So just where is Janet Yellen going by inviting left-wing groups into the boardroom of the Federal Reserve to give her their views on monetary policy? Is the Fed chairman prepared to extend the same courtesy to conservative groups? Those questions are being raised after Mrs. Yellen and several other members of the central bank’s board of governors met at Washington with a group of left-wing critics of the central bank. They are being raised by American Principles in Action, a right-of-center group that is mounting a campaign for sound money.

APIA sent its letter last week, saying said the Fed’s November 14 meeting with representatives with “extreme political views” was “deeply concerning.” The group that met with the Fed is affiliated with the Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy and “Fed Up: The National Campaign for a Strong Economy,” according to the Associated Press. The wire reported that the group wants a “commitment to keep interest rates low until good jobs are plentiful for all workers.”

“The left,” APIA wrote to Mrs. Yellen, “does not have a monopoly on concern for average working Americans.” APIA’s director of monetary policy, Steve Lonegan, wrote that he hoped Mrs. Yellen was “equally willing to meet with a center-right group to discuss our concerns about how current monetary policy is reducing their standard of living.” He asked for a “similar meeting” and expressed concern “regarding the political motives of the Federal Reserve System.”

By our lights this is the most important debate in our national conversation right now. For more than a decade the Fed has been pursuing a loose policy of ever-lower interest rates in the hope of ginning up more jobs. Instead, the share of the population that is working has fallen, wages have failed to recover, and the unemployment rate has only recently crept below 6%. This is in sharp contradistinction to the era in which the era before fiat money.

The question APIA is raising is whether the Fed is prepared to listen to those who reckon the way to bring about full employment is to restore the kind of monetary system in which the dollar is defined as a given amount of gold. When it was — from, say, 1947 to 1971 — the jobless rate averaged but 4.7%. Since 1971, the Bretton Woods System collapsed, unemployment has averaged 6.4%. If President Obama could have delivered that, the Democrats would have held Congress.

So the American Principles letter is a story to watch. It has been the strategy of the left in dealing with advocates of the gold standard and sound money to write them off as kooks, unworthy to participate in the national debate. But a growing number of serious figures are beginning to see the pattern sketched by recent history. This question is percolating in the Congress and, as we’ve reported on a number of cases, in the state legislatures. APIA is doing the Fed, and the rest of us, a favor in seeking to bring these concerns to the Fed’s leadership.