President of the Heritage Foundation and former Senator Jim DeMint gave an inspiring Keynote speech last night at the conservative Jackson Hole Summit on why the Left’s “debasement of monetary policy over the last century, are a subset of a larger crisis” that our nation’s political and cultural elites are out to “override the wisdom and experience accumulated by mankind over the last several millennia.”

DeMint compared listening to the research presentations by top economic experts about how America can reestablish the type of consistent monetary policy to launch another American Century to a sermon he attended by an old pastor who would read a profound Bible verse from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, would then bow his head and hesitate, then look up and say, “If that doesn’t light your fire, your wood is wet.”

Reminiscing about how President Ronald Reagan battled opposition from the elites, mostly Republican, who sneered at his pro-growth policies as “Voodoo Economics,” DeMint cheered detailed demographic research presented at the conference revealing that millennials hate the Federal Reserve more than any other demographic in the country. In response to the news, DeMint said, “My wood is lit!”

Having worked in Congress as a Representative for three terms and a Senator for two, DeMint said that he came to believe that “America’s monetary system is the Achilles heel of the greatest nation in history and the world’s economic system.”

In the Financial Crisis, when “trillions of new dollars were created out of thin air to bail out big banks, stimulate the economy and buy government debt,” he is still amazed that the political and media class are still unwilling to admit or even discuss how the effort actually undermined the standard of living of the average American.

DeMint saluted the American Policies Project for sponsoring the effort to host a conservative economics forum to counter-program the Kansas City Fed’s Symposium nearby, whose notoriously self-serving presentations seek to justify why the Fed has a duty to secretly make decisions about monetary policy, because the issues are too complicated to seek consensus input from the American people or Congress.

He emphasized “Gaining public support for changing our destructive monetary policy will be challenging, and it will require reformers to speak in terms Americans understand, and for reformers to understand that this will be a long and difficult battle that we can and must win.”

To DeMint, it is painful to realize that during the 101 years of the U.S. Federal Reserve the buying power of the “paper in our wallets that we use to buy things” has been the victim of a central committee in Washington “that has debased its exchange value” by about 96 percent.

He humorously described his teenage view of a dollar bill fifty years ago as:

One dollar equaled three beers and a Slim Jim. These items were in high demand for me, and fortunately in large supply … even though being under age sometimes created challenges to the free market. Today, however, one dollar will not buy one good IPA, and that has a great deal to do with our monetary policy.

DeMint closed by adding that although, “Too often our politics perpetuates broken institutions because all that we see is the obstacle in front of us,” the American people know the actions of the Federal Reserve over the last seven years caused them economic pain, and they are now demanding serious restraint of the Fed’s powers.