Much to the chagrin of the financial elite, gold and silver are reentering the American consciousness and starting to shake the wing nutty image of their recent past.  But it's taken a global financial crisis to get the public's attention – one that could wipe out our nation at almost any moment.

The U.S. government's role in the economy is on a seemingly interminable upward trajectory.  The government's official debt balance that just crossed the $18 trillion mark (with additional unfunded liabilities estimated at more than $100 trillion).  Half the population now lives in households that receive government payments.

Even as private sector jobs disappear and workforce participation rates languish near generational lows, the corporate sector is seemingly thriving.  Corporate profits as a percentage of the economy are at record highs.  Fortune 500 corporations are using cash hoards and cheap financing – not so much to invest in capital assets or business expansion, but to buy back their own shares and send their stock prices higher. 

All these dangerous excesses and distortions are made possible by our free-wheeling fiat monetary system. 

What's occurring now – endless proliferations of paper flowing into the Treasury and banking sector from the central bank – is precisely the sort of thing our Founding Fathers sought to prevent. 

The Coinage Act of 1792 authorized the minting of the nation's money.  It defined a “dollar” in terms of a specific quantity of grains of silver (equivalent to about three-fourths of an ounce).  Few people today even realize that the dollar bills in their pocket were originally intended to be silver. 

The de-monetization of silver was effectively complete in 1965, when the U.S. Mint ceased producing dollars, half dollars, quarters, and dimes containing 90% silver (from 1965 to 1970, half dollars still contained 40% silver).