By Franklin Sanders
The fact is, gold bugs (with their blind, monomaniacal devotion to gold) miss the point. They are so ideologically wedded to the yellow metal that they overlook both history and facts. It is not a monometallic gold standard that history overwhelmingly demonstrates, but bimetallism.
Shortly after I wrote Silver Bonanza for Jim Blanchard in 1993 but before it had been published, Jim teased this gem out of Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman: “The major monetary metal in history is silver, not gold.” (I remember it well because the statement struck Jim so strongly that he had it printed up on a sticker and inserted it on the flyleaf of the original 8-1/2 by 11 version.)
Friedman was right, of course. For most of mankind throughout most of history, silver has been the much more important monetary metal, familiar as the metal of daily commerce. Gold was used only for very, very large payments, which most people make only rarely, if ever.
