 My topic is the corrupt origins of central banking in America. And I'll talk by mentioning one recent example of corruption related to central banking. It has to do with the Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, Henry Paulson. Henry Paulson, if you look up his Wikipedia entry, he was the assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense in 1970 to 72. And so he was sort of a crony of Robert McNamara and the whole Vietnam War and Nixon administration. And then he became, in 1972, late 72, the assistant to John Ehrlichman, the Watergate criminal. And so naturally, you would want a guy like that as your Treasury Secretary to watch over the money. But anyway, the reason I bring him up, Henry Paulson, is that fast forward several decades, and George W. Bush appoints him Treasury Secretary because, well, naturally, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs. And as the Americans in the room all know, there's a federal law requiring the Treasury Secretary to be the chairman of Goldman Sachs. And I'm being facetious, of course. But it sure seems that way. And so he leaves Goldman Sachs for a while, goes to work for Bush, and administers a bailout of Goldman Sachs worth $12.9 billion with a B, and then leaves, goes back. And if you read his Wikipedia entry today, it says now, what's he doing now? He's running some kind of a global warming institute or something like that, whatever. But I remember reading at the time in The New York Times, shortly after he had arranged the $12.9 billion bailout of his company, and then went back to private life, that there was an article in The New York Times, I think I was on an airplane, how boring long airplane flights are. And I don't normally read The New York Times, but on a long flight I read every page because there's nothing else to do. And there was no internet on this flight. And I'm reading the style section. And there's a picture of Mrs. Paulson with a big smile on her face because she had just gone out and bought herself yet another $5 million house in the Hamptons. And so it doesn't get more corrupt than that, does it? And so there is story after story like this. In the 1820s, the precursor of the Fed in America was something called the Bank of the United States. It was the first central bank. And Henry Clay, the politician Henry Clay, who would later become Speaker of the House of Representatives, was a member of Congress at the time. And he was known as a big gambler. And he had racked up $40,000 in gambling debt in 1822, and millions of dollars in today's money. And so he left Congress for two years to become the general counsel of the Bank of the United States, the head lawyer. And in two years, he was able to pay off all his gambling debt. So there would be the equivalent today of millions of dollars to pay off the gambling debt. And so they paid him a salary, and they also gave him huge tracts of land for the cases he had worked on. And so he left that job and became Secretary of State. And so that's the kind of person you want to put in charge of a war-making guy who racks up 40, who's so irresponsible. He had 11 children, by the way, 11 children, and he racks up $40,000 in gambling debt. That's the kind of responsible person you want to put in charge of foreign policy out there. And so that's massive corruption. Daniel Webster, way back in the early 19th century, in one of my books, I quoted a letter from him to Nicholas Biddle, who ran the Bank of the United States, the second bank of the United States. It was called demanding what he called a retainer. He said, if you want me to support the continuation of the bank in the United States Senate, you will give me my retainer. He was angry because they were late paying him his retainer from the bank. And so corruption in banking, in the central banking, go hand in hand. And there are a couple of ways of looking at this. One way of looking at it is, well, these are just bad people that sort of weasel their way in there. If you get rid of the bad people, you'll get rid of the bad corruption. That's typically what most Americans anyway have been sort of conditioned into thinking. But the argument I'm going to make is that corruption like this is inherent in central banking, and especially in American central banking. And I think I can make the case and pretty much prove the case that it was always the intent of the advocates of a central bank to corrupt politics. This was an instrument of corruption. It's not just that a few bad eggs have gotten in charge of it from time to time. And if we only weed those people out, that's not the case. It reminds me of when I was at the University of Tennessee 100, I think it was 175 years ago. It seems like that. It was during the collapse of communism in late 80s, early 90s. There was a Marxist economist on the faculty. And I ran into him in the parking lot. His name was John. I said, well, John, what are you going to do now? Plumber, bricklayer, carpenter? Marxism is dead. And he said, oh, no, we're no longer tarnished with all these evil people like Stalin and Chuchesco and all these. Now we can have nice people that run socialism. So it'll work now. And that's sort of the attitude a lot of people have toward the corruption related to central banking. We got rid of Henry Paulson and all these crooks from Goldman Sachs. Now we're going to find good people. We'll put the pope in