Source: https://www.scribd.com/doc/31291792/The-U-S-Constitution-and-Money-Part-9-the-Gold-Seizure
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Henry Mark Holzer reviews each step in the process by which the government seized all the privately-held gold (and gold certificates) in the country, including the gold held by the Federal Reserve banks. See his article “How Americans Lost Their Right to Own Gold and Became Criminals in the Process” that is online here. Prof. Holzer’s article originally appeared in the Brooklyn Law Review 39 (1973) 517-559. Private gold ownership became legal again in 1975. One can therefore “self-redeem” FRNs by buying and selling gold and silver in the open market, but only at a serious disadvantage. Gold and silver are taxed as collectibles at ordinary tax rates. If one buys gold at $500 and later sells it at $600, in order to make a payment in FRNs or FRN-dollars, which are central to the currently predominant payments system, one must pay a tax on the phantom gain of $100.
In 1933 and 1934, the government ! Seized all privately held gold ! Defaulted on government obligations payable in gold, later found unconstitutional ! Outlawed gold clauses in private contracts ! Withdrew gold coins from circulation ! Devalued the statutory gold dollar, and ! Made gold ownership a criminal activity with jail terms and fines. No power granted to Congress justified these acts. None ever can. If seizing people’s money is allowable, then the government can seize anything else it wants, the result being that “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” That is certainly not the intended aim of the Declaration or the Constitution. Every component of the gold seizure was abhorrent, defying any notion of liberty and rights to property. It was a governmental exercise in brute force and theft, covered over with a patina of legalities passing for laws. The money system bereft of gold remains in place today. None of the steps taken were constitutional, as will be overwhelmingly demonstrated. The fact that the gold seizure happened shows that, in the blink of an eye, elected officials of constitutional government can subvert the Constitution and the government they are sworn to uphold. It shows what can happen under an elected government possessing a monopoly on legal force. It shows what can happen when a people no longer guards its liberties. It shows that those who want to preserve their liberty must constantly be suspicious of government in any form, must constantly monitor it, must have means of controlling it, and must take every precaution against it. The gold seizure served the interests of the government and the central bank fractional-reserve banking system. The government consolidated its control over the monetary system. It removed the last vestiges of a free market in money. It made a big profit, extracted from holders of gold. The Treasury began to play a larger role in monetary policy. The gold seizure and associated measures saved the banking cartel from its own evident failure, while divorcing its money from gold and making it into legal tender.3 Forcing everyone to turn in gold to the government in exchange for paper money was also, in a legal sense, bizarre and absurd. Vieira makes every sincere attempt to locate a constitutional basis for the various acts. That is the accepted way in examining statutes, as we have seen. But the further one goes into the sequence of events, the more that faulty explanations pile one on another, and the more remote they seem to get from any sense of right or constitutionality. It seems that once a departure is made from original constitutional meaning, the way is open to incredible eventual distortions and contradictions. After awhile, Congress and the Supreme Court We are living with the fiat money system today, and, once again, we are living through another sequence of bailouts of the central banking, big government, debt bubble, fractionalreserve banking system. The debt buildup of this system is so large that collapse of the monetary system and government is in view.
are talking and operating with concepts so far disconnected from constitutional reality that they lose themselves in a maze. The government’s excuse for seizing WE THE PEOPLE’s gold was that the country was experiencing an emergency. An emergency, we shall see, is not a basis for setting aside the Constitution. In addition, in practical terms, there was no good reason for the unconstitutional seizure of gold. It didn’t solve the problems it was supposed to solve, and, what is more, there existed a set of effective constitutional actions that would have resolved the banking emergency and prevented a future recurrence: The banking system could have been placed on a sound footing and gold and silver reintroduced as Money, especially in view of the adulation accorded Roosevelt. What Roosevelt and the Congress did was not only unconstitutional but unnecessary. Even within the scope of the system then in place, the gold seizure was unnecessary, for if the Fed had supplied paper notes, as it did after the banking holiday, that would have sufficed to reopen banks. Opening the mint to free and unlimited coinage of silver would have been another helpful step. The gold seizure didn’t solve the basic economic problem of a central bankfractional-reserve-banking cartel; and it didn’t solve the problem of a corporative state monetary system in which government caters to the banking cartel and vice versa. If these problems had been solved by removing gold from the possession of Americans, we wouldn’t be looking at an insolvent banking system in 2010, a government engaging in massive bailouts, a government deeply in deficit and with rapidly mounting debts, and a society facing the threat of monetary collapse. The reason for the emergency was that the fractional-reserve system had, yet again, experienced one of its periodic disasters. These always take the same form. Excessive loans turn into bad loans. Banks become insolvent. Depositors, who have a perfect right to withdraw Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) and gold, and who have a perfect right to act with prudence against the prospect of further losses in bank asset values, withdraw cash from the banks. Due to their bad loans, banks find that they cannot generate the cash flows demanded by depositors. Before 1933, bank closures had risen sharply. Even in the 1920s, there was a steady drip of bank closures as a consequence of the WW I boom-bust sequence. The Fed dithered. It could not resolve an insolvent system, but it could stop a chain reaction of bank closures by open-market operations and/or discount operations. This it did not do, despite its mandate to provide an elastic currency.4 President Hoover considered a government guarantee of bank deposits, but didn’t act
The Fed wasn’t the sole cause of the Great Depression. In addition, mismanaged government macroeconomic policies, such as the Tariff Act of June 17, 1930 (Smoot-Hawley), contribute to booms and busts. Inflation can’t and shouldn’t be used to cure such a situation. The cure lies in four steps. Sound money (gold and silver) supplied by a free market (opening the mint to free and unlimited coinage), reform of fractional-reserve banks, an end to the government-constructed central banking-managed bank cartel and to the legal-tender status of FRNs, and an end to the economy-wide misdirection of resources by government into its favored “investments,” which usually are unprofitable and increase uncertainty. All of these reforms are associated with a small and limited government.
on it.5 Why did the government seize the people’s gold? One reason was to inflate the supply of money and raise the overall price level in the United States on the theory that this would end the Great Depression.6 Another reason was to stop the bank closures and preserve the fractional-reserve monetary system. A third reason was to place the monetary system on a fiat money basis. A fourth reason was to profit from the devaluation. Seizing the gold stopped further withdrawals of cash from the banking system. This stemmed bank failures as well as decreases in the monetary base and the money supply. The latter could have been accomplished if the Fed had bought securities in the open market. Having seized the gold, the government devalued the dollar and had paper profits of about $3 billion. This allowed a corresponding inflationary increase in the monetary base. Congress in 1934 authorized the government to buy gold, which it did. It more than doubled the gold stock between 1934 and 1941. By this means, the Treasury inflated high-powered money. The Treasury took over the role of the Fed in this period. Vieira reminds us again and again that when acts of government are unconstitutional, as in the gold seizure, they are not laws. He cites Norton v. Shelby County (1886). In this case, the Supreme Court affirmed a ruling by the highest court of Tennessee that the Board of Commissioners of Shelby County “had no lawful existence; that it was an unauthorized and illegal body; that its members were usurpers of the functions and powers of the justices of peace of the county; that their action in holding a county court was void, and that their acts in subscribing to the stock of the Mississippi River Railroad Company and issuing bonds in payment therefore were void. “While acts of a de facto incumbent of an office lawfully created by law and existing are often held to be binding from reasons of public policy, the acts of a person assuming to fill and perform the duties of an office which does not exist de jure can have no validity whatever in law. “An unconstitutional act is not a law; it confers no rights; it imposes no duties; it affords no protection; it creates no office; it is in legal contemplation as inoperative as though it had never been passed.” The last paragraph is especially worthy of note. “An unconstitutional act is not a law...” The
These are inappropriate permanent measures. Within the fiat money fractional-reserve system, these steps were available. They could have bought time to take correct and permanent steps, had anyone wanted to. The policy didn’t succeed. See Robert Higgs, Regime Uncertainty Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War (1997).
distinction between de facto and de jure must constantly be borne in mind when we discover unconstitutional acts that have persisted for decades on end. Their de facto status does not lend them a de jure status. They are not laws. In legal contemplation, or from a legal perspective, such a law is “as inoperative as though it had never been passed.” People may be obeying the act or may have been made to obey the act, through force or threat of force, but the act is still not a law.7 Roosevelt’s Gold Seizure – The Initial Step Roosevelt’s gold seizure began with Presidential Proclamation No. 2039 on March 6, 1933. This, in turn, referred to the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended, otherwise known as the Trading With the Enemy Act.8 The original Act is online here. The Act of September 24, 1918 amended section 5(b) of the original. After Roosevelt’s proclamation, Congress on March 9, 1933 hastily passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933, which altered section 5(b) again. Further changes occurred in the Act of December 18, 1941 and in the Act of September 14, 1976. In Stoehr v. Wallace (1921), the Supreme Court ruled that “The Trading With the Enemy Act, originally and as amended, is strictly a war measure, and finds its sanction in the provision empowering Congress ‘to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.’” Since the country was not at war on March 6, 1933, Roosevelt’s proclamation had no legal basis. This is why he immediately asked Congress to pass the Emergency Banking Act. If the Trading with the Enemy Act was constitutional, it also had limits, according to the Court. In Becker Steel Company of America v. Cummings (1935), the Court ruled “Section 7 of the Trading with the Enemy Act conferred on the Alien Property Custodian authority summarily to seize property upon his determination that it was enemy owned, and such a seizure was lawful even though the determination were erroneous...But, in thus authorizing the seizure of property as a war measure, Congress did not attempt the
It does not even have to be repealed. It can simply be eliminated from the code by decision of the authorities; and an executive may simply stop enforcing the act’s provisions. But it is useful for all concerned if such an act is in fact repealed. At the time of the Constitution, the Trading with the Enemy Act might have been viewed as an unconstitutional infringement on rights because warfare was not unlimited at that time. See Murray N. Rothbard Trading with the Enemy: An American Tradition. See also his discussion in Chapter 3 of his Anatomy of a State. The latter quotes a passage from John U. Nef’s War and Human Progress in which Nef indicates how little the wars of the State affected relations between civilians in the two warring States at that time.
confiscation of the property of citizens or alien friends.” Any seizures were to be of enemy-owned property, not of citizens or alien friends. The Act defined the word “enemy” clearly as including persons who were “natives, citizens, or subjects of any nation with which the United States is at war,” and excluding citizens of the United States. Proper v. Clark (1949) confirmed this: “Through the Trading with the Enemy Act, in its various forms, the nation sought to deprive enemies, actual or potential, of the opportunity to secure advantages to themselves or to perpetrate wrongs against the United States or its citizens through the use of assets that happened to be in this country.” The Trading with the Enemy Act allowed the President to interdict or embargo transactions in foreign exchange, gold and silver coin, bullion, and currency, and credit and debts, between any person in the United States and enemies of the United States or their allies. It excluded purely domestic transactions. With reference to gold, the original language was “export of earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency.” The 1918 amendment changed that to “and the export, hoarding, melting, or earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency.” In the context of a war, hoarding and melting referred to processing and sequestering bullion for purposes of shipping to a foreign country. This did not make a large change, as long as hoarding meant placing in inventory for future shipment, since it was still directed at trading with an enemy. But if hoarding were taken to mean any holding of gold domestically by Americans, then it would be a very large change. The amendment in 1918 also gave the President a sweeping power over domestic transactions in bonds of the United States. He could “regulate...any transactions in such bonds or certificates by or between any person or persons” except those transactions done in cash.9 Rep. Hayes objected that such a power was tantamount to confiscation, which is ruled out by the Constitution. In Markham v. Cabell (1945), the Court made clear that the Act as a whole did not expire in 1921 when World War I ended, even if certain of its provisions no longer could be used. It stood ready to be used again in another war. On the eve of Roosevelt’s proclamation, the Trading with the Enemy Act could not be invoked since the country wasn’t at war. It certainly couldn’t reach to purely domestic transactions in specie among U.S. citizens. Hoover was communicating with the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) about what emergency action they would recommend. The Board sent Hoover a detailed message. It got to Roosevelt by his March 4 inauguration, and he incorporated large portions of it into his March 6 message. Most U.S. bond market transactions are not cash transactions. They are made on borrowed funds.
