The following quote is from an essay that was included in a book called Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:

“In the absence of a gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold. If everyone decided, for example, to convert all his bank deposits to silver or copper or any other good and thereafter decline to accept checks as payment for goods, bank deposits would lose their purchasing power and government-created bank credit would be worthless as claims on goods. The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to be able to protect themselves.

This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”

The author of that quote was Alan Greenspan. The title of the essay? Gold and Economic Freedom.

As I’ve stated numerous times, gold is a sucker’s bet for true TEOTWAWKI survival situations, but it is one of the best ways to preserve your wealth in economic depression, or just the “rough times” that seem to be ahead. I prefer to stock things people will trade for but gold makes sense for people with large amounts of money sitting in a bank losing value every day.