Posted on 01/10/2007 10:45:15 AM PST by presidio9
Prohibiting states from creating paper money was necessary in order to regulate the value of money on a national basis. It was a necessary requirement to help create a more perfect Union.
Merely because the basis for money HAD been gold and silver there was no possibility that that would continue to be the case. The financial history of capitalism is one of the attempts to escape the restrictions and deflationary bias of the metallic standards. Arguing against the removal of thoses monetary restriction is no more productive than arguing against the Wind. Metals will never be the base of a world wide monetary system agains nor should they be. They are nothing more than commodities and have value merely for that reason.
Experience during revolutionary upheavals in France or the United States are not the general way monetary authorities have operated. During our revolution there was insufficient gold and silver in the country to allow the War be fought. No one believed that method could be used indefinitely. Western Central banking since its initiation has been pretty responsible as long as Leftist forces have been kept away from it.
Incidentally your mentioning hoarding of gold and that fact alone makes gold an unacceptable means of providing the money supply for a growing economy. It is another means of inappropriately deflating the economy.
"Dishonor. Is that what you advocate? In the case of 1923 I can hardly blame them...Keynes warned it might lead to another war." Interesting since it was Keynes who warned the European powers during the Peace Conference of the great danger in punative financial measures against Germany and even wrote a book called the Economic Consequences of the Peace. "Other times money is simply printed to finance the aggrandizement of government officials and their empire at the expense of the peasantry." Silly class warfare rhetoric has no place in a serious conversation.
"What we have a superstitious attachment to is not gold but the idea that a man's property is his own, that his savings should be secure from man made inflation, that exchange implies value for value, that individual and national debt freedom is a good thing, that a commoditity money is, as opposed to borrowed, a free tool to estimate the value of other things, store wealth, and facilitate exchange." That is a tall order which a metallic standard would do more to endanger than to create. Metallic standard its likely hoarding and unacceptably slow growth of supply simply would slow economic activity too much and endanger all democracies. Value for value is NOT established when one side of the equation can be diminished for many arbitrary reasons. Having the value of American money dependent upon the jewelry preferences of Indian women is unacceptable.
Jefferson was a superb rhetoritician whose actions did not often match his talk. I will amend my statement in that he did do good work in prohibiting slavery in the NW Territories under the Confederation. However, the only slaves he freed were members of the beloved Hemmings family.
During the Revolutionary times it is safe to say that almost all slaveholders believed slavery to be morally wrong, only relatively good and something to put an end to in the passage of time. I mean, after all, its presence here was blamed on the King in the Declaration. By the time of the Civil War that attitude had changed into one praise for slavery as an absolute good.
While impossible to prove I do believe Jefferson and Sally were lovers and had children. There are many indications of the truth of this and the births of her children are consistent with his comings and goings to Monticello.
However, I do not believe it to be an explotative relationship but one of love and respect within the bounds of their social lives. Sally was very beautiful by universal assent and being his wife's half sister must have reminded him of her. His promise never to remarry may have played a role in this as well. It is also true that the Hemings were more White than Black and were very accomplished people. Two of her sons had been trained on the violin, the instrument Thomas loved playing until his broken wrist.
I do know for a FACT that the Jeffersonians have used very duplicitous and deceptive arguments and methods to suppress this story. Any books attempting to disprove this I would be happy to read. None of my thinking is affected by the recent DNA tests.
Other than the modern DNA tests and the fact that Callendar used Sally to smear Tom, out of revenge for lack of promised payment, I have nothing else to use as refutation.
OK. I doubted the story and do not base my belief on Callender though also don't discount it because of him. He was correct about Hamilton's affair with Maria.
Sally was 1/4 black. Her mother was half black. Her children had Jefferson's coloring particularly the red hair. Members of her family were the only ones freed upon his death. Sally was not freed but, under the humane and wonderful laws of Virginia, a freed slave could not remain in the state. So an elderly Sally would hardly have benefitted from being expelled from the only home she had ever known by being freed.