The FRB’s recommendation contained some remarkable statements, such as “by the end of banking hours tomorrow, the gold reserves of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago will be dangerously depleted. Representative bankers are assembled there tonight and have requested that a national holiday be proclaimed as the only method they know of for dealing with the immediate exigency with which they are confronted.” There is no credibility in the claim that a national holiday was the only method of dealing with the cash demands. The banks could have suspended payments in specie. The Fed, prior to this point, could have provided bank reserves that the banks could have withdrawn in FRNs.10 Clearinghouses, if need be, could have resurrected clearinghouse certificates. The Fed could have discounted more collateral more freely, or, if it had to, sought an expansion of allowable collateral. Roosevelt’s March 6 proclamation led off with this statement: “WHEREAS there have been heavy and unwarranted withdrawals of gold and currency from our banking institutions for the purpose of hoarding...” Roosevelt blamed Americans for the banking problems. Large numbers of Americans were doing what was their right, which was to demand their deposits in cash. The banks were obligated to respond. Whose fault was it that they could not? Whose fault was it that they had overextended themselves? Large numbers of Americans were behaving rationally in view of the likelihood that when they needed cash, the banks would not be able to meet their end of the bargain. It was prudent to take the precaution of withdrawing cash. By saying that the withdrawals were unwarranted and hoarding, Roosevelt blamed the American public for a crisis not of their making. Roosevelt paired hoarding, which simply means accumulating or storing up, with “unwarranted”, so as to connote that the hoarding was somehow a bad thing. He was blaming the victims of fractional-reserve banking for the insolvency of the banks. Next, he mentioned “severe drains on the Nation’s stocks of gold.” Individual persons had claims on this gold. It didn’t belong to “the Nation.” He said that “those conditions have created a national emergency.” Then he invoked Section 5(b) of the Act of October 6, 1917. He was careful to avoid calling it the Trading with the Enemy Act. He invoked a power to regulate transactions in gold and silver coin, including the hoarding thereof.
See Allan H. Meltzer A History of the Federal Reserve, Vol. 1, 1913-1951 (2003), pp. 272-414 for explanations of why the Fed failed to supply bank reserves. He rejects that the reasons were either operation of the gold standard or lack of knowledge of the economic situation. His explanation is that the Fed thought its policies were already sufficiently easy, because they, being guided by a real bills approach, were looking at the wrong indicators of tightness and ease.
The Act was inapplicable to the situation at hand, since there was no war and since only perfectly legal transactions of American citizens were involved. District Judge Mathes provided us with a highly readable no-nonsense opinion in United States v. Briddle (1962) that confirms these conclusions.11 For example, “In an obviously strained effort to find legal support for such drastic and unprecedented control of the banking business of the nation, the President made reference to the ‘national emergency’ and to authority claimed under the above-quoted provisions of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. [40 Stat. § 411.] Although this action was cheerfully accepted, and even welcomed, at the time, it was clearly unauthorized, since nowhere in the Constitution is the President given authority to act in an ‘emergency’ as such, and the requisite war conditions which might have called into play his granted power as Commander-in-Chief or his delegated power under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917 did not obtain. “This patent lack of authority prompted the President immediately to submit to a compliant Congress the bill which became the Act of March 9, 1933. [48 Stat. 1, 12 U.S.C. § 95a.]” Note that Judge Mathes says that a President has no constitutional authority to act in an emergency as such. The President and Congress have no authority to set aside the Constitution in an emergency, no authority to assume emergency powers unless they are necessary and proper to execute other enumerated powers, and no domestic police powers. Any purported laws to support acting under color of an emergency as such are not laws and, in legal contemplation, inoperative, even if they are in de facto operation. The Supreme Court spoke on emergency in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934): “Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the Federal Government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency.” The Constitution gives no power to the government even to declare an emergency. As far as legal power goes, such a declaration is (p. 892) “constitutionally irrelevant.” The Supreme Court spoke again on emergency in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935): “We are told that the provision of the statute authorizing the adoption of codes must be viewed in the light of the grave national crisis with which Congress was confronted. Undoubtedly, the conditions to which power is addressed are always to be considered
So does Anthony v. Bank of Wiggins, 183 Miss. 885 (1938).
when the exercise of power is challenged. Extraordinary conditions may call for extraordinary remedies. But the argument necessarily stops short of an attempt to justify action which lies outside the sphere of constitutional authority. Extraordinary conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power. The Constitution established a national government with powers deemed to be adequate, as they have proved to be both in war and peace, but these powers of the national government are limited by the constitutional grants. Those who act under these grants are not at liberty to transcend the imposed limits because they believe that more or different power is necessary.” The President declared the banks closed for four days, March 6 to March 9, during which time no banking transactions were to be done except those permitted by the Secretary of the Treasury. By the evening of March 9, 1933, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act of 1933. The Emergency Banking Act of 1933 This law passed in one day.12 Congress didn’t define the nature of the emergency, investigate its causes, or consider alternatives. Debate was extremely limited. Congressmen who may have wished to ponder the meaning or implications of what they were voting on had no time to do so. Congress went immediately to the supposed solutions.13 The first section of the Act “approved and confirmed” the actions taken by the President “heretofore and hereafter.” The Supreme Court has ruled in United States v. Heinszen & Company (1907) that Congress can, after the fact, ratify an action of the President if Congress had the constitutional power to authorize that act. Congress cannot ratify an illegal action of the President. We need to inquire into the constitutionality of the Act’s contents. Before doing that note that Congress can’t in the present approve and confirm actions taken in the future by the President, because such approval requires knowledge of the (p. 895) “material facts and circumstances surrounding that action,” which Congress lacks. The Supreme Court has articulated that condition in Bloomfield v. Charter Oak Bank (1887) and elsewhere: “Any ratification of an act previously unauthorized must, in order to bind the principal, be with full knowledge of all the material facts.” This means that the “hereafter” language in the Act shouldn’t be there. Section 2 leads off by saying that it amends Section 5(b) of the Act of October 6, 1917. Actually, it completely transforms the Act in three vital and unconstitutional ways. It adds the words “During time of war or during any other period of national emergency declared by the
Meltzer, op. cit., informs us (p. 389) that “Walter Wyatt, the [Federal Reserve] Board’s legal counsel, prepared the act. According to Joseph Dreibilbis, one of the Federal Reserve attorneys, there was only one copy of the act when it passed.” Congress is perfectly capable of hasty, ill-considered, and unconstitutional actions that are injurious to the American people. Congress is also perfectly capable of slow, well-considered, and unconstitutional actions that injure the American people.
President...” Since the amendment doesn’t define national emergency and since the President can declare a national emergency under a vast array of circumstances, this practically authorizes the President to exercise the Act’s powers at his discretion. This is an unconstitutional delegation of power because it’s too broad and vague. The Act contains no standard (or intelligible principle) by which Congress tells the President when there is a national emergency. Second, vagueness also comes in where the President is given power to prohibit “hoarding” of gold. Hoarding is undefined. The President has no intelligible principle by which to judge whether hoarding is or is not occurring. The Supreme Court disallows vagueness of legislative instruction. See such cases as Connally v. General Construction Co. (1926), Champlin Refining Co. v. Corporation Commission of Oklahoma (1932), and Cline v. Frink Dairy Co. (1927). Since hoarding is any accumulation or set-aside, the President could place anyone under threat of a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison merely for saving money in the form of gold. Third, the rewritten 5(b) got rid of the language referring to transfers between the United States and any foreign country that was an enemy or ally of an enemy. This left behind the power to control the “export, hoarding, melting, or earmarkings of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency by any person within the United States...” The power to embargo or interdict domestic to foreign transfers was transformed into a generalized power to prohibit any domestic transfers or even holdings of gold and silver. This cannot be justified under any war power, since there is no war and no enemy involved in domestic gold transactions. What power in the Constitution justifies it? It cannot be the power to coin Money and regulate the value thereof. That has the opposite objective of making a specific viable money available, namely, gold and silver. It cannot be the power to regulate Commerce among the several States. If the regulation of Money is included under the commerce clause, then what’s the use of the separate powers over Money? Clearly, the Constitution separates Money regulation from Commerce regulation. One must conclude that Congress has no power in the Constitution that justifies its prohibiting the holding and transfer of gold and silver coin or bullion or currency domestically. It cannot delegate this nonexistent power to the President. Furthermore, seizing gold coin contradicts the Congressional duty to coin Money. The next section of the Act went much further. It amended the Federal Reserve Act by adding a new section. This was Section 3 of the Emergency Banking Act. This authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to seize all the gold in the country. The gold would be exchanged for “an equivalent amount of any other form of coin or currency coined or issued under the laws of the United States.” “...the Secretary of the Treasury, in his discretion, may require any or all individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations to pay and deliver to the Treasurer of the United States any or all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by such individuals, partnerships, associations and corporations. Upon receipt of such gold coin, gold bullion or gold certificates, the Secretary of the Treasury shall pay therefor an equivalent amount of any other form of coin or currency coined or issued under the laws of the United States.”
