Quote:Thiel’s belief that the gold standard was a good idea is not shared by, well, pretty much anyone who knows anything at all. As Matthew O’Brien explained in the Atlantic,

Quote:Economics is often a contentious subject, but economists agree about the gold standard — it is a barbarous relic that belongs in the dustbin of history. As University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler points out, exactly zero economists endorsed the idea in a recent poll. What makes it such an idea non grata? It prevents the central bank from fighting recessions by outsourcing monetary policy decisions to how much gold we have — which, in turn, depends on our trade balance and on how much of the shiny rock we can dig up. When we peg the dollar to gold we have to raise interest rates when gold is scarce, regardless of the state of the economy. This policy inflexibility was the major cause of the Great Depression, as governments were forced to tighten policy at the worst possible moment.

Indeed, as economist Brad DeLong notes, nations began to emerge from the Great Depression at about the same time that they abandoned the gold standard..

Quote:In an essay published by the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, Thiel questioned the very idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the governed. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel claimed. He added that he thinks America made a serious wrong turn when it began extending basic human rights to women and poor people.

Moreover, Thiel’s views, while out of place among mainstream thinkers, are increasingly common among right intellectuals. Consider his Cato essay, for example. The main thrust of that piece is not that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, but that democratic values are the enemy of the libertarian society Thiel would prefer to live in.

Quote:I’ve been writing about Donald Trump’s claim that Mexico’s value-added tax is an unfair trade policy, which is just really bad economics. Here’s Joel Slemrod explaining that a VAT has the same effects as a sales tax. Now, nobody thinks that sales taxes are an unfair trade practice. New York has fairly high sales taxes; Delaware has no such tax. Does anyone think that this gives New York an unfair advantage in interstate competition?

But it turns out that Trump wasn’t saying ignorant things off the top of his head: he was saying ignorant things fed to him by his incompetent economic advisers. Here’s the campaign white paper on economics. The VAT discussion is on pages 12-13 — and it’s utterly uninformed.

And it’s not the worst thing: there’s lots of terrible stuff in the white paper, at every level. Should we be reassured that Trump wasn’t actually winging it here, just taking really bad advice? Not at all. This says that if he somehow becomes president, and decides to take the job seriously, it won’t help — because his judgment in advisers, his notion of who constitutes an expert, is as bad as his judgment on the fly.