RP - US should sell it's gold to pay the debt

[febo]

At first I thought, what, I thought RP was a goldbug?
Then Gary North explained - this is perfectly consistent with libertarianism - value, and thus power moves from the govt to the people, who can buy the gold.
But, RP did a few other things with this pronouncement:
a) he got the govt to admit that gold is very important to the US and would not be sold in a fire sale. That's very interesting.
b) he is getting the notion of hard money into the debate
Great move RP.
Agree?

[tsai3904]

There has been no definitive statement by RP saying that he wants the US to sell its gold. Many are questioning whether or not the NY Sun, who wrote the article claiming RP wants to sell the gold, confused Ron Paul with someone else, misquoted Ron Paul, or blatantly mischaracterized Ron Paul's views. The article written by the NY Sun doesn't even include ONE quote from Ron Paul.

[febo]

Yeah, I see MISH pointing to this confusion.

[I Don't Vote]

I agree with Robert Wenzel. We should not sell the gold.

[Original_Intent]

Even if all the gold that is supposed to be in Fort Knox is there, at today's prices it would only pay off about 2% of the debt. Which maybe that is Ron Paul's real point, to demonstrate how truly bankrupt we are.

And of course dumping that much gold into the market would kill the price, so realistically it would probably be about 1.5% or less of the debt we could pay off.

[sailingaway]

There is only this one blub printed by someone who was calling around getting a bunch of people's views on selling the gold. Ron will answer every question as a hypothetical or not, and he has never mentioned it anywhere else, when HE was choosing topics of conversation. I'm pretty certain it isn't a POLICY change for him, and suspect he was just angling to get it audited, both as to physical presence and title, which he has been trying to get for years. But hypothetically he is right, an individual would have to sell assets to pay bills, and since there is no push to do so saying so only calls attention to the gravity of our issues. I sincerely doubt he wants to sell the gold, he is pushing to get gold to be competing currency.