Gold Left From the Top Down. It Comes Back From the Bottom Up.
November 9, 2026
George Ford Smith has another sharp essay at the Mises Institute: Further Revenge of the "Barbarous Relic". It traces how the Federal Reserve was built to protect the big banks, how it financed America's entry into the First World War through inflation rather than taxes, and why gold had to be pushed out of the monetary system to make all of that possible. His key line:
"No government bent on amassing power, however, can do so while banknotes and deposits are still redeemable in gold."
And the corollary: gold had to go, but quietly, "so that people won't notice the theft."
I think he's right, and I'd draw out one implication he leaves implicit.
If gold was removed from the top down, by the institutions that benefited from removing it, then waiting for those same institutions to bring it back is a long wait. No central bank is going to disarm itself. No Congress is going to vote to make the money it spends harder to print. The incentives point the other way, and they always will.
That means the return to sound money, if it comes, won't be a policy. It will be a habit - millions of individual decisions to save in gold, pay in gold, and accept gold, until the paper is the thing that looks like a relic. That's how gold became money in the first place. Nobody legislated it. People chose it, trade by trade, because it worked.
For most of the last century that choice wasn't really available; you could hold gold, but you couldn't spend it. That's what I built TxGold to fix, at least here in Texas: gold you can send to a friend or pay a business with, from your phone, backed one-for-one by metal in the Texas Bullion Depository. And Texas itself has started down the same road, recognizing gold and silver as legal tender beginning in 2027.
Smith closes by asking how much harm a disarmed central bank could do. My answer: let's not wait to find out. Disarm it yourself, one payment at a time.