Gary North: Gold Money: Power to the People
…The crucial power to restrict the growth of bureaucracy is the power of the veto. This power used to be imposed by juries. This became the great threat to the power of bureaucracies. This is why they began to substitute administrative law courts for civil courts. There are no juries in administrative law courts.
….The international trade system, 1815 to 1914, rested on an agreed-upon gold standard by major nations. They agreed to redeem their nations’ currencies in gold coins.
This kept power in the hands of the people. The person holding a receipt from a bank or a bank note could demand gold coins for these paper receipts. The veto power was in the hands of citizens….
….It ended in the United States in 1933, by Roosevelt’s Executive Order. He confiscated the people’s gold at $20 an ounce. Then, in 1934, he hiked gold’s price to $35.
That act of national theft unshackled the bureaucrats….
…The great winners have been the bureaucrats. They have escaped vetoes by governments, because governments have escaped the public’s vetoes that were created by gold-redeemable currencies.
This is why all big-government politicians and their obedient, salaried intellectuals hate anything even remotely resembling the nineteenth-century gold standard….
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