Gold Mania Goes Mainstream

``Eighty years later, the quest to take down the Fed and revive the gold standard is harder to laugh off. Already this year, in Georgia, a Republican state legislator, Bobby Franklin, has put forward a bill that would require all state residents to use gold and silver coins to pay their taxes — and it has gained surprising support. In Utah, another legislator has proposed allowing residents to mint their own coins and conduct state business with gold. Virginia delegate Bob Marshall is backing the study of a new state currency, as a fail-safe “in the event of a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System.” (The last time Virginians had an official currency other than the dollar was during the Civil War.) Similar proposals are sprouting up in Montana and Idaho, all with the same goal — to free the states from the Fed, which, many gold bugs contend, has been eroding the value of the dollar and laying the groundwork for ruinous inflation.''