Late in his presidency Donald Trump renominated Dr. Judy Shelton to serve a fourteen-year term on the Fed’s seven-member Board of Governors, but given her written advocacy of the gold standard and her flip-flop during confirmation hearings, she failed to win the post.
Had she been elected, she would be sitting among members whose job is to keep the public confused and looking the other way while counterfeiting the monopolistic monetary unit known as the Federal Reserve note, a process that, for starters, inaugurates the Cantillon effect and exacerbates the ever-widening divide between the haves and have-nots.
And make no mistake, she fully understands this. She also understands why “more than 100 economists, including at least seven Nobel winners,” signed an open letter urging the Senate to reject her.
What made her a threat to the corrupt banking cartel?
Statements such as this, from “The Case for a New International Monetary System”: “The vision of providing a solid monetary foundation for global free trade was shattered by Nixon’s decision to suspend gold convertibility of the dollar.”
And these statements, from a 2009 Wall Street Journal article “Capitalism Needs a Sound-Money Foundation”:
Inflation is the enemy of capitalism, chiseling away at the foundation of free markets and the laws of supply and demand. It distorts price signals, making retailers look like profiteers and deceiving workers into thinking their wages have gone up. It pushes families into higher income tax brackets without increasing their real consumption opportunities.
And from the same article, “Inflation makes suckers out of savers.”
And from her bookMoney Meltdown: “To Mises, the fact that gold could not be tampered with by governments or special interest groups was reason enough to employ it as the people’s money.”
Given that 2 percent inflation is a stated goal of Fed monetary policy “over the longer run,” her anticounterfeiting position would not fit well with her colleagues on the Board. But maybe she would, like Alan Greenspan, do a “full 180” to fit the occasion. As Americans are gradually discovering, Fed monetary policy has produced obscene dollar depreciation since it began operations in late 1914 (“the longer run”).
The Fed and a market gold coin standard are polar opposites. Fortunately for statists, we had a government gold coin standard that Franklin D. Roosevelt criminalized with an executive order in 1933. (In my book Do Not Consent and its movie I suggest that the free market provides all the government we need, without coercion.) The key to every statist scheme is the money to fund it, and because it can’t be summoned into existence by Fed bureaucrats, gold (and its hoarding by the public) was declared recovery enemy number one after Roosevelt took office.
Judy Shelton’s written views, like pre-Fed Greenspan’s, are loathed and feared by our masters, but our masters have brought us to the edge of extinction. Fortunately, she is far from alone in her support of honest (voluntarily derived) money and her opposition to the corrupt scheme the Fed imposes. Consider the following:
“The excellence of the gold standard is to be seen in the fact that it renders the determination of the monetary unit’s purchasing power independent of governments and political parties.”—Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit
“When one studies the history of money, one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.”—Friedrich A. Hayek, “Down with Legal Tender”
“Inflation is simply a means to transfer wealth from anyone who has savings in a particular currency to anyone who has debt in the same currency. With hyperinflation, the value of savings gets completely wiped out and the burden of debt is removed.”—Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff, How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes
“The Fed’s low-interest policy not only encourages spending and borrowing, it discourages the one thing that best helps people raise themselves into higher economic classes—saving.”—Mark Thornton, “The Fed’s War on the Middle Class”
“Funding government through taxation is never enough because the victims might retaliate. What’s needed is what we have: the arcane subterfuge of a cloistered cartel. What’s needed is a central bank quietly mulcting the masses while it feeds the world’s power-holders.”—George Ford Smith, “Government’s Perennial Enemy”
“The one thing that the globalization of central banking has succeeded in doing is synchronizing disaster.”—Daily Bell article, “Gold: The Anti-bubble”
“Counterfeiting is universally condemned by civil governments. . . . Why do governments do this? Because they are all counterfeiters, and they deeply resent an invasion of their turf. Laws against counterfeiting in today’s world are a form of gang warfare.”—Gary North, “What Is Money? Part 2: Precious Metal Coinage”
“The degree of barbarism that [WWI] produced could not have been accomplished had a gold standard been in force. The public would have stripped the banks of the public’s gold. The governments would have had to come to terms with the enemy. It was the abandonment of the gold standard that made modern barbarism affordable.”—Gary North, The Gold Wars
“When economists call for boosting ‘aggregate demand,’ they do not spell out what this really means. It means forcibly overriding the voluntary decisions of consumers and savers, violating their property rights and their freedom of association in order to realize the national government’s economic ambitions.”—Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., “Hitler’s Economics”
“What the costs of mining produce for society is a restrained state. . . . That such a restraint might be available for the few millions spent in mining gold and silver out of the ground represents the greatest potential economic and political bargain in the history of man.”—Gary North, The Gold Wars
“If a domestic money consists of a commodity, a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself.”—Milton Friedman, quoted by Joseph Salerno, Money, Sound and Unsound
“Unlike natural (voluntary) money production that is regulated by the market forces of profit and loss, inflation is always an imposed increase of the money supply.”—George Ford Smith, “The Case for Natural Money,” paraphrasing Jörg Guido Hülsmann
“Commodity monies have built-in insurance against inflation.”—George Ford Smith, ibid.
“Inflation is not just an extension of the money supply. The crucial point is that it extends the money supply through a violation of property rights. Inflation provides not just gains; it provides illegitimate gains. Its alleged benefits are not really different from the benefits of robbery and fraud.”—Jörg Guido Hülsmann, The Ethics of Money Production
“The return to gold does not depend on the fulfillment of some material condition. It is an ideological problem. It presupposes only one thing: the abandonment of the illusion that increasing the quantity of money creates prosperity.”—Ludwig von Mises, “Gold versus Paper”
“Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it.”—Ron Paul, February 15, 2006
“One of the evils of paper money is that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect. Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice, and party; and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the morals of the country.”—Thomas Paine, “Thomas Paine on Paper Money”
“But tender laws, of any kind, operate to destroy morality, and to dissolve, by the pretense of law, what ought to be the principle of law to support, reciprocal justice between man and man—and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death.”—Thomas Paine, ibid.
“By substituting the pirate sign for Washington’s face, all I’ve done is unmask the fiat dollar for what it is: a hoax and a means of steady plunder. Where’s the obscenity? Exposing the fraud with an appropriate symbol or deceiving people with the face of the father of our country?”—George Ford Smith, The Flight of the Barbarous Relic
Like Alan Greenspan, Judy Shelton should have stayed far away from the Fed. Their worldviews are fundamentally at odds with the idea of a politicized banking cartel. But the lure of power is intoxicating, and Fed membership pays bills that principles don’t.
