America's Founders Knew Something Huge About Gold... We've Forgotten It -

Happy 250th Anniversary to America, Happy Fourth of July and welcome to this week’s Market Wrap Podcast, I’m Mike Gleason.
Coming up don’t miss this week’s interview with Ralph Benko, gold standard advocate, author of The Ten Commandments of Capitalism, co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto and the editor of the 500th Anniversary Edition of Nicolaus Copernicus' book titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Minting-Money-Nicolaus-Copernicus/dp/0982075642" target="_blank" rel="noopener">On the Minting of Money</a>.
Mike Maharrey’s guest this week dives into the little-known backstory of Copernicus – most famous for his achievements as a scientist and astronomer – and how he was actually a monetary expert in his day, and proposed solutions to the problems of currency debasement and inflation, which of course are very relevant now some 500 years later.
So, be sure to stick around for that and much more during a wonderfully fascinating interview with Ralph Benko, coming up after this week’s market update. And if you enjoy this material, please do us a favor and like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you consume this content.
Although we've seen a bounce in gold and silver over the last couple of days, the biggest driver behind the recent weakness has been the market's sudden shift in expectations surrounding the Federal Reserve.
Just a few months ago, investors widely expected at least one more interest rate cut this year. Now, following a series of hawkish comments from new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh, many traders are betting the next move could actually be a rate hike.
Speaking this week at the European Central Bank's annual forum, Warsh left little doubt about where he wants to take monetary policy. He declared that the Federal Reserve remains fully committed to restoring inflation to its 2% target, insisting that anyone expecting the Fed to tolerate higher inflation "will be disappointed."
That tough talk has strengthened the U.S. dollar, pushed bond yields higher, and added more pressure to precious metals, which generally struggle when real interest rates are rising.
The question, however, isn't whether Warsh wants to defeat inflation. It's whether he can.
The Federal Reserve doesn't operate in a vacuum. It must contend with a federal government carrying unprecedented debt, an economy built on years of artificially low interest rates, and financial markets that have grown increasingly dependent on easy money.
That's the dilemma.
If the Fed keeps rates high – or raises them further – it risks exposing the excesses created during nearly two decades of aggressive monetary stimulus. Higher borrowing costs threaten heavily indebted consumers, businesses, commercial real estate, and perhaps most importantly, Washington itself.
On the other hand, if economic growth slows sharply or financial markets stumble, history suggests the Fed will once again face enormous pressure to reverse course.
That's why many long-term precious metals investors remain focused on the bigger picture rather than today's headlines.
As veteran investor Brad Dunkley recently observed, policymakers have repeatedly shown they're unwilling to tolerate prolonged recessions or deep market declines. Instead, they eventually respond with lower interest rates, renewed liquidity, and additional monetary stimulus.
Whether it's the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic response, or numerous market interventions in between, the pattern has been remarkably consistent.
For now, markets may continue reacting to Warsh's hawkish rhetoric. But the larger structural forces haven't changed. Massive debt burdens and persistent deficit spending continue to favor a long-term environment of monetary debasement and negative real interest rates.
Those are precisely the conditions that have historically supported gold and silver – and they're unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
As for the weekly market action, through Thursday’s close anyway, gold comes in up about 1.1% to check in at $4,135 and looks to end a 4-week losing streak.
Silver, through Thursday, was up nearly $2 an ounce and trades at $61.72.
As for platinum, it checked in at $1,633 as of the U.S. close on Thursday, essentially unchanged on the week. And finally, palladium got a nice bump this week, rising $64 to come in at $1,279.
The market is open until midday U.S. time on Friday with the market observing the 4th holiday a day early here in the States. Money Metals is open for business however until 3:30pm Mountain Time (5:30pm Eastern) on Friday – so give us a call and we’d be happy to assist.
Before we celebrate America's 250th birthday this Fourth of July, it's worth reflecting on one of the Founding Fathers' greatest – and perhaps most overlooked – legacies: their understanding of sound money.