The penalty for noncompliance was twice the value of the gold that a person failed to deliver. The act allowed the government to give FRNs in exchange for the gold. The FRNs would then not be redeemable in gold because no one would be allowed to hold gold. The act allowed the government to give silver in exchange for the gold. Had that been done at the statutory rate of 16 to 1, it would not be an equivalent amount because the market exchange rate was 59 to 1. If the Secretary of Treasury had decided to make payments in silver at the market rate, that would have been unconstitutional anyway because he had no authority to regulate the value of the coinage. If we bend over backwards in an effort to find some justification for the seizure of the gold, we might view it as an act of eminent domain. This, however, is not enough. Eminent domain still needs to be justified by some enumerated power, because eminent domain is not a separate power of Congress. The Supreme Court has ruled that eminent domain is a necessary and proper power, that is, a means to an end.14 Hunting for the enumerated power that guides the seizure, we see that the source of the seizure power claimed in the Act is a monetary power, since the section amends the Federal Reserve Act. The constitutional money powers include coining Money, punishing counterfeiting, and borrowing money. Seizure of Money obviously is not justified by any of these powers. How about the illicit power that Congress claimed for decades, which is to emit bills of credit? Seizing gold does not come under that power either. Since we can find no power to justify the seizure, we conclude that it was unconstitutional.15 One aim of the seizure was to demonetize gold money as private money, i.e., to remove it from free circulation in the hands of individuals. The government would have it all to use as it saw fit for its monetary purposes, which would be, for example, for international balance of payments settlements or manipulating exchange rates. The public would not. This further undermined a free market in money, or a money supply created by the actions of many individual persons. It further nationalized money. It further solidified the corporative state in monetary affairs. At the same time, the gold seizure provided the banks with a mass suspension or default of gold redemption. This was exactly what the Federal Reserve wanted. It let insolvent banks off the hook of having to redeem in gold. Seizure of private gold was not necessary to accomplish this gift. The government could have amended the Federal Reserve Act so that FRNs would be redeemable in “lawful money” but not gold. (The government could have had no intent to use the gold to redeem FRNs domestically because it forbade private holding of gold.).16
See United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railway Co. (1896), Cherokee Nation v. Southern Kansas Railway Co. (1890), and Berman v. Parker (1954). Vieira (p. 916) writes that “the Supreme Court never heard a case which challenged Congress’s authority to seize WE THE PEOPLE’s gold at all, or the amount of payment for any confiscated gold as a denial of ‘just compensation’”. In the cases that were litigated on gold, the plaintiffs assumed that the seizure was constitutional. The idea that centralizing gold reserves was a useful tool of Federal Reserve policy may have played some part in the seizure. In addition, by paying $20.67 in FRNs per ounce of gold,
If one somehow stretched one of the enumerated powers in order to justify seizing gold, the government would then have to use its eminent domain power so as to compensate gold holders fully. We will now see that this is actually not feasible via this Act and could not have even been contemplated. The Act called for payment in an “equivalent amount of any other form of coin or currency coined or issued under the laws of the United States.” Silver would serve the purpose admirably, if it were distributed at a properly regulated value, as the Constitution requires. The silver dollar was still the standard 371.25 grains of fine silver. The statutory gold dollar was 23.22 grains of fine gold. With 480 grains of gold per ounce, this meant that gold was 480/23.22 = $20.67 per ounce of gold. Silver was 480/371.25 = $1.29 per ounce of silver. Gold’s price was officially 371.25/23.22 = 15.99 times the price of silver. In the market, however, gold had appreciated considerably relative to silver. In 1933, one ounce of gold bought 59.06 ounces of silver. In 1934, one ounce of gold bought 72.09 ounces of silver, on average. The 1933 ratio of 59.06 is 59.06/15.99 = 3.69 times the official rate. A gold dollar of 23.22 grains was exchanging for 3.69 silver dollars of 371.25 grains each. A $20 gold piece was exchanging for 73.9 silver dollars. The Treasury could not constitutionally regulate the value of the gold dollar with respect to silver, that being the job of Congress. For all practical purposes, the Act meant that gold had to be exchanged for FRNs that would be irredeemable in gold. The Supreme Court rulings on compensation for eminent domain takings are abundant and clear: the criterion for just compensation is the market value of the item taken, paid in money. The only way that the Treasury could provide an equivalent compensation in silver would have been to regulate the gold value to this 3.69 ratio. But this is constitutionally impossible, because only Congress can regulate the value of coined money. There is another obstacle, which is that it is a well-established legal fact that only the courts determine just compensation for takings, not Congress and not the Executive. Hence, the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 doesn’t even have a constitutional basis with respect to the equivalent compensation it was supposed to provide in exchange for taking the gold. The next two constitutional problems with Section 3 of the Act are that it delegates a power supposedly vested in Congress to the Secretary of the Treasury and it does so vaguely: “Whenever in the judgment of the Secretary of the Treasury such action is necessary to protect the currency system of the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury, in his discretion, may require any or all individuals...” If there is a power to seize gold, it most likely comes under the power to coin Money. This was an executive power in pre-constitutional English law. The Constitution explicitly made it a legislative power. For Congress to delegate this power back to the Treasury goes directly against the Constitution’s structure. the government later profited when it devalued the dollar to $35.00 an ounce.
If such a delegation were allowable, it would have to be in well-defined terms, which this delegation is not. The pertinent cases are A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. V. United States (1935) and Panama Refining Company v. Ryan (1935). The Schechter case says “Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President to exercise an unfettered discretion to make whatever laws he thinks may be needed or advisable for the rehabilitation and expansion of trade or industry.” In the Panama case, Justice Charles Evans Hughes laid down a significant number of provisos for a constitutional delegation, such as a policy, standards, a rule, a requirement, and a definition of circumstances and conditions. He wrote that the President should be finding facts and conditions that relate to the required conditions. None of this is present in Section 3. The actual gold seizure order of December 28, 1933 met none of these conditions. Even from this narrower perspective, the seizure was unconstitutional: “Whereas in my judgment, such action is necessary to protect the currency system of the United States: “Now, therefore, I, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Acting Secretary of the Treasury, do hereby require every person subject to the jurisdiction of the United States forthwith to pay and deliver to the Treasurer of the United States all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates situated in the United States, owned by such person...” From the point of view of people using gold as currency, it is lunacy to suggest that the currency system is being protected by totally removing that gold from circulation, as Morgenthau claims. Section 4 of the Act says that “no member bank of the Federal Reserve System shall transact any banking business except to such extent and subject to such regulations, limitations and restrictions as may be prescribed by the Secretary of the Treasury, with the approval of the President.” This is a broad power to control banking. It could include who gets what loans and how much they get. Where in the Constitution does Congress get such a power? If it does have such a power, can it delegate it to the Executive in this totally unrestricted way? Once again, we find this Act smashing constitutional fences and bounding into unconstitutional territory. Sections 301-304 of the Act allowed banks to issue preferred stock that could be bought by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in order to infuse capital into banks. Section 401 allowed Federal Reserve banks to obtain blank notes from the Treasury that could be issued as Federal Reserve notes by depositing with the Treasury all sorts of securities as collateral. In effect, the Treasury became the lender of last resort, although the issued notes would be obligations of the Federal Reserve banks. Section 402 allowed the Federal Reserve banks to issue credit to member banks on a member’s banks time or demand notes “secured to the satisfaction of the such Federal reserve bank.” These provisions loosened considerably the requirements for making advances to banks. Gold backing requirements were removed. Section 403 gave the Fed power to make shortterm loans directly to individuals, partnerships, and corporation on their promissory notes
secured by U.S. securities. The Fed used this power in 2008-2009 to lend on the commercial paper of corporations. The debate in the House on this Act lasted all of 40 minutes. It covers 3 pages in the Congressional Record. Mr. McFadden was able to make a few negative comments on the bill. He saw the influence of the Fed behind it: “Mr. Speaker, I regret that the membership of the House has had no opportunity to consider or even read this bill. The first opportunity I had to know what this legislation is was when it was read from the Clerk’s desk. It is an important banking bill. It is a dictatorship over finance in the United States. It is complete control over the banking system in the United States...I have been calling attention for some years past to the manner in which the Federal Reserve System has been conducted, and have predicted that it would lead to this kind of a situation. We have, step by step, been proceeding along the lines of centralization...This gives supreme authority to those people who have wanted to control the finances of this Government, through a centralized system, to have such a system...I can see much in this bill that can be abused and that may have been dictated by the same banking influences that are responsible for our present predicament...The other [section] gives supreme authority to the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States to impound all the gold in the United States in the hands of individuals, corporations, or companies...” Most of the other brief comments were cheerleading. Mr. Snell: “The house is burning down, and the President of the United States says this is the way to put out the fire. [Applause.] And to me at this time there is only one answer to this question, and that is to give the President what he demands and says is necessary to meet the situation.” Mr. Steagall: “The people have summoned to their service a leader whose face is lifted toward the skies. [Applause.] We follow that leadership today, and we shall follow that leadership until we stand in the glorious sunlight of prosperity and happiness in this Republic. [Applause.] Mr. Goldsborough: “Mr. Speaker, in time of storm there can be only one pilot. In my judgment, the House of Representatives realize that the pilot in this case must be the President of the United States, and they will steer their course by him. [Applause.] The First Fireside Chat On March 9, 1933, Roosevelt issued Proclamation No. 2040 to continue the national emergency. This froze the gold in the banks. He followed this the next day with Executive Order No. 6073 to freeze any gold in anyone’s possession so as to prevent it from leaving the United States. Roosevelt’s first fireside chat (March 12, 1933) began well enough by explaining the nature of fractional-reserve banking:
“First of all let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit-bonds, commercial paper, mortgages and many other kinds of loans. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around. A comparatively small part of the money you put into the bank is kept in currency -- an amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average citizen. In other words the total amount of all the currency in the country is only a small fraction of the total deposits in all of the banks.” He quickly veered off into a misleading analysis: “What, then, happened during the last few days of February and the first few days of March? Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold.” Roosevelt failed to mention that bank failures had been going on for years. He failed even to hint that the Federal Reserve had done little to stop them. He failed to raise any question about the viability or wisdom of the fractional-reserve system that had led to such a pass. He didn’t explain why confidence had been undermined. The rush to gold was so great, he said, “that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand. The reason for this was that on the spur of the moment it was, of course, impossible to sell perfectly sound assets of a bank and convert them into cash except at panic prices far below their real value.” This passage suggested that the rush to get gold was a blameworthy event, because the banks were sound, had perfectly sound assets of real value, and could only liquidate them at distress prices. This was all misleading. Depositors had a right to demand gold. Banks were supposed to manage their affairs so as to meet depositor demands. If the soundest banks could not meet the demand for cash, didn’t it suggest that the general run of banks were following unsound lending practices? The Fed was supposed to be providing an elastic currency for just such a contingency. After three years of depression, the value of the loans of most banks no doubt was considerably lower than the book values at which they were carried. Had they been sound loans, they would have found a ready market. Banks had made too many long-term illiquid loans while financing them with short-term liquid deposits. Their financing structure was untenable. The flaw lay in improper fractional-reserve banking methods, mainly borrowing short and lending long, creating a maturity mismatch; and including extending questionable, speculative, and illiquid loans. Roosevelt went on accurately to explain the steps taken to manufacture more notes that could be issued to the public. He then said “This currency is not fiat currency. It is issued only on adequate security -- and every good bank has an abundance of such security.”
