Gold Is Not a Relic: Ken Ivory on Why Sound Money Matters Now | PoliticIt Podcast

In this version of the PoliticIt Podcast Senator John D. Johnson sits down with Ken Ivory, a Utah State Legislator representing District 39 and chair of the Utah Federalism Commission, frames a debate about money that reaches far beyond Utah politics. His argument combines constitutional history, lived experience in international economics, and recent legislative efforts to create a practical, gold-backed financial alternative for state governments, vendors, and citizens. The conversation covers three overlapping themes: why money matters to liberty, how monetary policy has changed since the 18th century, and what a modern, transactional form of sound money could look like in practice.

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From small-town patriotism to an international wake-up call

Ivory’s political instincts have a personal origin story. Growing up in central Utah, early emotional responses to the American flag and the founding generation led to an abiding interest in the country’s founding ideas. Those early impressions were sharpened by two very different international experiences: a mission in Guatemala and several years living and working in Japan.

The Guatemala episode offered a vivid lesson in how differently people around the world perceive the United States. During a protest where an effigy of Uncle Sam was burned, Ivory was singled out because he looked American. That moment punctured any naive belief that “everyone wants to be American” and set him to thinking about global perceptions and competing national narratives.

Then, in Japan in 1989, working in the international relations department of the mayor’s office in Osaka, Ivory encountered a very different kind of wake-up call. He was handed China’s long-term strategic plan—and told bluntly that economic and political competition with the United States was inevitable. The document predicted a multifaceted contest that would not only be military but cultural, legal, political, and economic. It named control of critical resources, rare earth elements, and the dollar itself as strategic targets.

That exposure to a strategic global playbook reshaped Ivory’s worldview. He returned to study economics and law with a renewed focus on institutions, regulation, and the mechanics of power. His legal career, including time in a Las Vegas firm with prominent political ties, further anchored an interest in constitutional structures and federalism.

Federalism, constitutional grounding, and why states matter

Ivory’s engagement with law and constitutional theory is not academic. He describes sessions of dedicated study—reading the Federalist Papers and founders’ statements—that filled the gaps he felt law school left. Those readings reinforced his belief that the Constitution was not a dusty relic but a framework that prescribes limited and enumerated powers, including very specific language about money.

That constitutional mindset also underpins his approach to federalism. An episode from 2013 illustrates the gap he sees between constitutional theory and modern practice. When Utah sought to clarify state versus federal law enforcement jurisdiction following high-profile standoffs, the state’s assistant attorney general expressed a surprising deference to federal supremacy: the court hearing revealed uncertainty about whether states could check federal power. The experience motivated Ivory to create a commission focused on federalism and continuing education for lawmakers.

The Constitution, the coin, and the idea of money as a standard

Ivory’s core contention places money alongside the more familiar standards we accept without a second thought: inches, pounds, and measures. He emphasizes that the Constitution and the early Republic treated money as a fixed, measurable standard rather than a floating policy instrument.

Two constitutional provisions are central to his argument:

• Article I, Section 8, Clause 5: grants Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value.
• Article I, Section 10: restricts states to use only gold and silver coin as legal tender for the payment of debts.

Ivory highlights a tangible relic of that era: the Spanish silver dollar commonly circulating in 1787. The Coinage Act of 1792 later codified the dollar as 371.25 grains of pure silver, with a corresponding gold standard. Money, in this reading, is a measurement system—an agreed weight and purity—used to measure value across time and transactions.

Money is nothing but a standard by which we measure our liberty, our effort, our property, our means of exchange.

When standards are steady, citizens can plan, save, and contract with predictable expectations. If standards shift dramatically—if the definition of a dollar is changed from an objective ounce-and-purity standard to a floating, policy-driven number—then the ability to store value and plan for the future is undermined.

How the standard changed: from specie to fiat

The transition away from a fixed metal standard was uneven and driven by political and fiscal pressures. Ivory walks through the key phases:

1. Early Republic: money as a metal-defined standard tied to silver and gold.
2. Civil War and the greenback era: an initial disruption when government printed paper currency in response to crisis.
3. 1930s and Roosevelt: further movement away from strict specie constraints.
4. 1971 Nixon shock: a decisive break when the U.S. effectively ended the convertibility of dollars into gold for foreign governments, closing the “gold window.”