Across the country this weekend, Americans will gather for parades, backyard barbecues, fireworks, and celebrations honoring the Declaration of Independence. We rightly take pride in our nation's remarkable history, its enduring commitment to liberty, and the generations of patriots who built and defended the United States.
But there's one aspect of our founding that deserves more attention today than it often receives.
The men who founded this nation had firsthand experience with the dangers of inflation and paper money.
During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress printed enormous quantities of paper currency – known as Continentals – to finance the fight for independence. At first, those notes helped sustain the war effort. But without sufficient backing in gold or silver, and with rampant overprinting and counterfeiting, they rapidly lost value. The collapse was so severe it gave rise to the expression "not worth a Continental."
In his excellent July 4th essay <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2026/07/01/patriotism-shouldnt-apply-to-the-debauched-dollar-005033">posted at MoneyMetals.com</a>, author Stuart Englert explains how that experience left a lasting impression on America's founders.
George Washington warned that paper money would "ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice." Thomas Jefferson called paper currency "the ghost of money," arguing that only gold and silver could serve as honest and dependable money over the long term. James Madison likewise understood that governments inevitably abuse paper currencies and that excessive fiat money drives sound money out of circulation.
Those hard-earned lessons found their way into our nation's founding documents.
Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, prohibits the states from making anything but gold and silver legal tender for the payment of debts. A few years later, the Coinage Act of 1792 established the U.S. Mint and defined the dollar in terms of a fixed weight of silver and gold.
In other words, sound money wasn't an afterthought. It was woven into the very foundation of the American republic.
Of course, over the past two and a half centuries, America gradually moved away from that system. Today, our economy operates on a purely fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve – one backed not by precious metals, but by confidence in the government's ability to manage its finances.
Meanwhile, the purchasing power of the dollar has steadily eroded. Inflation has become a permanent feature of modern life, quietly reducing the value of savings and increasing the cost of everything from groceries to housing.
That doesn't diminish America's extraordinary accomplishments or the freedoms we enjoy. Patriotism doesn't require pretending every government policy is wise. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of our republic is the freedom to debate, question, and improve our institutions while remaining deeply proud of our country.
As we celebrate this historic Independence Day, it's fitting to remember that many of the same leaders who secured America's political freedom also believed economic freedom depended upon honest money – money that couldn't simply be created at will.
Whether or not the United States ever returns to a precious-metals monetary standard, the principles that guided the Founding Fathers remain remarkably relevant. Gold and silver continue to serve the same purpose they have for thousands of years: preserving purchasing power through times of inflation, uncertainty, and monetary experimentation.
So, as fireworks light up the sky this Fourth of July and Americans commemorate 250 years of independence, it's worth remembering that the founders gave us more than a nation founded on liberty. They also left us timeless lessons about financial responsibility, sound money, and the importance of protecting the value of our hard-earned wealth.
Well now, without further delay, and for a little more history on this subject, and how the understanding of the importance of sound money predates even America’s founders, let’s get right to this week’s exclusive interview.
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Mike Maharrey: Greetings, I'm Mike Maharrey and I'm joined today by Ralph Benko. He is the author of 10 Commandments of Capitalism and the editor of the 500th anniversary edition of Nicholas Copernicus' On Minting Money, which is what we're going to focus on today. How you doing, Ralph?
Ralph Benko: I'm doing fine, but just let me add one element. I'm also the lead co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto, which preceded the 10 Commandments of Capitalism, which was a companion book that went into greater depth of which Commandment Five was prescribing the gold standard.
Mike Maharrey: Gotcha. Sorry, I missed that. I neglected your bio. Bad host.
Ralph Benko: That's okay! If you're running out of things to read, you have wonderful shelves full of very fascinating books behind you and you'd like a copy of the Capitalist Manifesto, shoot me a surface address. I will send you a paper copy, or if you prefer them electronic, be more than happy to provide you with the electronic version.