This was misleading. The currency being issued had some security behind it for sure, but most fiat currencies do. Could this currency have lasted a day in a free market, as gold and silver can? It was forced into being or supported in its existence by a welter of government laws and regulations, and this made it a fiat currency. Roosevelt reassured his listeners: “I hope you can see from this elemental recital of what your government is doing that there is nothing complex, or radical in the process.” Not radical? Gaining the power to seize all the gold in the country? He had neglected to mention that. Other than the rush into gold, his only other mention of gold was that there were more important things than currency or gold. Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 6102 on April 5, 1933. He said that the national emergency still existed and that he was prohibiting the hoarding of gold by all Americans in the continental United States. Section 1 defined hoarding as “withdrawal and withholding of gold coin, gold bullion or gold certificates from the recognized and customary channels of trade.” This seeming restriction to hoarded gold was meaningless. Roosevelt didn’t leave any gold in private hands, even within the customary channels of trade, because Section 2 of his order required everyone to deliver “all gold...now owned by them” by May 1 to any member bank or Federal Reserve bank. The member banks were to deliver the gold they owned to the Federal Reserve banks. Violations were subject to $10,000 fines and up to ten years in prison. The banks receiving the gold were to pay “an equivalent amount of any other form of coin or currency coined or issued under the laws of the United States.” This was inconsistent with the Emergency Banking Act, which instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to make these payments. A month earlier, Roosevelt had left the impression that hoarding was inconveniencing banks. His authority was to seize hoards. He left the impression that restocking the banks with notes would alleviate the problem. Subsequently, he prohibited gold from being exported and banks could not pay out gold. Now it became clear, despite the continued linking of hoarding to channels of trade, that he had no intent to let any gold be traded. Mere possession was a crime. On April 20, 1933, Roosevelt ordered that no gold could be earmarked for a foreign account or exported. On April 28, the Acting Secretary of the Treasury declared that no licenses would be granted to obtain gold in order to pay off on contracts calling for delivery in gold. The government forced debtors to default on gold clauses in contracts. It abrogated the gold clauses. The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act of 1933 This was Title III of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of May 12, 1933. It contained Sections 4246 of that Act. The Act is headed by a reference to its supposed enabling power in the Constitution: “FINANCING – AND EXERCISING POWER CONFERRED BY SECTION 8 OF
ARTICLE I OF THE CONSTITUTION: TO COIN MONEY AND TO REGULATE THE VALUE THEREOF”. By this Act, Congress authorized the Executive to execute certain actions at his discretion. One such action was that the Secretary of the Treasury could arrange with the Fed to conduct open market operations. Another was to buy $3 billion of Treasury securities, while suspending certain Federal Reserve bank requirements. The Act’s Section 43 made clear that the open market operations were so that the government could engage in currency intervention: “SEC. 43. Whenever the President finds, upon investigation, that (1) the foreign commerce of the United States is adversely affected by reason of the depreciation in the value of the currency of any other government or governments in relation to the present standard of gold, or (2) action under this section is necessary in order to regulate and maintain the parity of currency issues of the United States...” The purchase of $3 billion of Treasury bills, notes, and bonds was, according to the same section, so that the government could both expand credit and fix currency prices: “...or (3) an economic emergency requires an expansion of credit, or (4) an expansion of credit is necessary to secure by international agreement a stabilization at proper levels of the currencies of various governments, the President is authorized, in his discretion...” If the Secretary of the Treasury could not secure the Fed’s agreement, then the President could have him issue United States Notes as provided in the Legal Tender Act of Feb. 25, 1862. This part of the Act authorized that “Such notes and all other coins and currencies heretofore or hereafter coined or issued by or under the authority of the United States shall be legal tender for all debts public and private.” Vieira (p. 972) points out that “Here, for the first time in American history, Congress claimed the power to make a full legal tender something other than silver or gold coin...This...went beyond even what the English King had claimed under pre-constitutional common law...” The words “or hereafter” show clearly that the theory behind this legal enactment is that anything that the Congress says is legal tender becomes legal tender, no matter what its qualities are, for Congress could not in 1933 foresee what such items might be. In this view, legal tender is detached from constitutional legal tender. The clause in the Constitution allowing the states to make nothing except gold or silver a legal tender becomes meaningless. Justices Strong and Bradley, who made all sorts of unconstitutional claims in Knox v. Lee, didn’t go so far as to say that Congress had the power to make anything into money. Strong wrote “The legal tender acts do not attempt to make paper a standard of value. We do not rest their validity upon the assertion that their emission is coinage, or any regulation of the value of money; nor do we assert that Congress may make anything which has no value
money.” Bradley wrote “This power is entirely distinct from that of coining money and regulating the value thereof...It is not an attempt to coin money out of a valueless material, like the coinage of leather or ivory or kowrie shells...No one supposes that these government certificates are never to be paid – that the day of specie payments is never to return.” One unconstitutional thing leads to another worse unconstitutional thing. The Court allowed legal-tender paper in Knox v. Lee under some sort of theory that it was temporary, or would be redeemed, or could be justified under the power to borrow. They said it was constitutional because it didn’t make money out of something valueless; the notes contained a promise to pay that was a reliable credit. By 1933, Congress was saying that even something valueless could be legal tender. The Court has never taken up a case challenging that view or made any attempt to reconcile the contradictions in these government actions with the Constitution. It could not do so honestly without bringing down the entire monetary scheme that grows out of it. The President was then given certain discretionary power to devalue the dollar in terms of gold. The Act read that if the preceding measures “prove to be inadequate to meet the purposes of this section, or if for any reason additional measures are required in the judgment of the President to meet such purposes, then the President is authorized –...” The President could, for any reason, take certain steps regarding gold and silver that he judged necessary in order to obtain the currency prices he thought desirable, such that foreign commerce would not be adversely affected, domestic prices would be stabilized, or in order to adjust the parity of foreign currencies with that of the U.S. These allowable steps were “By proclamation to fix the weight of the gold dollar...and also the weight of the silver dollar...at a definite fixed ratio in relation to the gold dollar at such amounts as he finds necessary from his investigation to stabilize domestic prices or to protect the foreign commerce against the adverse effect of depreciated foreign currencies, and to provide for the unlimited coinage of such gold and silver at the ratio so fixed, or in case the Government of the United States enters into an agreement with any government or governments under the terms of which the ratio between the value of gold and other currency issued by the United States and by any such government or governments is established, the President may fix the weight of the gold dollar in accordance with the ratio so agreed upon, and such gold dollar, the weight of which is so fixed, shall be the standard unit of value, and all forms of money issued or coined by the United States shall be maintained at a parity with this standard and it shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to maintain such parity, but in no event shall the weight of the gold dollar be fixed so as to reduce its present weight by more than 50 percentum.”
The act contemplated a dollar devaluation. Otherwise the restriction to a 50 percent limit would not have been included. Part of the background of this act is that Roosevelt and his advisors were acting on fallacious economic theories.17 They wanted to raise the domestic prices of goods, and they believed that if the price of gold were raised, this would cause domestic prices to increase.18 This act is filled with unconstitutional actions. To begin with, the coinage clause of the Constitution tells Congress to regulate the value of foreign coins, by which is meant, as explained in full in earlier parts of this series, to declare its appropriate worth according to its metal content relative to the standard silver dollar of the U.S. The government has no authority under the coinage clause to speculate in foreign currencies, to attempt to alter their values, or to attempt to create particular price relations with the dollar. There is no power anywhere in the Constitution
Politicians and central bankers engage in ceaseless, fruitless, and counterproductive attempts to understand, interpret, and manipulate markets and economies. They and most economists always rationalize these actions by incomplete and/or faulty economic reasoning. They always get lost in futile attempts to interpret prices, interest rates, market movements, and various facets of economic activity. If anyone can ever do this consistently, he will become very wealthy by market speculation alone. Such a complete understanding and manipulation of economies to a good end is beyond the limited capabilities and abilities of any human being fully to understand complex systems of human creation. This is due both to human limitations and to the dispersal of knowledge and information among countless persons, changing market dynamics based on changing knowledge and information, and due to the dynamics of changing values, human actions, and human interactions that are willed by individuals and can’t be predicted. Meltzer informs us (op. cit.) that Professors Irving Fisher, George Warren, and John R. Commons all advised Roosevelt to devalue the dollar. Warren was an administration consultant. Both he and Fisher thought that the price level should be restored to the 1926 level. Morgenthau endorsed Warren’s notion that raising the price of gold would raise the prices of agricultural commodities. Roosevelt was impressed with this theory. Dean Acheson and Oliver Sprague opposed devaluation. After a period of indecision, Roosevelt chose to devalue. Warren and Fisher met with Roosevelt on August 8, 1933 to advise on a price of gold. Both convinced Roosevelt that raising the price of gold would raise the domestic price level. In his October 22, 1933 fireside chat, Roosevelt said that “ever since last March, the definite policy of the Government has been to restore commodity price levels.”
to expand credit or to extend WE THE PEOPLE’s credit to anyone for any reason, be it an emergency or an international currency price-fixing scheme. Government has the power to borrow, but not to lend. If these acts were constitutional under the coinage clause, Congress could not delegate them to the President. Any such delegation, even if it were feasible, could not be made without more explicit standards than such vague language as foreign commerce being adversely affected, there being an economic emergency, or stabilizing prices at proper levels. What or how much is adverse, what defines an emergency, and what are proper price levels? The President was given discretion not to act as well as to act. Section 43 on devaluing the dollar is littered with one constitutional problem after another. Congress could not constitutionally delegate its power to regulate the value of the gold dollar. The silver dollar could not constitutionally be fixed with respect to gold; it had to be the other way around, if at all. It couldn’t be done constitutionally as the President “finds necessary”; the gold dollar coin content would have to be regulated at the free-market exchange rate between gold and silver. A presidential proclamation couldn’t do it without abandoning the constitutional standard and economic rationality. Any such regulation couldn’t depend on such nonconstitutional criteria as stabilizing domestic prices or protecting certain business interests from falling foreign currencies. No one, Congress or President, had authority to fix the weight of the gold dollar by an agreement with foreign governments. Once again, the illegality of a vague delegation crops up. Congress didn’t determine the weight of gold in the dollar but left the whole matter to the President’s discretion. The actual Congressional authority, which it had duly exercised up until 1900, was to fix the weight of gold in the gold dollar according to the standard silver dollar and to the free-market exchange rate between silver and gold. The authority in this Act to fix it or not fix it at the President’s discretion according to an international agreement completely overrode the constitutional imperative. Section 43 ended up with the directive to maintain the silver dollar at parity with whatever gold dollar was to be established. If this were carried out at the required 50 percent or less rate, it would surely depreciate the constitutional silver dollar by some arbitrary amount. Even the maximum 50 percent rate written into the law was unconstitutional. We saw earlier that “A gold dollar of 23.22 grains was exchanging for 3.69 silver dollars of 371.25 grains each” in the market. An appropriately regulated gold dollar should have been 23.22/3.69 = 6.29 grains of fine gold. The percentage devaluation should have been (23.22 - 6.29)/23.22 = 0.729 or 72.9 percent. When gold was made $35 an ounce, that was 13.71 grains per dollar (480 /13.71 = 35). The actual devaluation was (23.22 -13.71)/23.22 = 41 percent. The irony of this is that Roosevelt, under the mistaken theory that a devaluation would raise prices, resorted to all manner of unconstitutional means to achieve it, when all he had to do was do what the Constitution allowed. Had he done so, the devaluation would have been much larger. The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act of 1933 made the constitutional devaluation impossible by imposing a 50 percent limit.