The Nixon-era policy shift was a response to mounting fiscal pressure and international demands for gold. Ivory tells the dramatic anecdote of foreign powers—France in particular—sending hard currency demands that revealed how much the United States had expanded the money supply. The resulting policy decisions included temporarily closing the gold window and forging the petrodollar compact with OPEC in the mid-1970s.

That deal essentially replaced gold with role of the dollar for oil transactions, secured by strategic alliances and military assurances. The petrodollar helped preserve the dollar’s international primacy even after the formal gold standard ended.

Recent tectonic moves: petrodollar unraveling and new currency initiatives

Ivory stresses that changes have accelerated recently. Nations responded to aggressive U.S. financial measures—sanctions, exclusion from systems like Swift, and seizure of assets—by accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar.

Two developments he highlights are especially consequential:

• Saudi Arabia’s shift to sell oil in alternatives to the dollar, including the Chinese yuan and gold. That move signals a weakening of the petro-dollar compact that once underpinned dollar-denominated global trade in energy.
• The BRICS coalition’s announcement of a new unit, reportedly backed in part by gold and by members’ currencies. The plan aims to create an alternative settlement vehicle to the dollar-dominated international system.

Those moves matter because global confidence in a currency depends on both macroeconomic restraint and network effects: other nations must be willing to accept a currency for trade and reserves. When large producers and trade blocs offer alternatives, pressure on the dollar increases.

Consequences at home: inflation, housing, and wages when the standard drifts

When money is easy to create, the price consequences filter through the economy. Ivory emphasizes that expanding the money supply is another way of taxing citizens. Rather than raising explicit tax rates, governments can dilute the purchasing power of existing incomes and savings through inflation.

To make this point concrete, he compares prices expressed in dollars to the same goods expressed in ounces of gold. Two striking comparisons:

• Housing: A typical home on Utah’s Wasatch Front cost roughly $20,000 to $24,000 around 1971. In gold terms, that corresponded to about 680 grams of gold. Today, nominal dollar prices are much higher, but the same amount of gold from 1971 would purchase around four houses today, with substantial value left over. In gold terms, homes have not become more expensive; dollars have lost buying power.
• Wages: An average wage of $47,000 in 2000—if measured in gold ounces—would be equivalent to several hundred thousand dollars in today’s nominal currency. Yet modern wages have not scaled commensurately in real terms adjusted for a consistent store of value.

These examples illustrate that changing the unit of account makes wealth accumulation and intergenerational planning harder. Households that save in dollars find their purchasing power eroded over time. Those who access capital early—banks, large borrowers, and entities close to the credit spigot—capture the initial benefits of newly created money, leaving wage earners lagging behind.

What Utah has already done: rainy day fund and the first legislative steps

Ivory’s legislative strategy relies on pragmatic, incremental changes at the state level.

In 2024, the Utah legislature passed a bill allowing up to 10 percent of the state’s rainy day fund to be invested in gold. This was not symbolic. It created a modest, constitutional-aligned exposure to a store of value that performed strongly over the subsequent year—Ivory cites 75 to 80 percent growth on that allocation in a single year.

The logic of that move is straightforward: treat some portion of public savings as a hedge against fiat debasement. A diversified rainy day fund that includes precious metals can help insulate budgets from currency inflation and stabilize purchasing power for long-term obligations.

The transactional gold bill: what it proposed and why it matters

In the following year, the legislature introduced a more ambitious proposal: transactional electronic gold. The intent was to create a system where citizens, vendors, and government contractors could hold and transact using digital representations of physical gold and silver vaulted in the state. Technically, the bill was structured as an RFP for a state-approved provider and included a set of regulatory safeguards.

Key operational features proposed:

• Vaulting in Utah: physical metal would be stored in insured, audited vaults located within the state’s jurisdiction.
• Full redeemability: account holders would be able to redeem their digital balance for physical metal or cash on demand.
• Regulatory transparency: providers would be subject to audits, insurance requirements, and rules ensuring assets backing digital balances existed and matched customer claims.
• Payment rails: the system could be used at point-of-sale, with debit-card-style functionality for everyday purchases or large transactions such as real estate.
• Optional participation: vendors contracting with the state could elect payment in gold or silver rather than dollars, creating voluntary choice rather than mandatory re-denomination.

The bill drew a broad study committee, including former Federal Reserve leadership, CFOs from major financial institutions, congressional staff, and banking association representatives. The committee’s conclusion was not necessarily unanimous agreement that the dollar is doomed. Rather, many members—including skeptics—supported the principle of consumer and vendor choice.

