What Money Meant to America’s Founding Fathers
Hint: They didn’t have staggering debt and bottomless printable currency in mind.
As we celebrate America this week, our independence and the birth of our Republic remember that the founders specifically wrote into the Constitution itself a gold and silver based monetary system for the new nation.
First of all, they gave Congress the power to coin money. From Article I, Section 8, “Congress shall have Power…to coin Money.”
Not print. Coin.
It’s hard to believe that proponents of today’s irredeemable, unbacked printing-press money schemes can get away with conflating printed money with coined money.
The founders certainly knew the difference between the two. They had experienced the collapse of the irredeemable paper currencies of the colonies and that of the Continental Congress. The Continental paper dollar was such a failure that it gave rise to a popular expression, “not worth a Continental.” It was an all-purpose description of complete worthlessness.
In Section 10 they addressed the monetary system again without ambiguity: “No state…shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”
Why did the founders incorporate these provisions into the Constitution? First of all, they have learned men, well-read in the historical precedents of paper money failures, base-money inflations, and spendthrift governments.
Secondly, just as they intended to set up a government that would protect our rights, they wanted the new government to protect our wealth as well.
But our politicians had other ideas. They stripped away the protection gold and silver provide to a monetary system, first in the Civil War era with the “greenback dollar,” and then again later with the Federal Reserve system and the final break with a gold-backed monetary system in 1971.
Although we endured a brazen act of unconstitutionality from 1933 to 1974 when the government made it illegal for Americans to own monetary gold, today you can own gold.
So today, our politicians have failed to do what the founders wished, and instead of a sound monetary system that protects your wealth, you have to protect your own wealth.
And that’s exactly why we are here at Republic Monetary Exchange.
Have a happy Fourth of July. Spend some time thinking about the blessings of liberty this week. And when you or someone you know needs help protecting their wealth, call or stop by and find out why the founders trusted gold and silver.
