A House Subcommittee on Financial Services divided its session Tuesday between praising an idea by young students to print parts of the Constitution on U.S. currency and an anti-privacy proposal to rig that same currency with a device that would allow others to keep track of who has had it and for how long.

What’s more, the irony seemed to go over the heads of everyone who participated.

"In just one hearing, they showed us how to educate on the Constitution and how to ignore it,” a startled J. Bradley Jansen, deputy director of the Center for Technology Policy at the Free Congress Foundation, told NewsMax.com.

Every politician knows the public relations value of the "dog and pony show” that puts future voters on display so as to figuratively pat them on their heads for being good citizens.

Chairman Michael G. Oxley, R-Ohio, gaveled the House committee session to order by proclaiming that counterfeiting is done often by organized crime or violent drug gangs.

After greeting the students who were to testify, he welcomed Director Thomas A. Ferguson of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He would soon discuss the ongoing testing of "innovative security features, outside the current traditions of U.S. currency design, for possible application to future generations of currency.”

Outrageous Federal Intrusiveness

Jansen fears that the ideas circulating among crime fighters will venture "outside the current traditions” of the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. You don’t go following people’s money habits to find where they get the currency, where they spend it and how long they keep it. That is the equivalent of burning the house down just to kill a few bugs.

It would have been interesting to learn if the young students from Liberty Middle School and Patrick Henry High School in Ashland, Va., attending that hearing had been taught the Bill of Rights and the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. One assumes that if they want parts of the Constitution printed on our currency, they probably have. If they sat through the entire hearing and witnessed the contradictions, they must have been confused.

Article Four reads: "The right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

As the Center for Technology Policy sees it, the so-called "Mew” chip inserted in currency to trace the habits of citizens is a high-tech violation of that amendment. Pure and simple.

"It is important that the adoption of new technologies to thwart counterfeiting and to increase security are not used as government surveillance programs,” Jansen said.

The Mew chip is small enough that it could easily be implanted in money for security purposes. Bureaucrats at home and abroad "have expressed interest in expanding their power in ways that could easily trample over our liberties,” he added.

Marvin Goodfriend, a senior Federal Reserve official in Richmond, Va., proposed one such plan several years ago.

Stealing Your Money With 'Hoarding Tax'

This proposal would have imposed a tracking device on currency that would automatically reduce its value through a "carry tax” on hoarding.

It would hit you at your bank’s cashier window. If you go there to make a cash deposit, the Mew chip would determine whether you had held on to the cash for period that someone else determined is "too long.” Thus, you could walk up to the window, make a $120 deposit and get back a receipt for only $105.

Goodfriend’s idea sparked such backlash that it was dropped.

Keynesian economists at one time flirted with the idea. Supposedly, their purpose was to boost the economy with greater cash circulation in the event lower interest rates failed to boost the economy.

Does that ring a bell? What is Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan doing right now? Driving interest rates down, down, down, and the economy remains sluggish.

"That’s scary,” said Jansen.