The winner of the Maryland Congressional Delegation Investment-Picking Contest, held annually in this space since 2003, "just got lucky" last year, his spokeswoman suggests.
Don't believe it.
Congressman Roscoe G. Bartlett, the great-grandfather, physiological scientist, patent holder and Western Maryland Republican who always has a copy of the Constitution in his pocket, has owned and believed in precious metals at least since the early 1990s.
His stake in what we can assume is gold and similar items surpassed $250,000 last year as the financial system shuddered and people rushed for the only kind of investment politicians and central bankers can't mess up.
Gold rose 30 percent in 2007 to $834 an ounce. Bartlett's wealth rode along with it, according to recently filed disclosures posted online by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Precious metals valued at between $100,000 and $250,000 in Bartlett's 2006 portfolio were worth between $250,000 and $500,000 at the end of 2007. (Federal forms require only a range of value, not precise amounts.)
The stake didn't rise because he bought more. What he already owned just became very hot.
The value of Bartlett's total assets, most of which are real estate, rose from between $1.7 million and $6.5 million in 2006 to between $1.8 million and $6.8 million in 2007.
The congressman declined to be interviewed or give details beyond the "Precious Metals" indicated in his disclosure. But it seems fair to assume he is a classic gold bug who is suspicious of the Federal Reserve and worried about long-term inflation.
Although he has apparently said little publicly about monetary policy over the years, Bartlett is the kind of libertarian, Ron Paul Republican who puts more trust in markets and hard assets than in Washington.
He is a member of the Republican Liberty Caucus along with Paul, who favors abolishing the Federal Reserve (which tries to manage the paper-based money supply through regulatory fiat) and restoring gold and silver as money.
The case for gold is this: Congress and the Fed find it hard to resist goosing the economy with deficit financing and excessive money-supply growth. Over the long term this tends to blow the value of the dollar to smithereens, so the prudent citizen should store up wealth in the manner of yore, before there was a Fed.
