The editor of the fictional Daily Planet, Perry White, would say, "This is a job for Superman."  Clark Kent would overhear him, and Superman would appear.  Well, there is a job for Superman or lesser men, a problem driving our entire economy to certain collapse.

Currency volatility is just one drawback of fiat money because it invalidates normal trade accords.  Former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Paul Volcker has a solution: "A global economy requires a global currency."

Mr. Volcker did not suggest what the global currency should be.  The answer is in the Constitution: gold and silver coins.  Article 1, Section 10 requires the states to make payments of debt using only gold and silver coins.  Keep in mind that this is not another call for the gold standard, which has been used to defraud savers, pensioners, annuitants, etc.; is not in conformity with the Constitution; and has empirically failed.

The advantages of gold and silver coins as money are (1) they are not susceptible to manipulation by any single country or group of countries; (2) they have a history of being used as money going back to biblical times; (3) they have no counterparty risk; and (4) they are in conformity with needs of ordinary people as the stated monetary goal of the American Federation of Labor, the predecessor of the AFL-CIO: "We want money that doesn't depreciate at home or abroad."  Why should our money depreciate?

Most significantly, these coins would transfer power from Washington to the people, a much discussed platitude exercised only in the breach.  The Constitution provides sovereignty over the monetary system to the people, not the Congress, whose monetary powers are distinct and limited to coining and borrowing money, not printing it.

One might well ask: why don't we have the lawful monetary structure promised by the Constitution?  Gold coins as money limit bank money creation and concomitantly limit bank profits and political influence generated from these profits.

The wealth transfer to the banking system since President Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods Treaty – without any vote or debate – has been astonishing.  For the period 2006 through 2016, according to the FDIC, they include distributing $818 billion in dividends to bank shareholders, $1.8 trillion in employee compensation, $4 trillion net interest income on money that banks created out of nothing, and $6.5 trillion in revenues net of interest expense.

This wealth transfer is off the backs of working people on Main Street who earned it and over to banks on Wall Street.  The platitude suggested here is never mentioned by the panjandrums in D.C. or the 3,500 K Street lobbyists representing banks.

Perhaps most significantly, the usurpation of the Constitution's monetary powers and disabilities has led, as written by Justice James McReynolds in his stinging dissent in the 1935 Gold Clause Cases, to the "confiscation of property rights and repudiation of national obligations ... to destroy private obligations ... plain usurpation, arbitrary, and oppressive ... to destroy certain valuable contract rights[.]"

While there ought to have been a judicial remedy since 1935, the usurpation of the Constitution has expanded to the point where the document is almost unrecognizable.  Congress, with some minor exceptions, has been compromised by banks with what are euphemistically called "campaign contributions."  In the words of Senator Dick Durbin: "And they [the banks] frankly own the place [the Congress]."

This is clearly a job for a real-life Superman: President Trump.  He can get started without any new legislation, executive orders, proclamations, conferences, or debates.  All he needs do is to instruct that the IRS change its enforcement of Section 1001 of the Internal Revenue Code to be in conformity with law and a longstanding Supreme Court decision, Thompson v. Butler, 95 U.S. 694, 696 (1877), when dealing with U.S. Gold and Silver Eagles.  They are lawful money and legal tender of the United States; they are not some form of taxable property.  It is settled law that money may not be taxed.

This would again enable the use of gold clauses for contracts requiring future payment, black-letter legislation being already on the books since 1977 and having been affirmed by the courts.  It would have the effect of making moot the Inheritance and Estate Taxes, aka "death taxes."  It would get us on the road to restoring a monetary system that is stable, honest, and in conformity with the Constitution. 

President Trump, are you listening?

Herbert London is president of the London Center for Policy Research and the author of Leading from Behind: The Obama Doctrine and the U.S. Retreat from International Affairs.

Larry Parks is the executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Monetary Education and the author of What Does Mr. Greenspan Really Think?