“When you take the dollar off the gold standard, for example, there’s nothing backing up the dollar. When the dollar is worth, you know, whatever the inflated value of it is, when there’s nothing substantive behind it, when you have all these runaway trains here — and we’ve reached a point where it’s all coming due here at one time; and we’re going to make it even worse with this trillion-dollar stimulus package of Obama’s. The idea that we’ve gotta go in there and have all this new government spending because we’re going to emulate FDR? Well, the dirty little secret is that FDR prolonged the Great Depression with the exact thing Obama is going to do.”

Of course Limbaugh, a GOP hack, cannot comment on anything without getting a potshot in on Obama or some other leading Democrat, but if Limbaugh were to use his powers for good rather than evil, this would be a good thing, right?

Well, maybe. But if Limbaugh does come out for gold — and it’s not exactly clear he’s going all the way with the idea from the quote above — it could actually be a bad thing, in my opinion, since it would further perpetuate the misguided notion that laissez-faire libertarians are in league with “conservatives” like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, etc. We’re not.

Limbaugh and his ilk have no interest whatsoever in libertarian ideas when their political party rules the White House or Congress (or God forbid, both!). No, when conservatives are in power, they’re too busy expanding government for their own pet interests. But the truth of the matter is, we would be totally unable to fund the Right Wing progam under the gold standard.

War, in particular, is virtually impossible to fund under a hard-money regime, and that’s why the gold standard was suspended during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. In fact, any anti-war liberal — the type of people that Limbaugh hates — should embrace the gold standard as the ultimate companion of international peace. How sweet it would be for the Left to return to its laissez-faire roots and shut up the fake capitalists like Rush Limbaugh once and for all. Almost as sweet as it would be if Cindy Sheehan and Dennis Kucinich renounced socialism in favor of laissez-faire.