Beyond some rudimentary facts, very little is available in English about the life of J.B. Say.1  He was born in Lyons, France, to middle-class Huguenot parents, and spent most of his early years in Geneva and London.

[The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.]

It is difficult to find a seemingly more unobjectionable term that “equality” is the modern West and America. Equality is often understood to be an unqualified good and part of the American creed: “all men are created equal.”

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.

Several key figures in the Trump administration have declared that the “gold at fort Knox” ought to be audited. I’m all in favor of this, but the gold at Fort Knox is less than sixty percent of the federal government’s gold holdings. The rest of the gold reserves needs to be audited as well.

In a previous essay, I pointed out that it is very likely that the US will isolate itself from the worldwide trading system due to its past—frankly unlawful—actions to steal the assets of other countries and the increasing assault on the purchasing power of the dollar. My goal was to recommend actions that the US government could adopt to reassure its trading partners that neither outright theft of assets or decline in the purchasing power of the dollar could happen.