 The topic here is the origins of the corrupt origins of central banking in America. And I'm going to talk about some research I've done on this and some publications. And it's similar to research I did many years ago, back in the 1980s, when I was just two years old, on the origins of antitrust regulations. Because it was one of my fields, I've been publishing a lot in that area. And the whole area of scholarship and antitrust was all about attempts to tweak or revise or improve the enforcement of antitrust because of the fundamental belief that, yes, for the past 100 years they would say, it has done much more harm than good. It's been badly enforced or counterproductive. It has done the opposite of what it's supposed to do, but it's because of bad enforcement. And the people who are enforcing it are lawyers and they don't know enough economics. If only we get economists trained at the University of Chicago to be in charge, then antitrust will be wonderful. And even some of the books from the University of Chicago on the subject talked about a golden age of antitrust. Richard Posner, who is now a judge, had a well-known book on antitrust law and economics back in those days, and he said that. But none of this made sense to me. How could it be that the government passes a law and scholars of all persuasions admit that for 100 years it's been a bad law, it's had bad effects. Counterproductive very often done the opposite of what it's supposed to do. It has quelled competition, caused prices to go up. Maybe that was the intent all along to have this law. It wasn't really true that there was a golden age of antitrust. And I found out that the answer is no, there wasn't a golden age. The original laws were always intended to be protectionist laws to deter competition. And so I've done something similar with central banking. When I was in your shoes as an economic student, I learned all about all the debates between the monetarists and the Keynesians. The Austrians were rarely ever mentioned when I was in school. But the gist of these debates was that monetary policy, has more often than not screwed up. It's made the economy more unstable, it's created inflation. And my old friend George Selgen has an article published. I think the title is something like 100 years of failure about the Fed. It was published in the Journal of Macroeconomics. And he's given presentations about it at the Mises Institute conferences. So if you go online on Mises.org and type in George Selgen, you can find a video of his really outstanding presentation on the Fed's performance over the past 100 years. But with most scholars, they have the same attitude. They'll say, well, even if we agree with George Selgen, that the Fed in general has caused more economic instability, has caused more price inflation, has caused boom and bust, and has made unemployment higher than it otherwise would have been. Even if we disagree with that, the answer is smarter economists or policymakers that pay more attention to economists, do what the economists say. And so again, I've questioned this whole way of thinking about things. By asking the question, well, was this really intended, central banking, to correct some sort of market failure? That's the standard story of antitrust. Supposedly it came along in the late 19th century to compensate for a supposed market failure. So did the Fed, the story of the Fed and all central banks. We had central banks in the United States long before the Fed. And I really go down to the roots. I really go to the beginning. I go right shortly after the American Revolution when the Bank of North America was actually the first central bank that the United States had in my research. And so that's what I did in this research. I looked at the very origins of central banking and found that the purpose never was to improve economic performance, to improve the credit worthiness of the U.S. government as the worshipers of Alexander Hamilton still to this day will tell us. It was always corruption, political corruption, in the service of big government. And I'm going to explain to you why I think I've proven that pretty clearly in this paper. And so as I said, the first bank was called the Bank of North America. And this was driven through Congress by some wealthy businessmen led by Robert Morris from Philadelphia businessman. He was also a defense contractor. He's known in the history books as a financier of the American Revolution. But he was more of a defense contractor who made a boatload of money on the American Revolution. And so there was this group of powerful businessmen in American politics at the very beginning of the founding who wanted a bank run by government, modeled after the Bank of New England. And Murray Rothbard explained why they wanted this in his book, The Mystery of Banking. This is what he said. Rothbard said this on page 192. He said, Morris and his compatriots, I wanted to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that in Great Britain against which the colonists had rebelled. The object was to have a strong central government, particularly a strong president or king as chief executive built up by high taxes and heavy public debt. A strong government was to impose high tariffs to subsidize domestic manufacturers, develop a big Navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports, and launch a massive system of internal public works. