Do Americans have the guts to attempt a financial re-set and build a stable currency system? Or do we prefer long-term debt slavery and another Great Depression?

With the national debt reaching absurd heights and personal home/auto/college/credit card debt sucking the joy out of life, it’s long overdue for a fresh look at this ancient topic. If your understanding of financial matters is informed by mainstream news and/or subsidized academics, I’m guessing you may have missed some key points—since both groups love to talk and rant in closed-loop drum circles of irrelevancy.

The core issues of modern finance include the alchemy of fractional money multiplying, the nearly empty banks tottering on collapse, about 2,500% admitted inflationary theft over the last century (actually much more), the fiat mandate to use their “rubber dollars,” and the corporate-government-media collusion that allows all sides to exploit this system.

The ongoing failure to adequately address any of those core topics has led to trillions of hours of squandered labor and the rotten fruits of reckless fiat credit debasement. Until these foundational issues are properly sorted out, cultural progress—or perhaps even survival for many—will be significantly more difficult.

Since user-friendly organization isn’t just for the book publishing industry, I’ve decided to include a table of contents for the section headings of this essay, as follows:

• Corporate-Government-Media Collusion: Loss of Independence is a Killer


• Point of Clarity: Rejecting the ‘All or Nothing’ Canard


• Problems with the ‘Gold Standard’ and a ‘Fixed’ Rate of Exchange


• The Violent Origin of Fiat ‘Legal Tender’


• Designing A More Stable Currency System: Monitored Weight and Purity, Not Corporate Credit Sprees, Not Political Monetary Values


• A Valid Role for the Feds?


• The Crash of 1873 and 11 other Major Banking Collapses: Hard to Blame all these on ‘The Fed’


• A ‘Roaring’ Glimpse of Private Credit


• Call of the Mild: Pointless Chatter about ‘Globalism’ and ‘One Percenters’


• Conclusion

Moving on with the body of this essay, with the help of the aforementioned “barbarous relics,” the ten largest banks in the U.S. have accumulated nearly $10 trillion in assets (as of December 2019), all from the comfort of an air-conditioned office or a business lunch at the Capital Grille. A current listing of the top 100 banks in the world put their combined assets—the titles to millions of homes and businesses, corporate bonds and government IOUs—at many multiples of that U.S. figure.

What virtually no one in any position of institutional authority is willing to admit: nearly all of that money was clipped, skimmed and stolen from the dwindling producers of society. And every bit of that fiat “stimulus” credit is expressly inflationary, corrosive and unnecessary. Failing to face those hard realities, very few are willing to consider the only real options we have left: keep feeding this untamable beast with more debt until the economy implodes and everyone is left working at a Bezos-Gates-Zuckerberg data harvesting fulfillment center, or cancel the debt entirely and put the savings and credit process back in the hands of productive citizens where it always belonged.

An organized debt forgiveness program could also delineate clear boundaries between cancelling fiat credit schemes and (say) giving freeloaders an excuse to trespass “rent free” on an owner’s property. America’s struggles during the 1930s saw a similar debacle from a dithering executive who chose to appease unionized factory squatters instead of protecting property rights—as his own Vice President, John Garner, had privately urged him.

Whether America chooses to implement the deleveraging practice of a Debt Jubilee (which I seriously doubt) or just keeps promoting monetary gimmicks to delay the inevitable implosion (more likely) is largely moot for the purpose of this writing. I’m more interested in the question of what comes next? And I find it useful to start looking for ways to escape from the financial system that has kept millions of people trapped in debt and held hostage to inflationary credit bubbles.

This is not at all to suggest that everyone needs to immediately go “cold turkey” on the banking system. Honest bankers—those dreaded “money changers” some folks mistakenly criticize—can continue to play a vital role in keeping transactions secure, liquid and transparent. ATM vendors and credit card companies do an excellent job of that already, unless you’d rather pay for a new car with a bag of gold coins and settle the bill for a family dinner with a purse of silver shillings. (The most brazen of political windbags uncritically accept bank counterfeiting but bitterly complain about $2 ATM convenience fees. In other words, financial commentary has long been a magnet for charlatans and quacks.)

Since the experts are largely preoccupied with either exploiting the system or droning on in futility, I’ll do my best at offering the first original idea in financial oversight (that is not totally ridiculous) since at least as long as I can remember. To the dismay of both anti-government purists and pro-government authoritarians, I think there is a positive role that federal and state *governments* can play in keeping the financial scales fair and balanced—if and when sanity ever returns to this land.

