Most liberals support the Federal Reserve. Yet, private banks, and therefore rich bankers and "old wealth" families, profit from the deal which created a central banking system of private banks under government control. It's basically a corporation granted a monopoly by the government, but subject to more direct oversight by the government. Still, profit is made by rich bankers - there is a reason they lobbied the government for its creation. And the use of fiat currency has created excess inflation which has hurt the poor and working class the most.

Most conservatives support the Federal Reserve. Yet the creation of a central bank is one of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto. And grants more government control over an incredibly important sector of the economy. Not to mention that legal tender laws force everyone to use paper currency that would otherwise be worthless -- which goes against the original intent of the Constitution, history, and common sense by denying American citizens the use of money with intrinsic value.

What's the truth on the matter from a Constitutional perspective?

The truth is:

"The only substances ever declared as money within the U.S. were gold and silver, in coin form, with copper/nickel serving in token capacity only. See: 12 USCA 152 re. "lawful money" and Coinage Act of April 2, 1792, at Sections 11, 16, & 20; re. copper/nickel tokens, see Sec. 9, and 31 USCA 460."

Original U.S. Constitution

Art. I Sec. 8 Cl. 5
[Congress shall have Power ...] To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, ...;
Art. I Sec. 10 Cl. 1
[No State shall ...] make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; ...

Note that there is no such prohibition against Congress, or any delegated power to make anything legal tender. Congress was originally understood to have no power to make anything legal tender outside of federal territories, under Art. I Sec. 8 Cl. 17 and Art. IV Sec. 3 Cl. 2, but in 1868 a Supreme Court packed by Pres. Ulysses S. Grant, in the Legal Tender Cases, allowed Congress to make paper currency issued by the U.S. Treasury, backed by gold, legal tender on state territory, a precedent that remains controversial to this day, when courts allow paper currency not backed by anything to be considered "legal tender".

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What took us away from the Constitutional model was the court packing scheme by Grant and the unconstitutional ruling made by that court, which you can read about here.

Here are some more detailed views of the Founding Fathers on the money system:

"The founding fathers were concerned about the unrestrained control of the money supply. One thing they all agreed upon was the limitation on the issuance of money,

Thomas Jefferson warned of the damage that would be caused if the people assigned control of the money supply to the banking sector, "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. This issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the moneyed corporations which already dare to challenge our Government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country" Thomas Jefferson, 1791

Many of the founding fathers experienced the damage caused by fiat currency. Most of the revolutionary war was financed by worthless currency called "Continentals".

# The Continental Currency ("Not worth a Continental") that American colonists issued for the Continental Congress to finance the Revolutionary War was replaced by the US Dollar in 1785 when The Continental Congress adopted the dollar as the unit for national currency. At that time, private bank-note companies printed a variety of notes. After adoption of the Constitution in 1789, Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States and authorized it to issue paper bank notes to eliminate confusion and simplify trade. The U.S. Constitution (Section 10) forbids any state from making anything but gold or silver a legal tender. The Federal Monetary System was established in 1792 with the creation of the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. The first American coins were struck in 1793. The U.S. Coinage Act of 1792, consistent with the Constitution, provided for a U.S. Mint, which stamped silver and gold coins. The importance of this Act cannot be stressed enough. One dollar was defined by statute as a specific weight of gold.

# The Act also invoked the death penalty for anyone found to be debasing money.

# President George Washington mentions the importance of the national currency backed by gold and silver throughout his initial term of office and he contributed his own silver for the initial coins minted.

# The purchase of The US Mint in Philadelphia, was the first money appropriated by Congress for a building to be used for a public purpose. It was purchased for a total of $4,266.67 on July 18, 1792.

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Here's the Coinage Act so you can read it for yourself

"SEC. 19. And be it further enacted, That if any of the gold or silver coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of fine gold or fine silver therein contained, or shall be of less weight or value than the same ought to be pursuant to the directions of this act, through the default or with the connivance of any of the officers or persons who shall be employed at the said mint, for the purpose of profit or gain, or otherwise with a fraudulent intent, and if any of the said officers or persons shall embezzle any of the metals which shall at any time be committed to their charge for the purpose of being coined, or any of the coins which shall be struck or coined at the said mint, every such officer or person who shall commit any or either of the said offences, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death."

