Lots of bellyaching these days about the "rising price of gasoline."

Believe me, the babe and I fill up our cars regularly, and there aren't any 8-cylinder gas guzzlers in our family. I'm not saying there's no sticker shock as a fill-up passes $35 and occasionally hits $40.

What I am saying is that gas prices aren't up. They're down.

Given today's efficiencies of scale, they could be even lower if the environmental wackos and their government handmaidens hadn't blocked the construction of new refineries and the development of new offshore oil fields for decades. But they are down.

In 1930, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in this country was a nice, round 10 cents. One thin dime. To buy 10 gallons of gasoline, you had to spend a dollar.

Now comes the tough part, for those who aren't accustomed to going through the exercise. Reach into your wallet and see if you can find a piece of greenish paper with fairly high linen content, printed black on the front and green on the back, about 6 by two-and-a-half inches, with the number 'One" on it. Pull it out. What do you have in your hand?

Rolling our eyes, many of us would say, "A dollar bill, Vin, what's your oh-so-tedious point?" Just as we still tend to call call that jangly metallic stuff in there "silver."

We'd be wrong on both counts. Today's cupronickel loose change contains no silver at all. Hasn't since 1967. And a dollar "bill" was a written promise to pay you a dollar on demand, either in silver or in gold. The gold notes disappeared in 1933, the last of the silver notes in or about 1964. What you hold in your hand today is a piece of fake Monopoly money called a "Federal Reserve Note." It's worth about as much as a "note" from your mom that the banker should give you a loan -- less than five cents in any real money.

A "dollar," according to the definitions set by Congress before 1933, the last time they did their job in this regard, was either  .77 ounces of silver, or 1/20th of an ounce of gold.  The old  $20 gold piece  contained some copper to make it harder, but it nonetheless contained .976 ounces of actual gold, which we'll call an ounce to keep things simple.

One twentieth of an ounce of gold -- which is real money -- would have bought you 10 gallons of gasoline in 1930. How much will it buy today?

It now takes 875 of those goofy Federal Reserve "dollar" notes to buy an ounce of gold. (The value of gold is amazingly constant. An ounce of gold would have bought you a nice military rifle, or a nice tailored men's suit with two pair of pants, a century ago. It still will.) One twentieth of that 875 Federal Reserve "dollars" is $43.75. With gasoline at $3.50 a gallon, a gold dollar today will buy you not the 10 gallons it bought in 1930, but 12 and a half gallons.

If you can buy 25 percent more gasoline for the same amount of (real) money, the price of gasoline is down. The problem that makes us think the price is up is that we're trying to buy it with this crummy paper they're passing us at the banks these days instead of real "dollars," which are either made out of gold or silver, or else printed up as "bills" redeemable in gold or silver on demand.

Issuing "bills" that you can't redeem is fraud. The Congresscritters wanted to pull a big confidence scheme and buy lots of votes by promising us lots of free "services," but you simply can't print enough dollars to pull that off if  you're limited by the size of the redeemable gold and silver reserves in the vault.

Since 1913 -- and especially since 1933 -- the "Federal Reserve Board" has solved the problem. They're now printing up new money to cover all those promises at a rate of 16 to 18 percent per year, which is your real rate of inflation, by definition. And you wondered why you've been having trouble making ends meet.

In this way they steal the value of our paychecks and our savings and any stocks we hold in our 401-K plans that are denominated in current U.S. "dollars", and who do they get us to blame? THE OIL COMPANIES!

It's brilliant. The only presidential candidate who was willing to talk about it was Ron Paul. So of course he got laughed out of town as an "irrelevant wacko."

Maybe it's a bad dream and we'll all wake up before we're hauling these "notes" to the store in wheelbarrows to buy bread and milk. And maybe the newsmen will stop worrying about Barack's wacky minister and how Hillary downed a beer and a shot and instead ask if any of these characters is going to shut down the Federal Reserve and put us back on real money.

Any day now.