Saturday, May 29, 2010

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, OPINION PAGE

BY SETH LIPSKY

Edwin Vieira Jr. ( B.A, M.A. & Ph.D from Harvard) escorts a visitor through his gray, clapboard home at the north end of the Shenandoah Valley, and into the woodworking shop. Laid out on a table is his latest project, a handcrafted doorframe, each joint precisely squared and fitted. Nearby, on the wall of the stairway leading to his study, is a copy of his real obsession: the U.S. Constitution.

I've driven to Virginia from New York to visit Mr. Vieira, a retired chemist and a lawyer, because I've been reading his magisterial, 1,800-page book called "Pieces of Eight." It is a two-volume treatise on the monetary.

He and other sound-money activists are sometimes dismissed as cranks, given the Supreme Court sustained paper money as legal tender in 1871(Knox v. Lee). But with the value of the dollar now at a historic low and everyone from the communist Chinese to the United Nations fretting about the need for a new world reserve currency, he is  starting to look less like a crank than a prophet." ....... The finished book begins with a quote from Justice Stephen J. Fields dissent in a legal tender case. Dooley v. Smith (1871), warning that arguments in favor of legl tender paper currency "tend directly to break down the barriers which separate a government of limited powers from a government resting in the resting in the unrestrained wil of Congress."

Mr. Viera believes the Federal Reserve is unconstitutional on, among other points the same grounds that FDR's National Recovery Adminstration was found unconstitutional-namely that Congress had delegated too much of its own law -making responsibilities. . ...and now we are at a "race against time"

You can read the full interview with Mr. Vieira, Jr. in Saturday's WSJ.