Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story has gotten a lot of Americans thinking about our monetary and banking system. What’s it all about and why is it screwing us? What is its history? As it turns out, we’ve been grappling with the problem since the founding.
Here are a few among many largely unknown statements by prominent early Americans regarding the monetary system and banks:
President Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837) (best known, ironically, for his visage… on the paper $20 bill!), is quoted, regarding the central banks’ utilization of paper money:
The paper-money system and its natural associations—monopoly and exclusive privileges—have already struck their roots too deep in the soil, and it will require all your efforts to check its further growth and to eradicate the evil.
The bankers roused Jackson’s anger to such lengths that he forced their representatives, physically, from the White House:
…You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the Eternal God, I will rout you out.
(And he did.)
But imagine one of our über-scripted, contemporary U.S. Presidents doing that! Yes indeed, Americans did things differently back then! They ran on principle, principles that they weren’t afraid to put into action for the Republic, instead of letting them float hypothetically or as sound-bites like a Clinton or an Obama. Leaders actually…lead…back then? Apparently they did.
This, in contrast to our electric-shock collared, jump-when-we-tell-you, puppet government hat passes for American democracy these days.
Of course the bankers evidently came back in due course…
President Jackson and other American statesmen were assiduously aware of the risks of a centralized banking and monetary system. They sought to balance laissez-faire capitalism with the uniquely American agrarian↔
manufacturing give-and-take that made the early Republic so special; what separated it from the economically restricted and import-dependent (from the African/Asian colonies) Europeans.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter from Monticello, 28 May 1816 (see full-text at http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/7897401/jefferson/jefftaylor.html):
“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies…”
There you are.
From Jefferson in 1816 to Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009, not much has changed; the central bankers are dug-in; entrenched, and they have clawed along on the underbelly with us for 200-plus years.
How much longer?
The above article is inspired in part by Ron Ewart’s The Fed: Forcing Americans into Indentured Servitude, published at http://www.tenthamendmentcenter.com