charge. He'll run things better. So here's a story I'm going to tell. Murray Rothbard, in his book The Mystery of Banking, wrote about the origins of central banking. And actually, the first bank, the first government run bank, was actually called the Bank of North America. It wasn't the bank. The Bank of the United States actually came after this. But this only lasted about a year. And here's what Murray Rothbard said was the reason why the people who wanted a bank run by politicians. These are mostly business people from the Northeast part of the United States, New York, Philadelphia, Boston. And they were led by a man named Robert Morris, who was a wealthy businessman from Philadelphia. He was a defense contractor during the Revolutionary War. He was called the financier of the American Revolution. But I think most of the money went from the taxpayers to him, not from him to the government. He did arrange some loans for the US American government at the time. But Murray Rothbard said this is what these people were up to, these business people, bankers and merchants from mostly the Northeast. They wanted, quote, I'm quoting Rothbard, page 192 from The Mystery of Banking, 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. The 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 improvements or an internal public works. That is the government funding of building of roads and canals. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain, end quote. And an important part of what Murray Rothbard called the Morris Scheme 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. So that was the scheme. They wanted this economic agenda, protectionist tariffs, government subsidies for roads and canals. They also wanted a heavy public debt, which I'll explain in a minute, and a bank run by politicians, a national bank. So they started up this Bank of North America and it actually, they had a law passed that made it illegal for other banks to operate in the country. It was given a monopoly in currency issue, but it inflated its currency so badly that within one year no one had any faith in it and it was privatized. So it lasted one year. But these people never gave up, did they? We have the Fed, the Fed exists. And so that was the origins of the Fed. It was always a mercantilist scheme to fund corporate welfare. That's what it was always about. And then Rothbard also writes about a man he calls Robert Morris' youthful disciple. And this is Alexander Hamilton, who was the first treasury secretary in the United States. It's Robert Morris' youthful disciple. And he was youthful. He was only in his 20s, early 20s. Even though the average lifespan back then was, well, what was it, 40? The average man died in 40, 45. So 25 is not exactly a spring chicken back in the late 18th century. But anyway, but he was certainly more youthful than Morris or George Washington, who he also worked for as treasury secretary. And Hamilton knew nothing about finance and economics. And contrary to what Ben Bernanke will tell you, if you're interested in some of this, I wrote an article for lourockwell.com a couple of weeks ago called Ben Bernanke's Bromance. And he's very upset that there's talk about taking Alexander Hamilton, his hero and idol off the $10 bill. And so you could read this article about I sort of poke fun at Ben for doing that. But anyway, Hamilton knew nothing about finance or economics, never studied it, and they didn't have any background. But Robert Morris, he was Robert Morris' protege. So Morris writes, George Washington, the president, a letter recommending Hamilton as treasury secretary. And in the Pulitzer Prize winning book on Hamilton by Ron Cherno, Cherno says that George Washington turned to Hamilton and said, I didn't know you knew anything about finance. We never talked about it. But he appointed him treasury secretary anyway. So he was an economic dunce. But if you read Ben Bernanke, the opening line by the way of my article is, Ben Bernanke is in love with another man. And then dash dash Alexander Hamilton. And he talks like, it's like he's some kind of genius, economic genius. And this is sort of the myth, the mythology of American history, but he wasn't. He was totally unschooled. What he was schooled in was sort of the protectionist tracts written by the British apologist for mercantilism. So he knew that some of the mercantilist tracts written by publicists for British mercantilism. But I think he was unaware of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and the French physiocrats and all the people who his nemesis, Thomas Jefferson, was very familiar. It was Jefferson who translated the work of Turgo, the French economist into English. You know, if you walk into Jefferson's home, Monticello, tomorrow, right in the front door, I think there's Sir Francis Bacon over here, or maybe it's Montesquieu, I forget, but it's Turgo whose name is up here somewhere, on the wall, his precursor of the Austrian school. It was Jefferson who translated him and who knew, who understood that economics. But it was Hamilton who was the economic ignoramus. But if you read Bernanke or any of these people today who idolize Hamilton, they say the opposite. They say, oh, Jefferson was, he was a farmer and he didn't understand banks. He was against banks and he was against manufacturing. He wasn't. He was against government subsidies to banks and to manufacturing. He