Regardless of when and where economic stability next becomes viable, I find it worthwhile to picture a valid target to shoot for—instead of blindly hunting for ogres with plastic spoons. (Left-wing statists shouldn’t get too excited; I’m not suggesting an expanded role for the federal government. And I’m not advocating a return to unregulated “free banking” panics or any fixed-rate metal “standard” either. That chicanery is neither original nor rational—as much as some economics professors may insist otherwise.)

The conclusion I draw from reading a variety of economic viewpoints, working in the “real world” of the private sector (where difficult problems get solved once in a while) and talking to some professional bankers is: lots of folks are saying some interesting things (along with plenty of nonsense) regarding the tail end results of financial manipulation, but most of the public experts seem to be dodging the core issues. Their standard business model of preaching to the converted (i.e., pandering)—always keeping it as safe as possible—seems to preclude common sense solutions that challenge their own prevailing orthodoxies.

For instance, even the best analysts I can find usually avoid the vital topic of rampant, ongoing counterfeiting—not just by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, but by private bankers as well. Another huge void is the malevolence of fiat “legal tender” mandates, a vapid term that ignores the violent nature of that practice. As a result, I can’t find anything coherent addressing what to do about those central problems or the staggering debt crisis.

Whining about evil corporate “oligarchs” and “plutocrats” is so dumb I won’t waste much time arguing against that flimsy faux-populist platform. In banking and pretty much everything else, conservatives prefer losing with dignity instead of getting their hands dirty standing up for anything meaningful. I can’t recall anything worthwhile from that camp in at least the last 30 years. Liberal talking points about “public banking” (whatever that means) are about as impressive. In banking and elsewhere, the dominant liberal view reduces to: don’t look for evidence. Trust my unproven theories, immediately, upon everyone. And don’t question my motives or methods. Both are as pure as the “oligarchs” who sponsor my campaign.

That leaves us in a bind. All we have left on financial affairs are some anti-government fussbudgets who put up a bold front kicking the dead corpse of Keynesianism or whatever stuffed suit governs the Federal Reserve, then quickly flame out when it comes to new ideas or practical implementation. Simply urging Washington to Abolish the Fed is not a working solution since it is rejected by at least 95% of Congress and probably similar levels of the general public. Furthermore, it does nothing to address America’s 300+ year burden of private bank counterfeiting—even though Fed dissolution is a good long-term goal. (Yes, fiat banking is a very old menace. All 13 British colonies in North America experienced excessive issuance of Bills of Credit between 1690 and 1764, before the practice was briefly outlawed by the Crown, then reinstated on steroids by us Yanks during the Revolutionary War.)

From a monetary standpoint, we’re left with the giant pile of coin clippings we euphemistically call “credit.” Thanks to the single-issue extremists who dominate education and the know-nothing imperials who occupy mass media, we’re led to believe that society will come crashing to a halt if bankers lose their special privileges to create loans mostly out of thin air. This is no different than saying that historical coin clippers were indispensable for stimulating growth by skimming off the edges of coins and repackaging the wealth for subsequent purchases. That’s partly true, if one narrowly focuses on the people closest to the action. If we broaden our viewpoint, however, we readily see the greater segments of society being ripped off in the process.

Of course, our state-licensed media cartel has nothing enlightening to say on any of these crucial topics. While they have precious little useful information to offer on financial matters, they do provide a long list of experts eager to intone authoritatively about “fiscal policy” vs. “monetary policy” and babble endlessly about “aggregate demand” and “liquidity injections”—hoping we’ll buy their political advice, newsletter or latest book. Somehow, these monetary wizards don’t just miss the pesky nuances of counterfeiting and legal tender mandates, but they almost always confuse bank and government credit inflation with rising consumer prices, and only provide subterfuge for the whole sordid cabal.

It just so happens that corporate media rake in billions in financial industry advertisements—and usually revel in all forms of centralized planning, superficial left/right labels notwithstanding. This year, financial services advertising in the U.S. will bring in an estimated $18 billion just in digital online promotions, second only behind all combined retail ads ($33 billion). Retailers also like reckless fiat credit to spur bloated fiat consuming, by the way. As of 2019, combined digital advertising in the U.S. ($129 billion) surpassed all other TV, radio and newspaper ads ($109 billion total) among corporate journalists willing to say or not say anything for a fee.