Knowing that the Jeffersonians would have been desperate to refute this story and knowing also their almost unbroken record of mendacity inclines me to believe it as well.
And while I am no fan of Jefferson's personal character, he was one of the more straight laced of the FFs.
Do you completely discount the DNA tests?
Yes, there are some redeeming features in you, you are on FR and have admitted the errors of your past. I shall now give out my third pardon of the week, which happens to be more pardons than I haves previously given out in eight plus years, combined.
Go in peace; believe no more crapola propaganda and conspiracy theories and don't post them to FR either! :-)
Bank Panics were caused by many thing and perfectly sound banks used to fail with great regularity; unfortunately. For a long time, people saw banks and hospitals in the same light...horrors to be shunned at any and all cost. Savings and Loans were alternately seen as good and the worst of the lot.
American PANICS were often not only NOT "brief", but led to quite a few depressions. It was those depressions which lowered prices. We live in a much more stable era and you appear, with your flippant quips about losing your entire wealth and ME GENERATION rant about changing jobs, to be incapable of understanding and appreciating how much better things are today.
Inflation is nothing new.
Having a job with one company and one or two companies ONLY, in one's lifetime, is actually a relatively new phenomenon and discounting farm work, only began in the 20th century and did not make it through all of that. Actually, it wasn't so in the early part of the 20th century and certainly wasn't true at the end of it either.
Better, by far, would be for you to stop trying to debate things in a highly emotional way and deal with historical fact, sans emotion. You really know far less than you think you do and no, you still aren't discussing thing with much solid, factual info.
I am seldom wrong, but it does happen to us all; eventually. Not a one of us is "perfect"! :-)
One of the most...FDR is another; as is JFK.
I feel so blessed! I meant tag as in tagline...but nickname is much cozier, thank you. And thank you for the pardon, it means so much more to me than you can possibly imagine! ;o)
Best.
Source? Since we are wanting to deal with historical fact and all...Just sayin'. Who had the most use for banking were the commercial interests, merchants, companies, and they got on quite well using bank deposits. I have yet to be convinced that banks were as poorly thought of by the general population as you suggest. Where hard feelings might have come from could have been bank unwillingness or inability to extend more loans to farmers at the time of crop failures, so farms were lost. Or calling in of loans after 1929 so people lost their homes. Perhaps the banks had no choice, but the homeless would understandably have a bitter taste. I am still waiting for the ARMs to reset in 2007; Greenspan lowered the rates unreasonably low to save the stock market and now large numbers of people are on the hook for over priced houses that are about to be forclosed. I wonder if the Fed's actions will be painted as predatory in the end, or if excuses will be made that the mess made by the deflating housing bubble was justified by some greater good.
"American PANICS were often not only NOT "brief", but led to quite a few depressions. It was those depressions which lowered prices."
Panics followed booms. The boom was a boom in credit instruments, unbacked promises, which bid prices up and contributed to overcapacity, overproduction, and high prices which were indicative of the depreciation of the medium of exchange. People kept track of how much expansion there was and they had an idea when there was too much. When there was too much they'd go get their money (coins) out and that is what would start the panic. It wasn't the people's fault if the banks over extended credit. The bust was a bust in credit instruments and unbacked promises, a writeoff (CONTRACTION) of dishonored unbacked promises that shouldn't have been made in the first place, liquidation of now unneeded excess productive capacity, and lowering of prices until they came in line with the available amount of tangible money, gold and silver, and a nominal amount of money substitutes or paper money that people trusted, money now dear where before was cheap. Then the cycle starts over. Mises has said that the depth and length of the depression is inversely related to the size and length of the credit expansion. So if we had a big depression, it was because we had a big boom. It was contraction which lowered the prices.
We still have booms and busts, Nasdaq tech, Housing. Except we are now booming and busting with a continually rising price graph where the boom is even bigger and the bust has been replaced by levelling off, rather than one which negative followed positive, but averaged zero. Contractions have been replaced with reductions in the rate of increase of credit. Is this a revolutionary capitalist miracle which has brought Utopia? I think not. It has simply rearranged the hazards that were always there and distributed them among the population in a way that is harder for them to detect.
