Frank Chodorov's piece entitled "Shackles of Gold" turns out to be a confession rather than an accusation as the title had led me to expect. It is the old-time religion, humbly expressed and pleasantly intoned for the ears of the faithful of the Gold Standard League.

Chodorov has discovered that "money was invented by traders long before any government thought of monopolizing it." What escapes him is that traders have continued to issue all of the money in circulation and will ever be the sole issuers of money. He does not realize that no government ever has or ever can monopolize money issuance, because the so-called money issue of government cannot circulate of itself. It can only flow by blending with the real money issued by traders. The farmer cannot produce a salable commodity from the water pump alone; he must first get the milk from the cow and then inject the water into it to make diluted milk.

The nonsense about gold convertibility as a converter of counterfeit money into genuine: Does regulating gamblers make them any the less gamblers? This is not a perfect analogy, since in the case of counterfeit money the regulator and the regulated are the same. Nonetheless, the gold bugs do not seem to realize that we have gold/dollar convertibility on a sufficient scale to prove that it is no deterrent to the issuance of counterfeit. As you know, foreigners may convert dollars into gold, and yet gold piles up in Fort Knox. Also, there is no diminishment in the domestic gold miners' conversion of gold into dollars.

During the Civil War, the Government suspended convertibility. After serious debate for years, it restored convertibility on January 2, 1879, under tense fears of a run on gold. But the conversion worked in reverse; more gold flowed into the Treasury than flowed out.

When Roosevelt ordered the people to turn in their gold at $35 an ounce, they responded with alacrity.

The people, today, can get the substance silver not only in exchange for silver certificates, but for any bills. Yet there is no demand for conversion.

It is disconcerting that businessmen, realizing that there is something wrong with the monetary system, try only to get the counterfeiter to purify itself, instead of taking in their own hands the exclusive power and responsibility for the medium of exchange. It shows that they are at bottom paternalistic, willing only to whine against the socialistic trend which the political monetary system makes inevitable.