Yet, I am becoming more encouraged all the time, as it seems to me that many of the younger generation are fed up with the status quo and some are really digging for the truth about all types of things, particularly the financial debacle. Has the trend started to shift back toward individual rights?

There was significant news surrounding the metals this past month, but we chose to forgo writing our take on the metals in this issue to go back in history and bring out some of the most important principles about money, the U.S. Constitution, and errors made in bringing honest money to the people.

It was my honor to interview Dr. Edwin Vieira, Jr., this month, and it is my wish that all our members enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed doing it.

Dr. Vieira holds four degrees from Harvard: A.B. (Harvard College), A.M. and Ph.D. (Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences), and J.D. (Harvard Law School). For more than thirty years, he has practiced law, with emphasis on constitutional issues. In the Supreme Court of the United States, he successfully argued or briefed the cases leading to the landmark decisions, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson, and Communications Workers of America v. Beck, which established constitutional and statutory limitations on the uses to which labor unions, in both the private and the public sectors, may apply fees extracted from nonunion workers as a condition of their employment.

David Morgan: Edwin, how important was silver in the monetary system as prescribed at law when the Constitution was enacted?

Edwin Vieira: Very important. The monetary system of the United States—that is, of the Constitution—is based on a silver standard. The monetary unit is a silver coin, the “dollar.” Actually, it derives from the “Spanish milled dollar” that had been made the standard for the English colonies by a royal proclamation in 1704 and then a parliamentary statute in 1707. So there was almost 100 years of legal precedent for the Spanish milled dollar being the unit of currency. 

The Constitution adopted the dollar as the result of the work of the Continental Congress, pursuant to recommendations by Thomas Jefferson. If you go down the list you’ll see how important the people were who looked at this problem. And the basic reason was that the marketplace in the Colonies and then the independent states were in fact using the Spanish milled dollar as the monetary unit, primarily because there was a great deal of trade between the American Colonies and Central America, especially the so-called “triangle trade” for slaves among Africa, Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and the Colonies. So the dollar was picked up as a matter of economic practicality more than anything else. That was Jefferson’s argument: “The dollar is what’s being used in our economy; and it would derange our system the least to adopt that as a constitutional standard.”

Now, the Founders also brought gold into the system at its market exchange rate with silver. Gold was to be valued in terms of silver dollars at whatever the market exchange rate was determined to be. In those days, of course, they tended to use the so-called “bimetallic system,” in which a particular exchange rate between the precious metals was fixed in a statute. That was because they had seen over a long period of time that the fluctuation in the market value between gold and silver was relatively stable—at least during that era. And they thought they could get away with that. From a practical point of view, they had little choice, in light of the difficulty of getting accurate data to operate what we would call today a “floating” standard. A floating standard for gold as against the silver dollar was proposed in the 1830s, because at that point Congress recognized that the traditional fixed bimetallic standard was not really workable. But I think traditionalism took hold; and so the bimetallic system was not changed.

In any event, silver is the unit of the system. Gold is supposed to be valued in terms of silver. Therefore we have what I like to call a “dual” metallic system, in which both silver and gold are supposed to circulate in tandem. But the particular unit that is the standard for valuation (the dollar) is silver, as opposed to gold. The value of gold is to be measured in terms of silver units.

The rest of this interview and the complete April issue of The Morgan Report is available for paid members....