President Trump’s plan to nominate Stephen Moore to a governorship of the Federal Reserve could come to be seen to be as important as the justices he’s named to the Supreme Court. We understand that it’s not yet widely perceived that way. During the 2016 campaign, though, Mr. Trump made an issue of monetary policy, and this is the first substantive signal we’ve had that he might redeem that pledge.

Few issues have so riveted these columns as the monetary problem — how to work our way back from the wilderness of fiat money, meaning currency unmoored to gold or silver. How can we return to a system more in line with what the Founding Fathers of America intended and signaled in the Constitution and in statute? On this, we believe, will depend our success at home and abroad.

Mr. Moore has long been a strong voice for economic policies favoring growth and jobs, particularly in respect of fiscal policy and regulatory regimes. He is already being put down as but a salesman for Republican policies, and criticized for lacking a Ph.D. Then, too, no Ph.D. was held by Alexander Hamilton, who established the American monetary system that set us on the road to glory.

For that matter, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve board, Jerome Powell, also lacks for a Ph.D. Having a doctorate in economics, moreover, failed to protect from myopia two recent chairmen, Ben (“the crisis came from causes not captured by the new Keynesian models used at the Fed”) Bernanke and Janet (“I wouldn’t have seen it in the data”) Yellen.*

The Senate confirmation hearings are likely to ask Mr. Moore about Mr. Trump’s own flip-flops. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump lit into the Fed for its ultra low interest rates and quantitative easing, which seemed calculated to help the Democrats by creating what Mr. Trump called a “false economy.” No sooner did Mr. Trump win, though, than he started jawboning the Fed to keep interest rates low.

There is some speculation that Mr. Trump picked Mr. Moore because of his March 13 column in the Wall Street Journal. In it Mr. Moore warned that the Fed is a “threat to growth,” for hiking interest rates when there was no problem. Yet Mr. Moore also called for adopting a “commodity price rule” like the one, he says, Chairman Paul Volcker used to conquer inflation. Could a gold price rule be next?

What we like about Mr. Moore is that he is prepared to ask basic, even radical questions about our monetary system, such as whether we need the Federal Reserve in the first place. He posed that question in a Wall Street Journal interview, in which he favored a monetary rule and said: “I think we should have a discussion in this country about whether we need a Fed.”

That question has been pressed now and again by no less a figure than Alan Greenspan — even though he holds a Ph.D. from New York University. When he was asked by David Asman of Fox, “Why do we need a central bank?” Mr. Greenspan called the question “very interesting” in an era when central banks were losing the power to affect long-term rates.

The ex-chairman then suggested that some mechanism has got to be in place — a gold standard, he offered, or a currency board — because otherwise, “all of history suggests” that “inflation will take hold.” Mr. Greenspan then pointed out that “we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.” And, Mr. Asman added, without the Federal Reserve.

Could Mr. Moore pursue such questions from the Fed’s board? We’d like to think so. It could offer a way to reconcile the Pre-Election Trump and President Trump. Mr. Trump ran on a platform calling for the establishment of a monetary commission to begin reform. It certainly would be nice to see an advocate of a strong, stable dollar, defined in law, on the board of the Fed itself.

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*For that matter, there’s a list on the Internet of something like nine Supreme Court justices who lacked for law degrees (including Benjamin Cardozo and Robert Jackson).