Today is a holiday in the United States. But here at the mobile headquarters of The Daily Reckoning we reckon anyway.

What we are reckoning with today is the price of gold, which shot up again at the end of last week. It doesn't seem to want to go down. Maybe it knows something. Or it is just toying with us.

That gold has a sense of humor is beyond question. We hear it laughing every time Alan Greenspan opens his mouth. You'll recall that Mr. Greenspan was once a close friend of gold. The two were practically bosom buddies. Greenspan wrote that gold was indispensable to an honest money system. Of course, that was before he came to head up the largest and most cocksure central bank in history. Since then, he's hardly had time for his old pal. He has new friends in very high places.

A cynic would scowl and say that Greenspan merely did what he had to do; running a central bank is a government job. The idea is to keep the economy as stable as possible, while you debase the currency; that way, the voters never catch on or complain. Greenspan only did what his employers asked.

But a poet or an artist might smile. He could draw out a deeper meaning from Mr. Greenspan's career, and see in it an almost divine elegance - like the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel or Shakespeare's sonnets. Or, more modestly, he might see it as a short story with a twist at the end.

In the latest reported week, more than $25 billion was added to the nation's money supply. If this were to continue, it would add more new money in 18 months than the present value of all the gold ever mined. Of course, that is only a small part of the picture. While Mr. Greenspan has been on watch, the amount of money, credit, and debts have soared. By almost every measure, more purchasing power has been added since he has held his post at the Fed than under all the U.S. Treasury secretaries, Fed chiefs, and presidents that preceded him combined.

Gold chuckles.

What gold knows is that it is one thing to create money and credit; it is quite another to create real wealth. The first is as easy as running a printing press; the second is hard. You can inspire people to consume wealth by spreading around some spending money. You can even inspire people to make more of the things they consume. Before you know it, you'll have what looks like a boom. But if you could get rich by printing up extra currency, or by borrowing and spending...everybody would do it.

What gold also knows is that the more money and credit you make available, the less each unit of it is really worth. And if you order up enough of it, you can destroy the currency itself.

Gold chuckles knowingly again.

"The Greenspan era will not end on January 31st," says this week's Economist magazine, "Instead, his legacy will linger in the shape of the biggest economic imbalances in American history; a negative household saving rate and a record current-account defitit...Until these imbalances unwind - a process that could prove painful - it is too soon to applaud Mr. Greenspan's record."

Oh no, it's not. We applaud him right now. He is doing for central banking what the Titanic did for ocean cruises and George Armstrong Custer did for the cavalry. With a little luck, soon people won't want anything to do with it. For the first part of his career, he argued that paper money, un-backed by gold, was doomed to failure. For the last 18 years, he has worked to prove it. Not by logic or argument, but by demonstration. He has blown up the biggest bubble in money and credit the world has ever seen. When it pops, Americans will turn to gold. Gold will sell for thousands of dollars an ounce, before the dollar is replaced. And Americans will trust neither "paper" money, nor central bankers for at least the next three generations. We just hope Alan Greenspan lives long enough to see it.

** "You're right," reader Jim Jenness writes. "We should abolish the IRS."

The note comes in response to Addison's trip last week to meet Steve Forbes. (Details forthcoming...)

"If we make the income tax flat, how long will it stay flat? It can come back to bite us again and again and again. Will enactment of a flat income tax make pimps, pornographers, drug dealers, and all the others in the trillion dollar underground economy come out and declare their cash income?"

"Instead of Steve Forbes, you should consult Neal Boortz."

Maybe we'll do both.

*** Here's an interesting note from the Economist. Measured in the usual way - inflation plus unemployment - the misery index in the United States has gone down. Both numbers are low...making the country less miserable than its rivals in Europe, for example.

But the numbers are misleading, say analysts at Merrill Lynch. A proper look at misery should include GDP growth rates, interest rates, budget and trade balances, they say. When they use these additional numbers they get a different result completely: the United States "is the most wretched economy among the big G7 countries."

Who you gonna believe?

By the way, the Merrill Lynch numbers show that our neighbors to the north should be happier than we are. Canada has only half as much misery as the United States, according to the new index.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing.  For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.