Why I Resist Buying Gold

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I'm not sure who decided that gold was valuable. To some people, it really isn't. Last night, I spoke with a student who told her that she inherited gold jewelry from her mother in law. She kept only one piece as a sentimental momento and traded the rest for things she valued more. Yet, hardly a day goes by during which I don't hear an advertisement encouraging us to buy gold with the prediction that it will still raise 50% in value. Why must it? How do they know? If they really can see the future, why not tell me about other things about which I care? They're guessing. They are in the business to sell a product.

There are many different products. I really enjoyed Ludwig von Mises' book Human Action because he talks about values and what people value. This same student told me last night that girls stopped really desiring guys like me about the time I was born. Well, I'll still push for it. It is not that people who choose virtue do so in spite of what it doesn't pay. We value virtue more than any advantage the alternative affords. It's a matter of preference.

However, some things always have value. Yes, in the ads they say gold has never been worth zero. There may always be someone who wants it. However, if those people are your enemies, they may wage war on you to take it by force, and if those people are too far away, you may not be able to trade it for what you need when your need is great.

In previous posts, I talked about how things hung on refridgerators influenced me. For several years, and for some inexplicable reason, my mother has had a quote on her fridge. I looked up the full excerpt last night and found this (original part I knew is in bold):

Gold is assigned a value by men. Its value changes with the laws and whims of men. It was arbitrarily selected. Students of Adam Smith know that there was once a Silver Standard. I know. I read all about it.

Suppose you had millions of bushels [of wheat] to sell, and could sell it for twenty dollars per bushel, or for a million dollars per bushel, no matter what amount, so that you sell all your wheat,and transport it out of the country, and you are left with nothing more than a pile of gold, what good would it do you? You could not eat it, drink it, wear it, or carry it off where you could have something to eat. The time will come that gold will hold no comparison in value to a bushel of wheat. Gold is not to be compared with it in value. Why would it [wheat] be precious to you now? Simply because you could get gold for it? Gold is good for nothing, only as men value it. It is no better than a piece of iron, a piece of limestone, or a piece of sandstone, and it is not half so good as the soil from which we raise our wheat, and other necessaries of life. The children of men love it, they lust after it, are greedy for it, and are ready to destroy themselves,and those around them, over whom they have any influence, to gain it. (Journal of Discourses 1 pg 250, June 5th 1853)

For some reason, there's a big rush on gold. Usually when everyone is into something, my natural reaction is to go the opposite direction. When everyone says you should do a thing, usually they are wrong, and you would be wise to consider the source and ask yourself what they have to gain.

The problem is one of gain. We think we need money to find happiness. Happiness is a state of being. It comes from gratitude, from recognition of all the great things you have. Just this morning, I spoke with a close acquaintance who told me her husband caught her severe cold and solicited my prayers. At the end of our conversation, she pointed out the profound truth about how this small change made her more grateful for her health. We so rarely appreciate what is, bewailing only what might be. In the same excert, Brigham Young continues:

When this people are blessed so much that they consider their blessings a burden and a drudge to them, you may always calculate on a cricket war,a grasshopper war, a drought, too much rain, or something else to make the scales preponderate the other way. This people have been blessed too much,so that they have not known what to do with their blessings.

It sounds a lot like Lincoln who, only a decade later, would talk of how Americans were bound by unbroken success and became to proud to pray to the God who made them. At that time, a war broke out to make things they took for granted more dear, and that has typically been the cycle.


In our pride, we talk too much about what we deserve, what we lack, and how other people have it better. We are greedy for better circumstances, better times, and better opportunities. Without a proper perspective of how things might otherwise be, we covet things we do not have and discount what we do. I told this same student with whom I spoke last night that my several years of living outside the United States made me appreciate and understand more the advantages we have here. Poor people and their advocates often forget that in older times, they would not be poor, not because times were better, but because of disease or famine or war those same poor would be dead. Sick people and their advocates complain because they suffer forgetting that without our technology they would not be alive to complain at all. Even I, blind as I am, might never have made it to adulthood, let alone work in academia.

Our world values things that are worthless and considers as dross and refuse things that really matter. In the end, gold makes a really expensive paperweight. Land can provide shelter, grow food, and at least give you a place to live, and if the land is nondescript enough, you won't have to fight anyone to defend a field of empty holes. I know your values might be different. If you choose to buy gold, that's fine by me. When you have the gold and I have the wheat, don't be surprised when I decide against trading for something for which I have no use. Bon appetit.