Back in 1935, they seized the gold. But now, digital gold is back.
History is running in reverse.
Ninety years ago, FDR and his fellow travelers rode the 20th century arc of centralization. The chokepoints of then-new technologies for mass media and mass production allowed them to gain control over the population, recruit top talent for their "Brain Trust", and seize the gold after a series of epic legal battles.
Those gold clause cases are forgotten today, but received as much contemporary coverage as 9/11 or the Moon Landing. They were the most important issue in the country, receiving far more coverage than seemingly comparable Supreme Court decisions like Roe vs Wade. Why?
The reason is that the transition from a gold-backed to fiat-backed system was comparable to a soft communist revolution, as the visible seizure of gold laid the groundwork for the invisible seizure of wealth via money printing.
And the classically trained judges at that time fully understood this. Justice McReynolds' then-famous dissent denounced the ruling in the harshest terms, noting that the "Constitution is gone" and the "dollar...may be 30c tomorrow, 10c the next day, and 1c the day following".
McReynolds was right. While the court was forced into a grudging institutional surrender by FDR's threat of court-packing[2], the gold clause case affected every economic decision-maker in the country, as it amounted to the US government explicitly defaulting on its bonds by seizing the assets of its citizens, laying the groundwork for the century of monetary debasement to come.
Now all of that is unwinding. FDR's team could ride the wave of centralizing technology that built giant states around the world. But today, technology favors decentralization — personal computers, end-to-end encryption, mobile phones, and of course cryptocurrency.
Thus, top talent isn't being pulled into a government Brain Trust. It's being brain drained out of the US establishment. And as a consequence the epic legal battles are, on balance, going our way.
It's not just the DC Circuit case. The ideological conflict between decentralization and centralization is reflected in the 3-2 vote for the Bitcoin ETF approval itself. Read Peirce's brilliant pro-liberty approval, Crenshaw's dour denial, and Gensler's reluctant approval.
You'll see echos of the gold clause case, but in reverse. This time, it is the centralized state that is being forced into a grudging institutional surrender. And a surrender it is, as Crenshaw's dissent makes clear:
"...there is no primary regulator for the bitcoin spot markets. Spot bitcoin ETPs will be participating in an unregulated, fragmented, continuously traded, global free-for-all. Even if there were a primary regulator for this market, much of it could be beyond the reach of U.S. regulation..."
Let that sink in! This is what the US establishment truly fears: not Bitcoin as "fraud", but Bitcoin as freedom. They want to rule not just you but the world, so they're scared of the prospect of "a global free-for-all..beyond the reach of US regulation". And they know that any spot ETF will bid up the price of self-custodied Bitcoin outside their control, as Satoshi intended.
So: since FDR's seizure of gold, our lives have revolved around the centralized state rather than the decentralized market. The state has had control for so long we've forgotten what freedom is like. But now gold is slipping out of their hands, and back into yours.
And history is running in reverse.
Shown: Franklin Templeton ($1.5T AUM) added laser eyes to its famous logo for its Bitcoin ETF launch. Fittingly, Franklin is also on the $100 bill.