Some may find Legacy media’s constant habit of siding with the biggest bully on the playground to be coincidental. But I don’t. I tend to agree with foreign affairs analyst Caitlin Johnstone’s general assessment on such matters:

It has been my experience that if someone seems to be totally incompetent but every “oopsie” they make just happens to end up benefiting them, it’s manipulation you’re dealing with, not incompetence.

The highly competent but bombastic partisans of AM talk-radio and cable TV news are probably the worst offenders here, but pretty much all of commercial media soils themselves in this regard. An abundance of evidence suggests that accepting bribes gradually dulls the senses and makes a person susceptible to moral compromising and also prone to flights of megalomania. The widespread media support for mass killing, grand larceny and automatic censoring of dissenting voices would be some examples of such pathologies. Another part of that territory includes steadfastly pretending that a bribe isn’t really a bribe.

Knee-jerk conventionalists often protest at this consideration, reflexively blurting out: “We have no other choice!” Which is complete nonsense. There’s always a better way than auto-neurotic surrender to mindless corporate conformity and the intellectual straight-jacket that goes along with that heavy coat of arms. It just takes a little effort.

Put another way, loss of independence is a killer. Unfortunately, many subsidized academics fussing about these topics (incessantly for generations) don’t do much better than the comfort boys and girls of Legacy media. I find it interesting that the same folks who howl about tiny perceived “privileges” for white males somehow overlook the massive privileges of banks to multiply small seeds of their own capital into overgrown hedges of interest-bearing loans. I also find it revealing to hear large segments of official media decry petty “drug dealers” and condemn beneficial energy “fracking” but never use such inflammatory or descriptive language on the vastly more dangerous debt dealers and financial frackers poisoning our culture. That universal double standard is no accident either.

To keep things fresh and provide a few ideas you probably haven’t heard elsewhere (I certainly haven’t), I’ll move on to an important general concept.

A major point of confusion leading to enormous misapplication of “monetary policy” is the false option of total federal control versus state/local government monitoring. Thanks to so much political noise from professional pundits and leashed academics, these options are either blurred together or completely obscured with the foolish choice of Big Government or No Government at all. Regime liberals, conservatives, socialists and libertarians all make this same mistake to various degrees. (With subsidized academia—a $649 billion industry as of the Fall 2016 to Spring 2017 school year—dominated with 97.5% of revenue going to tax-favored governmental and “non-profit” colleges, any token residue of independence was squelched long ago in the atmosphere of elites jostling for attention.)

For the rest of us who live outside that shimmering retreat, I’ll explain what I mean. Two good examples of the all-or-nothing distortion involve money and energy. With monetary policy, public officials have long maintained that Washington must have complete dominion over the issuance and valuation of currency. Even a staunch “gold standard” man like President James Garfield said so during his inaugural address of 1881:

The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value.

This seemingly innocuous but dangerous assumption was last considered in three trials decided in February 1935, when the U.S. Supreme Court (by a 5-4 vote each time) approved Roosevelt’s repudiation of the gold standard that he had summarily terminated two years prior—abandoning his campaign promises from 1932. Even contemporary critics of those rulings (like Garet Garrett writing in the Saturday Evening Post) felt a need to confirm that “government must have dominion over money” because “it cannot be trusted to lie in private hands.” (Once again, we see why opposition to the New Deal failed so badly. Milquetoast Republicans have only gotten meeker since then.)

What so many conservative and libertarian “gold bugs” fail to grasp is that America’s gold standard (terminated for domestic use by FDR in 1933, then cancelled for international finance by Nixon in 1971) was a ticking time-bomb from the start. Sure, it was better than Indians trading Manhattan for jewelry beads or African chiefs exchanging human captives for guns and brass pans. But that’s not saying much.

If you regularly read any of the economic writers featured at ZeroHedge or LewRockwell—two of the better financial thought repositories in the country—you’ve probably noticed that the phrase “gold standard” tends to make conservatives woozy just like some people swoon to exaltations of “family farmers” and “senior citizens.” In all three cases, overuse of these jingoistic terms has led to very costly misunderstandings. In the case of money, the mistake is in the “standard” part. An ounce of pure gold is not a “standard,” it’s a physical measurement. It cannot be manipulated by politicians without being quickly detected by the general public. In other words, stable money not only has intrinsic value but also inherent transparency. Once you let politicians “declare its value,” we’re talking about a whole new shell game. One that’s always rigged in the house’s favor.

