Ted Cruz is leading — or at least neck-and-neck — with Donald Trump in Iowa.

One of the reasons for Cruz’s rise in the polls is that Ted Cruz, clearly, is the most conservative candidate in the race.

But is he the most conservative man in the world? Apparently not.

Apparently there are two men — including yours truly! — now leading him for the prestigious title.

One hopes this does not make him vulnerable come Caucus Day.

Last Sunday, I was startled and delighted to have been called “The Second Most Conservative Man in the World” — for my advocacy of the gold standard — by The Washington Post Magazine‘s Pulitzer Prize winning card-carrying member of the Columnist Party, Gene Weingarten.

Ted Cruz, shockingly, did not come in first!

Weingarten, writing of his visit to the annual Heritage Foundation Media Gala last December:

I had found nothing to make fun of until I met The Second Most Conservative Man in the World.

Ralph Benko, who happens to be a funny guy, is a senior economics adviser to a righty group called the American Principles Project. Ralph’s big issue turns out to be demanding that the United States return to … the gold standard! Now I don’t want to be snarky, but I believe the most prominent American most recently defending the gold standard was Grover. No, not Norquist … Cleveland. In 1896. It was such an archly conservative stance even back then that Cleveland was most famously opposed by none other than William Jennings Bryan, who went on to fulminate against teaching evolution in the schools.

Then Ralph gleefully informed me that he was only the second most conservative person in the world. As luck would have it, the most conservative person in the world also happened to be at the Heritage Foundation Christmas party, as Ralph’s guest! Benyamim Tsedaka, 71, is an Israeli scholar, who, Ralph said, “is so conservative, he is pre-modern! A stegosaurus.”

Senator Cruz, as you know, I am a great admirer of yours, not least due to your advocacy of the gold standard. And I have no doubt you can pass me in the rankings and take back the title you, not I, truly deserve.

That said… as the immortal Virgil wrote, Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore (Georgics 3.284-5), which as you, Senator, surely know — but for the benefit of others — means:

But meanwhile it flees: time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail.

This calls for even more advocacy for the gold standard on your part, Senator!

It would be an honor to fall to the status of “Third Most Conservative Man in the World” behind you. What might that take?

More gold standard advocacy!

Ralph Benko, internationally published weekly columnist, co-author of The 21st Century Gold Standard, lead co-editor of the Gerald Malsbary translation from Latin to English of Copernicus’s Essay on Money, is American Principles Project’s Senior Advisor, Economics.