by Stuart Englert, Stuart Englert’s Substack:
America’s Forefathers Warned Us About Fiat Currency
As the United States prepares to commemorate its 250th anniversary, Americans will celebrate the nation’s founding with pageantry, parades, pomp and patriotism.
Loving one’s country of birth and taking pride in its independence-inspired origins, praiseworthy accomplishments, and laudable legacy is a natural inclination and respectable trait.
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Similar celebration and reverence shouldn’t apply to the dollar, the nation’s debased and debauched fiat currency. Even though Federal Reserve Notes feature portraits of prominent American patriots and U.S. presidents, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the founding fathers weren’t fond of unkept paper promises and currency not redeemable for silver or gold.
A decade after the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, Washington expressed his concerns about paper currency to Jefferson. In a letter penned Aug. 1, 1786, the president-to-be noted some of the original 13 states were “falling into very foolish and wicked plans of emitting paper money.”
Six months later, Washington expounded on the economic degradation and moral degeneracy that arise from corrupt, defective and dishonest fiat currency.
“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice,” Washington wrote in a Jan. 9, 1787 letter to Jabez Bowen, then chancellor of Brown University in Providence, R.I.
Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration of Independence, condemned paper currency as well. He considered silver and gold superior forms of money. He believed precious metals have intrinsic value because of their scarcity and trusted them as a reliable store of wealth. Unlike paper notes, the monetary metals couldn’t be printed in unlimited quantities by banks and governments.
“Paper is poverty, that is only the ghost of money, and not money itself,” Jefferson wrote in a 1788 letter to Edward Carrington, a fellow Virginia lawyer, planter, patriot and politician.
After his retirement as the nation’s third president, Jefferson reiterated his support of gold and silver over unbacked paper bills.
“The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals,” he wrote in a letter to his son-in-law John Wayles Eppes on June, 24, 1813. “[Paper currency] is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.”
Based on the historic record of unredeemable, government-decreed paper currencies, Jefferson’s words were accurate and profound.
Fiat Lessons Learned
As military and political leaders, Washington and Jefferson witnessed, experienced and endured the perils and pitfalls of the nation’s original paper money.
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