Furthermore, any fair economic “standard” would embrace something that a buyer and seller work out together to offset cost and quality to their mutual satisfaction. The private sector does that all the time in areas of food, clothing, housing, furniture, appliances, driving, shopping and thousands of other large and small ways. The key aspect here is balance. That is, both sides having a real voice and the freedom to make an informed choice.

A government “standard” is unilateral by nature; so is the handiwork of a corporate cartel. No real choice is offered or allowed. In monetary terms, no one voted to discontinue the gold standard in 1933 or 1971. And no one knowingly accepted fraudulent bank notes before that. Those were “edicts” or criminal deceptions issued with scant consideration given to the weaker parties, namely, citizens owning gold and companies conducting business in hard currency. Frustrated bank customers just got to stand in lines outside of a locked financial institution. Bewildered voters and business owners got smarmy speeches and newspaper headlines telling people how lucky they were to have such bold political leadership.

Considering the inherent imbalances to any government “standard,” it should be apparent that such an approach was doomed to fail from the start—as it did during numerous “panics” throughout the 1800s and most dramatically during Lincoln’s Greenback-fuel excursion against half the nation. Contrary to so much hype about the “classical” gold standard, fixed government ratios tying an ounce of gold to $20.67 in paper currency (for a while) or attaching an ounce of gold to 15 or 16 ounces of silver (during the “bimetallic” period of 1792 to 1873) were both recipes for disaster. Giving the government arbitrary power to assign a fixed rate of exchange for gold and silver, or either of those precious metals with paper dollars, invites further chicanery when inevitable cracks develop in the foundation.

To some degree, the mistakes of the Founding Fathers are understandable because the world supply of gold and silver was relatively stable during the Revolutionary era. Then in the late 1840s and early 1850s, large gold deposits discovered in California and Australia made gold more abundant in relation to silver. So silver became more valuable in a bimetallic system and was “hoarded” by the public, leaving less reserves for “debt instruments” from banks. Then in the 1860s and 1870s, miners at the Comstock Load in Nevada brought tens of thousands of tons of silver to the surface, plunging silver prices and leading to public storage (i.e., private credit) of the more valuable gold. Subsequent discoveries of gold in South Africa and Alaska in the 1880s and 1890s further destabilized the legally “fixed ratio” approach (then in dollars to gold) in a sclerotic federal system.

In the more decentralized energy sector, petroleum markets have consistently adjusted in a significantly more volatile supply and demand landscape for over a century—despite the monetized “shale boom” in the U.S. and OPEC attempts at price fixing in recent generations. Thankfully, America had some semblance of a free press and a (privately) well-educated populace when petroleum became widely available in the late 19^th century. Politicians and their corporate sponsors have not quite been able to permanently corner the oil market to fleece the public—although J.D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monolith gave it their best shot.

Compared to the great robber baron of Standard Oil, commercial bankers got a two century head start in rigging the financial scales, bailing out kings during periods of war and funding corporations desperate to monopolize some emerging market—always at a steep price. When modern banking—including the lure of promissory bank notes—became commercially viable in the 17^th century, there was no free press and no widespread understanding of economics. Ever since, wealthy banking clans have had the means to multiply every dollar of initial capital and subsequent deposits into $5 or $10 dollars of fiat credit—or even more among “wildcat” banks of the 19^th century that got really hungry then soon went belly up.

The ongoing money multiplier effect (lost in jargon about “fractions” and “reserves”) helps explain why the U.S. has a total of $75.5 trillion (as of 4^th Quarter 2019) in outstanding credit (same as debt), but only $4.0 trillion circulating in M1 physical cash plus checking accounts (4Q 2019). The M2 money supply (M1 plus savings accounts and money market funds) then stood at $15.3 trillion, largely inflated by the $75.5T in easy credit.

