The Only Thing Backing the Dollar Now Is Force | William Watkins

The U.S. national debt has reached nearly $40 trillion, and the interest alone now rivals the entire military budget. Constitutional scholar William Watkins argues the dollar today is backed by little more than the coercive power of the government, and that the drift from the founders' hard-money design is why the debt keeps compounding.

Kitco's Jeremy Szafron talks with William J. Watkins, Jr. of the Independent Institute about how the spending guardrails came off (from the founders' "few and defined" powers to the New Deal-era Butler decision), why he calls the 1933 gold call-in unconstitutional, how Civil War greenbacks began the shift to fiat, what the arc from $35 gold in 1971 to $4,100 today says about the dollar, why he believes sound money was meant to make war expensive, and where the risk sits as foreign investors hold nearly a quarter of the debt.

This interview was recorded on July 22, 2026

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