Why We Can't Return To The Gold Standard

Barry Eichengreen (h/t the Dish):

BUT TO invoke the wisdom of Herman Cain, returning to the gold standard would be more difficult than practical. Envisioning a statute requiring the Federal Reserve to redeem its notes for fixed amounts of specie is easy, but deciding what that fixed amount should be is hard. Set the price too high and there will be large amounts of gold-backed currency chasing limited supplies of goods and services. The new gold standard will then become an engine of precisely the inflation that its proponents abhor. But set the price too low, and the result will be deflation, which is not exactly a healthy state for an economy.

Given the inflation-phobic nature of gold­-standard proponents, deflation would seem to be the more likely scenario. In response, we are counseled not to worry. In End the Fed Paul describes how the United States returned to the gold standard in 1879 after a two-decades-long hiatus caused by the Civil War. Resumption, as this decision was known, pegged the price of gold at levels lower than during wartime, leading to an extended period of deflation. If we could do it then, the implication follows, we can do it now.
Then again, there are some things you don’t want to try at home. The distributional effects of deflation are no happier than those of inflation. In this case it is debtors with obligations fixed in nominal terms, rather than creditors with assets fixed in nominal terms, who are unable to protect themselves. The populist revolt of the 1880s was stoked by farmers with fixed mortgages who labored under growing debt burdens and financial distress as a result of falling crop prices. Nor is deflation likely to support robust economic growth, as any close observer of the Japanese economy will tell you. Because nominal interest rates are not easily reduced below zero, the faster the price level falls, the higher will be the real interest rate (the real cost of borrowing and investing). The robust investment and job creation prized by the gold standard’s champions and the deflation they foresee are not easily reconciled, in other words.
Proponents of the gold standard thus face a Goldilocks problem: the porridge must be neither too hot nor too cold but just right. What temperature exactly, pray tell, might that be? And even if we are lucky enough to get it right at the outset, consider what happens subsequently. As the economy grows, the price level will have to fall. The same amount of gold-backed currency has to support a growing volume of transactions, something it can do only if the prices are lower, unless the supply of new gold by the mining industry magically rises at the same rate as the output of other goods and services. If not, prices go down, and real interest rates become higher. Investment becomes more expensive, rendering job creation more difficult all over again.
Under a true gold standard, moreover, the Fed would have little ability to act as a lender of last resort to the banking and financial system. The kind of liquidity injections it made to prevent the financial system from collapsing in the autumn of 2008 would become impossible because it could provide additional credit only if it somehow came into possession of additional gold. Given the fragility of banks and financial markets, this would seem a recipe for disaster. Its proponents paint the gold standard as a guarantee of financial stability; in practice, it would be precisely the opposite.

It's just not going to work.  Why this is such a hot topic amongst the Republicans, the party of business, I don't understand.  Nothing like grinding deflation to crush a nearly already depression-bound economy.  The Republican party needs to become much more pragmatic, and much less fundamentalist, whether that is Christian, free market or both.