Yes I know we live better now than 100 years ago. It is mainly due to the better educated WWII and Boomer generation, and Technology. I hope it can last.
Callender's biggest problem was he was a raving drunk. A fascinating examination of all this is in Scandalmonger a novel by William Safire. Very entertaining and very close to being the truth.
Jefferson was somewhat straight laced but not immune to the demands of the flesh. My own belief is that he probably fell in love with Sally even though it was an impossibly doomed affair. She could have been identical and from the other side of the family and been perfectly acceptable as a new wife but her theoretic "blackness" made her entirely unacceptable.
The DNA tests were from a nephew of his brother, Peter, as I understand not having looked closely into that. Hence, the positive finding from that analysis is not terribly pursuasive wrt to Thomas. The two nephews are a convenient claim for the paternity of Sally's children by the Jeffersonians when they are not deliberately ignoring everything about this. But there are problems of timing wrt the conceptions among other considerations which pretty clearly eliminate them as possibilities.
nopardons' description of the feelings about and description of the operations of banks is entirely correct. State intervention and regulation of banking was demanded from the very beginning because of the tendency of operators of "Wild Cat" banking to open, take in deposits then flee like wild cats back into the woods.
Or the banks would issue worthless script, "shinplasters" etc. which complicated money useage and diminished the value of all currency. These facts are easily discovered by reading any competent financial history not tinged by conspiratorial nutiness.
"Where hard feelings might have come from could have been bank unwillingness or inability to extend more loans to farmers at the time of crop failures, so farms were lost."
This was the inevitable and repeated results of metallic money regimes and produced the call for reserve banks throughout the nation.
With great frequency the Money Center banks would have need for larger than usual amounts of gold/silver often for reasons NOT related to the basic economy (speculative venture in railroad stocks or gold supplies producing disaster is one of the more common). Thus, the gold/silver would be called away to the East collapsing the economies of the Western farm states, forcing banks to call mortgages, bankrupting farmers and collapsing land values. As early as 1880 the Populist politicians and farmers were calling for some sort of Federal Reserve system. TOTALLY opposed were the big Eastern banks.
Greenspan's actions after 2001 were entirely correct and any foolish actions produced by low interest rates should not be laid at his feet.
Nor is your belief that booms only came through excessive credit creation and busts through excessive credit contraction correct. Discoveries of metals was a common way of starting a boom as were outbreaks of war. Wars ending were typical means of generating a bust. Plans made under the impetus of a war's needs suddenly were cancelled with multiple impacts down the financial and economic chain.
Even your incorrect view of modern financial arrangements does not deny the validity of its methods. If manipulations of basic aspects of economic realities merely make the problems "harder for them to detect" that means things are actually improved. Nothing was easier to detect than a financial panic of the past which produced disasters all around. We see nothing like that today.
Ideologues might argue with you as to the utility of public education which you seem willing to credit for being partially responsible for the MUCH better economic and finanacial lives people have today.
FDR was a great leader his ideology not withstanding. He was not even that Left for the day and was pushed from the Left within his own party by Huey P. Long prior to his convenient assassination. Given the real threat of revolution he seemed to face I cannot condemn his actions attempting to counter the horrors he faced. He was correct about the coming need to face Hitler and Japan as well. Nor was he the Communists' man prior to the German attack on the Soviet Union. In fact, he was roundly condemned by the Left because, as a reformist, he weaken revolutionary fervor and thus delayed the coming Revolution.
JFK was an exellent politician but cannot be said to have shown himself to be a statesman during his brief tenure. Ironically had he been able to do anything which would have stopped Vietnam from going critical no one would have recognized the damage we could have avoided.
I will credit him for knowing he had to draw a line over Cuba but must blame him for allowing the problem to grow in the first place. Of course having the Bay of Pigs operation thrown in his lap was not exactly a good idea and I might feel a bit sorry for anyone other than JFK.
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