wasn't against banks, per se. He was against a bank run by politicians. But he was for real banks. So anyway, they never did explain this. So Hamilton became the number one promoter of resurrecting a national bank. And he did eventually succeed. We did get the Bank of the United States, but the way in which we got it was kind of interesting in that there was a debate between Jefferson and Hamilton and before George Washington. George Washington, the president, asked both these men to make a case for and against the bank. And so Jefferson made a constitutional case saying it's unconstitutional because the Constitutional Convention considered a national bank and rejected it explicitly. So that's proof that it wasn't intended to be a part of the Constitution. And it is nowhere in the delegated powers of the United States Constitution to set up a bank. Congress does not have the power to set up a bank. Hamilton came back and essentially said, but if you read between the lines of the Constitution, there are implied powers of the Constitution. So he invented the notion of implied powers. And once you get on that road, then you're down the road to unlimited government power because implied means anything any politician could dream up in his imagination. If you get away from the actual explicit powers of the central government that are in there. And but anyway, they had this big long debate and both of these documents are online. You can read Jefferson's statement on the constitutionality of a national bank and Hamilton's statement on the constitutionality of national bank. But what the reason we got it though was a sleazy corrupt political deal involving George Washington. George Washington was a big time real estate investor. And he had invested in a big chunk of property in Virginia. And they were in the process of moving the nation's capital from New York to Virginia and creating Washington DC. And what George Washington wanted was them to extend the boundary of Washington DC so that it would be adjacent to his property in Mount Vernon. And then he said, if you do that, I will sign the bill creating your bank. He told the federalist, which he did. So we had all this brainpower that Jefferson and Hamilton put together and making their arguments, but it didn't matter. What mattered was Washington was able to enhance the value of his property in Virginia. And that's how we got the first bank of the United States. And so what was the purpose of this bank? What did they want to do with this bank? Well, I'll give you a hint of why they were so dead set on giving this bank in place. Here's what Douglas Adair, this is the editor of one of the editions of the Federalist Papers. The famous publication, the Federalist Papers, said in the foreword to his edition of this. This was a 1980 edition. He talks about Hamilton. He said, with devious brilliance, Hamilton set out by a program of class legislation, that is as Treasury Secretary, 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 granting government jobs 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. So he ran the Treasury Department as Treasury Secretary as a one big system of graft, as a way of buying the votes of members of Congress, of enriching members of Congress. This was the original version of insider trading, but it was political insiders. If you were a political insider, a member of Congress, or the Senate, you had all kinds of ways of making big money thrown at you by the Treasury Secretary, okay? Why? What did he want? He wanted votes in return. It wasn't that he enjoyed playing Santa Claus. He wanted the votes of these members of Congress in return. Votes for what? Votes for what Hamilton called the American system, protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for road and canal building, and a national bank. That's for what? So he saw his job as Treasury Secretary as did his mentor, Robert Morris, as a way of using tax dollars to buy votes of politicians for their economic agenda. It wasn't the bank per se they wanted. They wanted a vehicle to finance the corruption of politics, the buying of votes so they could put in the system of mercantilism. And that's why Jefferson himself and the Jeffersonians were outraged over this because they had just fought a long revolution to get rid of this system, to get rid of the British mercantilist system. And here comes the federalist saying, we kind of like this system. We want to bring it here to America. As Murray Rothbard called it, the British system without the British. That's how I called it in the mystery of banking. And what I usually say at this point in this talk is that this reminds me, I don't know if any of you have ever seen, there's an old movie called The History of the World Part Two with Mel Brooks, the comedian Mel Brooks, and he plays the king of France in this movie. And one of his laugh lines is he keeps saying, it's good to be the king. As though anyone would think it's not good to be the king. But every time something good happens, a servant brings him a wheelbarrow full of gold bars and he'll say, it's good to be the king. Something like that. Well, that was the attitude of Hamilton and the federalists about mercantilism and the mercantilist system. If you're on the paying end, it's bad. You don't want to be on the paying end of a mercantilist system. But if you're on the collecting end, it's good. It's good