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain, and then an important part of what Rothbard called the Morris Scheme. He says was, quote, to organize and head a central bank to provide cheap credit and expanded money for himself and his allies, the Bank of North America was deliberately modeled after the Bank of England. And so as soon as the American Revolution was over, the Americans had fought a revolution against a war of secession from the corrupt British mercantilist system. And then after the revolution, there were two different camps, political camps, the Jeffersonians who were more or less free market, free trade, personal liberty oriented, and the federalists or the nationalists who wanted to adopt the same rotten corrupt British system in America as long as they could be in charge of it. They understood that if you're on the, the paying end of a rotten corrupt mercantilist system, that's a bad thing, even worth fighting a revolution over. But if you're on the receiving end, the money collecting end, it's good to be the king, you know, it's good. And they literally wanted a king. Alexander Hamilton proposed at the Constitutional Convention a king. He didn't call him a king. He called him a permanent president. But what is that, a permanent president? He's a dictator. Okay, so anyway, we did get the Bank of North America and it did what all central banks do. It debased its own currency so quickly that within two years it was privatized because no one had any confidence whatsoever in that currency. And that was the end of that. But the statists never give up. They never ever give up. I just read an article on the web yesterday about how 130 environmentalist groups have called for an end to capitalism. So they never give up, you know. I call them watermelons. The green on the outside, red on the inside. Environmentalists. So I blogged on Lou Rockwell, something like Watermelon News Update. And I put a link to this article there. So they never give up. And so the early statists in America didn't give up either. And Robert Morris chose a young, brilliant Alexander Hamilton as his political water carrier. And Hamilton had been George Washington's adjutant general in the Army. And at the very end of the Revolution, when it was apparent it was over, the war was over, Hamilton, who was a young man, he was barely 20. How does the young man barely 20 get to be the chief aide to the commanding general of the Army? He had certain political skills, I guess. They got him there. But he was a smart guy, hard-working, but still 20 years old, 21 years old. Anyway, he writes a big letter to Robert Morris. He's working for the most powerful man, George Washington. And he decides, what am I going to do after I get out of the Army? Well, I'll write a letter to the wealthiest man in the country and see if he has any suggestions. And so at the time, Hamilton knew nothing at all about economics and finance, despite what any of you may have read in school, those who have read American history about what a genius Alexander Hamilton was. He had no real special education. His defenders, when they're confronted with this, as I have done in debates and things, will say, but he worked for merchants in the West Indies as a young man. That's where he learned all about economics. That's like saying your child is an economic genius because he works at McDonald's, making change for hamburger purchasers. But Hamilton was clever enough to write this big, long article to Robert Morris pretty much saying, I agree with everything you say, Mr. Morris. So I guess that's the kind of skill he had that got him in dear to George Washington so much. And so he wrote this article, and here's how Hamilton's biographer Ron Cherno puts it. This was the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Cherno on Hamilton about this episode. He said, Hamilton brushed up on money matters because he didn't know anything about money matters. He had a Colonel Timothy Pickering. Pickering was known as being very knowledgeable about finance. He was George Washington's Secretary of State after the Revolution. So he had Colonel Timothy Pickering send him some primers and books, David Hume's political discourses, tracks written by the English clergyman and polemicist Richard Price, and his all-purpose crib, Postal Weights Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. So he read a dictionary. Then Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Morris that set forth a full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank. So in this letter, it's online. It's April 30th, 1781, a letter from Alexander Hamilton to Robert Morris. If you typed it in on Google, it would pop right up. And in this letter, he said, here's what Hamilton advocated and said in a letter that I agree with you, Mr. Morris, this is what we need to do after the Revolution. High protectionist tariffs, a central bank run by politicians, heavy taxes on land, poll taxes, and a large public debt. How's that for a good economic agenda? And so, and then Hamilton became kind of famous later for saying this, a national debt, if not excessive, will be to us a national blessing. It will be a powerful cement of our union. And so he and Morris advocated a large national debt, not to finance a war or not to purchase infrastructure, roads, and canals, but just to have a large national debt because the owners of the debt of the government bonds would be primarily the wealthier people of the country. And so Hamilton's idea was the wealthier people of the country will then always be behind us politically for our agenda of higher taxes and bigger government because they will want to make sure there's enough money in the Treasury to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds. So it's a very Machiavellian scheme on his part, unlike today when the U.S. government wants to attach low-income people with welfare to the government to keep the system going. In those days, Hamilton wanted to attach the wealthier people to the government primarily. Of course, we do that too with corporate welfare now, but we seem to use the opposite. And so the objective was to create a mercantilist empire, and an essential bank was the keystone of all of this. The central bank was the keystone of all of this. And so I'm going to talk about corruption in a minute, but that's why the original proponents of a central bank in America wanted a central bank. It was to finance, help finance crony capitalism and the system of mercantilism, basically the system that the American Revolution was fought against. And some other things that Hamilton