Let’s stipulate that a candidate whose go-to rhetorical tic is “gosh” doesn’t need help looking out of date. Even so, Mitt Romney got some late last week when the GOP platform committee proposed studying a return to the gold standard, last seen in this country (more or less) in the early 1930s. The draft of the platform, which will be finalized this week in Tampa, called for a commission to explore “possible ways to set a fixed value for the dollar”—code for gold.

On the merits, the idea is almost self-evidently awful, at least if you know a bit about monetary policy (and I confess to only knowing a little). Using a gold standard means linking the value of the dollar to the amount of gold in the world. If there’s suddenly too little gold—suppose something crazy happens, like South African miners go on strike—then there will be too few dollars relative to the amount of buying and selling going on in the economy. When there are too few dollars, each dollar becomes more valuable, and people start to hoard them. Spending slows and the economy collapses.

This is no mere theoretical proposition. It was a regular feature of the U.S. economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Economists have convincingly argued that the speed with which advanced economies junked the gold standard determined how quickly they shook off the Great Depression.

So why, despite the idea’s self-evident awfulness is the GOP considering it? (Pretty much no mainstream economist is on board.) At first blush, the explanation looks pretty simple: Ron Paul earned himself a bit of leverage by racking up almost 200 delegates during the primaries. Being a dedicated hard-money crank, he decided to put that leverage to work for his pet cause.

But Paul and his quirky followers aren’t the only GOPers musing about a return to the gold standard. The cause has, in fact, become something of a mainstream proposition within today’s GOP. Paul Ryan himself has pushed a proposal that's similar, except arguably more ruinous to the economy. And Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, who co-chairs the party’s platform committee, insisted the gold flirtation didn’t arise as a sop to Paul. “These were adopted because they are things that Republicans agree on. The House recently passed a bill on this, and this is something that we think needs to be done,” she told The Financial Times. Even Sarah Palin has piped up with similar sentiments. Though Palin didn’t explicitly endorse a gold standard, her comments were right out of the hard-money circles where support for it flourishes.