to be on the collecting end of a mercantilist system. So they wanted to bring this system to America. Okay, and so they used the expenditure policies of the Treasury Department to buy votes. And there was also another big scheme that Hamilton used that really caught Jefferson's attention. And these two men hated each other. These two men really defined the two polar extremes of American politics and political economy that exists to this day. It really is remarkable. We even have the Brookings Institution, the left-wing think tank, where Ben Bernanke is now, by the way, in DC, they have something called the Hamilton Project with like dozens of articles and papers and books about what kinds of future government interventions they would prefer. And so these ideas still persist today. And so Hamilton's big scheme, though, was to nationalize the state government debt. And the American Revolution had been funded by the state governments. The federal government had no taxing power. Hold your applause, please. That's called the good old days in scientific language. They had no taxing power. And so some states like Virginia had almost totally paid off their war debt. Other states like Massachusetts had hardly paid anything. And so the federalists, who were headquartered in Massachusetts, naturally, said, well, let's nationalize this debt. Let's get someone else to pay our debts. It was they did, and they succeeded. But the way Hamilton, and Hamilton is sort of the grand puppet master over this. And so they had this plan. They passed the law. They're going to nationalize the state debt. And there were all these bonds out there. A lot of the Revolutionary War veterans were holding onto these bonds. They were paid in government bonds when they were in the Army. And so at the time, a lot of these bonds were trading at between two and 10% of face value. But the law that they had just passed said that at a certain date, like six months from now, the government will pay 100% of face value for these bonds. So if you could buy one of these bonds that's worth $2 today, and you're a member of Congress, you know this is going to be worth $10 in six months. And so the insiders made a mad dash all up and down the Eastern seaboard to buy up with the sending emissaries and representatives to buy up as many of these bonds as they possibly could and by any means possible because this was before the internet of course. And so they and only they knew that they could get these bonds and sell them for 20 times their value in a few months. And here's how there's a historian named Claude Bowers who wrote a book called Hamilton and Jefferson many years ago. And Claude Bowers was quite a remarkable person. He was a famous playwright at one point, he wrote some plays and anyway, he's one of these old early 20th century American historians that I've learned a lot from. But here's how he describes what happened. He said expresses and he means stagecoaches. Expresses with very large sums of money were on their way to North Carolina for purposes of speculation and certificates bonds, government bonds, splashed and bumped over wretched winter roads two fast selling vessels chartered by a member of Congress who had been officer in the war, the Revolutionary War, were plowing the water southward on a similar mission. And so there was ships, stagecoaches, horses going down in search of government bonds and to buy them up at two cents on the dollar. And so and then he goes on to say that the New York newspapers reported on how much money these political insiders made. And here are a few examples. Robert Morris himself made 18 million dollars. This is in the 18th century, 18 million dollars. The Governor George Clinton of New York made $5 million. Hamilton himself purchased the bonds through buying agents in Philadelphia and New York. So he became very wealthy personally through this scheme. Jefferson is observing all of this and he smokes out these rats. He figures out what they're up to. Okay, he understood what they're up to. And here's some of the things Jefferson said in a letter that he wrote, actually a big long essay on February 4th, 1818, this year, 1818. Hamilton died in 1804 by the way. His long after Hamilton is gone. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr who was a one-time Vice President of the United States. Not everyone here expected to know American history like that. Our friend Gary North, who lectures here sometimes, friend of the Mesa Institute, he told me once that he once started up at Aaron Burr Society and their motto was not soon enough. And he shot and killed Hamilton. I think they even had ball caps made. There's something like that, not soon enough, Aaron Burr Society. But here's what Jefferson said in this 1818 essay about what was going on here. He said, Hamilton's financial system had two objects. First, as a puzzle to exclude popular understanding and inquiry. Secondly, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature. So this extremely complicated system of the national bank and other things that he wanted to do, he said he wanted to intentionally confuse the public so that the public would always be in the dark about what the politicians were doing with their money. But second, as a means of corrupting the legislature, because he said this of Hamilton. He said that Hamilton is the kind of person who avowed the opinion that man could be