Nevertheless, liberal and neocon economists insist that “banks do not create money out of thin air.” So when banks instantly conjured trillions in today’s dollars to finance World Wars I and II (and hundreds of other conflicts before and after that, and the welfare state of the 1930s to present) this wasn’t “money creation.” No, not at all. Those civic-minded institutions actually had war chests of real money tucked away precisely for those contingencies. Thank goodness we have charitable bankers to Make Warfare and Welfare Great for All Times! This faux-liberal and neo-clown ideology may reflect some people’s desire for fiat deficit spending to fund their social engineering adventures. And such experts may possibly be angling for a job in central banking or at a government university, both of which also admire unlimited deficit spending.

The more “conservative” bankers, likewise, enjoy deficit financing from “thin air” or technically their computer terminals. And they learned from experience that when the inevitable credit cycle leads to a contraction (people consuming more and more resources to pay down prior debts instead of buying new items), fire sale bargains would be theirs for the taking. Fiat bankers always made sure to obtain inside access to princes, presidents and corporate boards who all wanted rapid funding for their various speculative projects to rob and pillage.

As an independent press became boisterous in the late 1800s and early 1900s, savvy bankers just bought off the publishers or bludgeoned anyone who had figured out their schemes. The popular Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin, was the last one who dared to speak out against banking corruption during the 1930s, and was systematically destroyed by FDR and other powerful entities as a public example. Independent newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Robert McCormick—both immensely popular in their days—didn’t directly go after the banking industry, but fought back against reckless fiat spending and met a similar fate.

But rampant counterfeiting privileges were and are not the only weapons tucked away in the bankers’ gilded briefcases.

Here is another area where it helps to go back to the beginning to understand what’s happing today. The term “legal tender” has been so stripped of its original meaning as to now imply that we’re allowed the privilege to use some specific type of currency. Even in the late 19^th century, the ridiculous nature of fiat money was lampooned in the press, as shown in this 1876 illustration by Thomas Nast.

In reality, merchants are forced to use anything declared “legal tender,” no matter how worthless, with no questions asked. If a creditor declines to accept any legal tender, the debt is immediately cancelled. That critical “fiat” mandate allows banks and governments to counterfeit and debase to their hearts’ content, as central banks across the world are currently doing.

As of early April, financial guru Egon von Greyerz noted that global debt was $14 trillion in 1981, but jumped 19X to $265 trillion in 2020. Fiat “legal tender” mandates played a major factor in that explosion of easy credit becoming crushing debt. It also begs the question that government officials refuse to answer: If central banks and/or private banks are not counterfeiting credit from “thin air”—where is all this debt coming from?

How did we get something so plainly absurd? Mainstream economic texts (and Wikipedia’s account for legal tender) strangely omit its origin. For that, I was lucky to stumble across Richard Maybury’s book Whatever Happened to Penny Candy a few years ago. In the sixth edition (published in 2010) page 35, he states:

Back in 1270 A.D. a government that ruled much of Asia was led by Kublai Khan. … He wanted silver and gold very badly, so he invented paper money, “paper gold,” as a substitute. If he needed twenty ounces of gold to buy something, he would write “Twenty Ounces of Gold” on a slip of paper and sign his name to it.

The above passage gives a good representation of Mr. Maybury’s writing style in this book, which is intended for younger audiences (as the gumball machine on the front cover also indicates). After subsequently reading other more “scholarly” economic texts, I recently went back and re-read Penny Candy and found a new appreciation for Maybury’s clear, and sometimes unflinching, information presented in such simple prose.

By the way, I’ve made it a point to skip the obligatory references to economic royalty for this essay. Sure, I’ve read a bunch of their stuff, and very little of it impresses me. I’ll elaborate to that end in my next writing in a month or so. For this article, I deliberately chose to bypass the academic jet set and use readily available internet experts as much as possible. One other exceptional book that helped my general understanding of 1920s to 1940s economic history is Robert Murphy’s Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal. A nice feature of Mr. Murphy’s book (which I’ll be quoting as “P.I. Guide” for short) is his inclusion of lengthy excerpts from other good books on those related subjects.

As for legal tender, Mr. Maybury’s choice of target audience probably led him to be generous with Kublai Khan (“a pretty mean guy”). So I’ll elaborate a bit for us hardy adults. The brutal Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, a complete madman who mined new depths of savagery against his conquered opponents and no doubt contributed to the climate of fear that later made fiat currency acceptable. In a recent account on China’s significantly milder crackdown on Hong Kong protests, the Economist notes Kublai Khan’s tactics in which his “Vanquished local rulers, if lucky, might be granted a princely death, sewn into a sack and then trampled by horses.”