said about this, you know, why Americans supposedly needed a bank run by politicians. He said this, Great Britain is indebted for the immense efforts she has been able to make in so many illustrious and successful wars because of the existence of a Bank of England. So if we only have a bank that can print money like this, you know, war is galore and wouldn't that be wonderful? And he said the tendency of a national bank is to increase public and private credit. And he said the former gives power to the state for the protection of its rights and interests. And so it was never to stabilize the economy to fight inflation, anything like that. It was imperialism. It was a financial tool of imperialism was the purpose of why there was a central bank and why they needed to be a central bank in the words of the original proponents of a central bank in America. And so to understand the corruption part of this story, you have to understand what happened just prior to the adoption of what eventually did replace the Bank of North America, was the Bank of the United States, First Bank of the United States, BUS. But before that, Hamilton himself was the Treasury Secretary. And here's how a historian named Douglas Adair, who was one of the editors of the Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers were a series of essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to defend or promote the idea of a constitution, the U.S. Constitution. And so Douglas Adair is a prominent historian and he edited one of the volumes over the years of the Federalist Papers. And here's what he said in the introduction to the Federalist Papers about Hamilton. He said, with devious brilliance, Hamilton set out by a program of class legislation to unite the property interests of the Eastern Seaboard into a cohesive administration party while at the same time he attempted to make the executive dominant over Congress by a lavish use of the spoil system that is handing out government jobs and so forth to political supporters. In carrying out his scheme, Hamilton transformed every financial transaction of the Treasury Department into an orgy of speculation and graft in which selected senators, congressmen, and certain of their richer constituents throughout the nation participated. And so, Douglas Adair recognized that everything Hamilton was doing when he was George Washington's Treasury Secretary. And by the way, he got that job because Robert Morris wrote George Washington and said, I think you should put Alexander Hamilton in the job of Treasury Secretary. After Hamilton wrote him that letter saying, I agree with everything you're proposing, protectionism, high taxes, public debt and all that, that's what happened. And George Washington, when he got this letter from Robert Morris, he turned to Hamilton and said, I didn't know you knew anything about finance. We never talked about it. But if Robert Morris wants you to be the U.S. Treasury Secretary, we'll do it. It's pretty much the same now, isn't it? When have you ever heard of a Treasury Secretary who was not the former head of Goldman Sachs? So this would be Robert Morris would have been the Goldman Sachs guy, but he just sent an emissary, Alexander Hamilton, from that version, early version of Goldman Sachs to be the Treasury Secretary to make sure that the government would be for the plunderers, for the most part. One of my favorite slogans that I take credit for is that the purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. And all of the stories you've heard this week, I think, demonstrate that. And so one of the things Hamilton did though when he was a Treasury Secretary is he orchestrated the nationalization of the war debt from the Revolutionary War. The states, the individual states had all issued debt. They borrowed money, mostly from Europeans and a lot of Americans who bought bonds, war bonds, to finance the war. And back in those days in the United States, Alabama was a state in the same sense that Great Britain and Spain were states. And that's how the American founding generation understood it. It was 13 individual sovereign states. If you read the last couple of paragraphs of the American Declaration of Independence, they refer to free and independent states. And then it says, well, free and independent to do what? And it says to raise taxes, to wage war and do all things that other states do. So that's how they thought of themselves. And that's why when the American Revolution was over, the King of Great Britain signed a peace treaty with all the individual states, naming them by name. There was no such thing as the United States government that was involved in the American Revolution. It was all the states, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, and so forth, the colonies. So anyway, these individual sovereign states had all financed the war. And so this was the first big push toward nationalization and consolidation to consolidate and mobilize the war debt. And so Hamilton and his party got Congress to go along with passing a law that would do this. But only the insiders in the nation's capital knew that this debt would be bought up at face value at a certain date, like two months hence. And this was for the young students in the class, this was before the internet. And so it was hard to find these things out that the government was about to buy up this debt. And at the time, a lot of this old debt, which was in the hands of war veterans who had been paid in part by but with bonds because they had no money to pay them, it was trading between two and 10% of par value. And so what happened was there was a mad rush, all the insiders, the big businessmen and members of Congress, Hamilton himself, Robert Morris, they hired people to scour the eastern seaboard in carriages, boats, ships, horseback, whatever it took to find and seek out those war veterans and anybody else who held any of these bonds and buy them from them. If they're selling a 2% par value, I'll buy it at 4%. There's a