I’m all in favor of a thorough and public audit of the US’s gold reserves. This includes the gold, not only at Fort Knox, but also at the other gold storage facilities at West Point, Denver, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ron Paul was right when, in 2011, he tried to force the federal government to be transparent about its gold holdings.

Virtually everything the US government owns is stolen, whether it’s stolen from Americans or from foreign individuals and institutions. This is certainly true of the federal government’s gold hoard. It’s important to know how much gold the US government owns for the same reason it’s important to know how much of any asset—land, buildings, or cash—the government owns. States can easily convert wealth into power, and it’s good to know how much wealth the regime directly controls. That is, it is important to have a full and accurate account of just how much the US government has stolen. Moreover, we don’t know if the US Treasury or the Federal Reserve is using that gold for secret political transactions it isn’t telling us about. We already know the Fed makes secret loans it obstinately refuses to make public. An audit is very much in order.

All that said, however, let’s not overstate the importance of the US gold reserve. The gold reserve is not a source of untapped wealth that can be used to balance the budget, pay off the federal debt, or fix the US’s current downward spiral into fiscal insolvency. At only $750 billion, the value of the gold reserve is much too small for any such thing.