In Wikipedia’s multi-culti whitewash of Kublai Khan’s history, it skips the brutalities but does obliquely mention “Kublai Khan is considered to be the first fiat money maker.” In a more interesting side note they add:

To ensure its use, Kublai’s government confiscated gold and silver from private citizens and foreign merchants, but traders received government-issued notes in exchange.

Supporters of Franklin Roosevelt may be surprised that a progressive champion of the 20^th century used similar economic tactics as one of the cruelest barbarians in world history. But FDR’s confiscation of gold in 1933 showed utter contempt for the American public while it wreaked havoc on the U.S. economy. His mad drive to bring the nation into Europe’s next war less than a decade later arguably showed a similar contempt.

Moving on to the French Revolution, the “legal tender” approach would once more be used to aid mob justice. Maybury notes:

In the 1790s, the French government was doing the same thing Kublai Khan had done. It was printing phony money and backing that money with a legal tender law. If a person refused to accept the paper money in trade for his goods or services, his head was chopped off by the guillotine.

Around that same time, during our own Revolutionary War, America’s democratic leaders were equally persistent but a bit less violent. When the early U.S. government was printing worthless Continental dollars, in Mr. Maybury’s words: “anyone who violated the legal tender laws was charged with treason and thrown in jail.”

After what Lincoln did to the South (using Greenbacks as legal tender), Wilson did during World War I (using Federal Reserve Notes), Roosevelt did during his Depression and World War II—plus generations of mass schooling and state-sponsored media—American conformity is such that the inherent abuse of “legal tender” statutes barely gets noticed.

With mainstream press independence now in tatters, it’s rarely acknowledged that government always had (and still has) the option of allowing competing currencies with 100% gold or silver backing, to be monitored for reserve quantities and purity instead of consolidating complete and arbitrary control over the entire process to a quasi-federal agency. Why does that matter? After ceding control of monetary policy in 1913, government (and banking) competence in protecting the value of money went so poorly that anyone who saved a dollar back then, if they were still living today, would now have under 4 cents of equivalent purchasing power. That’s an over 96% loss of value, by the federal government’s own crooked figures. (More accurate data from ShadowStats suggest over 99% loss in U.S. dollar value for 1913 to present, when you plug in traditional BLS inflation measures starting in 1984.)

For a stark comparison to that federal debacle, we can again look to the important topic of energy, which is efficiently provided from leaving the oil and gas business largely private and decentralized. A common myth persists in Hollywood and state media that the energy sector is “unregulated,” which couldn’t be farther from the truth, and may reveal their intent for making energy (like everything else) fully nationalized.

From a consumer level, public energy policy gets most visibly implemented at the gas pump and on the highway—with state and federal fuel taxes for state and federal infrastructure spending being the most obvious results. But a more important “consumer protection” occurs behind the scenes, with virtually no public appreciation. Maybe that’s because it works so well.

In the elaborate process of petroleum being located and extracted from the earth, temporarily stored at the wellsite and then transported as crude, intensively refined into useable fuels, further transported and stored at bulk terminals as a product, then finally sold in the competitive marketplace, its owners must navigate a multitude of laws and rules. These directives cover mineral rights, royalty payments, a slew of taxes, pipeline regulations from FERC, environmental controls from EPA, internal quality controls from bulk buyers, then other regulations at the pump. (Did I mention the lying liars who still call the U.S. energy sector “unregulated”?)

For this essay, I’ll focus on the tail end of the process—arguably the most reasonable and least appreciated aspect of the complex energy gauntlet. That is, ensuring that a “gallon” of gasoline is still 128 fluid ounces of strong-burning petroleum after all these years.

I can safely assume there is not a single gas station in the U.S. that is so crooked that when you try to buy a gallon of fuel you only receive a pint or a cup. If you did, that would be a criminal offense to be swiftly enforced by State Bureaus of Weights and Measures (like this one in Texas, this one in California or any of the 48 other comparable state administrations, with regional offices serving every town, village and city in America).