Mike Maharrey: Awesome. I will do that for sure. Well, what I want to talk about today is the more recently released edited edition and translated of Copernicus's work. And of course, he's probably best known. I always think of him as the space guy. He's the guy that set us straight and taught us that the sun is the center of the solar system, not the earth. I didn't even know, honestly, until I came across your work that he had written anything on money, which is probably a bad show of ignorance on my part, but it is what it is.
Ralph Benko: It's very common. Let me just say, I myself, it was found very enlightening as I began to dig into Copernicus to learn that he wasn't just the guy who put the sun at the center of the solar system. Astronomy was his hobby. He was a senior civil servant. He handled the defense of his city. He handled the administration of his city, and he wrote this very powerful book, short tracked for the king of Prussia saying, "It's catastrophic to debase your currency,” which the King of Prussia totally ignored and in fact catastrophe followed.
Mike Maharrey: Imagine that a government person ignoring good wisdom. So, I'm curious as to what motivated you to take on this project. I'm sure editing a 500-year-old work is no easy task on top of the fact that it had to be translated as well. So I'm curious what motivated you to do this?
Ralph Benko: Well, I'm an original gangster, gold standard kind of guy. My mentor was Lewis E. Lehrman. May he rest in peace and may his memory always be for a blessing. He just passed on about a month or two ago. He was one of Reagan's gold commissioners. He and Ron Paul were the only two pro-gold gold commissioners. And Lewis appointed me as one of the 23 official witnesses before the Reagan Gold Commission based on a paper that I had written in law school about the constitutional history of the gold standard based upon a footnote that I discovered in my commercial paper class and I went to the library. You remember those?
Mike Maharrey: I do.
Ralph Benko: I went to the books, remember those?
Mike Maharrey: Yep.
Ralph Benko: And I discovered that there was an absolutely fascinating historical provenance that was almost forgotten about American monetary policy. And in fact, the flip where the federal government became supreme versus subordinate to the states was a gold standard case named Julliard versus Greenman. And it was the 1970s. We were in stagflation. Jimmy Carter was sitting in the White House and says, nobody knows where inflation comes from. I give him great credit for the craft beer renaissance because he was the one who deregulated beer. He was a great deregulator, the best deregulator ever. Boy was he Dunns when it came to monetary policy.
So I just said, "Hey, there's a rich history here." And I wrote up a memorandum and I sent it to Jack Kemp's economist, John Mueller. And he's told me to send it to several people and actually maybe Jude told me to send it to Mueller. He told me to send it to Lehrman. Lehrman called me up and said, "I've got to talk to you. This memo, Constitutional Gold is great." So I was going to be in New York the next week for US Open. So I swung by to talk to him and he told me he was going to be running for governor, but also he wanted me to be a witness before the Gold Commission. I was one of the two pro – gold witnesses out of the 23. The other one was Alan Reynolds, who was Jude Winisky's chief economist. And that kind of got me hooked and started and I stuck with it.
I published a number of articles in the New York Bar Association Banking Business Incorporation Law Journal and in the Dallas Morning News and whatever. And so I just got hooked on this fascinating and very relevant, if very out of fashion thing called the classical gold standard. And when I tripped across in my perusals, the fact that Copernicus had written this wonderful lucid tract only 17 pages long talking about how catastrophic it is, one of the four big sources of catastrophe, including up there was civil unrest and degradation of the soil. And I forget for the fourth, but he said the basement of the currency, which is not even noticed by most people, which is interesting because Keynes, who is well aware of Copernicus, said the exact same thing in his economic consequences of the piece where he was talking about how depreciating the currency was the surest way to overthrow capitalism.
So, I'm going to stop right there because I probably qualify as a safe and effective remedy for insomnia there, Michael, if the FDA hears about this, but if that gives you the context as to how I came about this, I just tripped across it on the internet and it was nowhere in print
And all of the translations of it were very old. I said, "Well, I have to change this. " And so I worked with my friend Chuck Cadillac about 13, 15 years ago to bring out a new edition, but that has gone out of print and it was only the electronic edition. And when I realized we were coming up on the 500th anniversary of Copernicus's magnificent book, I decided to bring it out in my own boutique edition.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, it's fantastic work and I'm glad you did it. And it's interesting because we're talking about something that this goes back 500 years. These ideas aren't new and yet we go today and policy is actually 180 degrees different than what Copernicus recommended. I mean, currency debasement is a matter of policy in this day and age.