The Congressional Debates on the Emergency Farm Act of 1933 The debates can be summarized at somewhat less length than in previous chapters. It will suffice to provide the various points of view at times without direct quotation. Agitation for inflation as a solution to the economic problems is widespread, even though such a solution makes matters worse, Rep. Reed noted. Numerous Congressmen called for more currency, more credit, and more money in circulation. They thought it was essential to get wholesale commodity prices up, and that currency expansion would do it. The Thomas Amendment, much of which found its way into Section 43 of the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, aimed to cheapen the dollar in order to raise prices. Instead of thinking of a sound dollar as a fixed amount of precious metal, Congressmen spoke in favor of Irving Fisher’s idea that a sound dollar meant a constant purchasing-power dollar.19 Congressmen looked upon low prices of commodities as a cause rather than an effect. They wanted to manage the dollar, not realizing the inherent problems with the goal of a stable purchasing-power dollar. Such a dollar was nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Rewriting the Constitution, Sen. Connally said that “gold should be treated as a commodity and should not be coined...the number of grains which would be paid in redemption of a dollar would vary according to the commodity index of a thousand basic commodities...” He ignored the problem of how the prices of these commodities could be established without a unit of account in the first place. Sen. Shipstead called for control of credit and management of currency without realizing that the Federal Reserve already was doing this or asking how the Great Depression could have happened when the currency was managed. Congressmen continued to speak of national peril and emergencies, as if they had never occurred before and as if they meant that the Constitution could be forgotten. They spoke of emergency legislation as being temporary. Senator Couzens openly acknowledged that they were setting up an “autocrat” to deal with the problems, but one “selected by the people themselves.” He said the President would have a “tremendously broad” grant of authority, “virtually unrestricted...without precedent,” but the country was in “a great war on depression,” and had nowhere else to turn but their “Commander in Chief.” Senator Thomas saw the President as the only alternative because in 16 years in Congress, he had seen nothing but disagreement on the gold content of the dollar. If he had understood and turned to the Constitution, he would have found a perfectly satisfactory and constitutional answer that resolved all conflicts. The Founding Fathers had established a standard meant to be permanent and meant permanently to avoid all such money questions that invariably set debtors against creditors, bankers and government against the people, and people against one another.
See Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (2004), chapter 11, especially at 843-51, for a critique of stabilizing price levels.
A number of speakers recognized the deeper causes of the depression, pointing to “justifiable criticism of the Federal Reserve System”, improperly managed credit, the inflation of 1924-1929, and fractional-reserve banking that “cannot stand runs.” There were (outvoted) voices who spoke against the delegation of monetary powers to one man. Reed explicitly noted “The Constitution gives to Congress the power to regulate the currency. It does not give us the power to delegate it.” Senator Steiwer articulated perfectly the unconstitutional vagueness in the Act and the meaning of the separation of legislative from executive powers: “The failure to define the contingency upon which the President would act, the failure to prescribe a legislative policy, the failure to make a formula, the failure to outline a plan, the failure to fix the event upon which the President should act, and determine the time when he should act, the failure to make any requirement of him, giving to him...boundless discretion...takes this language...entirely beyond the power of Congress to enact.” Senators Reed and Borah similarly saw these problems. Senator Hastings saw the bill as “wholly unconstitutional...Congress ought to fold the Constitution and seal it and appoint a distinguished committee to take it to the White House and lay it in the lap of the President.” Too many Senators were willing to pass the bill and let the Supreme Court decide on the questionable provisions, abandoning their duty, since the Court rules on only a fraction of all measures that are passed. An abundance of ignorance was put on display by those who thought that the Coinage Act of 1792 set up the gold standard and the gold dollar, or that the Supreme Court “has held that printing money is the same as coining money under the Constitution.” Borah couldn’t get his priorities straight. He thought it worse that the government was taking people’s gold without providing them a safe place to deposit it with “assurance...that when they want it they can get it,” than that the government was commandeering the gold in the first place. He naively thought the gold deposit was a bailment, when the only receipt anyone would get for it was an FRN. He at least recognized that “we are proceeding under a pure threat” and had the sense to confess “It is difficult for me to understand why that policy is being pursued.” Norris had the good sense to conclude that the government has no right “to require any citizen to deposit his money anywhere, whether it is gold or any other kind of money. It has no right, as a matter of law...to do that.” He had the bad sense to vote for the bill that did just that. Senator Wheeler was a lone voice calling for opening the mint to free and unlimited coinage of silver; but he didn’t know what to do about gold. He thought that the government could fix the silver to gold ratio arbitrarily. Rep. Steagall again trotted out his adoration of the American Führer: “We have chosen a leader who is responsive to the will and wishes and who embodies the hopes and aspirations of the
people of the United States. In his hands he holds aloft the colors of civilization...Throughout the world the people have their eyes fixed on his leadership. They will follow him to new victories for peace and happiness. [Applause.] Outlawing of Gold Clauses The Emergency Farm Mortgage Bill passed on May 12 made any coin or currency of the United States into legal tender. Congress then went further. It required that all contracts for money payments, past, present, and future had to be in any coin or currency that it had made legal tender. The House Joint Resolution No. 192 of June 5, 1933 declared that gold was not such a legal tender, that it was “against public policy.” It outlawed gold clauses. Congress stopped private parties from making gold, or any particular kind of coin or currency at all, or any amount of money of the United States measured in gold, into a private legal tender within private contracts. Person A could not contractually agree to tender gold or an amount of money measured by the price of gold to person B as payment of an obligation of any kind; nor could they contract in some other kind of coin or currency. Congress outlawed making such agreements in the future and it outlawed all such provisions in existing contracts. Instead, “Every obligation, heretofore or hereafter incurred, whether or not any such provision is contained therein or made with respect thereto, shall be discharged upon payment, dollar for dollar, in any coin or currency which at the time of payment is legal tender for public and private debts.” There was one exception: FRNs. Federal Reserve Notes were an obligation that could be paid off in gold. Subsequently, the U.S. Treasury would redeem FRNs presented by foreign central banks for gold. Since American citizens were deprived of the right to hold gold, they couldn’t redeem their FRNs for gold. The resolution applied to obligations issued by the U.S. Treasury, including any bonds and notes that had promised payment in gold. This meant that the United States partially defaulted on its debt. The creditor’s option to receive gold ended. Henceforth, he would receive whatever was legal tender, but not gold. This might have been silver, which would have lent at least some constitutional cover to the default, but, as argued earlier, unless Congress regulated the gold dollar properly, payment in silver would have taken wealth away from bondholders. This part of the resolution was later found to be unconstitutional.20 The Resolution began with what amounts to boilerplate, namely, that the “holding of or dealing in gold affect the public interest” and therefore was subject to “proper regulation and restriction.” This broad language merely sets the stage. It obviously doesn’t justify a major interference in In Perry v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court found that “The Joint Resolution of June 5, 1933, insofar as it undertakes to nullify such gold clauses in obligations of the United States and provides that such obligations shall be discharged by payment dollar for dollar, in any coin or currency which at the time of payment is legal tender for public and private debts, is unconstitutional.”
private property rights like abrogating the gold clauses. The constitutional justification of a use of power requires a great deal more than declaring that something is affected with the public interest. Holding or dealing in all forms of property affects the public interest to some degree. If that is all it takes to justify a Congressional power to regulate and restrict, then the Constitution has created a totalitarian government. This is hardly the original meaning of the Constitution or the Declaration that informs the Constitution. The Resolution then argues that “the existing emergency has disclosed” that gold clauses “obstruct the power of Congress to regulate the value of money of the United States, and are inconsistent with the declared policy of the Congress to maintain at all times the equal power of every dollar, coined or issued by the United States...” This is nonsense. The emergency disclosed nothing of the sort. The failure of the banking system had nothing to do with contractual gold clauses. They had been around for decades without causing any emergencies. They were in bond contracts of bonds issued by the federal government. It’s astounding to read this in a piece of Congressional legislation. As for the gold clauses obstructing Congressional power, this too is a ridiculous accusation. How could they possibly do that? The Congress had it within its power to regulate the values of gold and silver, regardless whether private parties agreed to contract in gold, silver, platinum, or unspecified dollars. The Congress had regulated gold and silver in the past without hindrance from gold clauses. Indeed, gold clauses do nothing more than specify payments in gold so as to protect those contracting from Congressional failures to regulate properly. Many people would not even bother with a gold clause except that Congress fails to adjust the gold dollar to changes in the market exchange rate with silver. Gold clauses do nothing to hold Congress back from proper regulation of the coinage. When gold clauses started being used as a result of government issues of greenbacks, the Supreme Court had noted in Bronson v. Rodes (1869) that both notes and coin were okayed by Congress in contracts: “The coined dollar was, an we have said, a piece of gold or silver of a prescribed degree of purity, weighing a prescribed number of grains. The note dollar was a promise to pay a coined dollar; but it was not a promise to pay on demand nor at any fixed time, nor was it in fact convertible into a coined dollar... “If, then, no express provision to the contrary be found in the acts of Congress, it is a just if not a necessary inference, from the fact that both descriptions of money were issued by the same government, that contracts to pay in either were equally sanctioned by law.” If there was no obstruction of Congressional power in 1869 due to gold clauses, why did the Congress in 1933 think there was such an obstruction? The gold clauses were perfectly consistent with the declared policy of the United States given in the Act of November 1, 1893, quoted in Part 5 of this series, namely, to continue the use of both gold and silver as money and to regulate the coin values so that a dollar in each had “equal
