GOLD AND MONETARY FREEDOM

 Apparently my essay of October 26, 2025, on the subject of gold confiscation hit a chord because the reaction was more than I expected. One result was requests for more about gold. Here is one of my oldies.

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 Gold and Monetary Freedom

By
Professor Henry Mark Holzer

Even though the price of gold has just hit an all-time high, the elites, collectivists, and statists persist in deprecating the precious metal as a store of value and a hedge against the rampant inflation they have wreaked on the rest of the world and soon will have loosed upon the United States.

They will never learn!

The following is testimony I delivered to the United States Gold Commission (of which Ron Paul was a member), created by Congress purportedly to investigate whether America should return to the gold standard. [Bracketed material has been inserted for clarification.]

Good morning Dr. Schwartz [Executive Director of the Commission, and a colleague of Milton Friedman] and members of the Commission. As you know, I am not an economist but rather a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School in New York City. My field is constitutional law, and I have lectured and written extensively on the legal aspects of gold and the nature and scope of government monetary power. For example, two of my books are entitled, respectively, The Gold Clause and Government's Money Monopoly. [Both are now available from Amazon]).

I must confess to a certain ambivalence this morning because, while I appreciate having been invited to testify before this Commission, at the same time I feel like the lawyer who must tell a court that it lacks jurisdiction.

I have come here to say that despite this Commission's good faith, it cannot discharge its Congressionally delegated task--to ". . . make recommendations with regard to the policy of the United States Government concerning the role of gold in domestic and international monetary systems . . . ."--without first understanding, and then admitting, some hard truths about our Nation. Let me explain.

Dr. Allan Greenspan has written [before he changed his mind] ". . . that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other." ("Gold and Economic Freedom," The Objectivist, Vol. 5. No. 7, July 1966, p.1). Of course, he is correct: economic freedom--more specifically, for our purposes, monetary freedom--is an indispensable prerequisite to any meaningful financial use of gold.

However--and this is the core of the Commission's problem--today there is little economic freedom in America. And almost from our first day as a Nation, there was little monetary freedom; now, there is none.

As to economic freedom, tax laws have redistributed wealth on the basis of need and otherwise removed from productive use capital necessary for reinvestment, diverting it to countless ends disapproved by those from whom the money was taken.

Antitrust and fair trade laws have, contradictory and impotently, attempted to compel competition and protect consumers from themselves. Instead, such laws have caused business decisions to be predicated not on marketplace considerations, but on guesswork as to how bureaucrats and judges would interpret unintelligible laws.

Labor laws have created compulsory unionization, with its many attendant problems for unwilling employees and employers--and contributed greatly to America's steady decline as the world's preeminent industrial power.

Wage and hour laws have required private employers to establish pay scales and working conditions mandated, not by the free market and mutual agreement, but by government fiat.

Restraints on the use of private property are commonplace--in the name of zoning and so-called civil rights.

Liberty of contract is substantially restricted--in the name of equalizing bargaining power and the so-called public interest.

To understand our lack of monetary freedom, it is necessary to go back into history. With the birth of our Nation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, our Founding Fathers created a new government which possessed expressly delegated powers. Congress was the recipient of legislative power, and in the monetary realm it was authorized only to borrow money, to coin money and regulate its value, and to punish counterfeiting. The Constitution also expressly barred the states from coining money, emitting bills of credit, and making anything but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts. Clearly, when the work was finished in that hot Philadelphia summer of 1787, as to monetary affairs at least the delegates had substantially resisted the siren song coming from the unfree and semi-free statist European political systems.