Ralph Benko: They think that they're being very responsible by only depreciating the value of the dollar by 2% a year when they are on target. I don't remember whether it was Einstein who said that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. 2% a year doesn't sound like much, but when you compound that over 20 years, you have reduced the value of your currency by 50%,
Which is in a generation, which is very dramatic. When Nixon under the malign influence of the to be future bankrupt secretary of the treasury, John Connolly, the other guy who Lee Harvey Oswald shot was his treasury secretary and he was an arrogant son of a gun. And he was the one who basically pushed us to close the gold window in August 15th, 1971. Now, everybody at the time, almost old enough to remember, expected us to adjust the value of the dollar from $35 an ounce to probably 42, $43 an ounce. But Nixon got swept up in the Watergate crisis and the impeachment and the resignation. And General Ford was not the brightest bulb at the chandelier. So we never ever got around to refixing the price of gold, the price of the dollar relative to gold because gold does not change in its purchasing power.
It's been incredibly well documented over 5,000 years. In ancient Rome, an ounce of gold would buy you a very fine toga and in 21st century America, an ounce of gold will buy you a very fine Seville grow suit.
Just as another sidebar, it didn't end with Copernicus. When Sir Isaac Newton, you may have heard of him, who saw the apple fall from his mother's apple tree, spent the last 30 years of his life as the master of the royal mint. And as master of the royal mint in 1717, he accidentally invented the international gold standard. He was trying to invent the international silver standard, the pounds sterling, but he missed the adjustment by just a few pence. And that evolved very, very shortly thereafter into becoming the official monetary policy of the world, except France. The same year that Sir Isaac invented the gold standard, a scoundrel named John Law put France on the paper standard and caused a massive inflation, a destruction of the French finances, a destruction of the fortunes of many people, including his own. So to me, it's just odd that we had a monetary system that led to 200 years of wonderful economic growth with zero inflation. :
It would go up by a few cents. It would go up by a percentage over a few years and it would go down by a percent or two. So there were these longitudinal waves, but inflation was unknown except in times of war,
Whereas the paper standard has always and forever led to great losses of public welfare. And why that is not taught in every high school and every college economics course, I'm just not sure I have a theory, but I don't know if you want to hear it.
Mike Maharrey: I have a theory. I'll tell you my theory that paper money empowers governments. It allows governments to expand and grow and do much more than they could under a sound money system. And so it's a benefit to the government, even though in the long term it's destructive. Politicians are short-term thinkers, their next horizon is the next election. And so it just kind of goes from there. That's how I see it anyway. What do you think?
Ralph Benko: There's a lot of merit to what you say, but don't sugarcoat it, Michael. As a matter of statistical fact, Uncle Sam now spends every three days what it spent cumulatively from 1789 when the federal government was founded until 1900.
Mike Maharrey: That's insane.
Ralph Benko: In other words, it took us 11 years or something like that for the federal government to spend cumulatively, not annually, what it now spends every two to three days. So just to give you some idea of the monstrosity of the scope, that's really a shocking fact and that they don't teach that in high school economics or college economics either.
Mike Maharrey: No, they don't. So I'm curious, we have the history, we've seen the results of the collapse of these fiat systems and yet here we are. And I'm curious as to from That's Copernicus’s point of view and from this essay, why does he think that the government is debasing currency? Does he address that at all or is it more just a warning to not do it?
