FRIEDMAN ON FRUM

At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, the winner of the straw poll was Congressman Ron Paul. One of his best-known positions is support for a return to the gold standard. David Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, responded by blaming the gold standard for the Great Depression.

"Threatened with the exhaustion of its gold supply," Frum said, "the government felt it had no choice: It had to close the budget deficit. So, in the throes of a severe downturn, the U.S. government did exactly the opposite of what economists would otherwise advise: It cut spending and raised taxes — capsizing the economy even deeper into depression."

But as the table below shows, that version of the history of the Great Depression is entirely fictional.
David Friedman at Investors.com

-flynn