ThinkProgress recently posted an article ("Ted Cruz Embraces Fringe Monetary Policy That Went Out of Style in the 1930s") by Alan Pyke lampooning Ted Cruz's advocacy of a monetary system tied to gold at the Republican debate on October 28.
Tom Woods and two guests, Austrian-school economists Joseph Salerno and Jeffrey Herbener, rip apart Pyke's ill-informed analysis in entertaining fashion in an episode of the Tom Woods Show podcast.
Not that Pyke made it very difficult to do so.
The Austrian-school view of money does differ from the supply-side view in many respects, but Woods et al. are still staunch supporters of sound money.
Although supply-side economics is most often associated with tax-cutting, the supply-side literature is rich in its advocacy of sound money, i.e., a stable currency backed by gold.
Using long discredited arguments and the usual caricatures, Pyke apparently hasn't read any of the recent literature on the successful history of gold standard systems such as two books written by expert Nathan Lewis, Gold: The Once and Future Money and Gold: The Monetary Polaris.
In addition, recent books by Steve Forbes (Money) and John Tamny (Popular Economics) discuss the critical importance of stable money in promoting production and exchange.
The political left has to realize that saying "everyone agrees the gold standard was terrible" as Pyke does is simply shoddy analysis. Just because many of today's gold standard advocates are not academics with economics Ph.D's from elite universities does not mean that they are to be simply ignored. The burden is clearly on those who believe an all-powerful central bank is necessary to "manage" the currency and the economy. The evidence is not on their side.
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