Democracies cannot sustain a gold standard because voters will reject it

Evidence

By 1933 the lesson should have been clear. You can’t run a gold standard in a democracy. Eventually people will vote against it. They did so in Sweden and they did so in Germany. Austerity gave interwar Europe both social democracy and genocidal fascism. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 534

Categorization

• APHORISMS: ‘You can’t run a gold standard in a democracy’ is a compact, reusable political-economy warning about tying policy to an external constraint.
• XREF: connects to: The gold standard shielded monetary policy from democratic politics — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 998; Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415; Democracy cannot easily build large-scale public works that displace voters — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 107

Broader Connections

• The gold standard shielded monetary policy from democratic politics #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 998
• Rising democratic power forced the gold standard into terminal crisis #corroborates (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 415