If the Communist Chinese devalue the yuan against a dollar that is appreciating against gold, has the yuan gone up or down? We ask because the leading story on the New York Times Web site this morning reports not only that the Chicom authorities “sharply devalued” the renminbi but also that the move “could raise geopolitical tensions and weigh on growth elsewhere.” We ran the Times’ entire text through the Sun’s old hand-crank Von Mises brand language-specie prose separator. It failed to find any mention of — or even allusion to — gold.

This is all too typical of the way the currency wars are being covered these days. The Times reports that Communist China’s central bank “set the official value of the renminbi nearly 2 percent weaker against the dollar.” It’s no doubt true that the devaluation is, as the Times notes, “the largest since China’s modern exchange-rate system was introduced at the start of 1994.” It calls the move “the clearest sign yet of mounting concern in Beijing that the country could fall short of its goal of roughly 7 percent economic growth this year.”

Of what the move is really the clearest sign is the completeness with which talk about currencies has become divorced from classical and constitutional principles. To the authors of the Constitution, gold was — and was always meant to be — the money. Yet feature the chart herewith, which shows the price of yuan and the dollar and gold. The scale of the rise in the value of the dollar and the yuan is astonishing, ammo for those who see the economy as in a period of deflation (we find it hard to to use the word deflation for an economy in which the dollar has barely a quarter of the value it had at the start of the century).

In China, in any event, it has disclosed a bubble in stocks and certain other assets that has crested in recent years. What this adds up to, according to a wire from David Malpass, one of the fastest and shrewdest economists on the beat, is a “de-linking” of the yuan and the dollar. He reckons that the Chinese communists are “laying the groundwork for a yuan bloc and closer relationships with other Asian currencies.” By our lights this is but another consequence of the failure of the Congress to exercise its constitutional power to coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign coin and to fix the standard of weights and measures.

Why should the Chinese comrades link their yuan to the dollar if the dollar is linked merely to Janet Yellen’s Ph.D.? That phrase is but a facet of what James Grant likes to call the Ph.D. standard, meaning a dollar whose value is established by a group of economists credentialed with graduate degrees in economics, rather than by reference to classical specie. This is a moment for the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Jeb Hensarling, and the other leading figures to mark. The logic grows more plain by the day that Congress needs to step up.