The secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner, issued a warning the other day, telling Republicans to stop politicizing the Federal Reserve. The warning was reported on the Bloomberg wire. “It is very important to keep politics out of monetary policy,” the secretary was quoted as saying in an interview taped for broadcast on the show “Political Capital.” It’s a terrific idea — the idea of keeping the dollar from being whipsawed by politics. But there’s only one tried and true way to do it. It’s called the gold standard.

The idea is that the value of the dollar is set as a matter of law at a specified quantity of gold. Under the Constitution, silver could be used instead — or as well. Once the dollar is defined as a set amount of gold or silver, the politicians have nothing to say about it. This is how such figures as George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton thought it was going to work. In the Constitution, Congress was granted the power to coin money and regulate its value.

No sooner was the Constitution ratified than the Founding Fathers sat down and wrote the Coinage Act, which was passed in 1792 and defined a dollar as 371 ¼ grains of pure silver or the free market equivalent in gold. Their expectation was that the constitutional dollar would be the standard for America. The power to coin it was granted to the Congress in the same sentence of the Constitution that grants Congress the power to fix the standard of weights and measures.

The Founders figured that once the standard was set the politicians would have to adjust or deal with the consequences. But that has long since gone by the boards, and today a Federal Reserve, whose governors are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, sits around and decides what it thinks the dollar should be worth.

To see how that is the recipe for politicization, feature what has happened in the past few weeks. The mandarins of the Fed got it into their heads that the dollar was too strong. So they announced a plan to try to bring generate a little bit of inflation and bring down the value of the dollar. They would inject dollars into the economy buying more than half a trillion dollars of American government paper. This alarmed not only our trading partners overseas, from Britain to Germany to China, but also one of the most powerful institutions in America — Sarah Palin.

The former governor of Alaska, sensing a policy blunder ahead of the other politicians, used a speech in Phoenix to upbraid the Fed’s chairman, Ben Bernanke. Before you could say John Maynard Keynes, every politician from President Obama to Speaker-to-be John Boehner jumped into the act. The Europeans went into a currency-war footing in respect of exchange rates. Even the Chinese communists doubled down. At the Group of 20 summit meeting in Seoul, President Obama’s hectoring was spurned by the other leaders and he returned home humiliated.

Then a few days ago Sewell Chan of the New York Times reported that the Fed is getting into the Washington political game — “haltingly adopting the tactics of Washington, like strategically placed interviews, behind-the-scenes assuaging of opponents and reaching out to potential allies of Capitol Hill.” The next thing you know, the Fed’s chairman, Ben Bernanke, will be starting a political action committee. How about BenPac?

Backers of the Fed like to talk about the importance of the central bank’s “independence.” Translated into plain English what they mean is the freedom for the Fed to do whatever it wants, no matter what its political impact. The truth is that the idea of independence of the Fed went out the window formally in 1978, when Congress passed a law requiring it to adjust its monetary policy not only to protect the value of the dollar but also to protect jobs. The bill was put forward by the widow of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and named in his honor.

There is really only one way to take the Fed out of politics, and that is to return to a gold or silver standard. The idea is that there is a physical measurement of value that sits out there for everyone to refer to — the government, the banks, the housewife, the foreign potentates. They would all know what to expect. The politicians can then quarrel about their policies without getting involved in what the value of the dollar should be.

Is it possible to go back to such a system? There are lots of theories out there as to how it could be done. One way to start would be for Congress to remove the obligation of the Fed to worry about the unemployment rate and concentrate on steadying the value of the dollar. This is already being proposed by Congressman Michael Pence and as Senator Corker and endorsed by the Wall Street Journal and others. That would make it easier for the Fed to pay primary attention to the value of the dollar and, hopefully, stabilize it.

In the longer run, though, the betting is the Fed itself won’t be able to solve the problem. It will have to involve action by Congress or the states. Or both. There are those — most pointedly the constitutional sage Edwin Vieira Jr. — who believe the states should begin exercising the power reserved to them in the Constitution to make gold or silver coins legal tender and set up a kind of competing money to which Americans could repair as the dollar collapses. There’s also the hope that the national legislature won’t want to get scooped by the states and will start working on a monetary system more in line with what the Founders of American envisioned.