The Founders Chose Real Money!

From REAL MONEY FOR FREE PEOPLE!

It is wonderful to be commemorate America’s founding and independence 250 years ago this week.  But even with the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the later British surrender at Yorktown to the forces led by George Washington, there were some problems yet to be worked out.  Chief among them was the issue of money.  

Unlike today’s governing classes, the framers of the Constitution were learned men. They watched as people were thrown into ruin, experiencing the tragic “not worth a Continental” sorrows and deprivations of the failed paper money schemes they had inherited from the sudden amalgamation of thirteen separate colonies. 

They also knew the historical precedents of freedom won and lost. So, in creating the new Republic, they went to great lengths to protect our freedom. They constrained the power of the new State at every turn. They divided the State’s power among the branches. They provided checks on each branch. And the framers made clear in the first ten amendments to the Constitution that the central government could only exercise such powers as it was specifically granted. Instead, they forbid powers to the government beginning with their first five words: “Congress shall make no law…” Other prohibitions follow in series: “the right of the people… shall not be infringed”; “the right of the people… shall not be violated”; “the right… shall be preserved.”

Just as they drew up the Constitution with an eye to protecting our freedoms, they sought to protect our wealth. They specifically wrote into the new nation’s Constitution a gold- and silver-based monetary system.

First, they gave Congress the power to coin money. From Article I, Section 8, “Congress shall have Power… to coin Money.”

Not print. Coin.

Since the framers clearly knew the difference, it is hard to believe that proponents of today’s irredeemable, unbacked printing-press and digital money schemes can get away with conflating printed money with coined money. Congressional authority to coin money is correspondingly granted in the same clause that tasks Congress with fixing “the Standard of Weights and Measures.”

In Section 10 they again addressed the monetary system, again without ambiguity: “No state… shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

The deep distrust of paper money was expressed by one delegate to the Constitutional Convention who described any authority for the new government to issue paper money (“to emit bills of credit”) as a threat “as alarming as the mark of the Beast in Revelations.” His concern was justified. Many of the states had issued such bills of credit. Although they could be used to pay taxes due the issuing state, the bills were not redeemable in gold or silver, and so were bound to depreciate like any other fiat money.

The matter was settled.

Nevertheless, we have a paper money system today. Law professor Butler Shaffer once quipped that “the Constitution is that sacred document that prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does.” Despite the framers’ best efforts, today gold and silver are nowhere to be found in the State’s monetary system. That means that today, not only have the founders been betrayed, you have been betrayed as well. The State no longer protects your wealth.

Today it is up to you to protect your own wealth. See us at Republic Monetary Exchange before today’s unbacked money becomes “not worth a Continental.”

Happy Birthday America!