intrinsic and exchangeable value.” If that is done, the gold clauses are superfluous. If it is not done, then the gold clauses achieve that purpose. Furthermore, Congress declared a statutory gold standard in 1873 and 1900. Gold clauses did nothing more than implement that standard in contracts. In short, as Vieira (p, 1013) tells us: “In sum, the Congressional rationalization for the Joint Resolution of 1933 was monetarily moronic.” When Congress prohibited gold clauses, it contradicted its own Constitutional duty to regulate the value of Money. This can be seen in the Guaranty Trust Company v. Henwood (1939) case. Private railroad bonds had a gold clause that promised to pay “One Thousand Dollars in gold coin of the United States of America, of or equal to the standard of weight and fineness as it existed January 1, 1912, or in London, England £205 15s 20d, ...” as well as in three other currencies. Justice Hugo Black ruled that, since there was an option to pay dollars, the Resolution applied. Gold payment was forbidden. The 5-4 Court ruling meant that the options written into the contract were not options at all. After ruling that the presence of the options were irrelevant, a ruling which itself made no sense, Black went on to say of the law: “The Resolution intended that debtors under obligation to pay dollars should not have their debts tied to any fixed value of particular money, but that their entire obligations should be measured by and tied to the actual number of dollars promised, dollar for dollar.” In other words, Congress intended that debts be paid in nominal numbers of dollars, not dollars of fixed value, even if the value of the dollars had changed, which was the eventuality guarded against by the gold clause. Congress is actually charged with keeping gold dollars regulated in value so that the amount of gold in gold dollars paid to discharge a dollar obligation is equivalent in value to the exchange value of gold against the silver contained in a standard silver dollar. By forcing payments in nominal numbers of dollars, Congress prevents market participants from achieving this result; and by removing gold as a means of payment, which it is charged to regulate in value, Congress obstructs its constitutional duty. The dollars to be paid no longer are either standard constitutional dollars (371.25 grains of pure silver) or their equivalents in gold. In effect, the Resolution amended the Constitution by statute and claimed a monetary power that had never previously been claimed before or after the Constitution, which was to make a dollar be whatever Congress wanted it to be. In their aim to uphold the statute, Black and the Court failed to recognize any of this. The Court went on to invoke the aggregate powers doctrine of Justice Strong that we have criticized as being totalitarian in Part 6 of this series. In so doing, the Court ignored the explicit rejection of that doctrine by the Chief Justice who dissented and the equally strong denunciation by Justice Field. Actually, the Court cited its own recent case of Norman v. B. & O. R. Co. (1935), which was a gold clause case. In that case, we can read the passage in which the Court attempts to create credibility for its misjudgments by citing language from earlier misjudgments
and making believe that somehow these are reliable precedents upon which to base current (mis)judgments: “The Constitution grants to the Congress power ‘To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin.’ Article I, § 8, par. 5. But the Court in the legal tender cases did not derive from that express grant alone the full authority of the Congress in relation to the currency. The Court found the source of that authority in all the related powers conferred upon the Congress and appropriate to achieve ‘the great objects for which the government was framed’ -- ‘a national government, with sovereign powers.’ 17 U. S. 404-407; Knox v. Lee, supra, pp. 79 U. S. 532-536; Juilliard v. Greenman, supra, p. 110 U. S. 438. The broad and comprehensive national authority over the subjects of revenue, finance, and currency is derived from the aggregate of the powers granted to the Congress, embracing the powers to lay and collect taxes, to borrow money, to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among the several states, to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standards of weights and measures, and the added express power ‘to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution’ the other enumerated powers. Juilliard v. Greenman, supra,@ pp. 110 U. S. 439-440.” This passage shows how very important the legal tender cases were in overturning the U.S. Constitution’s powers and disabilities in the monetary sphere. But worse than that, the grandiose notions of aggregate powers at the service of a national government with sovereign powers aiming itself at “great objects” easily infiltrate the Constitution in other spheres, thereby rendering the document something that serves the interests of government, not those of WE THE PEOPLE. Section 2 of the Resolution amended a portion of the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act to read “All coins and currencies of the United States (including Federal Reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal Reserve banks and national banking associations) heretofore or hereafter coined or issued, shall be legal tender for all debts, public and private, public charges, taxes, duties, and dues, except that gold coins, when below the standard weight and limit of tolerance provided by law for the single piece, shall be legal tender only at valuation in proportion to their actual weight.” FRNs were accorded legal tender status. Since these are obligations of the United States, there is at least a modicum of consistency in this, even though it is unconstitutional to have anything but gold and silver be legal tender. However, there is not even that shred of sense in making National Bank Notes legal tender. They are entirely obligations of the issuing banks. Congressional Debates on House Joint Resolution No. 192 The leadership rushed this bill through Congress. There were complaints of “no witnesses before the committee...no explanation of the bill at first hand...working in
the dark...[not knowing] the meaning of some clauses of this bill...We simply know there is a general purpose to repudiate the obligations of the United States.” Rep. Bankhead heaped praise on the bill as “the greatest step that has ever been taken by a government on an economic or a financial issue in all...history.” Rep. Deen said he regarded “this bill which makes all currency of the United States worth as much as gold itself the most important bill that I will ever have the privilege to vote for.” Vieira (p. 987) wonders if this were so, why outlaw gold, since creditors will accept currency as a substitute. Rep. Luce saw “a permanent, constant, and complete abrogation of a solemn pledge” in the bill. Rep. Mates likewise said that the joint resolution “cannot be defended in law or morals.” Rep. Sabath identified the (p. 987) true culprits: “If Wall Street had not brought about the criminal inflation and later the deflation that ruined the Nation and bankrupted 90 percent of the American people, this legislation would not be necessary,” although why it was necessary to remove gold he didn’t say. Rep. Beedy identified the bill’s beneficiaries: “It would permit foreign nations to meet their obligations to us, even though they carried the gold clause, in any form of legal money, in depreciated paper currency. This is, indeed, one of the principal objects of the pending legislation...The pending bill is certainly most welcome to the international bankers...[who] welcome this legislation as a means of making possible a nominal payment of the bonds...” Rep. Steagall defended the joint resolution because Congress has declared its intention to maintain parity of all coins and currencies with one another and “So long as this parity and equal purchasing power can be maintained, there is no taking of property. The purpose of the resolution is to maintain the parity, not to destroy it.” The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act, however, showed an intention to turn the whole matter of gold and silver prices over to Roosevelt. Anyway, if coin and currency were properly regulated, there was no need to abrogate gold clauses and prevent payment in gold. Maintaining the parity of gold could not logically be the purpose of removing gold as a means of payment in gold clauses. Reps. Cross and Reilly defended the measure because the price level had dropped. They did not want debtors to have to pay off debts in a dollar with so much greater purchasing power. The Constitution, however, doesn’t give Congress the power either to alter the dollar or to abrogate contracts so as to maintain constant purchasing power. The dollar is a fixed amount of silver. Rep. Luce noted that insofar as interest rates reflect an anticipated rate of price inflation, the rates on gold clause bonds are lower. To alter those contracts ex post would create an immense wealth
transfer. Sen. Borah defended the principle of the legal tender cases. Sen. Gore drew a distinction between Great Britain and America, by noting “The theory of the British constitution is that Parliament is omnipotent.” In his reply, Borah drew the logical conclusion from the legal tender cases: “The Parliament of England has no more control over the money question than the Congress of the United States under the grant given in the Constitution. There is no limitation upon the power of Congress. It is not circumscribed in any respect whatever. It is given full and plenary power to deal with that subject; and therefore it is the same as if there were no Constitution whatever...” Vieira (p. 1001) notes “Here is a perfect illustration of how the doctrine of the ‘living’ Constitution leads straight to totalitarianism. And therefore here is a compelling argument against the doctrines of ‘judicial supremacy’ and ‘judicial finality’: If Congressmen assume that they must or ought to accept a decision of the Supreme Court, its merits notwithstanding, they will tend to do so out of the human weakness of shirking responsibility, if nothing else. And whatever blunders the Court makes will irreparably pollute the stream of both constitutional and statutory law thereafter. Whereas, if Congress treats a Court decision as merely the opinion [of] a majority of the Justices, rendered in one case, and binding only the actual parties to that case, then the merits of the issue will remain open, and Congress will retain its right – and, perhaps more importantly, its duty – to decide the constitutional question for itself when that question arises in the course of debate over a pending bill.” Borah completely failed to recognize what the dollar meant as a given amount of silver. Otherwise, he would never have said the following: “Every person contracts in the light of the power of Congress to change, modify, or wholly reestablish the kind of money which may be accepted as lawful money.” Those who contract do so in the light of de facto powers. But Borah is saying that control over what is lawful money is a constitutional or de jure power of Congress when it is not. Borah makes his position clear when he says that “I contend that Congress may declare that a dollar with 12.9 grains must be accepted in payment of a dollar of 25.8 grains. It may fix the value of the dollar, the value of money.” Or where he says that Congress “may thereafter exercise its power to name what the dollar shall be and to say that the dollar shall be of a different weight and fineness, and the individual must accept that dollar.” The Constitution settled the legal question of what the dollar is and what legal tender is. Borah’s confusion stems from (a) not knowing that the dollar is a fixed amount of silver, and (b) not understanding that when Congress changes the gold content of a gold dollar, it is not an arbitrary change whatsoever. It is constrained to be an amount of gold whose market value is the same as the market value of the silver in a dollar. That is the regulation of value. Congress doesn’t name
what the dollar is and make people accept an arbitrary weight under the Constitution.21 Borah had company in Congressmen who misunderstood the Constitution. Sen. Fletcher said “there is nothing sacred about gold as a commodity. It is not money, except as we make it money.” Sen. Barkley said that “Congress could tomorrow...pass a law destroying the value of gold as money at all by saying that hereafter gold shall not be money, silver shall not be money, but lead and tin and aluminum may be money.” Among some, the level of financial ignorance was so great that they worried that there was not enough gold to pay off on all debts. Sen. Reed had to remind them that gold circulated, that not all debts came due at once, and that the price system rationed the gold. A number of Senators were completely confused about parity of different dollars. Barkley thought that parity could only be maintained by not letting people have gold. After Sen. Fess correctly replied that “There is no such thing as parity unless we are willing to accept that which establishes parity when the equivalent is presented,” Barkley confessed his ignorance: “Of course, the question of parity and the standard of values is one that is so intricate that...there is not a man in the world who understands it.” Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 6260 on August 28, 1933. This revoked Order No. 6102 and the order of April 20, 1933, and replaced them. This order again called for delivery of all gold, gold bullion, and gold certificates. It significantly altered the terms of the exchange. Section 5 stated that “no person shall hold in his possession or retain any interest, legal or equitable, in any gold coin, gold bullion, or gold certificates...” The added phrase “or retain any interest, legal or equitable” meant that upon delivery, the gold holder had no claim whatsoever in the gold. He was not leaving the gold in the hands of the government and getting a receipt, as might have been the case under the April 5 order. He was giving up all interest in the gold. He could have no expectation of ever recovering it. The gold seizure became more stringent between March 6 and August 28. At first, the official language spoke of hoarding and its regulation. Gold in banks didn’t seem to be affected. Persons delivering gold may have expected to leave it in safekeeping. Within a short time, it became clear that Roosevelt was sequestering all gold from any source in the government and removing all titles and claims on it. By January 30, 1934, the Federal Reserve’s gold went into the Treasury and the Fed got gold certificates in return but the Treasury can redeem these certificates at a nominal cost of $11 billion.
It appears that an understanding of what a dollar is and what this regulation procedure does was virtually lost by 1933. If Congress had created only a silver dollar piece (and subsidiary silver coins) and minted gold coins without the dollar designation but imprinted with their weight and fineness, history might have been very different. In addition, if the Constitution or statutes had allowed any gold certificates issued by anyone, including both banks and government, necessarily to be warehouse receipts for given amounts of gold held as bailments on deposit, this too would have eliminated confusion over other possible kinds of paper money, such as bank notes, that are not bailments.
