Goldbugs

Friedrich A. Hayek gold coin (ca. 1979–80) | Courtesy of the author

People make bad money, and that money makes bad people.
— Peter Boehringer

Monetary issues have long divided neoliberals. Can you trust a central bank to manage currency? Can the growth of the money supply be made automatic? Should fixed or floating rates reign in global currency markets? Must money be backed by precious metals? While the debates fill many turgid journal pages, they are also rendered in the period style of The Omega Man (1971) in a paperback that appeared in 1979 with its title in glossy embossed red letters: Alongside Night. 

The novel opens in a near future where the Fed is struggling to prop up the value of “New Dollars,” banknotes that “resembled Monopoly money” worth so little against the “gold-backed eurofrancs” that European shoppers are flooding Manhattan. The gold price rises by a third every day as people scramble for stable assets. The protagonist is a young man named Elliot Vreeland. His father is the Nobel Prize-winning economist Martin Vreeland, a hybrid of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who summers in New Hampshire but hails from Vienna. An outspoken critic of the government’s monetary policy, Vreeland père becomes a target of the Secret Service as the crisis deepens. Anticipating his arrest, he sends his son to fetch his cache of gold coins sewn into a leather belt held by a bald, bearded man named Al at an adult video store in Times Square. Al becomes Elliott’s entry point into a radical libertarian underground called the Cadre whose greeting Elliott hears chanted in the streets: “Laissez-Faire! … Laissez-Faire! … Laissez-Faire!” 

The Cadre is part of the Agorist Underground, a hard money offshoot of the neoliberal movement that rejects the rule-based monetary management of Milton Friedman. Their initials are the chemical symbol for gold, the precious metal they see as the only vessel of value and means of orderly exchange. Taking seriously the anarchist injunction to “build the new society inside the shell of the old,” these so-called goldbugs have constructed a vast underground base called Aurora, which one enters after signing a “Submission to Arbitrate” with a third-party legal service. Fixtures include a vendor of nuclear warheads; a cafe named after Friedman’s famous statement that There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (TANSTAAFL); NoState Insurance; and the First Anarchist Bank and Trust Company or AnarchoBank, which issued its own coins and advertises “The Wonderful World of 100% Gold Reserve Banking.” In Aurora’s version of freedom, residents surrender the right to choose when to leave and agree to extensive surveillance, including, of course, IQ tests. 

The internecine neoliberal fights over money surface in the book’s finale. Lured into the orbit of government by the prospect of wielding technocratic authority, the Hayek-Friedman figure accepts the role of comptroller or “economic czar” to oversee the introduction of a new gold-backed currency after a loan from the European Common Market Treaty Organization (EUCOMTO). To the goldbugs of the Cadre, he is a traitor seduced to compromise with state power. When the rescue of the New Dollar fails, the Cadre’s own AnarchoBank steps in and their currency is soon the only one accepted. Taxis list their rates in the new money and unpaid members of the military queue to be employed by the Cadre and paid in gold. All services are privatized. The NYPD keep their blue uniforms but add red armbands reading “Security.” The book ends with the Cadre offered recognition as the legitimate government of the United States, a status they refuse on principle. Across the nation, the black flag of anarchism rises alongside the Gadsden flag with the rattlesnake and the logos “don’t tread on me” and “laissez faire” on a golden field.

Alongside Night presents a world where the direst predictions of what Melinda Cooper calls “debt millenarianism” have been realized. The trigger was the U.S. departure from the gold standard in 1971, a decision that many predicted would open the floodgates of money production and, in a morally loaded term, “debauch” the currency. The group that I call catastrophe libertarians pitched a form of survivalism, a way to prepare for the inevitable crisis. What made their survivalism different from those of other “preppers” was the conviction that the apocalypse might be a source of profit. One libertarian described the goldbug ideology as “the embracing of disaster.” He recalls people “who believed that when the crisis happened they could take a $20 gold piece and buy a block in midtown Manhattan.” “To listen to some of them is to hear people who not only worry about disaster but would welcome it,” he wrote, “Because they would be ready, which means that they would be right.” Being right would be lucrative. “In 1973, Ludwig von Mises died,” recalled one radical libertarian, and Austrians “outbid each other with predictions of the righteous monetary thunderbolt of the market at last bringing justice to the statists (and profits galore for those who went ‘long’ on gold and silver).” Twin pleasures—the vindication of winning an argument and the payday of economic enrichment—are at the heart of the Far Right’s capitalism, nowhere more evident than among the goldbugs.

How to Profit from the Apocalypse

Histories of neoliberalism begin at different points, to serve different purposes. Some begin with the coup in Chile in 1973 and the rise to power of Augusto Pinochet, showing how neoliberalism always hit the Global South first. Others begin with the breaking of the UK miners’ strike, or the slashing of top marginal tax rates in Reagan’s America, to capture the class contours of the project in the North. Others go back further to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire and the efforts to assemble a space where property and sovereignty were distinct, or the transformation of the IMF and the World Bank into the disciplinary arm of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments after Mexico’s default and the onset of the Third World debt crisis in 1982.

