350. The Gold Standard - Presented at the Property & Freedom Society

— Saifedean Ammous presents *The Gold Standard*, an economic fiction book imagining a 20th century where hard money prevented World War I by enabling capital flight via early aviation technology.

— The 1915 thought experiment centers on the Bank of England's insolvency (31% gold backing) and a secret 1914 bond-buying scheme (later revealed in 2017) that financed Britain's WWI entry through circulation credit rather than genuine savings.

— A Geneva conference convenes neutral powers and economic thinkers (Mises, Liechtenstein's Prince Johann II, Henry Ford, and others) to establish a three-pillar framework: free capital movement, free trade, and self-determination via referenda for any territory over 50,000 residents.

— In this alternate timeline, capital flight collapses central bank financing of war; belligerent nations go bankrupt while neutral countries accumulate wealth, eliminating the incentive for conquest and ending WWI without a Versailles Treaty.

— Hard money fundamentally changes 20th-century outcomes: living standards rise dramatically, housing affordability improves from 8 years to 1.5 years of labor, technological development accelerates, and unemployment, inflation terminology, and leftism never emerge.

— Political systems shift toward competitive governance models where citizens "vote with their feet" rather than voting over leadership, resulting in thousands of smaller polities offering competing tax rates and services.

— Study how centralized reserve systems enable monetary debasement and state financing of destructive projects; hard money's inability to be printed forces fiscal discipline and government competition as a market mechanism.

— Recognize that modern economic categories (unemployment, inflation, GDP, recession) are constructs of fiat systems; they would not exist under sustainable hard money, suggesting current economic metrics obscure underlying policy distortions.

— Understand that capital mobility is the ultimate check on state power; when wealth can exit jurisdictions, governments must offer competitive services, transparent taxation, and fiscal responsibility rather than pursue debt and inflation.