governed by only one of two motives, force or self-interest. Force he observed in this country was out of the question. And the interest therefore of the members of Congress must be laid hold of to keep the legislature in unison with the executive. And with grief and shame, it must be acknowledged that his machine was not without effect. That even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sorted enough to bend their duty to their interests, their self-interest, and to look for after personal rather than the public good. So Jefferson is talking about this scheme to nationalize the state debt. That these members were basically a bunch of crooks who were looking after their self-interest and not the public good. It's kind of a naive statement on Jefferson's part, thinking that any politician would not look after his own self-interest, okay? And then he goes on to say, continuing about Hamilton, he said, men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader would follow, of course, the chief who was leading them to fortune and thus become the zealous instruments of all his enterprises. So he's saying, the man who makes you rich, you're gonna follow him, he's gonna be your leader. So Hamilton was the man who made all these people rich, all these members of Congress, you're gonna follow them. They're not gonna follow him, they wanna become even richer. And they owe him also, they owe him votes. But the big problem Jefferson said, and he spotted this, was that this debt arbitrage scam that was played out was a one-time-only scheme. After all, these people are gonna retire or die, and along with them go their votes that had been purchased by making them millionaires. So how are you gonna keep this going? How are you gonna keep this mercantilist system going forever if the people who voted for it in the first place die off or retire, okay? And so Jefferson remarked, he said, the political power created by these things would be temporary, it would be lost with the loss of the individual members whom it had enriched, okay? And then he goes on to say, some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived. Who'd like to take a guess of what engine of influence he was referring to, to make this more a permanent scheme of corruption? A bank, a bank run by politicians. Once a bank is in place, then you have, you know, five years ago, Henry Paulson and the Fed is financing a $13 billion bailout of Goldman Sachs, okay? In return for Goldman Sachs, essentially, financing the political careers of most members of Congress and the president. Where do you think the American people just love George W. Bush so much, they're just sending him their paychecks to have him get elected president? Not likely. Well, the dumbest ones among us would do something like that, okay? So anyway, so Jefferson said, some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived. And then he said, this engine was the Bank of the United States. So that's what the Bank of the United States, that's the purpose of the Bank of the United States. So he had this figured out, that's why these people always wanted the Bank of the United States, the first Fed. And if you read Ben Bernanke's blog that I cite in my article from lurockwell.com, he proudly says that Alexander Hamilton was his idol, his role model. He was the first central bank chairman in America, or not chairman, but responsible for the creation of the first central bank. And like I said, that's his bromance with Alexander Hamilton. And then Jefferson goes on to say that Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but he was, at the Constitutional Convention, he proposed a permanent president who would appoint all the governors, and the governors would have veto power over any state legislation that was passed that the president disapproved of. So just like in England, the governors would just be puppets of the king. And of course we did not adopt that system in this country. But so Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but a monarchy bottomed on corruption. So why did he think he was so corrupt? Ben Bernanke's idol, role model. He told the story, Jefferson tells the story to another letter, he tells the story about a dinner party at his home. And the people at dinner were Secretary of War Henry Knox, I guess they named Knoxville after him, that's in Knoxville, Tennessee. John Adams, the former president. US Attorney General Edmund Randolph were there. And Hamilton. And Jefferson says in this letter, for the truth of which I attest the God who made me. So he's saying, I swear to God, this is true. He said they were having dinner time conversation was John Adams, the former president, said that the British constitution would be the most perfect constitution ever known to man were it not for the corruption of British politics. And then at that point, Hamilton intervenes and says, oh no, it's because of the corruption that the British constitution is the best constitution in the world. It's because of the corruption. And why would he say that? Well, Hamilton's position was always that the actual US constitution created a government that was far too weak and far too decentralized. And he was constantly badgering George Washington saying we need a government of more energy. And when they did pass the constitution, when it was ratified, Hamilton denounced it. He called it a frail and worthless fabric. He