But the resolve of America's leaders soon began to ebb. Less than four years after the Convention, the scope of our government's monetary power divided our Nation's leaders at the highest level. Congress wanted to charter the first Bank of the United States. The question was whether the legislature possessed the power, and President Washington sought opinions from his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson. It is popularly believed that the two disagreed. Actually, on the issue of government power, they were in complete agreement--in principle. Hamilton held that Congress's few delegated monetary powers were sufficiently broad to encompass chartering the bank, especially if those powers were "loosely" interpreted, and that Congress even possessed extra-constitutional powers beyond those which had been specifically delegated. Although Jefferson denied to Congress the bank chartering power, he would have granted it to the states--thus sharing Hamilton's statist premise about the power of government over monetary affairs. When the Bank Controversy was over, Hamilton's view prevailed. Washington signed the bank bill, and for nearly thirty years afterward few people noticed that the monetary power of Congress had grown considerably.

Congressional power expanded nearly thirty years later, when Hamilton's views about its extra-constitutionality became part of the bedrock of American constitutional law. In 1819 John Marshall's opinion for the Supreme Court in M'Culloch v. Maryland expressly held that in monetary affairs, the government of the United States was, like the monarchs of Europe, "sovereign."

That sovereignty was never more apparent than throughout the Civil War's "greenback" episode, a story too well known to the members of this Commission to recount here. Suffice to say that in order to fight the war, the northern government of President Lincoln created legal tender and simply forced individuals to accept greenbacks, no matter what they thought the paper was worth. As usual, the Supreme Court of the United States was a willing accomplice to Congress's usurping of non-delegated, extra-constitutional monetary power. In the first important legal tender case to reach the Court, Hepburn v. Griswold, while a bare majority held that the act could not be applied to a debt contracted before legal tender became law, every one of the justices (majority and dissent) nevertheless agreed on the underlying principle: that Congress possessed a broad monetary power whose outer boundaries were far from clear. Less than eighteen months later, Hepburn was overruled by Knox v. Lee, and legal tender was expressly held to be constitutional.

By the time of the last legal tender case some years later, nearly three centuries had passed since the 1604 English Case of Mixed Money had approved Queen Elizabeth's sovereign power to debase her coinage. Yet despite the fact that in America we had created a different kind of political system, despite a written Constitution that narrowly circumscribed the power of our government, the foreign sovereign who had been repudiated by the colonists seemed to have been replaced by a domestic one--at least in monetary affairs. The idea that monetary power belongs to the sovereign was conceived in Europe. If, despite the United States Constitution, that idea was born in America in John Marshall's M'Culloch decision (midwifed by Hamilton's opinion to Washington in the Bank Controversy) and reached its majority in the Legal Tender Cases, then its maturity came in three Twentieth Century cases.

In Ling Su Fan v. United States, the Supreme Court concluded that attached to one's ownership of silver coins were "limitations which public policy may require," and that the coins themselves "bear, therefore, the impress of sovereign power."

Two months later the Court went even further, at least in dicta. Noble State Bank v. Haskell held that a state bank could be forced to help insure its competitors' depositors against insolvency. In the course of his opinion for a unanimous Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes actually went so far as to admit that government monetary power was indeed omnipotent: "We cannot say that the public interests to which we have adverted, and others, are not sufficient to warrant the State in taking the whole business of banking under its control."

Holmes's dictum very nearly became a reality in the early days of the "New Deal," when, in a statist orgy of rules, regulations, proclamations, executive orders, resolutions, decrees and manifestos, America's banks were ordered closed, her dollar was devalued, her gold standard abandoned, private ownership of gold was illegalized, and gold clauses were nullified. Although only the gold clause issue reached the Supreme Court, when nullification of the clauses was upheld it was crystal clear that the Court had de facto approved of all the New Deal's statist exercises of raw government power--based on a chain of precedents running back inexorably to Noble State Bank, Ling Su Fan, the Legal Tender Cases, M'Culloch, the Bank Controversy, and thence to the Elizabethan Case of Mixed Money. Ironically, but not surprisingly, in little more than three hundred years, a round trip had been completed: from an English monarch's unlimited monetary power, to the reposing of identical power in the hands of a supposedly free representative democracy. When the smoke of the Gold Clause Cases had cleared--to the profound detriment of individual rights--the government of the United States unquestionably controlled every aspect of this Nation's monetary affairs: money, credit, banking, gold, the securities business, and more.

