RE GALT, GOLD AND GOD KRUGMAN RAND RYAN AND IT ALL

While I agree with Krugman here on Rand, one idea she had, along with many non Rand people, who have reflected on it, except economists, is that one needs stability and personal security in money.

You can't get stability or personal security in money by letting regimes compete with each other by manufacturing debt currencies. 

The fact that paper money has long been merely backed, more and then less, and finally not at all, by convertibility into metal, is part of the sad history of US banking politics. 

(Think also about Confederate paper money. There was a lot of it.  What happened to it?)

If Krugman were right about connecting Ryan's monetary views causally with something like the Great Depression, 1929 to the late 30s; 

then what is wrong causally with his discussion of the US having nevertheless been on mostly paper money since the early 19th Century? 

The technical answer, as he of course is aware, is that it was not mainly a question of a gold standard at all, (much less of something like Hawley Smoot) but of a multitude of things, cascading down from WW I, and from the huge speculations which had preceded it, not least of which was early financial as well as commercial globalism, and imperialism, too.

Krugman can't have it both ways, even against a Rand intellectual idiot like Ryan.

The dark secret, were we in a world of national economies instead of a global one,

 is that one could very well stimulate economic activity on a metal standard without printing debt currency to stimulate economic activity; 

(begging the larger question of whether one should really want limitless economic (read "economists'")       growth, in a finite and antagonistic world, in the first place, a question even Stephanie Flanders broached recently).

One enormous irony here re the US banking establishment, is that even on a paper debt currency basis, enormous bloated banks obviously cannot even be made, merely voluntarily, to loan fiat debt currency, even while now awash in it under mountains of quantitative easing paper money.