historian named Claude Bowers. He was a well-known historian in the 1930s. And he wrote one of the classic biographies of Hamilton and Jefferson. And in this book, he wrote this, this is a description of what was happening. He said, expresses with very large sums of money were on their way to North Carolina for purposes of speculation and certificates splashed and bumped over wretched winter roads, two fast-selling vessels chartered by a member of Congress who had been an officer in the war were plowing the waters southward on a similar mission. And then among the men who became instantly wealthy through this arbitrage scheme were, quote, leading members of Congress who knew that provision for the redemption of the paper at full-phase value had been made. New York newspapers speculated that Hamilton's political benefactor, Robert Morris, made at least $18 million in the deal. This is in the 1780s. Governor George Clinton of New York made $5 million and Hamilton himself purchased some of the bonds through buying agents in Philadelphia and New York. And so the insiders, members of Congress, Hamilton himself, Robert Morris, just made a killing, tens of millions of dollars in their pockets through this political insider trading. Talk about insider trading. This is political insider trading. And old Thomas Jefferson understood what was going on here and he understood the connection between this sort of thing, which is just, I've just described to you just one incident where Hamilton used his power as Treasury Secretary to enrich the wealthy and powerful in the country, especially in the business community, and members of Congress, because he wanted those members of Congress to always vote for his agenda. His agenda was the high protectionist tariffs of central bank and corporate welfare, internal improvement subsidies. Okay? Jefferson smoked it all out though in an essay that he wrote on February 4th, 1818. He said he refers to Hamilton's financial system. He said it had two objects, first as a puzzle to exclude popular understanding and inquiry. Now, Hamilton had written several big reports, one on the constitutionality of a national bank given to George Washington and the Congress, one on his report on manufacturers and one on the public debt. And Jefferson is saying this doesn't make, this stuff is just gobbledygook. No one can understand it, but that's the purpose. It's sort of like reading Keynesian economics. You know, what the hell is this? But, and Jefferson thought it was purposely confusing and convoluted. And Jefferson knew what he was talking about. He translated Terjeu's economics writings into English. And so if you were to go to Monticello tomorrow, Thomas Jefferson's home, you walk in the front door, there's Terjeu right there whose name is on the wall up here somewhere. So he was a physiocrat, an early precursor of the Austrian School of Economics. So Jefferson was well read in Adam Smith and the other economists, you know, of his day and before his day and the French free market physiocrat school as well. And so he understood nonsense when he read it, when he was reading an economic track by a guy who educated himself with cliff notes in a dictionary, Alexander Hamilton. And so here's Jefferson's assessment of this. He said, he said of Hamilton, you know, first as a puzzle, it wanted to be confusing. And secondly, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature. Okay, that was his purpose here with the bank and everything else. He said, Hamilton avowed the opinion that man could be governed by one of two motives only, force or interest, either just bold-faced force or self-interest. Force he observed in this country was out of the question. And the interest therefore of the members, that is members of Congress, must be laid hold of to keep the legislature in unison with the executive, that is to get Congress to go along with what Hamilton called the American system, which was really the British system of mercantilism. And with grief and shame, it must be acknowledged that this machine of Hamilton's was not without effect. So he sort of bemoans the fact that it has been succeeding. And so Jefferson really put his finger on what was going on here when he said this, men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader, Hamilton, would follow, of course, the chief who was leading them to fortune and thus become the zealous instruments of all his political enterprises. So he understood that the purpose of the arbitrage scheme and the agitation for a central bank was to be able to continue this, to be able to buy off members of Congress for the purpose, though, the ultimate purpose of the so-called American system, protectionist tariffs, big public debt, corporate welfare, and a central bank. But the problem, Thomas Jefferson said, big problem here is that this arbitrage scheme was a one-time thing. And these members of Congress who were enriched by this, they're going to retire or die off eventually. And so then where will the Federalist Party be then when these people are gone? And so what he said next, this is Jefferson speaking, he said, quote, some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived, something more permanent than just the law that nationalized the war debt. And what would that permanent engine of corruption be? It would be, of course, a central bank. Once you put a central bank in place, then you have a permanent engine of corruption that could be used to buy off anybody. Well, look at the Fed today. What does the Fed do today? It finances the welfare and the warfare state, and it hides the cost of the welfare and warfare state through money printing. The welfare and warfare state would not be quite as big and expansive if the government had to charge explicit taxes for everything. As Ludwig von Mises once said, if that was the case in war finance, wars would be much shorter and much less frequent if we had to pay tax for them. For example, George W. Bush alone would have had to say to each tax-paying family, here's your bill for $20,000 for the Iraq war. Are you in favor of it? How many people do you think would have said, fine, go have at it, George, if you're presented with a bill for 20 grand or more, as far as that goes. In this same essay, Thomas Jefferson talks about a dinner he had. It's kind of neat to imagine this for those of us who study American history anyway. It was Hamilton, Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, President John Adams, and the U.S. Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Jefferson says, for the truth of which I attest the God who made me, swear in a stack of Bibles what I'm about to say is true. He said the dinner-time conversation was as follows. John Adams, the President, who preceded Jefferson as President, he said that the British Constitution is the most perfect constitution in the world. If they could only rid the British government of corruption, it would be absolutely perfect. He was a big admirer of the British system of government. Of course, the British Constitution is unwritten. It's not like the U.S., but it's through basically common law. But that's what he said. And Hamilton interjected at this dinner and said, oh, no, it's the corruption that makes the whole thing work. That's the whole keystone, though it's the glue that keeps the whole thing together. And here's what he said. He said, Hamilton said, purge it of its corruption and give to its popular branch that is legislature, equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government. As it stands at present with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed. So he was saying, no, it's the corruption that holds this thing together because after all, he was a monarchist. And he was praising the fact that the monarchy was able to corrupt the British Parliament through bribery. And the Bank of England was a financial instrument of a lot of this bribery, as he was saying. And so Jefferson said, Hamilton was so bewitched and perverted by the British example as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was an essential to the government of a nation. And that's why he wanted a central bank to corrupt politics. And it's interesting the story of how we actually got it. George Washington asked Jefferson, Hamilton, and the Attorney General of the United States all to give him their opinions of the constitutionality of a national bank run by politicians. And the American Constitutional Convention had discussed this and explicitly rejected it at the Constitutional Convention. And these men all knew this. And they pretty solid evidence that it's not constitutional. It's not mentioned. It's not part of the delegated powers in Article 1, Section 8. And it was discussed at the convention. And they said, no, it sounds too much like the Bank of England. Didn't we just fight a revolution against the Bank of England in this whole system? Yes, we did. And so the nationalists lost that argument at the Constitutional Convention, which is why, by the way, Alexander Hamilton himself stormed out in a huff after a couple of days. And then when they did pass the Constitution, Hamilton condemned it as a frail and worthless fabric because it restricted government too much. It didn't allow for unlimited government, which is what he always wanted. And so he wrote this big, long report on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States. Hamilton did. And Jefferson wrote something similar. And Jefferson made the obvious point that there's nothing in the delegated powers of the Constitution to the government to do this. And Hamilton came back and essentially said, well, you need to read between the lines of the Constitution. And Jefferson's response, and I'm not saying, this is not his exact words. But if you read these reports, he's, in essence, saying, I've read between the lines and there's just blank space there. There's nothing there. And this is where Hamilton invented the idea of implied powers of the Constitution. So if you ever heard this lingo about the living Constitution, this is where it got started, the great debate over the constitutionality of a national bank between Jefferson and Hamilton. And these are both online, by the way, if anyone's interested in doing further research on this. And you just type in the titles and you'll find them. And so what Hamilton's argument came down to was the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution, where it says that the government has the power to do whatever is necessary and proper to carry out the delegated powers. There are 16 delegated powers in Article I, Section 8. Some of you listened to Judge Napolitano the other on Sunday. Even if you haven't taken his other classes, you probably have heard about these, if not here, somewhere else. And so Hamilton essentially made the argument that a national bank is necessary to carry out the delegated powers. So he used the necessary and proper clause. Jefferson once again came back and said, no, it's not necessary. We have banks. You know, we have banks. You can put the U.S. Treasury, the money, the tax dollars right now today are deposited in private banks. We don't need a government bank. We have banks. And so, and Jefferson said it would be, maybe it would be convenient for the politicians, but it's not necessary. We're back and forth like this. And then, but we didn't, we did get it. We did get the first bank in the United States, but not because Hamilton's argument won the day. It was a corrupt political deal between George Washington and the Nationalist Party, his own party, basically the Federalist. At the time, they were moving the nation's capital from New York to Virginia to create Washington, D.C. with a stopover in Philadelphia in between. And George Washington said this to the Federalist Party leaders, who wanted the bank? These are the people who are Robert Morris' water carriers and politics. He said, I'll sign the bill for National Bank if you expand the boundary of the District of Columbia