On December 28, 1933, the Secretary of the Treasury issued his own order calling for delivery of everyone’s gold. The reason seems to be that the court, in one of the Campbell court cases, had refused to enforce Section 5 of the President’s August 28 order. The Treasury paid out a silver dollar or paper currency redeemable in such a dollar in exchange for each gold dollar paid in. But since one gold dollar at that time contained enough gold to buy $4.53 silver on the open market, “the common people were cheated” (p. 1048.) On January 15, 1934, the Secretary of the Treasury gave people 2 more days to tender their gold, after which time as little as nothing could be paid at his discretion, and any gold offered would be held and applied against penalties for failure to comply. The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 Section 2(a) of the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 appropriated all the gold in the Federal Reserve banks, in return for gold certificates that are today carried at $11 billion on the System’s balance sheet or at a rate of $42.22 per ounce. The counterpart Treasury gold in 2010 has a value (at $1,200 an ounce) or about $313.8 billion. This can be construed as constitutional because Congress allowed the Fed to deal in gold in the first place, while maintaining the right always to alter, amend, or repeal the Federal Reserve Act.22 Section 5 created a national “gold reserve” or hoard of gold. It mandated the cessation of any further gold coinage and paying out any gold. All coin was to be taken out of circulation and melted down into ingots. Federal Reserve notes could no longer be redeemed in gold but instead lawful money. This was constitutional. Having seized the people’s gold, Congress laid down various rules for further management of the gold it had amassed. Section 6 instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to redeem gold certificates from the Fed so as “to maintain the equal purchasing power of every kind of currency of the United States.” This much could have been construed as constitutional by requiring him to implement a Congressional power. In practice, this was not done. The silver to gold ratio was officially 27.08 in 1934, whereas the market ratio averaged 72.49. The gold dollar was overvalued by a factor of 2.68. A revision of another piece of code contradicted this constitutional interpretation by not requiring proper regulation of value and giving the Executive an unconstitutional free hand in buying gold: “With the approval of the President, the Secretary of the Treasury may purchase gold in The Federal Reserve does not own the national stock of gold. The United States government controls the gold stock. The U.S. Treasury has issued gold certificates to the Fed that are valued at $11 billion. The Treasury could cancel these certificates by paying the Fed $11 billion.
any amounts, at home or abroad, with any direct obligations, coin, or currency of the United States, authorized by law, or with any funds in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, at such rates and upon such terms and conditions as he may deem most advantageous to the public interest; any provision of law relating to the maintenance of parity, or limiting the purposes for which any of such obligations, coin, or currency, may be issued, or requiring any such obligations to be offered as a popular loan or on a competitive basis, or to be offered or issued at not less than par, to the contrary notwithstanding. All gold so purchased shall be included as an asset of the general fund of the Treasury.” The goal of buying gold was to inflate the money supply and raise the price level. The government hoard of gold increased to a peak of about 650 million ounces in the late 1940s. Thereafter, flows overseas reduced it to its present 261.5 million ounces. Section 3 allowed the gold to be used to settle overseas claims, i.e., “for the purpose of settling international balances.” The gold was not available for redemption of any currency within the United States by ordinary Americans, but it was available to be redeemed at the request of international bodies such as central banks and treasuries. Section 12 amended Section 43(b)(2) of the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act. It underscored that it was delegating open-ended and standardless powers to the President to set the weight of gold in the gold dollar at his discretion. He could act or not act, and, if he did, he had to set gold at between 50 and 60 percent of its present weight. At that time, it would have taken a 78 percent devaluation to regulate the gold dollar to the silver to gold ratio of 72.49. This section also authorized the President “to reduce the weight of the standard silver dollar in the same percentage that he reduces the weight of the gold dollar.” This was entirely unconstitutional since the silver dollar is fixed at 371.25 grains of pure silver. It was also made no sense financially, as it was impossible to regulate gold against silver properly if both were changed by the same amounts. The following day Roosevelt devalued the gold dollar by 59.06 percent and left the silver dollar unchanged (Proclamation No. 2072.) The government’s unconstitutional actions in the Gold Reserve Act of 1934 included ! demonetizing gold, when the Constitution calls for both silver and gold to be a tender in payment of debts; ! delegating to the President the legislative power of regulating the value of the coinage; ! arbitrarily decreasing the weight of the gold dollar, rather than a proper decrease against the constitutional silver dollar; ! authorizing the President to debase the silver dollar by the same percentage; ! denying redemption of any paper currency in gold and confiscating private wealth without just compensation by failing to exchange silver or a currency redeemable in silver for gold at the proper ratio.
Congressional Debates on The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 Rep. Andrew spotted the essence of the bill: “Not only are we asked today to place the final seal of approval on the debasement of our gold coin but we are asked to abandon altogether the monetary system which has existed in this country since the beginning of its history, and to substitute for it permanently an irredeemable, inconvertible currency, depending for its amount and value only upon the fallible opinions of changing administrations. He and others complained about the haste: “We are asked to take this tremendous step 4 days after the bill was first presented to Congress with only 3 days’ hearings, which are not yet available to Members of the House, and after merely 3 hours of explanation and discussion...” A number of members gave up trying to understand monetary matters and deferred to the President. Rep. Berlin: “This measure is one which goes to the very fundamentals of monetary theory...The technicalities involved make it impossible for those of us, who have not spent a lifetime in the study of money and its allied problems, to pass final judgment upon its provisions...It is difficult...to understand how any Member of this body can attempt, with any degree of certainty,...to flatly contradict the predictions and expectations set forth by the President and his advisors.” Rep. Perkins: “It is quite impossible to know all of the ramifications of this bill...I am willing to accept the conclusions of the President...” Rep. Martin recognized the basic problem: “Ever since the passage of the National Bank Act in 1862 [sic] this banking system, wholly in private control, has been the dominant influence in the life of this Nation...Even the Federal Reserve System...has but tended to strengthen the hand of private ownership over the financial life of the Nation. Its calling in of loans and the reduction of its circulating medium in the space of a year brought on the terrible deflation of 1920 and 1921, and the use of its circulating medium and credit furnished much of the gas for the balloon which exploded in October 1929 and littered the Nation with the debris of its socalled ‘prosperity.” The remarks of Rep. Terrell represented those members who abdicated their duty and deferred to judicial review:
“I am not attempting to apply the Constitution to the bill under consideration – that will be done by the Supreme Court in the course of time, and Congress will have to conform to that decision...Congress need not worry about the constitutionality of laws.” Rep. Reilly correctly recognized the advisability of “cutting down the gold content of the dollar.” He failed to realize that Congress could and should do that on its own without seizing one ounce of gold and without resorting to a panoply of unconstitutional directives. Most members simply accepted the notion that gold should be suppressed. Vieira (p. 1059) tells us “The rationalizations the House put forward on behalf of the bill were truly pathetic. For example, Rep. May opined that ‘there was never a reason why gold as a metal should have been used as a circulating medium.’” He neglected history and disregarded the constitutional instruction that only gold and silver be a tender in payment of debts. House members had all sorts of theories. Both Reps. Martin and Greenwood endorsed monetary communism: “If there is any form of property which is, and of right ought to be, the property of all the people – and I mean that in the collective sense, in the sense of government – it is money.” Others wanted gold nationalized so that it could be a base for issuing currency, a notion foreign to the Constitution. Some thought that by taking gold from the people, it now belonged to the people. Irving Fisher’s theory of stabilizing the dollar’s purchasing power surfaced again, as it might since he advised Roosevelt. House members yearned to control commodity prices. Rep. Luce recognized that by first commandeering the gold and then devaluing the gold dollar, the government was “richer by thirty-four hundred to four thousand million dollars” and this was taken directly out of the wealth of “millions of depositors...Once again you are filching from the forgotten man.” Sen. Hastings saw through the entire scheme and spelled it out clearly for his colleagues: “The combination of the [pending] legislation together with May 12, 1933...which provided for the debasement of the coinage, in the discretion of the President, down to 50 percent, requires all persons to turn over gold in the form of coin or bullion or certificates..., title to this gold being vested by proposed legislation in the Federal Government in return for the payment ‘in equivalent amounts in dollars.’ This has been interpreted by the Secretary of the Treasury to mean payment of $20.67 [for each ounce of gold.] At the same time, the Government is paying for its newly mined gold in the domestic market approximately $34.45 for the same weight...The practical effect of this program of legislation and Executive orders is to confiscate all outstanding gold in the United States without the consent of the owners of such gold and at a figure which is fixed by statute – a figure which does not approximate the actual, as distinguished from the legal, value of the metal...a former owner of gold will now have in its stead money worth approximately one-third of the value of his gold. “...the whole course of the legislative enactments and of the regulations of the Secretary of the Treasury and of the President...show a plan to require the surrender of all gold and
to pay therefor, in depreciated money, a value which is approximately one-third of the value of the gold itself. The present bill ratifies the previous regulations of the President and the Secretary of the Treasury, and...contemplates that the weight of the gold dollar shall be reduced. It is not only a connecting link in the plan of the Government but is one of the most vital links...It would be absurd to predicate the power of the Government to accomplish such an objective upon the mere basis that the taking of the gold is accomplished at one time and the reduction in the value of the dollars given for the gold accomplished at a later time, when this power would be lacking were both these steps to be taken at one and the same time.” There was nothing wrong with changing the gold dollar if the gold had remained in the hands of Americans. They would still have the same amount of gold. The key to the Roosevelt plan was to seize the gold, pay a below-market price for it, and then devalue the dollar so that the government secured the profits from seizing the gold at below-market prices. The defenders of the expropriation referred to the Ling Su Fan case. We will cover that in the next article. It was no precedent for Roosevelt’s scheme. Vieira’s Summary Comments Congress acquiesced and fawned over a newfound Caesar. Legislators and the public showed (p. 1117) “profound ignorance of the constitutional principles...of money.” The President and his supporters in Congress slyly relied on and misapplied inapplicable and wrongheaded cases like Knox v. Lee (1871) and Ling Su Fan v. United States (1910). The notion of judicial review provided them with a convenient but dangerous excuse to avoid understanding and obeying the Constitution themselves. “‘Checks and balances’ and other mechanical devices designed to limit and control the governmental apparatus turn out to be worse than useless if WE THE PEOPLE allow themselves to be stampeded by untoward events, and not to search out the real causes and culprit.” Ironically, the gold dollar could have been devalued deeply in a constitutional manner had anyone understood the meaning of the dollar and regulation of coin values. Americans would have accepted this. This “tends to evidence the politicians’ ignorance, rather than their malice...” Further evidence that the “New Deal Democrats...were simply steeped in ignorance of their country’s monetary law and history finds support in the congruent blunders of the Republican Party, which had an overwhelming self-interest in criticizing Roosevelt’s monetary policies – yet could not see the forest for the trees.” An opportunity, given Roosevelt’s personal political capital, to attack the real cause of the problem, fractional-reserve banking, came and passed. Through all the unconstitutionality, the constitutional silver dollar remained. Silver coins and silver certificates still circulated. FRNs and other paper currencies redeemable in lawful money (p. 1119) “still promised, directly or indirectly, to pay their bearers silver ‘dollars’ on demand...” If Roosevelt and Congress “actually intended to usurp truly totalitarian monetary powers” by
