Lew Lehrman: Prophet of Honest Money

News of the death of Lewis Lehrman is received with sadness here at The New York Sun. A businessman and scholar, Lehrman was a historian and an admirer of Abraham Lincoln. In the early seasons of the Reagan revolution, Lehrman ran — against Mario Cuomo — for governor of New York in a campaign for tax cuts. Their contest featured long, lively, and substantive debates. Lehrman did better than expected, coming within a few points of winning.In 1981, President Reagan appointed Lehrman to the United States Gold Commission. It had been created by Congress to examine a role for gold in our monetary system after Bretton Woods. Membership of the commission was heavily weighted to monetarists. Lehrman and Congressman Ron Paul, emerged as leaders of the pro-gold faction. They issued a brilliant dissent, which was brought out as a book, “The Case for Gold.”It happens that we covered the hearings of the Gold Commission for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where we were then pulling an oar. After the Commission’s hearings, we would often share a cab to National Airport with Lehrman. On those rides he delivered riveting lectures on the importance of the issue of honest money. Lehrman was an heir of the thinking of Charles de Gaulle’s finance adviser, the economist Jacques Rueff.One of the important points that Lehrman pressed was simply that it is possible to return to a system of honest money defined in terms of specie. The issue, though, has yet to prosper in Congress. There was a period when it looked like it might, and at one point, when Paul Ryan became speaker, the House issued a bill that would have set in train a formal examination of the performance of the Federal Reserve in the century after it was created in 1913.The measure died in the Senate. Lehrman himself began his own battle against Parkinson’s disease, and the task of keeping the issue of honest money alive in the debate lost its biggest champion. It was, we’ve often thought, remarkable to have had a champion like Lehrman. He would have been staggered to see the dollar collapse in value to less than a 5,000th of an ounce of gold. One thing that can be said with his passing is that he more than did his heroic part.

Lew Lehrman: Prophet of Honest Money

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