One could also begin from a less well-known event: when a book called How to Profit from the Coming Devaluation hit the national bestseller list in 1970. The book was by Harry Browne, an investment advisor and a pioneer of the nearly forgotten genre of the investment newsletter. Browne acknowledged Murray Rothbard as one his most important influences and dedicated a later book to Rothbard and other MPS (Mont Pelerin Society) worthies Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. The author of Alongside Night, J. Neil Schulman, credited Browne as the inspiration for his novel. He wrote it to show libertarianism not as an intellectual project but an activist one. His characters were not libertarians because they “spout all the theories” but because they had “something concrete to offer: safe areas, free trade zones, communication and transportation immune from the State, ways to beat the system.” Schulman had a point. Histories of neoliberalism are often too focused on the heady debates of monographs and seminar rooms and not enough on the practitioners, tipsters, and hustlers who often drive radicalization, recruit new believers, and, in not a few cases, shift popular common sense. Understanding the marriage of libertarianism and the Far Right requires entering the profane space of the newsletter, the advice manual, and eventually, the website, the feed, and the chatroom.

How to Profit from the Coming Devaluation was published by Arlington House, a small press out of New Rochelle, New York. One of the editors was Lew Rockwell, encountered in earlier chapters as Rothbard’s collaborator in the founding of the Mises Institute in 1982, the creation of the paleo alliance in the early 1990s and the publisher of Nathaniel Weyl on the precarious state of white minority republics in Southern Africa and commissioner of Integration: The Dream That Failed, which attacked the desegregation of schools based in part on Weyl’s extensive research on the supposedly hardwired genetic gaps in intelligence between racial groups. Running the Conservative Book Club for Arlington House in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Rockwell tapped into the new demand for right-wing publications in the years of backlash against the civil rights and student movement and the nascent counterrevolution to the cultural revolution. How to Profit was a runaway success for Arlington House. Rockwell tried to follow up the success with a series of copycat titles, including Panics and Crashes, and How You Can Make Money Out of Them; How to Buy Gold Coins; and How to Buy Gold Stocks and Avoid the Pitfalls.

What the books had in common was the prediction of an impending social and economic collapse and the need to secure hard assets, preferably in precious metals, and make plans for the safety of oneself and family. Survivalism was both an investment strategy and a business opportunity. As one person involved wrote, “the mid-1970s witnessed a tremendous increase in ‘hard money’ books, newsletters, seminars, coin companies, survival retreats, food storage, and related businesses.” The mixture of topics is captured in an issue of Libertarian Review from 1976. It included selections from German neoliberal economist Wilhelm Röpke alongside advertisements for a cassette program on “basic relaxation and ego-strengthening” by Ayn Rand’s designated heir Nathaniel Branden and fine print offerings of “survival information” from Inflation Survival Letter. Pamphlets for sale ranged from the innocuous “how to minimize your taxes” to the more alarming “layman’s guide to survival firearms” and “how to hide your valuables.” It included a piece by Rothbard advertised as “the dean of libertarian economists” as well as pieces by Gary North on “How to Buy Rural Property—Part I and Part II” and future MPS member and standard-bearing goldbug Mark Skousen on investment advice.

The idols of the catastrophe libertarians were the investors who knew how to profit from apocalypse and the books were guides to how to join their ranks. Browne’s book, like the others, portrayed the modern period as a fall from metallic-monetary grace. At the end of the nineteenth century, all major national (and imperial) economies had subscribed to a gold standard that limited the amount of currency in circulation and was believed to place built-in constraints on state expenditure. The gold standard collapsed with the First World War only to be resurrected with difficulty in the peace. The Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression created a liquidity crunch with accompanying spikes in unemployment and plummet in prices. The decline was only reversed when Great Britain abandoned gold convertibility in 1931 and the United States followed two years later, removing the limit on money creation and the expansion of credit and liberating governments to spend freely. After the Second World War, a novel compromise arrangement was devised whereby the U.S. dollar was returned to convertibility to gold while the rest of the world’s major currencies had fixed but adjustable rates in relation to the dollar.

The so-called Bretton Woods system ended on August 15, 1971, when Richard Nixon decreed that the United States stop converting dollars into gold. This is Day X for goldbugs, marking the descent into what German libertarian and MPS member Roland Baader called “monetary socialism” (Geldsozialismus) under which, they felt, the printing presses funded programs for the present at the cost of building up federal debt, which would lead in time to global monetary collapse. The end of the gold standard was mourned by many neoliberals, and Browne as well. They felt it freed states from salutary constraints. “Governments don’t like gold because it tells them when they do wrong things,” Browne wrote in 1970. “Without the gold, they might be able to stretch their misdeeds a little further. But it will not stop the consequences. They’re inevitable.” Leaving the bonds of gold meant runaway inflation and, by implication, devaluation of currency and savings. Degenerating morality was both consequence and cause of the collapsing monetary order. The erosion of the traditional family, the multiplication of children born out of wedlock, the rise of no-fault divorce: all were seen as bloating state spending, entitlements, and transfers and accelerating the coming crisis.

