By 1900, there were no more blank spaces on the globe. There are no frontiers left on earth. This closing of physical horizons led to a shrinking of mental horizons, and the result was one of the great tragedies of human history. As all ideas do, this one became a physical reality, in Germany in the 1870s, when Otto von Bismark invented the modern welfare state . This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists' tirades against Gold.
Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the hidden confiscation of wealth.
Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists' antagonism towards the Gold Standard. No nation ever goes to war relying only on its taxing power to raise the necessary means to pay for it. The cost of the war is always disguised by debauching the currency.