left the constitutional convention in a hissy fit after a few days because they did not adopt his king proposal for a king. And he just fought a revolution against the king. And there comes Hamilton and his crony is saying, hey, let's have a king, let's try that. How insane would that have been? And so he left in a huff and denounced the whole thing. Denounced the whole thing. And so anyway, Jefferson is saying here that this was always the intent of Hamilton and other supporters of the central bank is to create a permanent engine of corruption. And he quotes Hamilton's own words as saying praising corruption to the treetops. That's why he said he was bewitched and perverted by the British example, Jefferson said. And of course, one other figure in American history that Murray Rothbard quite a lot about in his writings on banking was Andrew Jackson. And again, you know, Murray Rothbard, for Murray Rothbard to say something nice about the politician was pretty rare. But Jackson is one of the few politicians. Jackson and John C. Calhoun, he liked some of the things they did and wrote. But that doesn't mean he approved of everything. Every time I say something like this, I'll get emails or write something like this. I'll get emails from somebody who digs up some nefarious thing that Jackson did or Calhoun did and say, how can you defend this? Well, I don't defend it. I just quoted something that makes sense that he once said one day in his life. It doesn't mean I defend every day of his life and every single thing he ever did. So Murray did not defend Andrew Jackson's murder of the Seminole Indians when he was in the army as a young man, for example. So when I arrived, quoted Murray Rothbard in my writings as approving of what Jackson did with banking, I inevitably will get emails from people saying, but he murdered the Seminole Indians. How can you defend the murder of Indians? Anyway, that's part of the sort of the collective insanity that so many Americans seem to have these days about these things or inability to think logically. And anyway, but why did Murray like Andrew Jackson? Well, he defunded the Bank of the United States. He ended the First Central Bank. The first one, it was called the First Bank of the United States had a 20 year charter and the charter was not renewed because it had created so many boom and bust cycles and generated so much corruption, just like the Jeffersonians predicted and just like the Hamiltonians wanted. That's what they wanted. And it did that. And so it did it so bad, it was so bad that the Congress, even though the Congress, many members of Congress had been enriched by this whole system, they feared they would lose their seats in Congress if they voted for it. So they voted against it and it went out of business. Then the War of 1812 came along and they resurrected it after the war in January of 1817 to monetize the debt that was accumulated to finance the War of 1812 in which the Americans attempted several times to conquer Canada. That was really the main purpose of the War of 1812 is the attempt by the Americans of the day to conquer Canada and they failed and the Canadians literally set fire to the White House in Washington, D.C. Hold your applause please over that and the Library of Congress and much of the rest of the city. Okay, wouldn't it be nice to be alive back in those days to witness that sort of thing? And so anyway, Andrew Jackson, it was resurrected. Same thing happened. You had Henry Clay and his corruption as a general counsel of the Second Bank of the United States. Daniel Webster demanding sort of mafia style retainer money for his political support of the bank. The bank financed the political careers of politicians who supported it and they published scathing critiques and libelous smears of politicians who opposed the Bank of the United States. So they totally corrupted politics and you know, Murray Rothbard's dissertation, his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University was on the Panic of 1819 and it's a title of one of his books. It's online and I think you can buy it downstairs, Panic of 1819. The Bank of the United States was brought back in 1817 and it promptly created the Panic of 1819. Back in those days, depressions were called panics and it was Herbert Hoover, by the way, the president, Herbert Hoover in the 1920s who decided that the word panic was a little too inflammatory, so let's use depression, that's better. So that's how we started to call these things depressions instead of panics, by the way. And so it created the panic and for the first time in American history, there was large scale unemployment in some of the cities and Murray dug up some of the statistics about, I think in Philadelphia, if I can recall, he said there were light manufacturing jobs that went from, I think he said they went from something like 7,500 people employed to 1,500 in one year. So that is a massive unemployment in one year. This is the sort of thing that happened during the Second Bank of the United States, not just political corruption, but boom and bust cycle. And so when Andrew Jackson became president in the late 1830s, he defunded it. The bill, it came up for renewal and he vetoed the bill to refund the Bank of the United States and the Congress did not have the votes to override the veto. So it sort of slowly went out of business and that was the end of it. And here's