The new Federal Reserve chairman, Janet Yellen, gave a policy speech today at Chicago, where, in a startling gesture, she mentioned three working individuals by name — Jermaine Brownlee, Vicki Lira, and Doreen Poole. They lost their jobs in the Great Recession and have been struggling ever since. It was a refreshing, even affecting demarche by Mrs. Yellen, who has made a return to full employment a public priority. She underscored her sincerity by telephoning Mr. Brownlee and Ms. Lira and Ms. Poole before delivering her speech.

All the greater the sense that the three — and the millions of unemployed or underemployed Americans like them — deserve a more radical, more courageous initiative than the bromides they got. They deserve a look at whether the Federal Reserve itself is part of their problem. We are now in the sixth year of an employment crisis that has consumed an entire presidency. The month that Barack Obama acceded, January 2009, the unemployment rate was at 7.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It reached 10% in October of that year and, while it has slid down somewhat, it has yet to fall below 6.5%.

Yet this entire time the Fed has been busting a gusset to reduce unemployment. It has expanded its balance sheet by trillions. It has launched forward guidance, held press conferences aimed at jawboning the system, and undertaken its quantitative easing. With all this, the unemployment rate is still substantially above what it was in 1978. That was the year the Congress gave the Federal Reserve a second mandate — to work toward full employment — on top of its traditional mandate of price stability. The legislation was the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act.

What a mockery it has been. The year Humphrey Hawkins was passed, the unemployment rate was 6.1%. Since then the unemployment rate has averaged 6.4%. Even the liberals at the time comprehended the law was a sham. The New York Times, in a famous editorial, warned it would “play a cruel hoax on the hard-core unemployed, holding before them the hope — but not the reality — of a job.” Shouldn’t this record of failure instill some humility in the new chairman of the Fed? Maybe its accommodative monetary policy isn’t the right solution in the first place.

How about a look at the year 1971. That year stands as a divide. From 1947 to that year, unemployment averaged only 4.7%. Since 1971, unemployment has averaged 6.4%. If President Obama had been able to deliver that at pre-1971 rates, he’d be bound for glory. So what was it that happened in 1971? That turns out to be the year America defaulted on the dollar. President Nixon closed the gold window. The gold-exchange standard of the post-World War II Bretton Woods system was abandoned. America turned toward the system of fiat money over which Janet Yellen and her colleagues preside today.

Yet the mandarins of the Federal Reserve do not want to open up the question of what Lawrence Parks of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education calls “irredeemable, electronic, paper ticket money.” No member of the Fed is, or can be expected to be, receptive to questioning the fiat system itself. But where does that leave individuals like Mr. Brownlee, a plumber by trade, and Ms. Lira, who worked for a printing company, or Ms. Poole, who used to process medical insurance forms for a living?

There was a time when labor’s representatives understood the importance of sound money. If one looks at a graph of the declining share of the all American workers who are members of a union, the long plunge begins in the mid-1970s, when we moved to the fiat system. The figure was above 28% in 1971; now it’s below 11.5%. It’s not our purpose here to plump for union membership. It is our purpose to suggest that people like Jermaine Brownlee, Vicki Lira, and Doreen Poole — who are eager and able to work — are owed better than the talk they are getting from the United States Federal Reserve.