KEN'S CEMETERY
There's good reason Ken Brown of Nevada is being honored as "Mr. Veteran" on Capitol Hill.
As Rep. Jon C. Porter (R-Nev.) observes in a tribute to the World War II Navy veteran, Brown was the driving force behind the creation of a veteran's cemetery in Boulder City, Nev.
"Using his own personal savings," the congressman reveals, "Mr. Brown purchased 83.5 acres of land in Boulder City to be used as a veterans' cemetery site."
Brown's incredible gift is now known as the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery.
DOLLARS AND INCHES
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) probably wishes he was Treasury secretary.
In recent weeks, he's proposed "abolishing" the Federal Reserve, which Paul says is responsible for the nation's current economic difficulties.
"Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, middle- and working-class Americans have been victimized by a boom-and-bust monetary policy," says Paul. "In addition, most Americans have suffered a steadily eroding purchasing power because of the Federal Reserve's inflationary policies. This represents a real, if hidden, tax imposed on the American people."
In addition, Paul is pushing the Honest Money Act to repeal legal tender laws that compel American citizens to accept irredeemable paper-ticket or electronic money as their unit of account.
"Absent legal tender laws, individuals acting through the markets, rather than government dictates, determine what is to be used as money," Paul observes. "Historically, the free-market choice for money has been some combination of gold and silver."
The congressman says while fiat money is widely accepted thanks to legal tender laws, it does not maintain its purchasing power and works to the disadvantage of ordinary people who lose the purchasing power of their savings, pensions, annuities and other promises of future payment.
"Legal tender laws disadvantage ordinary citizens by forcing them to use money that is vulnerable to vast depreciation," he says. "As Stephen T. Byington wrote in the September 1895 issue of the American Federationist: 'No legal tender law is ever needed to make men take good money; it's only use is to make them take bad money.'"
Which is why the Constitution does not grant legal tender power to the federal government, and the states are empowered to make legal tender only out of gold and silver. Instead, says Paul, Congress was given the power to regulate money against a standard, i.e. the dollar.
"When Alexander Hamilton wrote the Coinage Act of 1792, he simply made into law the market-definition of a dollar as equaling the silver content of the Spanish milled dollar (371.25 grains of silver), which is the dollar referred to in the Constitution," he says. "This historical definition of the dollar has never been changed and cannot be changed - any more than the term 'inch,' as a measure of length, can be changed."