This evening at 7 p.m. Eastern Time, we wrap up our online conference “End Inflation and the Fed” with my presentation “Separate Money and the State.”
We hope you have enjoyed our conference. We consider it to be one of our best and most timely conferences, especially given how Americans are today suffering the ravages of Federal Reserve inflation.
REMINDER: This is our end-of-year fundraising time. Your support enables us to have conferences like this, along with the other vehicles we use to spread our principled, uncompromising perspectives on liberty, such as our Libertarian Angle, our FFF Daily, and our Future of Freedom journal. I hope you will help us spread the light of liberty far and wide in the year ahead by making a generous tax-deductive donation to FFF.
This evening, I will be giving a historical overview of America’s monetary system from the Revolutionary War through the present. I will be explaining how it was that the American people chose gold coins and silver coins as their official money and rejected a paper-money monetary system.
In fact, the U.S. Constitution established the gold-coin, silver-coin standard. The Constitution was supposed to be the highest law of the land, one that was designed to control the actions of government officials. The Constitution made gold and silver coins the official money of the American people. One searches in vain for any grant of power in the Constitution to make paper money the official money of the American people.
U.S. Double Eagle (1907)
Contrary to claims made by the mainstream press and high-school and college economics teachers, America never had a monetary system in which paper money was “backed by gold.” Gold coins and silver coins, not paper money, were America’s official money for more than 125 years. That’s a long time.
So, how is that we are living today under a paper-money standard? One thing is for sure: The Constitution was never amended to abolish the gold-coin, silver-coin standard that was called for in the Constitution and that was in existence for more than a century. So, how was it possible to replace the constitutional system of gold coins and silver coins with a paper-money system if there was never a constitutional amendment to accomplish this?
I’ll be covering that question in my talk. I’ll also be discussing some of the important legal cases that came before the U.S. Supreme Court regarding America’s monetary system.
I’ll also be talking about one of the most shocking and reprehensible events in U.S. history — President Franklin Roosevelt’s nationalization of the gold-coin holdings of the American people. Today, that event is treated with a collective yawn by the mainstream press, historians, and high-school and college economics teachers. But it truly is one of the most unbelievable and horrific abuses of power in U.S. history. And it needs to be talked about even today, given that FDR’s dictatorial action was the pivotal step in the abandonment of the gold-coin, silver-coin standard that had been established by “we the people” in the Constitution.
After all, it’s one thing to advocate for a different system than the system the Framers established in the Constitution. It’s quite another thing to adopt a new system without going through the amendment process called for in the Constitution.
What does Roosevelt’s dictatorial action have to do with inflation and the Fed? Everything! Roosevelt’s dictatorial action set the stage for decades of monetary debasement that has plundered and looted the American people and that continues to do so today.
I hope you’ll join my tonight for my presentation. It’s FREE. To receive a Zoom link via email, register here.
REMINDER: Click here to read my end-of-year fundraising letter and to make an end-of-year donation to FFF.
The post FDR’s Gold Nationalization Set the Stage for Today’s Inflation appeared first on The Future of Freedom Foundation.
The Future of Freedom Foundation was founded in 1989 by FFF president Jacob Hornberger with the aim of establishing an educational foundation that would advance an uncompromising case for libertarianism in the context of both foreign and domestic policy. The mission of The Future of Freedom Foundation is to advance freedom by providing an uncompromising moral and economic case for individual liberty, free markets, private property, and limited government. Visit https://www.fff.org