Claims that BRICS can easily abandon the dollar for a gold-backed currency overlook that China, Russia and others rely on export-oriented, wage-repressing inflationary regimes that would be severely disrupted by genuine hard-money constraints.

Official gold holdings and institutional history show the West (especially the U.S.) remains far better positioned for a gold standard than BRICS economies, whose models depend on continued Western consumption and cheap credit.

A Western return to gold-backed money could actually harm BRICS by reducing demand for low-cost subcontracted manufacturing and commodities, while strengthening Western savings, R&D and potential re-industrialization.

Ever since the sanctions onto Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, combined with real domestic economic anxieties of the post-pandemic era and declining institutional trust, a handful of libertarians and a mix of anti-war conservatives and the far-left have been announcing that de-dollarization was inevitable, prompted by BRICS’s desire to pursue a gold-backed currency.

The gold standard has always been part of many libertarians’ and others’ agenda, and for good reasons: it serves as a hard check on both monetary expansion and a major fiscal constraint on government spending, prevents a regressive tax on politically-unconnected populations, and therefore constrains government powers by pegging currency notes to verifiable specie instead of the whims of arbitrary “revaluations” or inflationary policy (particularly through the fractional-reserve system). Most libertarians should be able to recite the basic Misesian position without a problem.

And yes, the American economy and the American state are problematic, to say the least. I certainly don’t have to recite all of the abuses, from the most infamous and egregious practices like abusing eminent domain, hawkish foreign policy, and inflation. Libertarians should call those abuses and malpractices out as they are.

But it isn’t just strictly the American economy or the American state that are at fault for the crimes it is accused of—there are far more egregious acts committed by other states, and other economies are far more dysfunctional than the American one, and often by a long shot. Most libertarians are only vaguely aware of this, as their exposure to global economic freedom and rule of law are often dictated by metrics and brief summaries like the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom or positively-minded documentaries from Johan Norberg or Milton Friedman.

While these are great primers and do a good job at explaining what happens when economies liberalize, however marginal the liberalizations may be, they certainly do not explain in depth on how economic policies of those countries actually look like, other than standard........

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