Stablecoins, treasuries, and competing visions

Ivory contrasts the gold-backed transactional proposal with stablecoins built on Treasury obligations. Stablecoins gained legal clarity through federal legislation designed to enable tokenized dollars. In practice, many stablecoins are collateralized by short-term U.S. treasuries. That design deepens demand for Treasury issuance and keeps value anchored to federal debt instruments.

Ivory argues that stablecoin structures effectively channel more private capital into treasuries, increasing demand for a federal liability that is itself subject to dilution through future government borrowing and printing. By contrast, an electronic gold system ties digital media of exchange to an asset with a historically proven store of value and a finite supply profile.

The veto: political dynamics and timing

Despite wide legislative support—unanimous passage in the House and a near-unanimous result in the Senate in the initial session—the governor vetoed the transactional gold bill. Ivory describes the veto as unexpected and, from his perspective, premised on correctable technicalities or misunderstandings.

Reported reasons included concerns that the bill favored a particular vendor, procedural naming issues, or questions about which state department would administer rules. Ivory notes these were addressable via minor edits or administrative clarifications. He also suggests intra-legislative horse trades and last-minute negotiations complicated the override effort.

The political consequence was unusual: other states moved quickly to adopt similar frameworks, with governors in Florida, Texas, and several other states signing comparable bills shortly after Utah’s veto. Those states seized the public stage to champion choice in monetary media, leaving Utah—despite having been first to craft the language—on the sidelines temporarily.

Refiling, new bills, and a broader strategy

Ivory’s response was not to retreat. The bill was refiled with refinements. Additional, complementary bills were proposed to expand the infrastructure around a state-level gold economy:

• Purchasing department gold reserves: Add a small vendor fee to state purchasing cooperatives—about one percent—and invest that fund in gold. Because governments purchase common supplies continually, this is a built-in, predictable hedge that would compound in real purchasing terms as gold appreciates relative to fiat currency.
• Taxes paid in gold: Allow mining companies, particularly those working with rare earth or critical elements, to remit state-level taxes in gold. This would create a natural revenue stream denominated in sound money and reduce the state’s exposure to fiat depreciation.

Those measures are designed to be pragmatic and cumulative. A state can begin small—10 percent of a rainy day fund, a modest purchasing reserve fee—and build institutional expertise before expanding transactional capabilities.

Operational safeguards and the electricity of trust

One advantage of the proposed Utah model is that it emphasizes auditable, physical backing. A gold-backed digital instrument is only as credible as the custody and auditing mechanisms that support it. The legislative language aimed to embed key safeguards:

• Insured custody to protect against theft or loss.
• Regular independent audits to confirm physical holdings match account liabilities.
• Redemption rights on demand so holders could convert digital balances into physical metal or cash.
• Local vaulting to ensure jurisdictional control and oversight.

That mix of features aims to combine the convenience of digital payments with the assurance of a tangible store of value. Compared with algorithmic or purely ledger-based tokens, the appeal is straightforward: if audits show a one-to-one match between tokens and metal, the system inherits the historical properties of precious metals while offering modern payment rails.

Democratizing savings: small contributions, long-term protection

Ivory frames the proposal as a democratizing tool. The mechanics are nothing fancy: individuals could redirect modest weekly savings into a stable store of value. A worker putting aside $5 or $50 per week into a gold-backed account would, in theory, preserve purchasing power across time periods when dollars depreciate.

That accessibility matters. When money is being created rapidly, those first in line to receive new money capture price advantages. Wage earners and savers at the end of the distribution chain see prices rise by the time new dollars trickle to them. Allowing ordinary people to participate in a sound-money store of value levels the playing field.

We don’t need a minimum wage. We just need sound money.

That provocative statement captures the idea: measured in a stable unit tied to metal, historical wages and purchasing power look very different. Ivory uses the example of pre-1965 U.S. quarters, which contained 90 percent silver. At a time when five quarters equaled the minimum wage, those quarters now have collector and melt values that far exceed their face value, implying the old minimum wage had much higher real purchasing power when measured in a stable store of value.

