I have always liked gold but alas never actually had much of it. However one time at a gold shop I got the chance to hold a one-kilogram block of gold in my hand - about the size of a standard size block of Cadbuyr's chocolate - but much better looking! I gazed at this object, and the light and colour of it really were quite beautiful. I gazed at it some more, and gazed some more, and it seemed to be entrancing me. I looked up at the sights around me, and back down at the gold, and I really felt I could just go on gazing at it! Even if it had no other attraction than its simple and powerful beauty it's easy to see why people want gold.

However just because it's true that value is subjective, and just because there is no such thing as "intrinsic objective value", doesn't mean gold doesn't have objective value, meaning an objective *price*. Obviously it has objective value in that sense - its market price arises from the fact that so many people want it.

Michael's critique of Austrian theory is incomplete because he doesn't seem to understand what they are saying, and has not refuted Austrian theory. Just because there is objective intrinsic value, does not mean that one thing is just as good as another when it comes to money, nor that gold is just as good as government's paper rubbish, nor government can increase the supply of money substitutes without causing bubbles and depressions.

There is no need for Michael, or Keynes, to decide on behalf other people, what they should value. They are quite capable of doing it all by themselves.

The very fact that fiat currency is and can only be maintained by criminalising society's first preference for money just says it all, doesn't it? Perhaps Michael and Keynes are cleverer than everyone else in the world put together - and just perhaps they are not.

Michael, if you read "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" and "The Mystery of Banking", both by Murray Rothbard (free online I think) you will see that government manipulating the money supply by increasing money substitutes relative to money in specie, has historically been behind the bubbles which you wrongly attribute to capitalism without giving any reason for your belief. You need to refute that argument before you can just baldly assert without justification, as you have done, that such bubbles are intrinsic to "capitalism", rather than government inflating the supply of money substitutes. Thus your entire argument against the Austrian school collapses.

"Gold can offer a safe haven in difficult times like this, but is surely no panacea for regulating economies."

Here we see why Michael's argument has miscarried: he thinks the purpose of money is for "regulating economies" - by governments with their hand in the till and a direct conflict of interest with the rest of the population.