Under new president John Allison Cato while maintaining its scholarly rigor is beginning to pack an increasingly serious wallop inside the corridors of power.
Libertarianism thanks among other factors to the emergence of leading presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul is coming to the fore. It is presenting itself in fresh less eccentric and increasingly attractive ways. Moderate libertarianism may be capturing the fancy of an overtaxed fed-up-with-debt-fueled grandiose government war-weary live-and-let-live Republican base and American people.
Time Magazine recently featured Sen. Rand Paul as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was not just on the list. Time placed Paul on its cover for the first though likely not for the last time.) This may signal the emergence of the Libertarian Moment.
We didnt arrive into this Grandiose Government" pickle absolutely positively overnight. Sen. Paul and others seek to lead us on the path out and to safety. It will make their job easier if we better understood how we ended up in this gutter in the first place.
The road toward serfdom was a long and winding one. How did the American government transform from our servant to master? Where did it get the resources to move from a small frugal lighthouse-keeping cluster of agencies to its status of world-record Hey Big Spender" which with federal 2013 projected outlays of $3.8T spends more than the entire GDPs of every nation other than the U.S. itself China and Japan?
To put federal government spending into its spectacularly vertiginous perspective this columnist elsewhere about two years ago noted:
The federal government spent $15 billion from 1789 1900. Not $15 billion a year. $15 billion cumulatively. Ed. Note: by another source it was $16.5B an immaterial difference. Uncle Sam will spend $10 billion a day in 2011. The federal government spends more every two days than it did altogether for more than Americas first century. Although these sums are not adjusted for inflation or population growth they give a correct impression of the magnitude of the change from what our Founders set forth and our early statesmen delivered.
How does Washington get its hands on so much money? Three ways. Taxing us on which it is maxed out. Borrowing deficits to which there is a growing massive resistance. And there is a third and even more pernicious way: printing dollars. …
The power to print money at whim is wrong. It is toxic to our personal and national wellbeing. And it is unconstitutional.
From $16 billion cumulatively over a century to $10 billion a day? Unconstitutional? Therein hangs a tale.
Spoiler alert: it was a logically indefensible 1884 U.S. Supreme Court decision about federal monetary powers that imbued the federal government with sovereign attributes. This laid the doctrinal predicate for the metastasis of meta-statism. It will be easier to extricate America from its dispiriting predicament by knowing how we got here in the first place. Enter Cato Institute.
Cato promotes a vision of society free from excessive government power." Cato patiently has been taking the lead in disputing against the manifold rationalizations propounded by those lusting to become corrupted absolutely" through the achievement of absolute power. Under new president John Allison Cato while maintaining its scholarly rigor is beginning to pack an increasingly serious wallop inside the corridors of power.
Case in point. Cato has carved out a niche as thought leader on monetary policy in Washington. This is in large measure attributable to the work of its Vice President for Academic Affairs (and editor of the Cato Journal) Prof. James Dorn. For over thirty years Cato has staged an extensive annual conference on what had been a mostly orphaned issue: monetary policy. This annual conference now approaches iconic status.
Cato now is upping the ante on monetary reform dramatically. The Spring/Summer 2102 issue of The Cato Journal drawing on the proceedings of its 29th annual monetary conference was devoted to Monetary Reform In the Wake of the Crisis." So many prominent scholars and many highly respected public intellectuals were featured therein that it is impractical to list them all. Cato makes this publicly available .
More recently moreover Cato staged a panel to an overflowing crowd to celebrate the publication of Prof. Richard Timberlakes latest tour de force" (as it is described by the influential Prof. Kevin Dowd of the University of Durham): Constitutional Money A Review of the Supreme Courts Monetary Decisions. The fact that premier academic publisher Cambridge University Press brought out this Cato Institute Book itself is noteworthy.
Timberlake is the dean of classical monetary policy economists and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He likely is the only economist still productive who was born under a regime where one could present a $20 bill at any bank and receive a $20 one-ounce gold coin). Catos own description of this work concludes: The final chapter describes the adjustments necessary to return to a gold standard and briefly examines other monetary arrangements that would be consistent with the Framers Constitution."
Contained in Constitutional Money is a gripping expos of the judicial coup detat inverting the constitutional structure of the United States from one of limited government to one of almost limitless government. Timberlake nails the infamous case of Julliard v. Greenman (1884) which for the first time imbued Congress with the attribute of sovereignty."
Timberlake: (Mr. Justice) Gray then observed: The people of the United States by the Constitution established a national government with sovereign powers legislative executive and judicial. He cited Marshalls opinion on the scope of Congresss enumerated powers noting that the government …though limited in its powers is supreme within its sphere of action…. Nowhere in Marshalls decision or in the Constitution can one find the words sovereign or sovereignty. (p. 120) … Nothing in the written Constitution supports such a construction. No man who attended the Constitutional Convention in 1787 would have imagined it or endorsed it for an instant or even tolerated it as arguable. (p. 123)"
This columnist takes great personal pleasure at Prof. Timberlakes decisive evisceration of Julliard. In 1981 this columnist was one of the 23 formal witnesses called (at the behest of Gold Commissioner Lewis E. Lehrman with whose Institute he now has a professional relationship) to testify before the Reagan Gold Commission. That testimony was reflected in Commission executive director Anna Schwartzs excellent Reflections on the Gold Commission Report (p. 326): Two attorneys attacked the present monetary system as unconstitutional."
Prof. Schwartzs passing comment does not quite capture the argument contained in my testimony The Constitutional Requirements that U.S. Currency Be Backed By Precious Metals" which was a critique not an attack. That testimony concluded not that fiduciary currency is unconstitutional" rather that The Founding Fathers who had lived through periods of inflation and hyperinflation intended to and effectively did remove the temptation of paper money from the hands of the state governments and withheld it from the federal government. These men were intellectual giants. As the heirs to their good works it is up to us to preserve their legacy rather than subvert it."
Prof. Timberlake has struck a real blow for liberty by exposing and providing a devastating intellectual critique of the smoking gun" behind Ultragovernment Julliard. By authoritatively prying it from its hiding place in the vaults of American jurisprudence Timberlake furnishes a potent tool with which authentic small r" republican leaders better may begin to right the ship of state.
Timberlakes Constitutional Money provides excellent scholarship. It also presents as an intellectual thriller a page-turner which those who care about classical liberalism will find impossible to put down. It is a great contribution to monetary as well as classical liberal discourse. Most of all in publishing this work Cato Institute provides a powerful intellectual tool to reformers such as Rand Paul. As principled officials like Sen. Paul expand the defense of our civil liberties into advancing an economic agenda built on those principles they could do no better than to begin with Timberlakes Constitutional Money. Restoring money with constitutional integrity and only by restoring money of constitutional integrity will foster a climate of equitable prosperity personal dignity and true liberty.