Ralph Benko: It's more just a warning not to do it. He says it just does bad things to everybody in society, particularly working people across the board. And he was too politic, I think, as a senior civil servant to attack the motivations of the royalty, but he pulls no punches in this book in terms of just how catastrophic debasing your currency is. And back then it was gold and silver and what they did was they poured brass and copper. And so the intrinsic value, if you will, or the intrinsic value is a little problematic, but it's good enough for a podcast. It became functionally worthless and less and prices went up. And by the way, this was not by any means the first time this happened. The Roman Empire experienced catastrophic currency debasement and the attended wage and price controls under Diocletian and several of the other very prominent emperors.
So, the depreciating currency, you were absolutely right, provides certain unfair advantages to the ruling class while it destitutes or at least depreciates the welfare of us working stiffs.
Mike Maharrey: Yeah, absolutely. So, you mentioned that this was written in the context of Prussia. Can you give a little bit of historical background on what was going on? What exactly specifically was Copernicus addressing?
Ralph Benko: Yeah, he was asked to… He was a very respected polymath. Although just as an aside, he was buried in unmarked grave. We only found his remains about 10 years ago. They finally put up a marker to him. Well, he was a church warden and they buried them under the floor of the cathedral. They didn't bother to put up markers. And Copernicus was a humble fellow. He was not self-aggrandizing. I don't know whether he would've ever succeeded in getting Heliocentricity adopted if they had social media back then.
Mike Maharrey: No doubt.
Ralph Benko: He was asked to make an assessment by the court as to what their monetary policy should be and being a man of great integrity, he gave it to him straight. So, the answer was, as best as I can tell, that he was asked what the facts were and to make an analysis of the facts. He studied the facts very assiduously. He was very, very much a pragmatist, not a romantic. And he wrote up this report, which then essentially got ignored and got basically lost to the world for almost 500 years.
Mike Maharrey: Fascinating, fascinating. So, a skeptic would say to you, Ralph, this is great, but it's 500 years old. We're modern people and we have modern systems. Why does this even matter? We're beyond all of this. How would you respond to that kind of criticism?
Ralph Benko: Well, let me just say this about that. We are now following the monetary policy of William Jennings Bryan, who is well known for prosecuting John Scopes for teaching evolution in the public schools. That's how he's mostly remembered because of inherit the wind. Why we are following… And he's also remembered for his great line that shall not press down this crown of thorns upon laborers brow, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. He was 35 years old, that gave him the presidential nomination. He lost to McKinley who re-implemented the gold standard in 1900 and the economy took off like a rocket. What happened, there's just been a grotesque misunderstanding. We went off the gold standard in the Revolutionary War and had enormous inflation. George Washington wrote some very poignant letters to, I think it was John J saying, "It takes me a wagon load of continental currency, paper currency to buy a wagon load of supplies from other troops." But then after we won the Revolutionary War and created the Constitution of the United States, Alexander Hamilton, who was a very rigorous, highly principled economist, put us on a bimetallic standard, which eventually evolved in practice into the gold standard because you just can't keep gold and silver adjusted.
One will be too high, and one will be too low and the one that's too high will get exported to France or whatever. So, in any case, until Andrew Jackson came along and created the panic of 1830, we had it really well. Now, Jackson was another soft money guy that's not usually talked much about, but it is historical truth.
Then when the Civil War came along, we went to the Greenbacks and that caused the relative price of everything to go up by 50%. And after we won the Civil War or the War of Northern Aggression, if you happen to be a Southerner, then we went into a long deflationary period, which was a mistake. It was very painful to farmers and to industrial workers. In fact, it's well documented now that The Wizard of Oz was a parable of populism, the Prairie Populist movement in the book, Dorothy was wearing silver slippers, not ruby slippers. And on the yellow brick road, Oz Ozie Ounce, she had a long and winding road. My gene at Amherst College was the one who discovered this, Henry Littlefield, he rest in peace and wrote it up. And so, you had the little man behind the curtain, which was the president who was projecting great images.