Browne’s book was followed by a series of books with similar titles, including Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression, Harry Schultz’s Panics & Crashes and How You Can Make Money Out of Them, and Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, the last described as “the bestselling financial book in history.” Browne even copied himself, hitting the top of the New York Times bestseller list in 1974 with You Can Profit from a Monetary Crisis. Crisis Investing hit number one in 1980. These authors were part of a scene of authors of investment newsletters. Before the internet expanded in the 1990s, direct mail and the mailing lists associated with them were a prime means of approaching the common person, getting around the gatekeepers of the mainstream media. None other than nativist neoliberal Peter Brimelow wrote a book called The Wall Street Gurus in 1986 with the subtitle How You Can Profit from Investment Newsletters. He described brokerages being blindsided by the power of the recipients of newsletters. Stock prices would move based on the flood of phone calls they would receive on the advice of a newsletter.

In the print world of goldbugs, investment advice was not just about a stock portfolio or savings account but one’s entire lifestyle, understanding of politics, and encounter with the past and the future. It was a starting assumption of the writings that monetary collapse was inevitable. The question was not if the death of money would take place but when. Because of this, one must prepare not just financially but tactically. Browne’s book ended with admonitions to create some kind of “retreat,” from a “well-stocked camper” to an “elaborate hideaway.” An essential part of the goldbug formula was instilling a basic mistrust in the utterances of public authorities. Politicians of all parties only shifted blame to keep the greater confidence game going. “You will hear—right up to the crisis,” Browne wrote, “all the typical platitudes, asserting that the dollar is absolutely sound, that ‘we have nothing to fear but fear itself,’ that ‘depressions are caused by fear mongers’ etc. but we have seen the fundamental economic principles that transcend confidence and mass psychology.” “Your patriotism will be appealed to,” he wrote, “but react by saving yourself, not the government. You are not responsible for what has happened; it is the government that has destroyed the currency.” “You have only one mission,” the book concluded, “to survive and prosper.”

Goldbug investment advisers and other counsels of market apocalypse channeled a kind of folk version of Public Choice theory. They argued that money creation was a tool that political elites used to reproduce their own power. The rhetoric of achieving social justice through social spending was hollow: a sleight-of-hand to conceal the politician’s real goal of buying votes with taxpayer dollars. The most extreme version of this argument came from the outright conspiracy theories of authors like Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, cited and propagated by goldbugs over the years. In their 1976 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Allen and Abraham argued that finance capitalism was the “anvil” and communism the “hammer to conquer the world.” They argued that debt was used to create power over people on the path to a global oligarchy, joining the party elites of the Soviet-led world with the financial elites of the West.

Until 1974, the practicalities of hoarding gold for the end-times were complicated by the fact that it had been illegal to possess it privately in the United States since 1933, when individual gold holdings were requisitioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet in his 1970 book, Browne noted an important loophole: you could hold gold coins if they were old enough to be considered antiques. Thus was born a critical nexus. Though the two are rarely recounted at the same time, the history of libertarianism in the United States cannot be separated from the business of selling collectible coins. The most high-profile libertarian in the country, Ron Paul, sold coins for decades, and his partner, Burton Blumert was proprietor of Camino Coins in Burlingame, California, as well as the founder of the Center for Libertarian Studies, cofounder of the John Randolph Club (JRC), chair of the Mises Institute, and publisher of the Rothbard-Rockwell Report. Paul partnered with Blumert from the time he stepped down from Congress in 1984 until he returned to Congress in 1996.

Later JRC member Gary North also started out in the coin and newsletter scene. He moved from a position at the Foundation for Economic Education in the early 1970s to sell silver coins with Browne, conducting “seminars” in cities to move their product. He attended the famous founding conference of Austrian Economics in 1974 in South Royalton, Vermont, sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, before joining Ron Paul’s staff in 1976 to write his newsletter followed by a position writing Howard Ruff’s newsletter in 1977. His own newsletter was making him so much money that he changed states to avoid income tax. As a “Christian Reconstructionist” as well as an adherent of the Austrian school, North believed that money and morality were inseparably connected and rooted in biblical teachings. The adoption of welfare functions by the government— financed by fiat currency— drove humanity further from God and closer to the abyss. In 1979, he wrote his own copycat Browne book titled How You Can Profit from the Coming Price Controls.

The apocalypticism and counterfactual claims so familiar from the online Far Right of the early twenty-first century had a precedent in the goldbug investment newsletter, which also offered packaged insights that appeared to go against the grain, to offer you the edge that nonsubscribers lacked, the one the mainstream media did not want you to have because otherwise everybody would beat the market. They cultivated an aura of esoteric knowledge and an abiding suspicion of conventional wisdom. They also often used stark, frightening language used to propel the reader into action to save themselves. A common word used was “survival.” Rothbard himself wrote multiple articles for Skousen’s Inflation Survival Letter. The binary of survival or death mirrored the binary of buying or selling a share but, in this case, one’s own existence was the asset in question. Life itself was the stake.

Excerpted from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian (Zone Books, 2025). Used with permission.