The Missing Gold

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“The U.S. government did two dramatic things after World War II. They created a GI Bill which enabled literally millions of returning veterans to go to college for the very first time. My father, when — who was in the Second World War, went to college on a GI Bill. So there was an enormous expansion of opportunity that enabled them to integrate into a new, emerging society. The second thing they did is, they dramatically cut taxes, and the economy took off and grew dramatically, and it absorbed the workforce.”

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Newt Gingrich may have had a great debate last night, but by our lights he missed several opportunities to mark what we believe is the most important issue facing the country today — the need for monetary reform. The speaker listed, as as quoted above at Charleston, two of the dramatic things the U.S. government did after World War II to set the stage for the generation of growth that followed. But we’d have thought his list would have included the signing, at Bretton Woods, of the treaty that established the post-war gold exchange standard. That set up a gold-linked monetary system that served as the superstructure for the post-war success.

The speaker’s failure to mention gold was a disappointment. Just the day before the debate Mr. Gingrich had declared for a return to sound money backed by gold. He went so far as to call for the establishment of a new Gold Commission to chart the way. It is an important demarche, particularly in a state, South Carolina, that itself is so concerned about the collapse of the Obama Dollar it is exploring making gold and silver coins legal tender in the state. One of its senators, James DeMint, is already playing a leading role in pushing the monetary issue in the Congress.

Mr. Gingrich had another chance to bring up the crisis of the dollar when he was being ridiculed by Senator Santorum for his penchant for grandiosity. Mr. Gingrich acknowledged the jibe, pointing out his role in daring to imagine — and in winning — a Republican majority in the House. And also in passing the largest tax cut in American history. We kept waiting for him to park out there the next major reform waiting to be enacted, which is a restoration to the dollar of a legal definition as a specified number of grains of gold.

If Mr. Gingrich is going to lead this fight, as he suggested this week he is prepared to do, he’s not going to be able to miss the kinds of opportunities the debate last night presented him. The Federal News Service transcript of the debate doesn’t even once contain the word gold. Mr. Gingrich, or whoever wants to lead on this issue, is going to have to talk about it at every turn, the way Congressman Ron Paul has done so obsessively, consistently, knowledgeably, and heroically. Dr. Paul, however, has lashed himself to a critique of his party’s foreign policy that makes it difficult, at least so far, for more than a quarter of Republican primary voters to swing behind him.

This is not a problem that Mr. Gingrich has. He is with the party on foreign policy. He understands that the costs of our fight against terror are more than manageable in a growing economy and, in any event, are dwarfed by the mandates, regulations, and entitlements that are such a drag on our growth. Nor is Mr. Gingrich a stranger to the gold question, as was pointed in these columns on the eve of the debate by Andresen Blom of the American Prinicples Project. He was, as far back as 1984, a sponsor of Jack Kemp’s Gold Standard Act.

Mr. Gingrich is magnificent when he gets his dander up, as he did when John King brought up at the start of the debate the question of his long-ago marital problems. The way to put the politics of personal destruction behind this campaign is for someone to lift it up to the larger issues, like monetary reform. It is a perfect plank on which to stand against President Obama, under whom the value of the dollar has collapsed to less than a 1,600th of an ounce of gold. If Mr. Gingrich doesn’t want to talk about his former wife, that is how he can seize the lead on the issue that he signalled this week he understands so well.


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