Lawson for Congress

I just read a fascinating book, High Cost of Living by Thomas Cushing Daniel, published in 1912 and now digitized thanks to Google Books. It is a fantastic “living documentary” of the history of our monetary and banking system. I especially recommend these quotes from the chapter “Responsibility Rests with the People”, on pages 157-158 of the electronic document or pages 150-151 of the book:

I urge all voters to apply this crucial test to their representatives before supporting them.

Make them commit squarely and unequivocally to these questions. Do you believe Congress should exercise its sovereign power as provided in the Constitution of the United States to create money and regulate the value thereof and control the circulating medium in the interest of the whole people? Or do you believe this sovereign power should be transferred to Banks of Issue?

Their answers will prove conclusively whether they are with the people or against them.

Or do you believe that Banking Corporations should issue a credit substitute and through it control the money and circulating medium of exchange of the people of the United States in their own interest?

Watch your presidential candidate carefully and see that he commits himself clearly on this vital question. It will be a true test of his honesty and fitness for office. Admitted ignorance on the monetary issue should not excuse him. The subject is as old as our government, and if he does not know enough about it now to answer these test questions, he is not qualified to fill the position he aspires to, and should not ask your votes.

If he is unwilling to commit himself before election, he would be able, after becoming President of the United States, to fall in line with the great banking and corporate influences that have controlled the finances and business of the country up to the present time, and enable them to act into law the Morgan-Rothschild-Aldrich Bankers Bill now pending in Congress; or a bill based upon the same principles, which would make permanent the absolute control of all the business of the people of this country by a gigantic money trust.

This story did not end well for the Republicans. Going into the 1912 election, the Republican incumbent president William Howard Taft split the party into conservative and progressive branches. This philosophical divide was cemented by former president Theodore Roosevelt’s forming a separate Progressive party after he challenged Taft for the nomination in 1912. Sure enough, Taft and Roosevelt split the Republican vote, and Wilson was elected.

President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Along with the Federal Reserve, we also receive the sixteenth amendment, Internal Revenue Service, and the income tax. Since the Federal Reserve was created, our dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power, and we send an unprecedented amount of money to foreign central banks as interest payments on a $9.2 trillion national debt.

Perhaps Thomas Jefferson said it best, one hundred years previously:

If the debt which the banking companies owe be a blessing to anybody, it is to themselves alone, who are realizing a solid interest of eight or ten per cent on it. As to the public, these companies have banished all our gold and silver medium, which, before their institution, we had without interest, which never could have perished in our hands, and would have been our salvation now in the hour of war; instead of which they have given us two hundred million of froth and bubble, on which we are to pay them heavy interest, until it shall vanish into air… We are warranted, then, in affirming that this parody on the principle of ‘a public debt being a public blessing,’ and its mutation into the blessing of private instead of public debts, is as ridiculous as the original principle itself. In both cases, the truth is, that capital may be produced by industry, and accumulated by economy; but jugglers only will propose to create it by legerdemain tricks with paper. [emphasis mine]

Letter to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:423

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 11:23 pm and is filed under banking, monetary reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.