Congressman Ron Paul is in the news again, this time for calling for an audit of America’s gold reserves. He issued the call in an interview with a news service run by a gold dealer, Kitco News, which reported that the congressman intends to introduce legislation calling for such an audit of what we hold at Fort Knox and other sites, such as the New York Federal Reserve Bank in lower Manhattan. It’s the kind of thing people tend to laugh at, the way they once did when Dr. Paul launched his legislative campaign to audit the United States Federal Reserve. Yet after years of persistence by the Texas Republican, Congress finally passed a law requiring an audit of the Fed. It passed the mandate by a wide margin and a bi-partisan vote. So whatever snickering there will be over Dr. Paul’s proposal for an audit of the gold holdings, it will be more muted.

We are not in the camp that believes a vast conspiracy has stolen America’s gold. But neither are we in the camp that sees any harm to an audit. As Dr. Paul put it to Kitco News: “If there was no question about the gold being there, you think they would be anxious to prove gold is there.” He has been pressing the point, on and off, since the early 1980s, when he was a member of the United States Gold Commission. He reminded the interviewer from Kitco that his recommendation back then that Congress audit the gold reserve was rejected by 15 of the Gold Commission’s 17 members. It strikes us that it would not be a bad thing were an audit to keep our national mind focused on our gold holdings — particularly at a time when the value of the dollar has collapsed to less than a 1,200^th of an ounce of gold.

If that weren’t enough of a warning, the Bloomberg wire reports that “gold’s most-accurate forecasters” are predicting that the value of the dollar may fall to but a 1,500^th of an ounce of gold. It reports that what it calls the most widely held option on gold futures in New York is for the dollar to fall to but a 1,500^th of an ounce of gold by December. The lowest value to which the dollar has plummeted so far is a 1,266.50^th of an ounce of gold, which was the value of the dollar recorded on June 21. Bloomberg reports that holdings through what it calls “bullion-backed exchange-traded products” are within a 10^th of a percent of the all-time high of 2,075 metric tons. It quotes one Deutsch Bank analyst, Dan Brebner — whom it calls “the most accurate forecaster so far this year — as predicting the value of the dollar may drop to a 1,550th of an ounce of gold.

Suddenly the question to ask is not why in the world is Dr. Paul asking for this audit but why is he the only member of Congress making our gold holdings an issue. It was only a decade ago, at the start of the presidency of George W. Bush, that a dollar was worth nearly a 250^th of an ounce of gold. As it started dropping, these columns warned repeatedly that it was a signal to be heeded, starting with “The Bush Dollar,” which was issued in December, 2005, and carrying on up through “The Pelosi,” “The Greenspan,” “The Bernanke,” “Ron Paul’s Prescience,” “$1,000 Gold,” “The Obama Dollar,” “Golden Opportunity,” and “Paul Ryan’s Question,” just to name but a few of the editorials of the Sun that have touched on this topic.

By our lights a weak dollar policy is a strategic mistake for America. We felt that when President Carter and his treasury secretary at the time, W. Michael Blumenthal, were running a weak dollar. We’ve never credited the idea that one cannot have a strengthening dollar and a growing economy, an idea that should have been thoroughly discredited during the Reagan years and the Clinton years. One could say that a strong dollar is a good idea that is bi-partisan in pedigree. But what good can come of a weak dollar policy, such as the one being pursued by Messrs. Obama, Geithner, Bernanke, Mrs. Pelosi and the others who have various levels of constitutional — or, in the case of Mr. Bernanke, non-constitutional— authority over policy in respect of America’s money? As the value of the dollar evaporates, why in the world wouldn’t ordinary Americans want to have the gold holdings they’ve been told about for so many years given a full and independent audit?