Ben Bernanke is certainly raking in the big bucks — ah, make that small bucks. It turns out, according to the New York Times, that since he stepped down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Mr. Bernanke has been raking in the dough making speeches. As Fed chairman, he pulled down about $200,000 a year. Now he earns that in an hour or so, the Times reckons. He does this by giving speeches to hedge fund billionaires, bankers, and others he used to regulate.

Nice work, if you can get it. We don’t begrudge Mr. Bernanke, though if 200,000 over lunch is what a Fed chairman can fetch, we ought to let him give such speeches while he’s in office and save ourselves the salary. Then again, the value of 200 grand isn’t what it was when Mr. Bernanke acceded. It is less than half of the 568th of an ounce of gold it was worth when the Princeton professor was sworn in as head of our central bank.

Aye, there’s the rub. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a monetary system in which one didn’t have to pay a Federal Reserve ex-chairman 200,000 spondulicks in order to gain a glimpse of what the value of the dollar might be? What, after all, would one do if Mr. Bernanke weren’t, as one person quoted by the Times phrased it, “joined at the hip” with the current chairman, Janet Yellen? Maybe accrued millions in speaking fees will get people thinking about a law-based definition of a dollar.