“Why Not Paul Ryan?” is the question the Wall Street Journal poses in an editorial this morning urging his candidacy for vice president on Governor Romney’s ticket. It’s a noteworthy moment. In recent decades the Journal has hung back from making what might be construed as an endorsement, and the Ryan editorial comes close to breaking a tradition. For good reason, too, in that he is the most substantive figure in the Congress, in terms of the fiscal crisis facing the country, and temperamentally he is one of the candidates who could step into the presidency. We like him for all of the above reasons and one other — he’s been asking the right questions in respect of monetary policy.

This struck us during a hearing two years ago, at which Chairman Bernanke was testifying and the congressman from Wisconsin asked him about gold. We issued an editorial about it at the time called “Paul Ryan’s Question.” The congressman noted that recently “gold hit an all-time high,” or, as we like to put it, the value of the dollar fell to an all-time low. What got our attention was that Mr. Ryan noted that most people would view the development “as a vote of no confidence against fiat currencies.” He asked Mr. Bernanke: “What does that price signal tell you and what is your view of the long-term repercussions with respect to weak currency policies?” He said he supposed one could argue that we don’t have a weak dollar because everyone else is weaker, but asked about the implications for a the “strength and stability of our currency.”

Over many years of following this question in Congress, if often from a distance, we don’t recall the question having ever been put better. It elicited from Mr. Bernanke a memorable confession. “I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price,” said the chairman of our central bank. The confession was tucked into the middle of the following:

“Well, the signal that gold is sending is in some ways very different from what other asset prices are sending. For example, the spread between nominal and inflation index bonds remains quite low, suggesting just 2% inflation over the next 10 years. Other commodity prices have fallen recently quite severely including oil prices and food prices. So gold is out there doing something different from the rest of the commodity group. I don’t fully understand the movements in the gold price, but I do think there’s a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety in financial markets right now and some people believe that holding gold will be a hedge against the fact that they view many other investments as being risky and hard to predict at this point.”

The chairman’s answer struck us at the time as a classic. “One doesn’t go into gold because, as the be-puzzled Mr. Bernanke seems to suggest, one lacks confidence in, say, ‘other investments,’ soybeans, say, or iron ore,” we wrote. “One goes into gold because one lacks confidence in the fiat currencies.”

A grizzled old newspaper editor we admire used to advise that one deal with an adversary so deftly that the adversary doesn’t know his head has been sliced off until he tries to walk away. We don’t mean to suggest anything inappropriate with the gory analogy, but the Ryan question to Mr. Bernanke would have pleased that grizzled old editor. What we like about Mr. Ryan is that he thinks about both the fiscal and the monetary side of the policy problem that bedevils our economy. To bring Mr. Ryan onto the national ticket would be a confidence building measure for many reasons, and improving the prospects for sound money would be one of them. There are those who say that Mr. Ryan would be wasted on the vice presidency, but the vice presidency has changed in recent decades, and it has long-since emerged as much more than the bucket of warm spit John Nance Garner said it wasn’t worth. The Journal noted that there a number of fine vice presidential possibilities. The logic of Mr. Ryan is that a vice president of substance has become an important part of a successful presidency.