And then in any case, the post-Civil War deflation caused enormous suffering. That was the cross of gold that Brian was actually legitimately complaining about. If we had redefined the dollar according to the post-Civil War prevailing price level, we would not have had any of that. We could have just resumed. And by the way, as someone much smarter than me once said, the only thing we learned from history is that we never learned from history. So in 1925, I think it was, when Winston Churchill was the chancellor of the ex-chancellor; he put the pound sterling back on the gold standard at pre-war parody, which caused a massive depression through three quarters of a million people out of work and made him into a political pariah for 10 years. He followed the advice of his central banker, Montague Norman, who told him to repeg at pre-war parody and he ignored Maynard Kings' advice to repeg it at the prevailing level.
Then after World War I, there was a conference in Genoa which they decided to slightly not go to the classical gold standard, but go to the gold exchange standard in which the pound Sterling was treated as an official reserve asset because it was convertible into gold,
But it lacked the automatic adjustment mechanism of the classical gold standard. Under the classical gold standard, if the price of gold went up by a penny or two, the monetary authorities would stop printing money and went down by a penny or two, they would start printing money. It was a very elegant system, which Robert Mundell, the father of supply side economics, talks about it at length in his 1999 Nobel Prize acceptance speech called The Reconsideration of the 20th Century. If you haven't read it, there's a treat line in store for you there. But Rueff, Luis Lehrman's mentor, Lewis Lehrman was my mentor, said that the gold exchange standard was a grotesque caricature of the gold standard, but people missed the distinction. And so my parents, God rest their souls, when I asked what caused the Great Depression, they said, "The gold standard." The gold standard had been out of business for a good decade
This fake gold standard, the gold exchange standard was there in its place. So, there really is a very rich history, but there's on fatal flaw and that is the classical gold standard doesn't need PhD economists to work. And so the whole economics profession doesn't particularly like it because it renders them irrelevant, at least when it comes to monetary economics. And so the experts are very hostile to the gold standard because it… And so the people that the politicians go to to say, "What should we do? " Surprise, surprise, you should do what we tell you to do,
Not what the gold standard says. So, in part, I'm trying to resocialize the prestige and the reputation of the gold standard by pointing out Copernicus is great and very easy to read work, by the way, by pointing out Newton's contribution. And Joseph Priestley, who was the father of modern chemistry before he evented oxygen, before that we all had to brief Lagestan was also a big advocate of the gold standard. So it has a very, very profound dignified scientific provenance in ways that macroeconomics, which Hayek indicted as scientism in his Nobel Prize speech simply lacks. And so I'm doing my little bit to try to persuade people like your listeners to call up their congressmen or congresswoman or write letters and say, "Why aren't we restoring the gold standard?" That is the solution proven historically over and over and over again to the affordability crisis. It will get economic growth roaring again and it will stabilize the price of everything.
So, Michael, I'm counting on you to pester your listeners and your devoted followers to actually take action. If they want, they can go to Amazon.com and buy my copy of on the Minting of Money. It's not terribly expensive. They can get a kindle, they can get a paperback, they can get a hardcover if they want to bone up on this a little bit. And preferably buy two copies, my royalties are paltry. So this is not a mercantile sentiment on my part. One to send to their congressmen, one to keep and one to send to their congressmen. The only way that we can set matters to write is if we the people get out of the elect neglect and reject motivation, which is currently what we're doing and use our citizen power, which is enormously powerful. We're the stockholders of this corporation, but if we ignore them and we don't give guidance to our elected representatives, we've got nobody to blame but ourselves.
Mike Maharrey: I'm so glad you said that and I really appreciate the fact that you kind of wrapped up the discussion with a call to action because that is so very important. So consider this audience pestered and we will continue to do so. Okay.
Ralph Benko: Well, I'm pestering you. I'm expecting you to contact your congressperson and send them a copy of Minting of Money. If you're too broke to afford one, I'll send you a complimentary two copies, one for your library and one for your member of Congress.
Mike Maharrey: Well, I can handle the cost and I'm not sure that my Congresswoman has the mental capacity to grasp it, but I'll do my best. We'll try to educate her.