In the nearly fifty years since then, that control has both deepened and become considerably more sophisticated (as in the Bank Secrecy Act), emulating other contemporary societies which we rightly disparage for their lack of freedom.

Dr. Schwartz and members of the Commission, I have come to Washington today to say that the United States--its government and its people--can not have it both ways. Either we have monetary freedom and a gold standard, or no monetary freedom and no gold standard, though mine may be a lonely voice crying in a wilderness of omnipotent government, I emphasize that there is no middle ground.

If this Commission wishes to recommend a gold standard, it must first understand the nature and scope of our Nation's lack of economic and monetary freedom, and then communicate that understanding to the American people. Only then, and in that context, can a gold standard recommendation from this Commission have any real meaning.

Indeed, should this Commission recommend that a gold standard be instituted, and should Congress and the President take the unlikely follow-up step of introducing one, even then, a gold standard resurrected under today's economic and monetary controls would not be worth the paper it was proclaimed on. Until the government of the United States once and for all pulls out of the economic and monetary affairs of its citizens--whether there be a gold standard or not--we cannot have economic, or monetary, freedom. Without it, what we have instead, as uncomfortable as this may be to admit, are revocable privileges--which are the antithesis of individual rights.

Thank you.

I delivered this testimony to the United States Gold Commission on November 12, 1981

Is there a right to own gold

 

Confiscation Of Gold

With the price of gold escalating, commentators are finally beginning to wonder about confiscation. Indeed, just yesterday one wrote that "gold in the hands of the American public has never been confiscated, never can be, and never will be."

Oh?

Because of this erroneous assertion, I'm reprinting here a blog I wrote back in the day.

Will Private Gold Be Confiscated?

“Inflation” is “an increase in the supply of currency . . . relative to the availability of goods and services, resulting in higher prices and a decrease in the purchasing power of money” (Encarta Dictionary; my emphasis.) According to Webster’s Dictionary of the American Language, inflation is “an increase in the amount of money in circulation, resulting in a relatively sharp and sudden fall in its value and rise in prices.” (My emphasis.)

Ultimately, there is only one actor who can “increase” “the supply of currency” or “the amount of money” and only one way it can be done: a government, which possesses a monopoly on the “creation” of money, literally prints more paper currency and moves it into the stream of commerce.

If on Monday the money supply is X, and if on Tuesday the government doubles the amount in circulation, Monday’s and Tuesday's money is worth ½ X.

Historical examples of runaway inflation abound: the German mark after World War I, when postage stamps cost millions; the Chinese currency during the civil war in the 1940s, when it literally took a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. Today one need look only at the once-prosperous African nation of  Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe government has printed so much money that it’s worth less than the paper it’s printed on.

The late classical economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in his On the Manipulation of Money and Credit that “[i]nflationism, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. It is only one piece in the total framework of politico-economic and socio-philosophical ideas of our time. Just as the sound money policy of gold standard advocates went hand in hand with [classical] liberalism, free trade, capitalism and peace, so is inflationism part and parcel of imperialism, militarism, protectionism, statism and socialism.”

Thanks to the credulousness of our recent “compassionate conservative” president and a compliant, if not complicit, Congress, who handed nearly a trillion taxpayer dollars to his lame-duck, unelected treasury secretary with unchecked power to dispense it any way he wished, and the advent of the Obama Administration with its own grandiose plans to spend trillions more trying to spend their way out of this recession, we are facing serious, perhaps devastating, inflation— because there’s only one way the now-in-charge Collectivists/Statists/Socialists/Communists can get that kind of money: Print it!

Typically, one way to hedge rampant inflation, some believe the only way, is through ownership of gold, either physically or through enforceable claims on gold.

However, gold and the gold standard has long been maligned by the supporters of fiat money because it is an existential threat to government induced inflation. Indeed, its current quasi-free market price reflects serious concern about inflation.

But not all is well with gold, especially gold ownership.

