MONETARY REFORM 102
By Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., Ph.D., J.D.
May 28, 2011
One of the major hurdles to true monetary reform—that is, making United States silver and gold coinage readily available for WE THE PEOPLE’S use as actual currency in day-to-day transactions—is the perverse practice of various agencies of refusing to treat the monetary value of United States gold and silver coinage as the face values of the coins, as given by Congress, but instead purporting to “revalue” these coins at their market exchange-rates with Federal Reserve Notes. So that, for example, a “$50” American Eagle gold coin is treated as if its monetary value were (as of today) somewhere around “$1,500”. In principle, the States should not be able to do this because, perforce of Article I, Section 8, Clause 5, Article I, Section 10, Clause 1, and Article VI, Clause 2 of the Constitution, the States have no authority to “regulate the Value” of United States coins and currency, or to declare that one form of such coin or currency is the standard of monetary value to the exclusion of all others. And no mere agency of the General Government should be able to engage in such “revaluation”, either, because Congress has set the monetary value of such coins by giving them specific face values. Indeed, the Supreme Court has admitted that even it—as a branch of the General Government co-equal with Congress—has no authority to disregard the specific monetary values that Congress has set on coins and paper currency. See Thompson v. Butler, 95 U.S. 694 (1878). The model bill set out below corrects that problem.
Inasmuch as the Supreme Court has already definitively ruled on this matter, the bill should be “noncontroversial”.
Under present conditions, it is also absolutely necessary.
I am posting this material as a public service in the hope that hundreds and even thousands of Americans will propose this model to their Representatives and Senators in Congress as a first step in returning this country to a semblance of sound money before the collapse of the Federal Reserve System throws the economy into possibly irremediable chaos.