by three miles so that it is adjacent to my property at Mount Vernon. And it would greatly enhance the value of his property in Mount Vernon, and so they did. They redrew the map of Washington, D.C. so that it would be adjacent to George Washington's property at Mount Vernon and enhance the value of his real estate, and he signed the bill. And that's how we got the first bank in the United States. And here's what Rothbard said about the first bank in the United States. The first bank in the United States promptly fulfilled its inflationary potential by issuing millions of dollars in paper money and demand deposits. The result of the outpouring of credit in paper money by the new bank of the United States was an increase in prices of 72% from 1791 to 1796. So it immediately created 72% inflation in the first five years. And the bank of the United States did exactly what Jefferson and the opponents of it said it would do. It did create price inflation. It did create boom and bust cycles. And it did corrupt politics. The money-cheap credit was offered to political supporters of the Federalist regime at the expense of everybody else. And it created so much instability and corruption that the same Congress that had voted it into existence in 1791 did not recharter it 20 years later. It was given a 20-year charter. And so they did not recharter the bank of the United States because it had done exactly what it was expected to do by Jefferson and the others. It also did exactly what it was expected to do by Hamilton and his followers, corrupt politics. That's what they said was the purpose of this bank. But in those days, you had someone like Andrew Jackson who came along later. It was sort of serendipitous that the second bank of the United States came along to help finance the war debt of the War of 1812. And so in 1811, the Congress votes to bring back the bank after all. After it had voted to not recharter this bank, it brought it back to help finance the war debt from the War of 1812. And so, not in 1811, it went out of business. But then by January of 1817, the Bank of the United States was back in business. And then two years later, it was the great panic of 1819. And that's the subject of Murray Rothbard's doctoral dissertation at Columbia, which is for sale downstairs. And you can read it online too. So the news, our second bank of the United States quickly created the first really big depression in the United States. These were called panics at the time. Does anybody know who's responsible for the word depression? Anybody hear that? It was Herbert Hoover. He thought panic was a little too scary. Depression would be a better word. Let's call them depressions. But they called them panics up until then. And it was the first time in American history where there was large-scale unemployment in the cities. Rothbard quotes, I think, Philadelphia, where he got statistics on manufacturing jobs in Philadelphia. And I think they went from 9,500 manufacturing jobs to 2,500 in a year because of the depression of 1819. And so we did get that bank, and it did what the first bank of the United States did. There were... It was even... By the time you get to the 1830s, Henry Clay, the politician Henry Clay, had become the successor of Hamilton in terms of the promotion of central banking. Hamilton died in 1804 in a duel with Aaron Burr. And our friend Gary North once told me that he started up an Aaron Burr society once. And their logo was Not Soon Enough. He shot Hamilton dead in a duel. Those of you who don't remember that part of history, that would be kind of a nice ball cap or something to have. T-shirt, Not Soon Enough. Maybe with a bullet in the head or something. But anyway, the second bank of the United States, Henry Clay, to show how the corruption was there, he was Secretary of War, and he stepped down. He resigned as Secretary of War to take on the job as General Counsel for the Bank of the United States because he had run up $45,000 in gambling debt in Washington. He was a big gambler and partier. This is in the early 1830s, 1820s actually. $40,000 in gambling debt. And so if you read the biography of Henry Clay by Maurice Baxter, he says, in just two years, he was happy with his remuneration and he paid off all his debts. He was paid in cash and in land by the Bank of the United States. So the Bank of the United States was spending huge amounts of money on its supporters in Congress. In one of my books, I even quote Daniel Webster, who wrote a letter to Nicholas Biddle, the head of the Bank of the United States, saying, I need to receive my retainer if you expect me to continue my support in the Senate for the Bank of the United States. And so members of Congress were literally extorting money from the head of the Bank of the United States in return for votes. They weren't waiting to be bribed. They were taking the initiative there. And so they would publish the political pamphleteering of proponents of the mercantilist system. If you were a protectionist, if you were certainly a supporter of the central bank, if you're a supporter of corporate welfare, they would support your political campaign for Congress. If not, of course not. And so much so that Andrew Jackson, when he became president, he vetoed the rechartering. This was a 20-year charter again. And so he vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States and it eventually went out of business. And here's what Jackson said. And Jackson, he was one of Rothbard's favorite politicians. If there is such a thing as a Rothbardian favorite politician. But Murray was not a perfectionist. In fact, he was very annoyed at these libertarian perfectionists who would say, if Murray would advocate something, there would be a gigantic advance in a direction of freedom. But it was not absolutely 100% pristine and perfect. He would get all this mail from these perfectionists who had claimed to be more holier than thou, more Rothbardian than Rothbard. And he always thought that these people were jerks. And