Unfortunately, most Americas are under the illusion that they have a right to own gold. They are mistaken. America’s history, and the financial situation today, proves that our government has usurped omnipotent power over monetary affairs, one major consequence being that private ownership of gold has never been a right, and remains today a mere privilege revocable at will.

For a thorough historical discussion, see the [seminal] 1973 Brooklyn Law Review article “How Americans Lost the Right to Own Gold, and Became Criminals in the Process,” by Professor Emeritus Henry Mark Holzer:   

Treason

 

July 25, 2025

Treason 

By Henry Mark Holzer
 

Article III, Section 3, of the Constitution clearly provides that: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." [My emphasis.] The federal treason statute tracks the constitutional provision.

As explained in the Holzers' book "Aid and Comfort":  Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (www.amazon.com), the Supreme Court of the United States, has interpreted the constitutional and statutory crime of treason to require four elements for indictment and conviction: (1) an intent to betray the United States by "levying" or "adhering," (2) an overt act, (3) proved by two witnesses, and (4) "providing aid and comfort."

In Hanoi Jane's case, she traveled to North Vietnam during hostilities, made broadcasts (tapes of which were relentlessly played to our POWs), held press conferences, provided photo ops for the Communists, attacked the United States and its leaders on Radio Hanoi, exploited American prisoners of war with whom she met, fraternized with North Vietnamese military and civilian leaders — and was thanked for her efforts by grateful, top level Communist leaders. This is why "Aid and Comfort" concludes that, given the law of treason and given Fonda’s conduct, there was more than sufficient evidence to support an indictment. Conviction or acquittal would have been up to the jury, which should have convicted.

That is because most essential element of the crime of treason, a question of fact for a jury, in the Fonda situation, in the cases of terrorists, and today's "Russia, Russia, Russia" conspiracy, is intent.

Only in rare cases can criminal intent be proved through direct evidence (for example, from an admission by the defendant). Because intent is a state of mind, almost always it must be proved indirectly. In the crime of treason, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the requisite element of intent can be inferred from a defendant’s overt acts. In Fonda’s case, a jury could have concluded from all that she said, and did, that her intent was to betray (i.e., harm) the United States.

Thus, the "Russia, Russia, Russia" alleged conspirators (probably not Obama) can certainly be indicted and convicted by a federal jury.

Or not!

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/06/what_lies_beneath.html

What Lies Beneath

By Joan Swirsky

When I was a nursing student decades ago, a doctor friend told me about an interesting case in which he performed a routine yearly checkup on a 12-year-old boy, including blood and urine tests, and to his surprise, this healthy-looking preteen had blood in his urine.  The doctor promptly ordered an intravenous pyelogram (IPG) — now in medicine’s dinosaur museum — which revealed that in one of the youngster’s kidneys, the renal medulla — the innermost region — and the renal cortex — the outermost region — were reversed, and as a result, the aberrant kidney took four hours longer to collect and then empty the body of urine.

But the doctor told me that the funniest thing was his mother’s reaction.  “She said, ‘How did this happen?  What did I do?’  And I told her that maybe she had the same thing, but she never had an IPG!”

Speaking of kidneys, I learned years later that a distant relative found out in his late forties, again as the result of a modern medical test, that he was born with only one kidney!  And sticking with the theme of hidden phenomena, I recently learned that a former neighbor went to a neurologist with hand tremors, and the MRI the doctor prescribed revealed a hemangioma — a cluster of blood vessels — in his brain!

“How did this happen?” he asked the doctor.

“It might have been there for twenty years,” the doctor said, “even maybe since you were born!”

LESSON: There are approximately eight billion people in the world, just about all of whom know nothing about what’s going on inside of their bodies — an undiscovered tooth high in the gum, an insect embedded in the skull, an undetected stroke.  I even knew a man in his eighties — a friend and neighbor — whose doctors found a deeply lodged bullet!

What does all this have to do with politics?  Everything!

