"The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him."
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
MOREThe next big step in the gold standard debate is going to be taken next month at Washington, when one of the original members of the Reagan-era United States Gold Commission offers a five-step plan to return America to sound money.The architect of the plan, Lewis Lehrman, a businessman and scholar, will present his program in an address October 5 at a conference in Washington on the how to return to a stable dollar. He will outline a five-step program to return America to a gold-backed currency within five years.
What is significant about the event is its aim of shifting the discussion to practical steps that could be taken to rescue the American monetary system. It comes as the value of the United States dollar has collapsed to record lows, sinking at one point this month to less than an 1,800th of an ounce of gold. The value of the dollar has recovered marginally in recent days, but still lurks below a 1,600th of an ounce of gold, a level that would have been nearly unimaginable — at least in policy terms — as recently as the start of President George W. Bush’s first term, when the dollar had a value of a 265th of an ounce of gold.
“The stand-pat defenders of today’s paper-dollar system turn back every argument in favor of the gold standard by claiming that there’s no practical way to re-establish it,” says the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, James Grant. “What Lehrman has done is to devise a practical and persuasive plan to do just that.” He predicts “the ball is now — or soon will be — in the paper-money court as it has not been for a long time.”
In recent months, a growing chorus of serious observers have started to speak in favor of the restoration of a link between the dollar and gold. Some of them have been establishment figures, such as the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, who in November last year startled the debate by issuing in the London Financial Times an op-ed piece suggesting there might be a role for gold in a reformed monetary system.
Since then a number of the nation’s most respected journalists — led most notably by Mr. Grant — have come out publicly for a return to the gold standard. Mr. Grant’s demarche came on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Several Republican candidates for president, ranging from Congressman Ron Paul to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Governor Perry, among others, have signaled that they view that the restoration of a sound dollar as being a component of returning America to the path of economic growth and full employment.
Mr. Lehrman, however, is the first of the leading figures in the debate to step forward with a plan, which he is expected to lay out in the Washington conference on a stable dollar. The conference is being hosted by the Heritage Foundation think tank. Mr. Lehrman’s plan is elaborated on at length in a book his institute will publish next month called, “The True Gold Standard: A Monetary Reform Plan Without Official Reserve Currencies.”
Although Mr. Lehrman was once a member of the United States Gold Commission, the plan he will announce next month has no official status. But when Mr. Lehrman was with the Commission, he co-authored with Dr. Paul a famous dissent, which made the case for gold and has been widely consulted in the decades since the Commission majority made its recommendation to continue with a system of fiat money, which in turn, advocates of stable money argue, culminated in America’s current travail.
The first step
We shall see.
ReplyDeleteBob
III
Since it's sensible, they'll make every effort to defeat it.
ReplyDelete