A long career watching the World Bank only increases the delight with which your editor notes the dispatch in the Financial Times by the institution’s current president, Robert Zoellick, in respect of the restoration of some kind of gold standard. The piece runs under the headline “The G20 must look beyond Bretton Woods.” His reference is to the 19 advanced and emerging nations and the European Union that make up the Group of 20 that was established in 1999. Mr. Zoellick wants what he calls parallel agendas of structural reform and a growth recovery program, to be complemented with “a plan to build a co-operative monetary system that reflects emerging economic conditions.”

Mr. Zoellick reckons such a new system is going to need to “involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound” and what he calls “a renminbi that moves towards internationalisation and then an open capital account.” Quoth he: “The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today.” He ends his piece by suggesting that the package of reforms he proposes could “get governments ahead of problems instead of reacting to economic, political and social storms.”

Much as we’re happy to read of this kind of thing coming from such an institution as the World Bank, which is in the business of steering credit where the markets wouldn’t normally take it, our own reaction to Mr. Zoellick is that the political storm has already gotten w-a-a-a-a-y ahead of where he’s at. It’s not just Sarah Palin’s challenge to Chairman Bernanke, of which we wrote about earlier; it’s a whole raft of new or rising congressmen and women to are onto this issue — including, to name but a few, Michelle Bachman of Minnesota, now bidding for a position in the House leadership, Congressman Ron Paul, his son, Senator-elect Paul, and Congressman Ryan.

And the debate is moving way past the idea of simply “considering employing gold” as an “international reference point.” The kinds of reformers now rising in the Congress are talking about a return to the idea of constitutional money, an abhorrence of the idea of paper money. Some are even for moving to a system in which prices are stated not in dollars at all but in ounces of gold or silver, the two types of money countenanced in the Constitution. These reformers are concerned less with the international problem than with the national problem — the monetary powers and disabilities of the Constitution itself.

Such reformers understand that Congress has defaulted on the exercise of one of the most important of its enumerated powers — to coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin and to fix the standard of weights and measures (it’s all in the same sentence). The World Bank, though it’s nice to see it headed by a figure who is open to ideas, is the least of it. The reformers advancing on the Hill are taking a look at the Fed itself, at whether Congress erred in delegating to the Fed too much power. They are going to seek the audit the Fed has been trying to deny to Congress (and to the rest of us). We have the sense that at the end of the day gold will be less an international reference point than the starting place of a new system.