Peter Martuneac’s Reviews > The Case for Gold: A Minority Report of the United States Gold Commission > Status Update

Ron Paul calls for the Federal Reserve to be abolished (unconstitutional as it is), for the dollar to once again be defined as a weight of silver or gold (the dollar currently has no definition), and for a Constitutional amendment that forbids Congress from ever again creating a Federal Reserve or from printing unbacked paper notes of credit. How sad that 40 years later and this was all ignored.

The Constitution explicitly forbids the several States from making anything but gold and silver legal tender in Article I Section 8. It also gives Congress power to COIN money, not print it. And the overwhelming majority of the Constitution's signers hated paper currency with a passion. Ron Paul makes it clear that our current system of money is, from top to bottom, unconstitutional, immoral, and unsustainable.

Scotland, from 1715-1845, had an entirely free market system of banking: no central banks, no restriction on issuing notes, no bail outs, no strict regulations. And Scotland's money and banks were the envy of the world.

Also interesting, from 1833-1933, the year we lost the gold standard, prices increased by only 0.9%. From 1933 to 1982, prices went up by 625%. We need a new gold standard, clearly!

In the 1890's now we begin to see a shift in the major political parties, both converging towards the center. Republicans abandoned the Protestant Prohibitionists and adopted a pro-gold stance, gaining an avalanche of new voters by doing so. In response, the Democrats dropped a lot of libertarian, hard-money stances to try and gain more voters back.

After the US returned to a gold-standard in 1874, not only did real wages and national productivity increase until 1889, but prices also fell! This has long perplexed economists who are afraid of deflation, because according to their theories there should have been a Depression in this decade, yet it was one of the most profitable decades in American history.

This John Cooke guy really boils my blood! A corrupt, politician-buying banker who helped railroad the National Banking Service through Congress, paving the way for the Fed to come in, and spouting laughably flawed Keynesian talking points before Keynes even wrote his manifesto.

Following the Civil War, the US implemented the National Banking Service, a disastrous, centralized-banking scheme that led to the Federal Reserve, without which we never could have funded half the wars we've fought since 1913. It's heartbreaking to imagine where we might be today and how many wars we may have avoided if we'd stuck to hard money and decentralized banking.

The Suffolk Bank is a really interesting part of financial history in the US. It was a private bank that was basically doing what the Fed does now but without any power of federal coercion behind it. It'd be interesting to see if that could happen again in the 21st century

“...the disappearance of foreign credit would have the healthy effect of cutting off wasteful gov. spending. There was in this response an awareness by the public that they and their gov. were separate and sometimes even hostile entities rather than one and the same.”