Making the Case for Gold… (Romney & a new Gold Commission) #2
Seth Lipsky’s Wall Street Journal article “The Gold Standard Goes Mainstream” reports on the growing calls across the US for real and fundamental monetary reform, for the restoration of a metallic basis to money (a return of the Gold Standard), auditing the Federal Reserve, and the restriction of the Fed’s central banking powers. Moreover, the growing clamour for reform, Lipsky argues, is not dependent upon a Romney victory; but Mitt Romney’s victory in November might just bring that reform forward. As Mr. Lipsky records:
An under-reported development of this campaign season is the Republican Party’s decision this week to send Gov. Mitt Romney into the presidential race on a platform effectively calling for a new gold commission. The realization that America’s system of fiat money is part of its economic problem is moving from the fringes of political discussion to the center.
Mr. Lipsky continues, “Congress has come alive” to fundamental and radical monetary reform:
Rep. Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, is seeking to pass the Sound Dollar Act, which would end the Fed’s mandate to keep unemployment down, instead having the central bank focus only on stable prices. Rep. Paul is pressing the Free Competition in Currency Act, which would end legal tender and put Hayek’s ideas into practice.
Nor is this just confined to the House:
In the Senate, Jim DeMint, Mike Lee and Rand Paul are offering the Sound Money Promotion Act, which would remove the tax on the appreciation in the value of gold and silver coins that have been declared legal tender by the federal or a state government. Utah has already made gold and silver coins legal tender in the state.
Though painted as a moderate and hardly a Tea Party favourite, Mr. Lipsky even sees signs of optimism in the Republican Nominee, Mitt Romney:
In Paul Ryan he chose a running mate who understands the idea of sound money. In June 2010, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Mr. Ryan asked Mr. Bernanke what he made of record-high prices of gold. (The value of the dollar had just slid to below 1/1,200th of an ounce of gold; it has since plunged to below 1/1,600th of an ounce.)
“I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price,” Mr. Bernanke replied. He confessed his belief that some people were hedging “against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.” No wonder the eventual House bill to audit the Fed passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.
None of this makes radical and fundamental monetary reform a certainty; it’s election year and Mitt Romney is out to court every voter he can and not all election manifesto commitments are kept after elections, especially the more radical ones.
Yet one can hope.
Indeed, the most high profile and articulate advocate of monetary reform in US politics has been for many years Rep. Ron Paul. Whilst his candidature for the Republican nomination in 2012 may have failed, Ron Paul’s energetic championing of radical monetary reform and his calls to Audit the Fed have served to bring the critique of central banking from academic obscurity into the political mainstream – and it’s testament to Ron Paul’s influence and the extent of his followers that Romney is now running on a platform endorsing a new Gold Commission.
(Article hat-tip to Guido Fawkes’ blog, www.order-order.com)
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