The second of two articles on the gold seizure of 1933 is now ready. It is Part 10 of the series on the U.S. Constitution and Money, available here and here. Through lawyer tricks explained here, the Supreme Court refused to hear the challenges to gold seizure made by Frederick Campbell, but we review his lower court case. The Court did hear the Gold Clause Cases. We inspect how low the Court sank in rubber-stamping the unconstitutional actions of the other branches.
I am summarizing Edwin Vieira Jr.’s Pieces of Eight. Vieira believes that the Constitution’s enumerated powers on money make for a sound hard-money system in which banking can be made to play a proper role. In such a system, the government does not attempt to or in fact control the economy. His view is that it has taken considerable unconstitutional action and interpretation to create the unsound fiat-money system and government control of the economy that we now have and that he thinks is headed for disaster. His book documents the constitutional and monetary history by which the Constitution has been overcome in the monetary sphere. The removal of gold was a crucial step in this process that Vieira terms “the declension of the monetary system from bimetallism to fiat currency.”
