Thomas Jefferson’s Warnings About Today’s Banking Crisis
“Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his
own kind, for I can apply no milder
term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.” “I, however, place economy
among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.” “Our country is
now taking so steady a course as to show by
what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary
consequence.”
We must not let our
rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion
and servitude. If we run into such
debt, as that we must be taxed in our
meat and in our drink, in our necessaries
and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling
and our creeds ... [we’ll] have no time to think, no means of calling our
miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring
ourselves to rivet their chains on the
necks of our fellow-sufferers ... And this
is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one
instance becomes a precedent for [another] ... till the bulk of society is
reduced to be mere automatons of misery...
And the fore-horse of this frightful
team is public debt. Taxation
follows that, and in its train
wretchedness and oppression.
If
the American people ever allow private
banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by
deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them, will
deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless
on the continent their fathers conquered.
The art and mystery of
banks... is established on the principle that 'private debts are a
public blessing.' That the
evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital,
and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United
States. Here are a set of people, for
instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt …
without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to
pay this debt when called on;
Certainly no
nation ever before abandoned to the avarice and jugglings
of private individuals to regulate according to their own interests, the
quantum of circulating medium for the nation -- to inflate, by deluges
of paper, the nominal prices of property, and then to buy up that property [cheaply],
having first withdrawn the floating medium [or credit – ed.] which might endanger a
competition in purchase. Yet this is what has been done, and will be
done, unless stayed by the protecting hand of the legislature. The evil has been produced by the error of
their sanction of this ruinous machinery of banks; and justice,
wisdom, duty, all require that they should interpose and arrest it
before the schemes of plunder and spoilation desolate
the country."
As the
doctrine is that a public debt is a public blessing, so [the chickens of
the Treasury] think a perpetual one is a perpetual blessing, and
therefore wish to make it so large that we can never pay it off.
Everything predicted by the
enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined
now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private
fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of
employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other
useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of
property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no
useful industry of theirs.
I
consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all
powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited
by it to the States, are reserved to the
States or to the people' (10th Amendment). To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically
drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field
of power, no longer susceptible to any definition. The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill (chartering
the first Bank of the
The system of banking [I] have... ever reprobated. I contemplate it as a blot left in all our [State] Constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction, which is already hit by the gamblers in corruption, and is sweeping away … the fortunes and morals of our citizens." "The banks... have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and... condense and explode them at their will.” “Already they have raised up a moneyed aristocracy that has set the Government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.”
“[The] Bank of the
Instead of funding
issues of paper on the hypothecation of specific redeeming taxes, we are
trusting to tricks of jugglers on the cards, to the illusions of banking
schemes for the resources of the war, and for the cure of colic to
inflations of more wind.
“The monopoly of a
single bank is certainly an evil. The multiplication of them was intended
to cure it; but it multiplied an
influence of the same character with the first, and completed the supplanting
the precious metals by a paper circulation.”
“It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have
silver for it at the bank where it issues. This
is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a general application would soon exhaust their vaults, and leave a ruinous proportion of their paper
in its intrinsic worthless form.”
Yes, we did
produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose
the memory of freedom? Material abundance
without character is the path of destruction.
Private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments.
It is incumbent on every generation
to pay its own debts as it goes. Never
spend your money before you have earned
it. In matters of style, swim with
the current; in matters of principle,
stand like a rock.
To compel a man to
furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful
and tyrannical. Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time,
and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
“Single
acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of the day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a
distinguished period, and pursued
unalterably through every change of ministers (administrators) too plainly proves a deliberate, systematic
plan of reducing us to slavery.” “The mass of mankind has not been born
with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to
ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Rightful
liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the
law,' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it
violates the rights of the individual.
“If
a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will
be... if we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed”
The
issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man
shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a
small elite.
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