one of the things that Andrew Jackson said. He said, one of the problems with this bank, he said was this is part of, comments for his statement, his veto statement, which is online, you can read it for yourself if you're interested in this, you can want to do a term paper someday. Said the bank like this is subversive of the rights of the states and dangerous to the liberties of the people. Every monopoly and all exclusive privileges are granted at the expense of the public. And he said that many millions, which this act of rechartering 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. And he says these people were quote profiting from their connection with the government only and not on any productive efforts on their part. And so he, like Jefferson smoked out the truth about this bank, although he had a lot of help. It wasn't just one man. It wasn't just Andrew Jackson. And that's why Murray Rothbard wrote favorably about Andrew Jackson. One of the reasons, in fact, the whole Jacksonian movement, Murray said, was really the early libertarian movement in America, the Jacksonians. And that's why some of the modern day historians all kind of hate Andrew Jackson. And Ben Bernanke's blog that I refer to when I wrote the article about Bernanke does that too. He sort of sneers and belittles the whole idea of Andrew Jackson being on the $20 bill. And I quote one of the historians as saying that this speech that I just quoted to you was revolting. He used the word revolting. I thought it was a great libertarian speech that Andrew Jackson gave was revolting. But he had lots of help. For example, when the Bank of the United States showed up in the state of Ohio, it opened up two branches in the state of Ohio. The state of Ohio did not want the boom and bust and corruption from Washington DC in their state. And so the people, the legislature of Ohio imposed a $50,000 per year tax on each branch of this bank. And in the 1830s, that's a lot of money, $50,000. And so the BUS Bank of the United States refused to pay. So the state of Ohio sent armed marshals into the bank carrying a big empty chest and they made their way with guns, guns strapped to their hips into the vault and took $50,000 out of the vault of each of these banks of the United States and walked off with it. And the state of Maryland did something similar. The state of Maryland did the same thing, imposed a big tax. And that ended up in a famous Supreme Court case, McCulloch versus Maryland. But at the time, the chief justice of the United States was John Marshall, who really had a real bromance with Alexander Hamilton. I don't mean literally real, but if you read his writings, it was like just worshipful. It was like the way a monk would describe Jesus Christ, John Marshall describing Alexander Hamilton. And in this decision, page after page after page is literally plagiarized verbatim from Hamilton's writings, McCulloch versus Maryland, on the constitutionality of a bank, but one of the slogans that has come out of that decision was the power to tax is the power to destroy. John Marshall said that, the chief justice of the United States, he meant the power to tax the central bank is the power to destroy the central bank. And the people of Maryland said, well, yeah, that's the idea. And the people, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, tell us something we don't know. And so anyway, so he makes John Marshall who invented the idea of judicial review. You know, the words judicial review did not appear in the United States Constitution. John Marshall just made this up. And so there was like a 50 year crusade to give the Supreme Court, by the way, a monopoly in judicial review. They had me judicial review at the time. Andrew Jackson read this statement and he pretty much said, thanks for your opinion on the constitutionality of the bank, but I disagree. And I'm the president and I have just as much, my opinion counts just as much as yours because we have three branches of government, not one. You know, we're not a judicial tyranny like we are today yet. And so Jackson pretty much said, Congress has a valid view on this. I do as president. You do as a Supreme Court. And so do the people of the states, by the way. Jackson didn't say that, but that was true at the time. People of the states nullified many federal laws, you know, not just related to tariffs either, including this one. And so there was a lot of other states. Connecticut weighed in on this. Connecticut cited Jefferson in saying, we don't want this. We don't want this bank in our state either. And so it wasn't just Andrew Jackson that did this. But so those were the good old days when they defunded the bank of the United States. And because it was recognized that it really was a permanent engine of corruption. So by the time you get to the 1830s and 40s, there were many, many Americans who understood that Jefferson was right about this bank and Hamilton was wrong. And that I think is why it took them from, basically from 1840 until 1913 to finally resurrect this monster. You know, we didn't get the Fed until the year 1913. And so, and so, but I think it was because of the understanding of so many people that Jefferson and Jackson were right about this, the corruption of the bank and other, but that was a long time ago. And the Americans have been rebrainwashed in Fed worship. That's all we'll say for now then. Thank you.