It’s hard to think of a dispatch that has quite captured the absurdity of the Congress putting Mark Zuckerberg in the hot seat over Facebook’s plans for a new currency called Libra. Congress did this Wednesday at what Yahoo! Finance called a “marathon” hearing of the House Financial Services Committee. Its chairwoman, Representative Maxine Waters, was asked whether she’d been reassured. Replied she: “Absolutely not.”

Forgive us, but whom would you trust to issue a currency — the Congress that regulates our dollar or the youthful tycoon who made $100 billion tapping on his laptop? The securities of Mr. Zuckerberg’s company have soared to one of the greatest fortunes in history. The value of notes issued by Congress have collapsed by as much as 98% or more — just in the century since the creation of our central bank.

We comprehend that the showdown with Facebook involves more than just the question of Libra. It is, though, the monetary question, the prospect of a new currency, that rivets our attention as we stagger onward covering the long march to monetary reform in the years since the collapse of Bretton Woods. We may be advocates of the gold standard, but we’re not indifferent to the newsworthiness of Libra.

It is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency being promoted by a not-for-profit organization called the Libra Association. That is based at Switzerland. Facebook is but one participant, though it generates outsized headlines because of its enormous reach. One of Facebook’s vice presidents, David Marcus, recently became Facebook’s nominee to Libra’s five person board. Some of the other major companies have dropped out.

We don’t hold ourselves out as any kind of expert on Facebook or Libra or cryptocurrencies. We have, though, been following the travail of the dollar at least as far back as 1971, when President Nixon closed the window at which foreign governments were, by treaty, supposed to be able to redeem their dollars for at a 35th of an ounce of gold. The Nixon Shock precipitated the world into the age of fiat money.

It hasn’t been entirely downhill since then. America’s economy is radically larger than it was then. We won the Cold War. There is, though, a growing sense that a reckoning awaits over, among other things, America’s debt. Many of us of a certain age sense a loss of integrity and accountability in our system. We sense that property rights have been growing less secure and contracts less binding.

Beginning with the United States Gold Commission, launched in 1980, we’ve watched one reform effort after another die in the Congress or be left to flounder. As recently as 2015, the House, under Speaker Paul Ryan, sent to the Senate a bill designed to launch a strategic review of the dollar. The measure was never heard from again, though eventually nearly all the Republican candidates in 2016 paid lip service to reform.

So there are sages — from Friedrich von Hayek (now gone, alas) to Ron Paul — who turned to what Hayek called the “denationalization of money.” The Nobel laureate issued a monograph by that title in 1976. It pressed the idea that the world need not rely on governments to issue currencies. That could be done by private enterprises regulated by the free marketplace. Dr. Paul offered a bill on this head.

That’s the prism through which we regard Libra and the other blockchain currencies. It’s the context in which we look at the role of the Congress. There is no doubt that Congress holds all — 100% — of the monetary powers that the Constitution grants to our government. Those are the powers to tax, spend, borrow on the credit of the United States, coin money, and regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin.

Yet Congress has made a hash of it. When the 20th century began, the value of a dollar was fixed in law at a 20.67th of an ounce of gold. The Federal Reserve was set up in 1913 only after Congress wrote into the law that it would not abandon gold convertibility. Yet Congress defaulted — the word was used — under FDR in the 1930s. Bretton Woods was set up at the end of WWII, and turned out to be a failure.

In the years since the Bretton Woods Treaty, the value of a one-dollar Federal Reserve note has plunged more than 97%. As recently as 1971, we were redeeming them a 35th of an ounce of gold. Today a one-dollar Federal Reserve note won’t fetch a 1,500th of an ounce of gold. So where do Congresswoman Waters and her colleagues, on both sides of the aisle, come off lecturing Mr. Zuckerberg about money?

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Image: Drawing, “The Austrian School,” by Elliott Banfield, courtesy of the artist.