Tom Frank Driven Mad by Gold

We've seen it in any number of movies--seemingly sane men driven stark staring mad by the lure of gold. Wall Street Journal columnist and the smartiest smarty pants among the progressive journalist intelligentsia Tom Frank joined them last week.

Take a ginger tiptoe around his breakdown, in which he floats the idea that it would be pretty neat if the government fucked up all those right-wing wackos who don't trust the government to manage the currency properly by willy-nilly selling off--or even just hinting that it might sell off--lots of its gold in order to make the price drop, just to cause everyone who is unpatriotic enough to think they want to protect their assets by connecting them to something other than government paper to get it and get it good.

Of course, after rubbing his fingers together with unalloyed delight at how wonderful and apt this would be, how it is exactly what anyone who doesn't trust the government deserves, he lets you know:

Of course, it is an article of my corny liberal faith that government should never craft policy merely in order to damage its partisan opponents.

He then goes on to backtrack and talk about how cool and appropriate and rough-justice it would be if the government really did it. Psych! He's kidding. Really. But…come on, they deserve it, right? But naaah, that would be wrong. But wouldn't it be cool! Nah, that's all right, goldbug brothers, I'm just messin' with ya.

A whole bunch of Reason magazine stories and blog posts on the continuing crisis of Thomas Frank in our public life.