Gold offered no mechanism for restraining the sovereigns, and had to rely on trust in them not abusing the gold standard and the population remaining eternally vigilant against them doing so. This might have been feasible when the population was highly educated and knowledgeable about the dangers of unsound money, but with every passing generation displaying the intellectual complacence that tends to accompany wealth,13 the siren song of con artists and court-jester economists would prove increasingly irresistible for more of the population, leaving only a minority of knowledgeable economists
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