Ralph Benko: Let me tell you, don't denigrate these people, okay? They are where they are because they are really good at reading the room. If they're not hearing from their constituents, they don't care. If they're hearing little flare-ups from their constituents that then go away, or one of the very few hot button issues like gay marriage or abortion or whatever, then if you're not giving them… They're really bright people and if they're hearing responsible, emphatic, but respectful guidance from the folks back home, they will 80% of the time do exactly what you want them to do. So please, they're not morons. They're just heuristically structured to read the room and to do what their voters and their constituent groups want. So I've spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill. I've gotten legislation passed personally without a budget and without any campaign contributions through two Congresses. If you just treat them with respect, but treat them consistently and stop with the elect, neglect, and reject stick, your listeners can go a long way toward putting America back on the right track.
Mike Maharrey: Well, I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that perspective and thank you for the work that you're doing and we will do our best to magnify and extend that. Is there any place else you'd like to send folks… The book is available on Amazon. Is there any place else you'd like to send folks that can follow your work more closely?
Ralph Benko: Well, I was a weekly columnist for Forbes for about eight years and then a weekly columnist for Newsmax for about three years. And I still do occasional freelance stuff, but I'm very preoccupied with my neuromorphic concurrent computer software platform, which is in the process of revolutionizing AI and a bunch of other things. So, I only write occasional columns. So, there's nowhere that they can go that they can reliably find me. But if they want to know more about me, they can go to claude.ai or ChatGPT or Gemini and probably Perplexity and stuff like that. Who is Ralph Benko? It's kind of like, “Who is John Galt,” but advanced into the 21st century and learn more about me. And I'm probably going to regret this, but if they want a free electronic copy of the Copernicus book and they are willing to say, I will call my Congressman, I will follow up.
I will consistently advocate to people in power that they do the right thing, which is restoring the classical gold standard. If they write to me at ralphbenko@gmail.com. If they're willing to make a moral commitment that they will follow through and not just throw their Sabbaths at the TV screen out of frustration, but they will actually contact their congressman and say, "Why aren't we going to the gold standard?" I will send them a free copy, a free electronic copy. I'm very, very busy, if I don't respond immediately, be patient, but I will follow through. Anybody who emails me and asks for a free copy about the minting of money, free electronic copy, I will be sending that to them with They link to Amazon with a request that they give a five star review and maybe even buy an on paper copy.
How's that?
Mike Maharrey: That sounds like a heck of a good deal. Folks should take you up on that. I really do appreciate you taking a little time out of your busy day to talk with me today. It's a great discussion as we head into Independence Day and consider the fact that we have been greatly blessed in this country with a lot of opportunities and a lot more liberty than a lot of people enjoy. We do in fact still have the ability to make a difference within that system. I appreciate that you've given us that reminder today and thank you for the work. So appreciate it. Thank you so much.
Ralph Benko: If I haven't already board you into a stupor, shoot me an email. You've got my email address now. I laid out a complete complex about how 100,000 people, 300,000 would be better, but 100,000 people to activate themselves into local nonpartisan civic leagues to communicate to our members of Congress. Senators are the goalies in the game of politics. I don't care about them. Representatives are the live wires. I will send you a link to my transpartisan review article and you will have the blueprint and maybe you will be the person who saves us from the impending doom.
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Very interesting conversation there and I’m so glad we had Mr. Benko on to share his wonderful insights with us about the importance of sound money, a truth – as we’ve discussed quite a bit here today – that has known by many key figures throughout history.
Well, that will do it for this week. Be sure to check back next Friday for our next Weekly Market Wrap Podcast. And to check out any of our audio programs, including our second podcast, the Money Metals Midweek Memo, just visit <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/podcasts">MoneyMetals.com/podcasts</a> or find them wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And as a big help to us we would ask you to please like, subscribe, download and rate our podcasts. Doing so helps us extend the reach of this material.
Until next time, this has been Mike Gleason, thanks for listening. And from all of us here at <a href="https://www.moneymetals.com/">Money Metals</a>, we wish you and your family a safe, joyful, and patriotic Independence Day. Happy 250th birthday, America!

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