**ABANDONED** Mine, All Mine

[Candlewhisper Archive]

Because we don't have a reversal to adopting the gold standard yet...

TITLE:

Mine, All Mine

VALIDITY:

Gold standard, but not autarky AND planned economy as well.

DESCRIPTION:

Adopting the gold standard has fixed some problems but has distorted the @@DEMONYM@@ economy, resulting in an over-allocation of national resources to gold mining, and a vulnerability of currency value to fluctuations in the global market value of gold.

OPTION 1

"The problem isn't basing currency on a tangible commodity, but rather on a commodity of unstable supply," explains Cecil Highways, of the De Bears Group. "Tie the gold standard to an underlying diamond standard. You can be sure that the value of diamonds will always remain steady, we've kept it that way for centuries, sheltered from so-called market forces of supply and demand. Gold shines, but diamonds are forever."

OUTCOME:
the nation prefers hard currency

OPTION 2

"No, that's over-complicating things," argues your Minister of Elegant Simplicity, who has attended the meeting in a plain gold-coloured jumpsuit, with gold-dyed hair, gold lipstick, and who is rumoured to enjoy showering in gold. "If you want to avoid over-mining, then don't allow over-mining. If you want the price of gold to be steady, then fix the price of gold. Of course, this will mean a planned centralised economy, strict control of trade of goods, and absolute disconnection from global markets of currency and goods. But then we will be golden."

OUTCOME:
the faithful proclaim that only @@LEADER@@ can see The Golden Path to a perfected future

OPTION 3

"There's another solution, perhaps, where we could say how much the currency is worth directly," muses your Minister of Policy Reversals. "We can still have 1 @@CURRENCY@@ be worth a fixed value of gold, but it could be theoretical gold, rather than needing to be gold in our vaults. Call it 'fiat gold', which exists because we say it exists. We could then borrow freely, without any need for gold reserves, and meet our public spending obligations, and by saying how much this fiat gold is worth, we'd avoid being tied to commodity value fluctuations. I know, I know, it's a crazy idea, but I've got a feeling it might actually work..."

OUTCOME:
people know the price of everything and the value of nothing

[Trotterdam]

OPTION 1
"Tie the gold standard to an underlying diamond standard."

OPTION 3
"We can still have 1 @@CURRENCY@@ be worth a fixed value of gold, but it could be theoretical gold, rather than needing to be gold in our vaults. Call it 'fiat gold', which exists because we say it exists.

So you have two options here which are both "merely pretend we have a gold standard while doing something that any sane person can tell is not a gold standard".

Switching from gold to diamond is also a pretty boring option, since practically precious metals and precious gemstones are very similar as commodities: both are mined and both are valuable more for being rare than for being directly useful. (The difference are the gemstones have less fungibility - if you split a diamond in half, the value of each fragment won't be half the value of the original diamond - and that diamonds in particular are much easier to counterfeit in a lab, both of which make diamonds less viable as a currency than gold, not more. Even if I admit some appeal to making a nation run on Legend-of-Zelda-style rupees.) Instead, look at other commodity/representative currencies that people have proposed or used in the past. Various nations in history have used currencies based on food, such as rice (Japan), cocoa beans (Meso-America), or barley (Sumer). Or even weirder things, like cowry shells (pretty widely used along the coast of the Indian Ocean, actually). Science fiction authors and the like have discussed energy-based currencies, either pegged to certain energy sources such as barrels of oil, or to megajoules of electricity or the like. Both of these have serious problems, of course (and I'm not knowledgable enough about economics to explain them), but they're more interesting choices than just "gold", "not gold", or "something very simlar to gold".

I know you're fond of "reversals that pretend not be reversals" (#907 5, #1196 3), but I don't feel it works this time. You're just too blunt about it. Besides, the joke's been done.

[Jutsa]

For an issue reversal to the gold standard, having it so restricted otherwise is kinda making it a moot reversal.

Nautarkies, I could maybe kinda see (though it feels odd excluding them), while socialist nations could easily just have a variant for socialist trading nations.

I feel like this could be made at least to accommodate socialists, but probably nautarkies as well, what the fact that it takes so much money to mine the darned stuff in the first place,
along with the possible influx of inflation caused by finding a large gold mine, and (in the event of capitalist nations) mining around for it themselves,
and the environmental impact that would have... well, tangent over, but I'm basically nudging at the possibility of making it a universal reversal.

ed: All that said, I thank you for working on this much-needed reversal. Hopefully this one doesn't fall flat.

[Fauxia]

I assume this is because I’m American, but I find the lack of cross of Gold references disturbing.

[Australian rePublic]

Why can we assume that nation is capable of influencing global gold prices to the point where it would actually manipulate the value of gold significantly? Does nation have that significant proportion of the world's gold reserves that if nation says "no more mining" the world can't just find gold elsewhere and move on? Because, otherwise, no matter what nation does, it'll only have a minor impact on global gold prices, and only one option cuts nation off from the rest of the world. Unless nation delusionally thinks that they can tell the rest of the world how much to mine, that is