The Sopranos and Gold:
Raped by the Sopranos
Memo To: Lynne Cheney
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Soprano Rape Scene
I’d thought of you, Lynne, not long after my wife Patricia and I switched
off our television set in the middle of the rape scene in last Sunday’s HBO
episode of The Sopranos. Actually, I’d also thought of Tipper Gore, since
both of you have been so involved over the years in trying to clean up the
filth in our entertainment industry. But I’d never met Mrs. Gore and I’ve
known you for a long time. It was nice to run into you in January when I
stopped by to say hello to Dick, before the inaugural. (I now would now have
to refer to him as “the Vice President.”) I’d e-mailed him a copy of my
Monday memo to Home Box Office, when I told how disgusted my wife was with
the most graphic rape scene we had ever witnessed in a theater or in our
living room that we decided to cancel the HBO subscription we have had since
HBO began.
In case you did not see the memo, I’ll append it below, but this memo to you
was inspired by one of my website browsers who e-mailed me Monday, asking
“What does this have to do with economics?” You may find this hard to
believe, Lynne, but it was an angry Patricia who startled me on Sunday,
after we decided to cancel HBO, who said: “This is what we get for not
having a gold standard!” I thought she was kidding me, but she said she was
serious: “There are no standards any more, for anything. Everything is
relative, nothing is absolute, nothing is wrong anymore because there is no
anchor to what is right, for our money or for anything else.”
This is actually a point I have been making for almost 30 years, since
President Nixon cut the link between our paper dollar and gold. Without an
anchor to something real, the dollar has inflated and deflated and inflated
and deflated and inflated and deflated again. In my book, The Way the World
Works, I recalled the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius
Caesar in 44 B.C., and the situation that his adopted son, Augustus,
encountered 16 years later. According to Will and Ariel Durant, “Rome was
full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability:
soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had
seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation of war and waited
vacuously for some returning tide to lift them back to affluence; women
dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions and adulteries.” The
Durants wrote that in 1944 in the third volume, Caesar and Christ, of their
History of Civilization. The golden age of the Roman Empire was built on the
tax and monetary reforms that had been designed by Julius and carried out by
his son: “He restored the stability of the currency by basing it on gold and
issuing a golden aureus, equivalent in purchasing power to the British pound
sterling in the nineteenth century.”
History also tells us, Lynne, that the restoration of a gold dollar after
the Civil War in the United States was led by Christian evangelicals. They
were the quickest to see the social pathologies that resulted from a
greenback dollar that changed its value from one day to the next, broke the
links between effort and reward, and rewarded currency speculators at the
expense of work and saving. If I were you, I’d seriously look into the
issue, and discuss it with the nation’s religious leaders. I’ve practically
exhausted the other avenues toward a monetary standard. The nation’s bankers
seem to enjoy being able to manipulate money, because they can do it
profitably, especially when they have inside information from their friends
at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Pat Robertson, for
example, is a longtime champion of a gold dollar. Andrew Young, who was in
Congress when Nixon went off gold, has argued that the most serious problems
of the black family began with that decision. When living standards fell in
the inflation that followed, the black folks at the bottom of the
socio-economic pyramid were crushed. Andy Young is now the a leader with the
National Council of Churches. Even before Nixon went off gold, the late
Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam in 1966 warned against leaving the
gold standard, for all these reasons. Another advocate of a return to gold,
believe it or not, is his successor, Louis Farrakhan. I’ve spent many hours
with him discussing the role of an undefined national money in the social
pathologies that afflict not only the United States, the only remaining
superpower, but are at the root of so much poverty and despair throughout
the world. You can start the project, Lynne, by calling Jack and Joanne
Kemp, who understand the problem about as well as Patricia and I do. Maybe
we will have to thank the Sopranos for pushing us over the edge, thereby
inspiring this memo to you. A reform has to start somewhere.
* * * * * |