they were, and are. And so he kind of liked Jackson because he wasn't... He did some good things. He did some evil things too. He was the mass murderer of Indians in Florida as a young man in the army. And so Murray never, for goodness sake, would never have condoned that. But defunding the Bank of the United States was a pretty good thing. Okay. And so here's what he said in his opinion, vetoing the recharter of the Bank of the United States. He said, he condemned the Bank of the United States as, quote, subversive of the rights of the states and dangerous to the liberties of the people. He said, every monopoly and all exclusive privileges are granted at the expense of the public and that many millions, which this act, that is a rechartering of the Bank of the United States, proposes to bestow on the stockholders of the existing bank must come directly or indirectly out of the earnings of the American people. These stockholders are profiting from their connection with the government and not from any productive efforts on their part. And it was funded about 20% government funding and 80% stockholders. And so it was just the ownership of the bank was a way of subsidizing the politically connected people, let alone the functioning of the bank and the extending of cheap loans and that sort of thing to politically favored businesses. And so that's my story and I'm sticking to it that the original purpose of central banking in America always was to corrupt the political system and economic instability be damned. But it took many years after. You know, there really wasn't an economics profession until really the late 19th, early 20th century in America. There's an economist who's long dead now. His name was A.W. Coates, C-O-A-T-S. He wrote an article in the American Economic Review around 1960. It was called the American Economics Club. It was about the early days of the American Economic Association in the late 19th, early 20th century where there were about 20 members. And so there weren't that many people who made a living as an economist. Adam Smith wasn't an economist. He's a moral philosopher. And so, but as soon as we, you know, it was once we got, you know, a much bigger economics profession, that's where all the rationales for central banking, the market failure rationales came from, especially from people like Irving Fisher, who was one of the big proponents of a central bank and of the Fed in particular in his day. And so, but if you look at the actual history, there were no arguments being made that this will create economic stability or hold down prices or anything like that. That all came much, much later once we had the economics profession. And, you know, the American Economic Association was founded in, I think, 1888. Richard T. Ely and John Bates Clark were the co-founders. And the founding principle was that laissez-faire capitalism is unsafe in practice and unsound in morals. That's the original, the actual charter. And that's why Ludwig von Mises always refused to join the American Economic Association. And he would look at the charter, are you want me to join this? It's like a bunch of communists, you know. Why would I join this, this organization? And so he didn't, but then all these rationales about the wonderment of central banking came much later. But the truth is much dirtier and much more corrupt. And I think that's about all I'm going to have to say for now. I'd be glad to take questions, comments, brilliant orations from the floor or if you want to take a nap before the next session, that's okay too. It's about this time of week when the students just start getting a little bit tired. We have 15 minutes left and I was just giving this book here that's written in Portuguese. Maybe I'll just start reading it on page one and fill up the last 15 minutes. What's that? Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Okay, well if there are no questions, we'll call that a day then. Oh, there is a question, okay. Yes, yes, yes. David Gordon, there's, you know, we have a book reassessing the presidency for sale downstairs if it's not free. They've been given away, they printed way too many of them and they've been given away for free for years. I don't know if they're not, it's very cheap. But there's a chapter on George Washington by David Gordon in that book. And so if you want to read something less than, you know, wishy-washy idolization about George Washington, read that one, read that essay. But yeah, he was a federalist. George Washington was a businessman and a pretty good businessman and became very wealthy, a big landowner. And you know, one of the episodes, one of the things that really convinced me of what a rotten scoundrel Alexander Hamilton was, was the whiskey rebellion in Pennsylvania during his day when he was Treasury Secretary. The farmers in Western Pennsylvania had decided that growing wheat and other grains and transporting them clear to Philadelphia or wherever the bigger markets were, was too expensive. So they turned the grain into whiskey and it was more profitable for them to turn the grain into whiskey than to sell the grain. And so there was a special whiskey tax and they opposed that. They had a big tax revolt because they said, well, why is there not a special tax on tobacco and cotton and all these other things? Why is there a special discriminatory tax on us? And besides that, the Constitution, the original Constitution prohibited discriminatory taxation. So there was a big tax revolt in Western Pennsylvania and it was Hamilton who convinced George Washington to raise an army of conscripts. They got governors of the states on the eastern seaboard to conscript men into a 15,000-man army to drive up into northern Pennsylvania to put down the tax rebellion. And all they were doing was things like when the federal tax collector would show up, they would tar and feather him, things like that. And they weren't paying the tax. And so Hamilton saw this as we need to teach all Americans a lesson that we