destroying the ‘gold standard’ through seizing gold, repudiating gold clauses, and debasing the gold dollar, they failed. The gold standard and gold dollar were “never more than politically driven statutory fictions.” The constitutional silver dollar “was always the legal standard – and remained such, both in principle and in practice, notwithstanding all of Roosevelt’s machinations.” Monetary Confusions: 1896-1934 Sheer ignorance played a part in the unconstitutional monetary actions of 1933-1934. Those who might have resisted the actions taken, inside and outside government, of both political parties, did not possess the intellectual tools to resist. When the right (and constitutional) ideas are ignored or set aside, a variety of worse ideas fills the vacuum. This can be seen by reviewing monetary ideas that preceded the New Deal. In 1896, Republicans stood for “sound money” and the statutory “gold standard” of 1873. They stood for a dollar as good as gold and no currency debasement. They were opposed to “...the free coinage of silver except by international agreement with the leading commercial nations of the world,...and until such agreement can be obtained the existing gold standard must be preserved. All our silver and paper currency must be maintained at parity with gold, and we must favor all measures designed to maintain inviolable the obligations of all our money...at the present standard...” Th first confusion here is the inversion of gold and silver. In the U.S. constitutional bimetallic system, the way to maintain parity is to adjust the gold content of the gold dollar to parity with the silver content of the standard and constitutional silver dollar. The Republican misunderstanding goes very much deeper than this. They don’t know the difference between what a standard dollar means and what the constitutional regulation or adjustment of coin values of non-standard metals to the standard means. They think that they can change the standard legislatively in the same way that Congress can adjust non-standard metals to the standard. These two are different. The mischief arising from their confusion is immense, so much so that, for the last time in this series, I will digress to explain what it is in the Constitution that tripped (trips) up those in government who were (are) sworn to uphold it but didn’t (don’t) understand it and didn’t (don’t) bother to read the history that would explain it to them. A metal cannot be made a standard in the abstract. A coin of specific weight of that metal has to be made a standard. Even that basic idea seems to have been lost among the Congressional dunces. If a gold dollar is declared by Congress to be the standard (itself an unconstitutional act and beyond the power of Congress), then its content in gold has to be declared and then presumably kept constant if it is to be a standard. That implies that Congress then would have to adjust the
silver content of the dollar. It never did this.23 Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that the silver dollar-standard is established in the Constitution and cannot lawfully be changed by Congress but only by constitutional amendment. Suppose Congress were to set a new statutory standard – a gold standard. What would the gold content of the new standard dollar be? Would it be the 23.22 grains of fine metal set in the 1873 statute? It would be whatever Congress decides. It could be changed at the will of Congress whenever it wants to. But this gives an immense power to Congress. If Congress can legislate and define at will the content of a gold dollar standard, then it can change the value of all money to be paid in contracts whenever it wants to. If it can alter the amount of gold in a standard statutory dollar, then it can redistribute wealth between debtors and creditors at will. Any contract calling for payment in dollars calls for a given amount of gold in each dollar. If Congress can alter that gold content by statute, then it can make the debtor pay more or less gold to the creditor. This leads directly, in Vieira’s phrase, to “monetary totalitarianism.” Such a power is not given in the Constitution. One can see that there is very good reason not to give such a power. The power given is to adjust the amount of gold in a gold dollar so that its value is the same as the value of silver in the standard silver dollar that contains 371.25 grains of fine silver. That not only can be done, it should be done. This is so that debtors pay creditors in dollars of the same worth, in terms of an amount of silver or its current gold equivalent, as when they contracted. Adjusting the gold content of a gold dollar to a silver standard is radically different from creating a new statutory gold standard. Suppose that in 1825, a debtor agrees to pay a creditor $1 in 1875. This means a payment of 371.25 grains of fine silver. Suppose that the gold dollar in 1825 is 23.203 grains of fine gold, which is 1/16th of 371.25. This assumes that 1 ounce of gold in a coin called the gold dollar can buy $16 of silver in the market. Fast forward to 1875. Suppose the gold dollar can now buy $32 of silver in the market. If the debtor pays the $1 debt in silver, he pays 371.25 grains of silver. If he were to pay in a gold dollar coin, he’d be paying the equivalent of twice that amount in silver. Consequently, he’d pay the debt in silver, not gold. Gold dollars would disappear from use as payments. Congress, in order to keep gold coins in circulation, is supposed to regulate the content of the gold dollar to the silver standard so that it is defined in 1875 as one-half of 23.203 grains of gold or 11.60 grains. Then 1 gold dollar could pay the debt and still be equivalent to 371.25 grains of silver. This idea is conceptually difficult to grasp. It takes study. Supreme Court Justices and Congressmen have stumbled over it, to the detriment of Americans. There is a simple way to avoid it. Keep the silver standard. Then mint a gold coin containing 23.203 grains of gold. Do not call it a gold dollar. It will trade in the market at a floating price relative to the silver What economists mean by the gold standard and the gold-exchange standard are different things than this. They are referring to some sort of system or systems in which states went into the market to maintain certain gold prices in terms of paper currencies or certain exchange rates among currencies. Unlike the constitutional system, this is not a free market system.
standard. In 1825, it would sell at $16 (in silver.) In 1875, it would sell at $32 dollars (in silver.) If someone owed a debt of $1, he would be indifferent between paying one silver dollar and onehalf of one of these gold coins. Congress would relieve itself of the burden of continually adjusting the gold dollar. Vast misunderstandings would be avoided. Futile attempts to start up gold standards would be short-circuited. Attempts to fix the prices of silver and gold would have no rationale. Congress didn’t adjust the silver dollar to the so-called gold standard or gold dollar. Instead, the government sought to maintain a fixed ratio or a desired ratio by entering the markets for gold and silver and buying and selling them. The government attempted to maintain exchange rates at certain levels. The term “gold standard” meant something very different from what a constitutional gold standard entailed, if the latter had been attempted. Gold standard stood for a government attempt to fix gold prices and exchange rates. This ends the digression. The Republican platform rules out the free coinage of silver; it thinks of it as a debasement. This policy is absurd for anyone who understands the monetary system of the Constitution. Free coinage simply means that anyone can bring silver bullion to the mint and get it coined at no cost into a silver coin. Bullion that weights 371.25 grains is worth about the same as a silver dollar with that same silver content. It is just more convenient to use as money because it is official money and a legal tender. This procedure allows people in a free market to control how much silver circulates as money and how much does not. There is not and cannot possibly be any debasement when the government mints 371.25 grains of bullion into a silver dollar. As for waiting for an international agreement before coining silver, that too is absurd and unconstitutional. The duty of Congress is to coin silver at the known standard weights, not to paralyze coinage and hold it hostage to some international agreement or other. The Democrats’ platform was far better, although not without error. They recognized silver and gold “as the monetary metals of the United States.” They recognized “that the Constitution made the silver dollar the money unit and admitted gold to free coinage at a ratio based upon the silver dollar unit.” They correctly supported bimetallism. They were correct to demand the “free and unlimited coinage of both gold and silver,” and to do so “without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation.” They were wrong that this coinage be “at the present legal ratio of 16 to 1.” This showed that they too didn’t understand how to regulate the coinage. The market ratio at that time was 30.59 to 1. The amount of gold in the gold dollar needed to be reduced by almost one-half. The second place they went wrong was on paper money. While rightly denouncing National Bank Notes, they accepted United States Notes redeemable in coin.24 The third place they went wrong was to attack the right to have gold clauses in private contracts. They somehow viewed this as “demonetization...by legal contract.” If the coinage had been properly regulated, there would have been no need for gold clauses. They are a means of fixing the amount of money (actual metal content) to be paid without using a This is basically a choice between monetary fascism and monetary socialism (or populism.)
“dollar” unit subject to Congressional misbehavior. Brief Summary of Gold Seizure Actions 1. March 6, 1933. Roosevelt issued a Proclamation declaring a bank holiday from March 6 to March 9, during which time all payments by all banks, in silver, gold, or currency, were suspended. This was a suspension of specie payments on a nation-wide basis. No title transfers of gold were involved. 2. March 9, 1933. Congress authorized the Secretary of the Treasury at his discretion to require all gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates of all individuals, partnerships, associations, and corporations to be surrendered to the government in return for an equivalent amount of another United States coin or currency. 3. March 10, 1933. Roosevelt decreed that no gold may be exported or moved from any banking institution. This froze the movement of gold. 4. April 5, 1933. Roosevelt commanded the delivery of gold on or before May 1 to a Federal Reserve bank or a member bank, which would pay therefor an equivalent amount. Member banks were to deliver all gold delivered to them to a Federal Reserve bank. This violated the March 9 act that authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to require the gold and make the payments for it. This Order did not vest any title to the gold in the banks. They acted as agents for its transmittal. 5. May 12, 1933. Congress made FRNs and National Bank Notes into legal tender and authorized the President to devalue the gold dollar at his discretion. 6. June 5, 1933. Congress outlawed gold clauses in contracts. 7. August 28, 1933. Roosevelt forbade anyone other than a Federal Reserve Bank from acquiring gold. Banks were to act as agents for gold being surrendered. He again violated the Act of March 9, 1933 when he, not the Secretary of the Treasury, required that no person could, starting 30 days thereafter, hold, possess, or retain any interest, legal or equitable, in gold (beyond some low minimum.) 8. December 28, 1933. To correct the errors in the April 5 and August 28 orders, the Secretary of the Treasury promulgated his own order. This order made clear that the Federal Reserve banks were acting only as custodians for the gold account of the United States. 9. January 30, 1934. Congress provided by statute that all right, title, interest, and claim of the Federal Reserve Board, Banks, and agents to any gold are vested in the United States, and that the Secretary of the Treasury would issue gold certificates in exchange. Gold certificates now held by the Fed have three sources: Gold expropriated from the people; gold expropriated from the Fed; and gold newly-acquired by the Treasury.
In sum, WE THE PEOPLE were forced to surrender all gold in any form (except some minimum exceptions) to the Treasury (via the Federal Reserve), and were paid the nominal face value in some other coin and currency. This was substantially less than the market worth of gold at the time by approximately $3 billion. Hence a substantial expropriation of wealth occurred in addition to the seizure. The Federal Reserve banks were forced to surrender all their gold, and were paid the nominal value in gold certificates. Gold clauses in private contracts were nullified. FRNs became legal tender. Conclusion Eighty years after the Great Depression, the inherent flaws in the banking system have yet to be corrected. Removing gold from the monetary system didn’t solve the basic problems. It took the nation further away from the constitutional system, which is also a workable system if combined with banking reform. The gold seizure activities exhibit a high degree of unconstitutional actions on the part of Congress and the Executive. Congress rushed through legislation without proper consideration. Congress rubberstamped what the President wanted. The degree of latitude afforded to the President was extraordinary. We are still living with the fruits of these actions. Congress gets a failing grade for (i) its exceedingly low level of understanding of the monetary powers and disabilities of the U.S. Constitution that every member is sworn to uphold; (ii) its readiness to accede to judicial review while not bothering to think through the constitutionality of the laws that it is passing; (iii) its failure to analyze the causes of the Great Depression and come to grips with the problems of central banking and fractional-reserve banking. Haste, superficiality, ignorance, shirking of responsibility, and excessive deference to the judiciary and executive branches were and are a recipe for poor legislation.
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