Economic and political objections—and responses

Any meaningful change to monetary arrangements provokes pushback. Common objections and the responses offered by Ivory and supporters include:

• It favors the wealthy. Response: The design is voluntary and accessible. Small savers can participate. Institutional allocations are limited (for example, a 10 percent cap on rainy day funds), preventing speculative concentration without broad consumer uptake.
• It undermines monetary policy. Response: States cannot and are not attempting to replace national monetary policy. The proposal is about private choice and parallel media of exchange for contractual settlement. It is a hedge, not a proposal to supplant the Federal Reserve.
• Operational complexity and vendor risk. Response: That is precisely why the bill emphasizes audits, insurance, and local vaulting. The RFP process and regulatory oversight aim to limit vendor capture and ensure transparency.
• Legal conflicts with federal supremacy. Response: The approach is framed as voluntary and complementary to federal systems. Allowing state contractors and vendors to choose payment in an audited store of value is within the historic scope of state authority over contracting and treasury operations.

Why a state-led approach can work

Ivory argues that states have both the constitutional authority and practical incentives to experiment. Several advantages of a state-centered rollout include:

• Regulatory agility. States can design tailored custody, audit, and redemption requirements without waiting for federal rulemaking.
• Localized oversight. Physical vaulting within state jurisdiction simplifies enforcement and reduces cross-border custody complexity.
• Natural demand sources. State purchasing, vendor payments, and tax regimes create guaranteed flows that support the viability of a transactional gold instrument.
• Market signaling. Successful state experiments can provide a model for other states and inform federal policymakers.

The political argument is also strategic. By taking incremental steps—reserve allocations, vendor options, purchase-fee hedges—states can build institutional competence and data that would make broader adoption a natural next step.

Rare earths, mining taxes, and building a local ecosystem

One of the legislative ideas complements transactional money with local industry policy. Utah is home to gold production, refining, and mining activity. Ivory notes the ironic fact that Utah’s largest export by dollar value is gold, and its largest import is also gold because of refining flows.

Allowing mining companies to pay certain taxes in gold does more than create a gold revenue stream for the state. It aligns the state’s balance sheet with the asset base of its key industries, helping stabilize public finances against currency depreciation and creating an ecosystem where mining operations, refining, vaulting, and fintech services can co-locate and grow.

Comparing gold-backed digital instruments, Bitcoin, and stablecoins

Ivory carefully distinguishes several forms of non-fiat money:

• Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies: decentralized, algorithmically limited, and not backed by physical commodities. Price volatility remains a major barrier for everyday use as a unit of account.
• Stablecoins backed by treasuries: offer digital convenience but reinforce demand for government debt and keep value tied to fiat instruments.
• Gold-backed digital instruments: combine digital payment convenience with a historically stable store of value rooted in scarcity and physical custody.

He presents transactional, vault-backed gold as a pragmatic middle path: familiar monetary characteristics (store of value, recognized historical pedigree) plus modern digital usability. That hybrid model aims to avoid the volatility of crypto while also sidestepping the implicit support and demand-stimulating effects of treasury-backed stablecoins.

Broader geopolitical stakes

The monetary debate is not solely technical or local. It sits at the intersection of geopolitics, national security, and economic sovereignty. Ivory links fighting over rare earth elements, strategic mining, and currency arrangements to the same contest he encountered in the late 1980s in Japan: nations pursue long-term plans to secure resources, markets, and monetary influence.

When major producers or blocs pivot away from the dollar—or when alternative reserve units backed partially by gold arise—that weakens the unique advantages the dollar has enjoyed since the Second World War. For states and citizens, the practical consequence is less stable purchasing power and increased exposure to external monetary shocks.

What success looks like: metrics and milestones

Concrete measures for assessing whether a gold-backed, transactional approach is working would include:

• Percentage of state reserves allocated to gold and the year-over-year real purchasing power preserved compared with dollar-only reserves.
• Number of vendors and state contractors electing to be paid in gold-backed digital instruments.
• Audit results confirming on-chain or ledger balances match vault holdings with no material discrepancies.
• Usage metrics for the payment rails—daily transactions, average ticket sizes, and redemption activity for physical metal withdrawals.
• Impact on state purchasing costs for routine items when a purchasing reserve in gold is used to stabilize prices over multi-year contracts.

Practical next steps for policymakers

1. Start small with reserve allocations. Maintain strict caps and transparent reporting to evaluate performance.
2. Design robust custody and audit rules before authorizing transactional functionality.
3. Use RFP processes to create competition among providers and to avoid single-vendor lock-in.
4. Phased rollouts—begin with vendor payments and state contracting, then expand to broader public adoption if systems prove secure and useful.
5. Coordinate with industry stakeholders—mining, refining, banking, and fintech—to foster a local ecosystem.