After World War II, the unspeakable, malignant horrors of the Holocaust were revealed for all the world to see: six million Jews, from infants to centenarians and everyone in between, rounded up, crammed into suffocating cattle cars, hauled off to concentration camps, and gassed to death in Hitler’s crematoria, effectively eliminating half of the microscopic Jewish population of 12 million in the entire world.

Surviving Jews all over the world dared not tell their children of this catastrophe, the better to shield them from lifelong paranoia, dread, and depression.

But what followed — from the war’s end in 1945 to the miraculous advent of Israel becoming a state in 1948, and for about a decade or more beyond — was encouraging to these protective parents.  Not one word of Jew-hatred or vicious stereotypes or calls for the death of the Jews.

Aha, these naïve Americans — and Jews throughout the world — believed. Humanity has learned its lesson.  We finally, at last, after almost 4,000 years, have nothing to worry about.  Baruch Hashem!

What Lies Beneath

What Jews didn’t realize was that it was not benevolence or compassion or empathy that motivated the behavior of many in the outside world, but rather the self-interested preservation of the image they wanted to convey — of decency, tact, discretion, moral clarity.

But just like the clandestine kidney and the hidden hemangioma, the pathology — of Jew-hatred — was there, probably, as the above-mentioned doctor speculated, for decades!

Inculcated early — in homes, houses of worship, schools — and magnified when the State of Israel was established, it was mostly manifested in certain institutions, professions, even country clubs that enacted quotas that excluded Jews, in a few vicious media stereotypes and in personal insults.

But it wasn’t destructive enough to stop this minuscule minority — most of whom fled to America with no money and no knowledge of the English language — from flourishing wildly in every avenue they pursued.  From science and medicine to business to law to literature and other arts, the list is long.

When denied entry into medical schools, they built the finest hospitals in the country...to this day!  When denied entry into top law firms, they established their own.  When denied opportunities in the entertainment industry, they literally created Hollywood.

By the 21st century, Jews had more than arrived.  Although still a tiny minority of 5.8 million — or 2.4 percent out of a total population of 345 million — they have occupied several seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, served in great numbers as U.S. senators and members of Congress, enjoyed full professorships at America’s top colleges and universities, contributed mightily to America’s health through their discoveries and innovations, and founded massively successful businesses, among them Dunkin Donuts, Dreamworks, Estee Lauder, Facebook, Google, H&R Block, Home Depot, Starbucks, Slim-Fast, and on and on and on.  And in recent headlines, in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)’s Final Four, three of the coaches were Jewish.

The Cesspool Erupts

Then October 7, 2023 happened.

To be accurate, this subhuman-initiated catastrophe was preceded by a phenomenon never before seen in America: the entrance of blatant, virulent, noxious Democrat antisemites not only being elected to the U.S. Congress, but blaring their toxic, Jew-detesting Israel-loathing racism for all to see and hear.

And without one single solitary word of disapproval from a sitting Democrat, including nine Democrats in the Senate — and Senate minority leader Charles Schumer — and 21 Democrats in the House.  And don’t let them tell you they sent out press releases of disapproval.  They mean nothing!

The sole defender of Israel and condemner of his party’s racism has been Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.), whom the rest of the Democrat party has now marginalized, if not dismissed.

Even worse than this Democrat travesty, which was ultimately rejected by 77 million people in their thunderous election of President Trump last November, is the true pandemic of antisemitism that has transcended the clandestine kidney and the hidden hemangioma.

Now the once hidden hatred is out in the open.  World leaders, most recently in France, the United Kingdom, and Canada (but they are not alone), have given us a vivid picture of their psychological and racist hatred of Jews from their metaphorical X-rays, sonograms, MRIs, and PET scans.  They have let us look inside their hearts and minds to see clearly their hatred — and probably jealousy — of Jews and of their biblically inherited homeland, Israel, is again, as the aforementioned doctor speculated, from birth, and no doubt in their DNA!

Here, Yonah Elias skewers these moral cowards. 

