William McKinley (1897-1901) ran for president on the basis of the gold standard. |
By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.
~ John Maynard Keynes
The question
You've heard of the song "America, the Beautiful," but have you heard of "America, the Gold Standard"? Should America have ever gotten off the gold standard? Should America return to a gold standard to back our currency? I've always viewed the wisdom of any economic system based on the gold standard as both economically prudent and morally just. From antiquity all the great nations of the world used a gold or silver standard or both.
The gold standard in the 20th century
The gold standard is when the value of a country's money is tied to the amount of gold the country possesses. The economic advantage of a gold standard is that artificial currency (e.g., paper money) is backed by a fixed asset of real value. It presents a self-governing and stabilizing effect on the economy. One would not build a skyscraper or even a chicken shack on a foundation of shifting sand, because it would soon collapse at the first strong wind or storm; neither should a great republic like America, which touts itself as the greatest nation in the history of the world, continue its economic structure based on the phantom dollar backed by the unconstitutional and fraudulent entity called the Federal Reserve, which is partly responsible for getting America into this $17 trillion dollar deficit and $61.6 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
President Woodrow Wilson's fascist Federal Reserve Act (1913) notwithstanding, Article 1, Section 8, mandates that only Congress can print money and set interests rates banks can charge, and not some unelected, unaccountable oligarchy of bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve.
Throughout history, sustained liberal economic policy – whether under Marxism, socialism, Fabian socialism, Keynesianism, or FDR/LBJ/BHO welfare statism – would have been politically and economically impossible if America had retained a gold standard. Liberal Democrats would've long ago been completely exposed as duplicitous traitors and within two elections relegated to permanent, irrelevant status. The federal and state governments could no longer promiscuously print and spend money to fund unconstitutional wars and welfare scams, promote discriminatory tax rates, and enact federal and state regulations that function as business killers.
In 1900, President William McKinley reintroduced the gold standard, which immediately helped America return to prosperity after the Panic of 1893, and America greatly prospered until the early 1930s when FDR immediately took America off the gold standard in March 1933 by federalizing all gold reserves, declaring a nationwide bank moratorium in order to prevent a run on the banks by consumers lacking confidence in the economy and forcing the Federal Reserve to recklessly print money to artificially inflate the dollar, fund his New Deal welfare scams and finance World War II.
The above introductory quote by Fabian socialist economist and liberal icon John Maynard Keynes, whose sophistic economic arguments took Britain off the gold standard in 1931, proposed to put the power to print money in the hands of the privately owned Bank of England, which led to the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement that established the International Monetary Fund and an international monetary system based on convertibility of the various national currencies into a U.S. dollar that was in turn convertible into gold. Continuing the treachery FDR started in 1933, in August 1971, President Richard Nixon completely abandoned the gold standard. Forty years ago gold was $35 per ounce. Today gold is almost $1,800 per ounce while the dollar continues its descent into economic abyss. You do the math.
Gold standard = bye bye, Democratic Party and welfare state
In a recent Fox News article about JKF's issuance of silver certificates in Executive Order 11,110, a perceptive reader had the following comments:
There is no such thing as "enough" gold. It is a matter of setting the conversion rate dollar/weight. For those who would like to ask, if the gold standard was so good, why was it abandoned? … It was abandoned because it was too good. In other words, it acted as a straight jacket and did not allow governments to spend unlimited amounts of money.
Eureka! Do you think the legions of petty bureaucrats at the Federal Reserve would have a job if America were on the gold standard? People like Dr. Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner should be in orange jumpsuits on their way to prison along with all of the rats on board the Obama Titanic who jumped overboard months ago because they knew that the America ship of state was on fire and sinking.
The answer? Gold, chains and the Constitution
If America hadn't created free public education in the 1850s, which are merely Marxist, Darwinist, Freudian propaganda factories and temples to education atheism, we would have long ago learned the moral and constitutional words of President Thomas Jefferson, who like a prophet of old proclaimed, Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.
Unless America elects enough tea-party Republicans to not only kill Obamacare, QE1, QE2, Stimulus, TARP, Wall Street kleptocracy bailouts, but also LBJ's Great Society, FDR's New Deal and replace the IRS with a flat tax, then America as a superpower and the greatest of all great nations is kaput. To paraphrase Jefferson, America's return to the gold standard will be a good first step to enforce fiscal discipline, a balanced budget, limit government intervention and restart the Reagan revolution by binding liberal Democrats down from economic, political and legal mischief, shackling these thieves (and their RINO co-conspirators) to the chains of the Constitution.