From The Quotable Mises — surrounding passage

The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion—policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners—had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard. Solemn pledges were broken, retroactive laws were promulgated, provisions of constitutions and bills of rights were openly defied. And hosts of servile writers praised what the governments had done and hailed the dawn of the fiat-money millennium. The Theory of Money and Credit , p. 461

“The classical or orthodox gold standard alone is a truly effective check on the power of the government to inflate the currency. Without such a check all other constitutional safeguards can be rendered vain.”

The Theory of Money and Credit , p. 495 If we had gold coins in actual daily circulation everywhere in the world . . . the depreciation of gold would . . . not have taken place at all. Money, Method, and the Market Process , p.