A couple of points. Theodore Roosevelt called Hamilton “the most brilliant American statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time,” yet you glibly ridicule him. I daresay the primary author of the Federalist Papers, and the individual most responsible for ratification of the Constitution deserves more respect than a journalistic flyweight like you affords him…Milton Friedman, whom you may have heard of, favored elimination of the Fed, but he did not endorse species based currency. He favored fiat currency with the requirement that the growth of the money supply be rule driven rather than arbitrarily determined by the whim of an individual or an agency in the government. There is nothing magical about the gold standard. All a government has to do to devalue gold backed currency is to inflate its valuation in terms of the its currency’s unit.

Victor Mascolo
Bayville, N.Y.