mountain of gold the gummint is probably going to want to lower the price of gold in order to be able to buy it and since raising the price of gold causes inflation, lowering it must cause deflation, which is bad because, well I am not sure.  I guess if I own a store and I know that everything on my shelves is going to be worth more tomorrow I am not going to want to sell anything today.  I don't think we have ever had deflation except for maybe a brief period during the depression.

Doesn't this gold standard seem like something of a scam, I mean if we are going to raise and lower the price of gold at will.  Well maybe that was the way the gummint controlled the economy, but then isn't that interfering with the invisible hand of the market, beloved by capitalism,

I do remember those silver certificates.  Seemed like some bills were and some weren't and then eventually none were, but you could still get four quarters for a buck even if it wasn't a silver certificate.

I think I vaguely remember us going off the gold standard.  Doesn't seem like it was a very big deal at the time, I suspect because we were always running whatever we are running now and the gold standard was just the wizard behind the curtain.

I watch a bit of Fox, though I won't have Bill O'Reilly to kick around anymore, and it used to be every third commercial somebody was hawking gold.  I think conservatives like gold because it is somehow outside of the gummint, it doesn't have all that icky gummint writing all over it.  It's concrete, something they can hold (which is actually why I like cash opposed to plastic).  I think they sold it either as coins, in which case I am sure they were ripping off the customers, or as some kind of certificate that laid claim to gold in some mint somewhere, the sort of thing you buy and sell but never hold.  If you don't trust the gummint, why in hell would you trust G Gordon Liddy (he was one of the hawkers, where is he these days?)?

I remember when the idea of the negative income tax was floated by the McGovernites because I was a McGovernite myself.  I had a notebook where i cut out clips from the newspaper and pasted them in, which meant I read every word the candidate or his proxies said.  I have never done that for a candidate since then because the more you read about your candidate the less you like him.

McGovern's negative income tax came and went pretty quickly, but maybe as Beagles says its time has come, maybe the Dutch and the Finns are leading the way.  What does the Finnish Beaglestonian think of that?