are going to collect the taxes. So he goes up there and takes over. And George Washington went up there because he owned land in Pennsylvania. And so if you read about this, it seems like he was looking at it as sort of a real estate showing. He was trying to sell the officers in this army were bondholders from the eastern seaboard. The soldiers who were supposed to do whatever fighting that was going to be done, they were the conscripts. So the bondholders were the officers ordering the conscripts around saying, let's go do away with these tax protesters because if they succeed, I'm not going to get my bond. My bond is not going to be paid back. We can't have that. And so that's what was going on. And I think George Washington wanted to sell some of these guys, some of his property holdings in Pennsylvania. So that's why he went up there. And then he left after he did his real estate showing, see, this is, you know, I own this much of Washington County and it's named after me. You know, after it was Washington County, Pennsylvania, where this took place. And so he left Hamilton in charge. So they ended up getting about two dozen of these tax protesters. They marched them clear across from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in the winter months with chains and manacles on them. And they put them on trial in front of Hamilton, the judge. He made himself the judge. He wanted to hang them, but George Washington pardoned them all. And so that's just one you asked me about George Washington. So that's one good thing Washington did. He pardoned them all, but Hamilton wanted to hang the tax protesters to teach all Americans, not just Pennsylvanians, but all Americans a lesson about not paying taxes. And so that episode convinced me that the reason why Alexander Hamilton was the big champion also of a standing army, which was prohibited by the Constitution, is he wanted a standing army of tax collectors just like the British had. That's the big complaint about how he has housed soldiers in our houses in the Declaration of Independence. That's what Hamilton wanted. And so he got his army of tax collectors to go to Pennsylvania. And that's sort of what we have now. It's called the IRS. No, that's Abraham Lincoln is the worst figure. Who was a Hamiltonian through and through, by the way? But Hamilton didn't kill too many people. The latest death toll of the American Civil War is as much as 850,000 with more than double that number maimed for life. And so Hamilton, Hamilton never did anything like that. He was never able, he did not shut down the presses. He did not shut in prison tens of thousands of political dissenters like Lincoln did. So Hamilton, Hamilton was a nobody compared to people like Lincoln or Wilson, Roosevelt. My favorite president is William Henry Harrison. He died one month after taking office. He caught pneumonia on inaugural day and kicked the bucket a month later. So he's my favorite. He could not have done much damage. It's also Lou Rockwell's favorite. Yes, sir. Thank you, Adrian. What was the... Oh, the Louisiana Purchase. You know, like I said, if you can praise Jefferson for doing one thing without everything, like Rothbard, as I mentioned, he would praise Jackson for defunding the bank, but that doesn't mean he would praise him for everything. Jefferson's, one of his biographers on the Louisiana Purchase explained that he thought America could become an empire of liberty. So he thought the purpose of the Louisiana Purchase was once we had this system of limited constitutional government in place, let all the immigrants from Europe who want to come here, come here, and populate the land of the Louisiana Purchase, and he called it an empire of liberty rather than an aggressive empire. That was his argument for why he thought it was constitutional to have the Louisiana Purchase. But also at the same time, you have to understand that when a philosopher becomes a politician, he acts like a politician, which means he may or may not pay attention to the constitution or the rules if he can get away with it. And I don't see it, in fact, Adam Smith himself, Adam Smith, after he left the university world, became a customs agent in England. He was a tariff collector at the end of his life because he needed the money, he needed a job. Even the person who's probably most famous in all of history as an advocate of free trade became a tariff collector when he got a job in government. And the same is true with a lot of politicians that you might admire. Herbert Hoover made some nice speeches after he became president. But as president, he was horrific. He was just horrible, absolutely horrible. He created the Great Depression with his interventionism, turned a stock market crash into a Great Depression, and his successor doubled up on all his same policies and made it orders and magnitudes worse. But if you read some of his speeches in later life, they sound great. Martin Van Buren, he was a pretty good president. Martin Van Buren, when he was faced with a depression, panic, he made a speech about why we need to cut taxes, cut spending and encourage free trade, get rid of tariffs and things like that. And so he's credited with being the founder of the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party of the 19th century was the party of Jefferson, Jeffersonian philosophy of free trade and so forth. So at least in America, to the extent that any political party had members that were close to what people in this room would think is agreeable, it was the mid-late 19th century Democratic Party. But then it all imploded in 1896 and became a gang of socialists. Essentially, the progressives took over the Democratic Party. What's that? Watermelons. Yeah, they eventually became watermelons. It's an appendage of them. I don't think they were... I guess Teddy Roosevelt was probably the first watermelon. He's like the Godfather watermelon. Any other questions, comments, brilliant pronouncements? Well, that's all we'll do for today then.