Congress Should Do One Thing This Year, Restore Gold Standard

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – If I was going to counsel Congress to act on one priority, as Speaker Boehner called it, of the American people, the one that I would instruct them to spend their time prioritizing is their power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.  Even if you don’t eliminate the Federal Reserve — at this point I’m ambivalent about it provided that the Fed then has to administer its treachery through a gold standard, which it will not be able to do.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Jim, you’re on the Mike Church Show on the Sirius XM Patriot Channel.  How you doing?

Caller Jim:  I’m doing great, Mike.  Good morning.  Thank you.  First, I want to say that Patrick Henry, he’s the best.  I don’t know why we don’t hear more about him.  You always hear Jefferson, Madison.  I just think this guy was the best.  My think about the enumerated powers —

Mike:  I agree, by the way.

Caller Jim:  He’s brilliant.  He’s on point at all times about liberty.  Anyway, I’ll go to the point I called about.

Mike:  Go ahead, please.

Caller Jim:  Gold and silver is money.

Mike:  Yes.

Caller Jim:  Everything stems from it.

Mike:  Yes.

Caller Jim:  You have the Federal Reserve.  They enacted that law and they bypassed our Constitution.  Gold and silver are supposed to be money and it’s not.  Everything that stems from it, I think all our problems stem from it.  The ability to create money out of nothing allows government to borrow for things it shouldn’t be doing.

Mike:  So you and I are in agreement.  If I was going to counsel Congress to act on one priority, as Speaker Boehner called it, of the American people, the one that I would instruct them to spend their time prioritizing is their power to coin money and regulate the value thereof.  Even if you don’t eliminate the Federal Reserve — at this point I’m ambivalent about it provided that the Fed then has to administer its treachery through a gold standard, which it will not be able to do.  So they would be reduced to mortals if the gold standard were returned.  I agree.  To me, that solves — again, Jim, that is an action that then controls 900 billion other actions.  Now you cannot borrow money willy-nilly.  You may not print it willy-nilly.  You may not extend you credit beyond what you are actually able to repay.  You must then actually collect the taxes that are requisite for the spending.  You must then get on a spending regimen and a discipline, which a standard of gold is going to put you on.

Look, for you Austrians and you anarchos out there, I’m not opposed — don’t you send me any hate mail.  I am not opposed to competing currencies provided they have some basis in some sort of what has been historically viewed as a way to regulate currency, a precious metal.  You may say: What about Bitcoin?  I can’t answer that right now.  I can answer about silver and gold.  If you’d like to read it, there’s a pretty good history of how the government of Austria, once upon a time, was facing a currency crisis just like we’re facing.  It was in the 1880s.  I can’t remember who the emperor or king was or whatever at the time.  Jim, how did they fix it?  What did they do?  They issued a silver standard.  Apparently they didn’t have access to enough gold, so they issued a silver standard.  In a matter of years, the problem was solved.  Inflation was curtailed.  Deflation was then the buzzword because a standard like that has a deflating effect against a fiat currency.  They were able to stabilize their currency and stabilize their pecuniary affairs.  I agree, this is priority number one.

This also, without having a balanced budget amendment, this basically forces a balanced budget, it compels it.  It may not be totally balanced, but it is a tub of a whale, to use 18^th century parlance, closer to being balanced than we could possibly imagine today.  I agree.  You picked the exact one that I had in mind when I said I’m not going to tell people what it is but I’ve only got one.  That’s the one, money.  Return the gold standard and we are back on the way to recovery.

Caller Jim:  I believe at the same time, in 1880 or about that time, there was another gentleman in Congress that was — there was a question of gold and it was a bi-metal thing.  I believe one gentleman fought for silver and gold while some of the others were just saying one.  It was about leading up to the time when they started getting into talks about the Central Bank and Federal Reserve.

Mike:  The reason for that is because bankers, by and large, are not moral people.  They do not know the biblical principle of usury.  If they did, then banks wouldn’t operate the way they do.  They did not want to have to be cement-booted to a gold standard, which is what a gold standard does.  It puts cement boots and puts bankers into a cage.  There’s not a lot they can do when they actually have to deal with people’s money.  People get very angry when you steal their gold.  They don’t like it when you steal their gold.  They hang you when you steal their gold.  This would be a great DirecTV commercial: So, at the end of the day, don’t steal gold, get DirecTV.  Gold is the answer.  I shouldn’t say that.  Gold is one of the answers.

Caller Jim:  Gold and silver, they’re competing with each other.

Mike:  Yeah, that’s fine.  I have no problem with that whatsoever.

Caller Jim:  Can I go back to your usury thing?

Mike:  Absolutely.

Caller Jim:  How about that that is in the Bible and something that people have never paid attention to?  They wouldn’t even know what that is, and the far-reaching implications of that.  It’s so destructive.

Mike:  Tom Woods writes about this in his great books on Catholicism and economics.  If Roman Catholics in the United States, and Christians, if they just understood two principles and applied them, number one is the principle and ancient law against usury, which basically means — I’m not going to define it here because I’m not an expert in it.  It basically boils down to: Don’t be a loan shark.  Don’t take advantage of people because you have money and they need it and they want to borrow it.  It doesn’t mean you can’t make a profit on it, but it has to be one that is necessary and needed.

So, number one: re-learn usury.  Apply it, use it, and obey it.  Number two: learn the Catholic concept of subsidiarity.  If we were all to live by the concept of subsidiarity, we wouldn’t have any problem with having a central government, because we would know that the central government is extraordinarily limited in what it may do, and that most of what is done is done in our counties, in our town halls, and in very large, shared circumstances, maybe in the states.

If we all understood those two simple concepts, usury and subsidiarity, then we would all have a much better understanding of federalism and republicanism.  It would be very difficult for governments to grow and perform the acts of tyranny that they perform routinely today.  Jim, this is the result of us as a people not being God-fearing any longer.  We no longer believe there is any law higher than the Constitution.  I’m sorry to my Constitution-loving friends out there, there is a law higher than the Constitution.  It’s called God’s law!

End Mike Church Show Transcript