Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Greenspan

“Almost hysterical” is doing a lot of work here: it’s less an economic description than a character assessment. Greenspan frames opposition to the gold standard not as a reasoned policy disagreement but as an emotional overreaction, a tell. The word choice quietly delegitimizes critics while positioning gold as the calm, rational baseline - the grown-up in the room - and it signals the essay’s real target: the modern state’s toolkit for managing society through money.

The subtext is a political theory smuggled in as monetary commentary. “Statists of all persuasions” collapses ideological differences into a single shared instinct: control. Greenspan isn’t arguing that gold is merely a better technical standard; he’s arguing that it’s a constraint device that makes certain kinds of governance harder. Under a gold standard, deficits, monetary expansion, and crisis-era improvisation run into a physical limit. That limit is the point. The “inseparable” pairing of gold and “economic freedom” implies that discretionary fiat money isn’t neutral infrastructure - it’s a lever that can be pulled to redistribute, rescue, inflate away obligations, and centralize authority without explicit votes.

Context sharpens the intent. This line comes from Greenspan’s 1960s libertarian phase (his 1966 essay “Gold and Economic Freedom”), written in the shadow of Bretton Woods and a rising postwar consensus around activist fiscal policy and central banking. The irony is historical: the same man later chaired the Federal Reserve, embodying the discretionary system he once treated as a moral hazard. The quote works because it’s not really about gold; it’s about who gets to write the rules when money itself becomes policy.