Having said all this, fiat currency has unfortunately always been legal, but only in very limited, defined circumstances. The Founders believed:

(1) It should be done only in FEDERAL TERRITORIES and not in the STATES
(2) It should be done ONLY if absolutely necessary and if there was no other option
(3) It should be done ONLY in WAR TIME and NEVER in PEACE TIME
(4) It should ONLY be done TEMPORARILY and NEVER permanently
(5) That it promoted INSTABILITY and not stability
(6) And James Madison said it was still EVIL even if used in this temporary manner
(7) And Jefferson once asked if a Constitutional veto could be put on fiat currency even in this limited usage

The bottom line is that FIAT CURRENCY WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE LEGAL TENDER. It was never the intention of the Founders to allow the government to force fiat currency as legal tender on the American people. If they wanted to do that, they could have easily done so. Instead, they demonstrated their true convictions by making it illegal to remove gold/silver backing from legal tender and invoking the death penalty for anyone who violated this.

Megakudos on that article. You need to get it posted in a place with a little more traffic, tho.

Thanks. Don't worry, it's making the rounds.

In honor of your avatar:

Inflation is the result of the excess currency printed by the Federal Reserve, not any action of the private market place. Milton Friedman proved this before winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.

"... a world monetary system has emerged that has no historical precedent: a system in which every major currency in the world is, directly or indirectly, on an irredeemable paper money standard . . . It is worth stressing how little precedent there is for the present situation. Throughout recorded history . . . commodity money has been the rule. So long as money was predominantly coin or bullion, very rapid inflation was not physically feasible . . . The existence of a commodity standard widely supported by the public served as a check on inflation .. . The key challenge that now faces us in reforming our monetary and fiscal institutions is to find a substitute for convertibility into specie that will serve the same function: maintaining pressure on the government to refrain from its resort to inflation as a source of revenue. To put it another way, we must find a nominal anchor for the price level to replace the physical limit on a monetary commodity." - Milton Friedman, "Monetary Policy in a Fiat World"

The reason we've been able to avoid hyperinflation so far is because the income tax is used as a buffer against the fiat currency. If you repealed the income tax tomorrow and allowed the government to print money at the same levels they do today, you would see runaway hyperinflation similar to what happened in Germany in the 1920's.

The Federal Reserve even admits Friedman's conclusions are correct:

"The "Great Inflation" of the 1970's challenged and permanently altered economic theory. It vindicated the once-controversial analysis of Milton Friedman, then at the University of Chicago.

"Friedman's monetary framework has been so influential that in its broad outlines at least, it has nearly become identical with modern monetary theory," said the Federal Reserve governor Ben S. Bernanke, at a recent conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. (The full text of his speech is available here.)

Mr. Bernanke is not a former Friedman student. He did his graduate work at M.I.T. Someone reading Milton Friedman's monetary economics today is likely to miss its significance, Mr. Bernanke noted, much as an apocryphal student called Shakespeare's plays "just a string of quotations."

"His thinking has so permeated modern macroeconomics that the worst pitfall in reading him today is to fail to appreciate the originality and even revolutionary character of his ideas, in relation to the dominant views at the time that he formulated them," he said.

Against the conventional wisdom, Mr. Friedman argued that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." Inflation had nothing to do with aggressive unions, greedy businesses or even oil cartels -- the bad guys who took the blame in the confusing 1970's. Prices shot up everywhere because the federal government made the supply of money grow faster than the real economy created value. Based on the historical record, he argued, the effects of monetary policy were fairly predictable.

In a 1970 lecture, "The Counterrevolution in Monetary Theory," Mr. Friedman outlined 11 propositions about how monetary policy affects the economy. All were wildly controversial, almost disreputable, at the time. Most are accepted today."