Addressing risks without losing the experiment

No policy is without risks. The key is to calibrate them and to make the experiment reversible and transparent. State lawmakers can limit exposure, require immediate redeemability, and impose strict custody audits. Those mechanisms reduce systemic risk while allowing innovation to proceed.

Ivory’s legislative approach emphasizes choice rather than compulsion. Citizens and vendors would opt in. That voluntary structure limits potential spillovers into broader macro systems while still providing real-world tests.

A concluding perspective: money, liberty, and institutional trust

At the heart of this agenda is a philosophical claim: money is intimately connected to liberty. If money is a standard by which individuals measure savings, labor, and contracts, then altering that standard through policy-driven dilution has distributional effects and implications for intergenerational equity.

Ivory’s prescription is both constitutional and pragmatic. Constitutionally, the founders set a metal-based standard in a context of paper money abuses and cross-state confusion. Practically, modern states can use their contracting power, reserve buffers, and jurisdictional authority to pilot alternatives—vault-backed digital instruments that preserve purchasing power and provide citizens with a real choice.

Whether that approach becomes a major shift or a localized hedge depends on political will, operational discipline, and how the international system evolves. The immediate task for policymakers is to design transparent, reversible, and accountable systems that protect ordinary savers while testing a historically grounded alternative.

For communities that worry about savings, housing affordability, and the long-term purchasing power of wages, a local, audited, gold-backed option is more than a policy novelty. It is a tool to stabilize futures and to restore a degree of predictability to the most fundamental unit of economic life: the money in people’s pockets.

Supporters have created a resource hub at iggovern.us to gather materials, model legislation, and explanations for citizens interested in constitutional money matters and state-level experimentation.

Key takeaways

• Money functions as a standard: historical metal standards provided predictable units of account that aided long-term planning.
• Fiat expansion shifts distribution: printing money redistributes purchasing power to early recipients and away from ordinary savers.
• State-level experiments can be practical: limited reserve allocations, audited vaulting, and vendor choice provide a low-risk pathway to test alternatives.
• Operational safeguards matter: insurance, audits, and redeemability are essential to maintain trust in any gold-backed digital system.
• Geopolitics amplifies stakes: moves away from the dollar and new international payment units backed by gold increase the urgency for hedges.

Further reading and action

Engaged citizens and policymakers should review the constitutional clauses that govern money, study custody and audit practices for vault-backed assets, and evaluate pilot programs’ empirical results. Measured experimentation—with rigorous transparency and well-defined limits—offers a way to test whether a modern, digital, gold-backed medium of exchange can deliver the stability many feel the dollar has lost.

Gold Is Not a Relic: Ken Ivory on Why Sound Money Matters Now | PoliticIt Podcast

In this episode of the PoliticIt Podcast, host John D. Johnson sits down with Ken Ivory—former Utah legislator and Chair of the Federalism Commission—for a wide-ranging conversation on sound money, constitutional authority, and Utah’s effort to lead the nation on gold-backed alternatives.

This is not a theoretical debate. It is a grounded discussion about how money works, why the Founders cared so deeply about it, and what happens when the standard erodes.

Ivory draws on personal experiences abroad—including time in Guatemala and Japan—to explain how global power, currency dominance, and long-term strategy shape nations. He connects those lessons to the U.S. departure from gold, the rise of fiat money, the petrodollar system, and the inflationary pressures Americans feel today in housing, wages, and savings.

The conversation also dives deep into Utah’s recent legislative actions, including:
• Allowing a portion of the state’s rainy day fund to be invested in gold
• A proposed (and vetoed) bill to allow transactional, digital gold backed by physical metal vaulted in Utah
• Why other states like Texas and Florida are moving quickly in this space
• How gold-backed systems differ from stablecoins and cryptocurrencies
• Why state-level experimentation matters constitutionally and practically

At its core, this episode asks a simple but profound question:
If money is a standard—like inches or pounds—what happens to liberty, savings, and planning when that standard keeps changing?

Whether you are concerned about inflation, federal overreach, housing affordability, or the long-term purchasing power of wages, this conversation offers a constitutional and practical lens on one of the most important economic questions of our time.

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⏱️ Topics Covered
• Why the Founders tied money to gold and silver
• How the U.S. left the gold standard—and why it matters
• Inflation as a hidden tax on savers and workers
• Gold vs. fiat money vs. stablecoins
• Utah’s role as a national laboratory for sound money
• Federalism, state authority, and economic resilience
• Global shifts away from the dollar and what comes next

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