The Lesson

There is not a baby in the world born with hate in his heart.  Hate is taught.  Hate is learned.  What we have been witnessing — really since Obama made his ignominious debut in our body politic — is that the hate that is learned has remarkable staying power.  It transcends education and objective reality and cold, hard facts.  It is animating and energizing.  After our most powerful emotion, fear, come jealousy and hate, which are often in desperate competition.

And there’s nothing quite like the bandwagon effect to mobilize these haters into action.  Hence the great number of people who conveniently forget that it was Israel who was savagely attacked by the terrorists whose very charter pronounces genocide as its major goal!

But history doesn’t change.  The world hated Jews when they were defenseless, and now, they especially hate Jews when they fight back. And prevail!

From now on, when you look at the pro-terrorist politicians and media whores and United Nations shills, don’t be surprised.  Just shrug your shoulders or turn to your friend and say: “Hemangioma, probably since birth!”

Joan Swirsky is a New York — based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com

 

Solemn Memorial Day, Not Happy Memorial Day

Henry Mark Holzer 

I send these remarks every year close to or on Memorial Day because they are a useful reminder that the Day is not a “happy” one. As well intentioned as some people are, associating the word “happy” with Memorial Day is not appropriate.

Memorial Day, the last Monday in May each year, is a federal holiday established to remember those who died while members of our country’s armed forces (unlike Veterans’ Day, which celebrates those who served).

With the Day’s genesis in Decoration Day – when volunteers laid flowers at graves of the fallen – Memorial Day is not a time for family barbecues, baseball games, or garage sales.

It’s a Day for all Americans – those who wore our Nation’s uniform and those who were not so privileged – to memorialize by thought and deed the heavy, irredeemable price deceased Americans have paid . . . and how much we owe them for what they lost in every war from the Revolution two-hundred-fifty-years ago to our government’s shameful flight from Afghanistan.

Memorial Day is very different from America’s birthday. Independence Day (not the “4^th of July”) should be celebrated with fireworks, patriotic songs, and loud band concerts.

But not Memorial Day, a time of remembrance too solemn an occasion to be “happy.”

Requiescat in pace.

 Jane Fonda opened her big mouth again. See "Aid and Comfort": Jane Fonda in North Vietnam.

See janefondasite.com 

 

 

Shall We Not Revenge?: A Jon Willard Novel (Jon Willard Novels Book 6) Kindle Edition

by Henry Mark Holzer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

Book 6 of 6: Jon Willard Novels

See all formats and editions

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WHAT CAN A GOOD LAWYER DO WHEN
THE LAW COLLIDES WITH JUSTICE?


During the Vietnam War, many American POWs were tortured to produce propaganda and intelligence.

Or for fun.

The worst North Vietnamese guard was nicknamed “Torque.” His worst crime was the deliberate murder of an Air Force colonel.

Thirty-five years later, the CIA learned that after the war, the sadist had escaped Vietnam and faked his way into the United States as a refugee.

With the president’s blessing, the CIA director concocted a plan to find Torque and try him for first-degree murder in an American court.

The government then drafted New York criminal defense attorney Jon Willard to prosecute.

At the trial, Willard faced a mysterious federal defender named Danielle Hong.

But Hong's devious but dramatic courtroom tactics ended the trial with a shocking twist that even wily legal veteran Jon Willard never saw coming...


Don't miss these previous suspenseful courtroom novels in the Jon Willard series:

Book 1: THE PALADIN CURSE by Erika and Henry Mark Holzer

Book 2: A FOOL FOR A CLIENT by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 3: JUSTICE DELAYED, IS JUSTICE DENIED by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 4: ABUSE OF POWER by Henry Mark Holzer

Book 5: THE RIGHT TO DIE by Henry Mark Holzer


And don't miss Erika Holzer's previous bestselling novels, also available on Amazon:

Freedom Bridge -- a gripping Cold War spy thriller, chosen as a Literary Guild featured selection, and . . .

Eye for an Eye -- a white-knuckle vigilante crime thriller, which became a major motion picture starring Sally Field, Kiefer Sutherland, and Ed Harris.