I’ll tell ya, you can tell when I’m on the road. Normally, I would not post two article from the same source in one day. This isn’t a philosophical thing, although I do try to mix it up. It is that when I’m at home, I have my RSS feed. So things come in all mixed up. But when I’m out, I’m stuck with my crummy phone. And so I tend to stick with single outlets. That’s especially true of Vox, which displays really well on my phone. (Interestingly: Frankly Curious does not; I’ve really got to do something about that.)

Anyway, Vox is a great source. I really like the site Lawyers, Guns, & Money, but it is very much an old fashioned blog with a lot stuff that is either pathetically brief or too obscure without cluing me in on what’s going on. Vox is great at cluing me in regardless what the subject is. Anyway, so one of the excellent articles I read was Amanda Taub’s The Fear and Insecurity Behind Putin’s Bizarre New Workout Video. The video is of Putin and his beta Dmitri Medvedev working out in the gym. Taub thinks it is pretty pathetic. I’m not so sure — they look pretty good for guys their age. But putting it out is pathetic, that’s for sure:

According to Taub, these videos and the other ones we know so well (shirtless horseback riding) are not the result of an autocrat exercising his ego as Mussolini did. They are rather a calculated propaganda tool of an autocrat with a weak grip on power. As long as he is invading Crimea, the people know he is “strong” and don’t need videos of him working out. But when his popularity slips, he wants Russia to know, “He Tarzan; he strong.” It shows just how paranoid these leaders are, because Putin is hugely popular in Russia. But whatever.

What I find fascinating is how my fellow Americans scratch their heads about Putin’s approval ratings. But Putin’s high approval ratings are mostly due to the exactly the same things that gave the last two Bush presidents such high approval ratings: chest thumping and war mongering. Apparently, humans just love this kind of thing. But they just can’t see that they do the same thing. A good example of this was France during the Iraq War. It wouldn’t allow the US to fly some fighter jets over its air space. The people of France loved it. But Americans decided that France was awful and weak. That’s right: they thought that France was weak for not just bowing down to the US.

When the attacks of 9/11 happened, I had many reactions. I was saddened, of course — even disgusted. But I was also self-critical. First, I knew (and I can document publishing this on that very day) that we would use the tragedy inappropriately. We would do things that the government had long wanted to do, but really nothing to make the country safer. But I also thought, “What did we do now?” That wasn’t to justify the attacks; I don’t think they are justifiable. But I knew that they didn’t just happen. The US interferes with every country on the globe. All kinds of people have all kinds of really good reasons for being pissed off at America.

But almost no one now (and even fewer at that time) would admit such a thing. No, it is the greatest myth of America: we just mind our own business and people hate us for no reason at all. That’s why we have troops stationed in almost 150 countries and bases in 38 countries. This, above all, is what Americans need to understand: we are just like every other country. We aren’t “exceptional” except in our power, and that only makes us worse.

So Putin is working out on video? How is that different from Obama playing basketball or Bush clearing brush? It isn’t.

I want to talk about the stupidity of the gold standard. But before I get to that, I think we should take a moment to be pleased that Mount McKinley will now be called by its previous name, Denali. It is the tallest mountain in North America. The Koyukon people have been living in the area for centuries — long before William McKinley was even a glint in the eye of William Sr. They called the mountain Denali — or as close as you can get to it when you aren’t speaking one of the Athabaskan languages. The fact that we are going back to the old name is a very good and honorable thing.

But Matt Yglesias is the kind of guy who isn’t above kicking a guy when he’s down, President McKinley’s Policies Were Garbage, and He Doesn’t Deserve an Awesome Mountain. As usual, Yglesias is totally right. While it is true that McKinley was president during a rip-roaring recovering at the end of the 19th century, it is also true that it was just dumb luck. He’s kind of like the Ronald Reagan of his day: he got all the credit for a change in the money supply that he had nothing to do with.

Now in the case of Reagan, we weren’t on the gold standard. So it was Paul Volcker who basically destroyed Carter’s presidency and then created Reagan’s “Morning in America.” (Note: Volcker was and still is a Democrat; can you imagine a Republican sabotaging his own party like that? And don’t say Greenspan because it doesn’t work at all!) But in McKinley’s time we were very much on the gold standard. And what happened at that time ought to make all the gold bugs out there rethink their ridiculous notions of money. But of course, they won’t.

Remember William Jennings Bryan “Cross of Gold” speech? If you are like most Americans, you don’t understand a damned thing he was talking about. And all the stuff about “free silver” is the same thing. People advocating for it wanted a greater supply of money in the economy. They wanted inflation. I know that the power elite have done a great job of vilifying inflation in this country, but as I write about all the time, modest inflation is a good thing. It drives the economy forward; it creates jobs; it alleviates debt. But on the other hand, for the rich, it’s a bad thing — primarily because more demand for labor means more money has to be paid for it, and because lenders want to squeeze every drop of blood out of borrowers that they can.

So allowing currency to be based on gold and silver would have been a good way to achieve some inflation and provide farmers and workers with some relief. But McKinley — like most representatives of the power elite — did not want to provide the working man with relief; he wanted the rich to keep on getting richer. So he was strongly behind the gold standard. But a funny thing happened during his presidency: there was a huge increase in the output of gold in the world. As a result, the value of gold went down, causing the inflation that the “free silver” movement wanted. McKinley got the credit, but he shouldn’t have. In fact, if he had gone with the “free silver” movement, the depression would have ended much earlier.

A couple of years ago, I wrote, Gold Is Not a Good Investment — at Least for 500 Years. The truth is that the value of gold has only gone down over time. What’s more, its value is highly volatile. The gold bugs are always on about how the Federal Reserve is “printing money” and causing inflation. As I said, that would actually be a good thing. But the truth is that since we left the gold standard, the economy and prices themselves have been far more stable than they were when we were on the gold standard. So I don’t even know what these people are on about — except that they are totally irrational and immune to reason.

But it is very cool that Denali in the highest mountain in North America. In addition to it being the right thing to do, it is one less occasion when we even need to think of President McKinley.