A similar point can be made about states ensuring the quality of gas, such that the standard 87, 89 or 93 octane fuels you see labeled at the pump actually contain that much useful energy—not gasoline diluted with 96% water. The monitoring of those important standards comes from the same state agencies noted above. (Regarding fuel quality, consistent with Congressional legislation, the federal EPA just barks out expensive and conflicting mandates such as: more ethanol (and corn fertilizer pollution) to appease the Farm Lobby; wait, make that lots more ethanol! More MTBE to cut smog pollution. No, less MTBE to reduce groundwater contamination! More BTEX to replace lead… no wait, the “b” stands for benzene, that’s bad. So, definitely less BTEX! Drop everything and re-design your refineries now or we will shut you down!!! Besides that expert advice, the EPA doesn’t actually help the public ensure the stated octane rating of gasoline is what it’s supposed to be. The private sector does most of the hard work; state agencies keep a steady watch. And thousands of gas stations across the land help provide freedom of mobility to the entire nation.)

That is to say, Americans benefit from transparent government monitoring at the point of sale, not manipulative federal control from oil well to refinery to transportation to gas station. Certainly not from the government outlawing, then monopolizing and secretly administering all “hard” measures of quantity or quality (ala FDR’s gold heist of 1933 and subsequent Fed tinkering). If such a dollar-like devaluation of gasoline was ever to occur, only the most slovenly corporate shill would try to excuse that away as natural “inflation.” Come on you people! You can’t expect a gallon of liquid to still be a full gallon after 100 years! You can’t expect gasoline to actually “burn” like it once did! Yet it is. And it does.

Now I’m sure many will incline to say something like: “that’s easy… a gallon is a physical unit of measure.” But so was a “dollar,” once upon a time. As discussed in Richard Maybury’s Whatever Happened to Penny Candy, for centuries in the Western world, a dollar (derived from the Bohemian thaler coin) was universally understood to be a fixed weight and purity of silver within a given region, not a political “standard” to be arbitrarily altered on a king’s whim. (The U.S. Treasury’s own gold certificates loosely mimicked this concept for mainly $20 bills and above until 1933 and their silver certificates did likewise for $1, $5 and $10 bills until 1964.) The vital tool of a stable currency helped societies climb out of the depths of the Dark Ages and feudal bondage by establishing a sound economic foundation for trade and investment. Without a stable currency, servitude to tyrannical overlords and remote bureaucracies is now making a resurgence—although ruling elites never connect the dots on this elementary cause/effect relationship.

As far as stability goes, with about 190,000 tons of gold now residing in human hands, that should provide an excellent anchor for any financial storms that our cast of political and corporate leaders steer themselves into from year to year. The alternative of “rubber dollars”—to borrow a phrase from former New York Governor and Democratic critic of the New Deal, Al Smith—has proven to provide only an illusion of temporary stability.

The politicized management of the money supply—throughout the tumultuous 1800s, getting worse in 1913, shooting for the moon in 1933, then completely launching into the abyss in 1971—has consistently failed in its mission to protect the value of our currency. The appeasers and crooks running the federal government, education, mass media and major banks just make effective “regulation” look complicated with their fiat junk money and flurry of technical jargon to mask their intentions. But protecting the value of real money is not that difficult, if we stay focused on what matters, and reject the false all-or-nothing extremism of the chattering classes.

Is there any valid role for the federal government in effective monetary policy? Sure. It’s called “regulating interstate commerce,” as originally intended by the Founders. This concept is also backed by a common sense recognition of what works in the real world versus what may seem plausible in academic philosophy models.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution conveys federal power to “regulate Commerce… among the several States” and calls for the “Punishment of counterfeiting.” Although both quoted terms are poorly defined, a Wild West interpretation of anything goes relating to private bank counterfeiting—or even a managed Federal fiat system—would seem absurd.

The same section of the Constitution establishes a federal role:

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

“To coin Money” explicitly signifies hard currency. Since the passage deals with money and nothing else, fixing a standard cannot reasonably be read to mean arbitrary measures of money nor issuing paper fiat currency—the latter of which eludes both weighing and measuring. Furthermore, the Founders were probably well aware of the inflationary disasters experienced by all 13 colonies during the early to mid-1700s (Bills of Credit) and certainly the experiment with worthless paper Continentals during the Revolutionary War.

Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution goes on to state:

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another;

Here we see a prohibition against federal preference favoring one state over another. Since all 13 colonies had ocean ports, and interstate land travel was then very difficult from a commercial standpoint, shipping from state ports was a major means of commerce.

Lastly, for this Constitutional primer, Article I, Section 10 states:

No State shall… make any Thing but gold and si