 I'm going to talk about the corrupt origins of central banking in America. And this is based on some research I've done. And the type of research is kind of similar to things that I've published in the past on antitrust. And I was, years ago, I was in a bit of a debate with sort of mainstream economic researchers over antitrust, because the method of analysis, as it is in most of these areas, was, you know, recommendations to reform antitrust. You know, there's, you know, paper after paper is published. They should do this, they should do that, they're doing this wrong, doing that wrong. And the same with monetary policy. When I was in your shoes as a student, you know, we learned all about the great debates between Milton Friedman and the Keynesians and the proper type of monetary policy. But the conclusion I came to pretty quickly with antitrust is that trying to reform antitrust is kind of like trying to reform kudzu. I don't know if you know what kudzu is. Some of you from the South know what kudzu is. It's that vine you see on the side of the highways that grows, some people call it inch and night vine. It grows an inch and night. And you can't reform kudzu. You can't trim it or clip it or make it look nice. It just grows like crazy. You gotta pull it out by the roots and then make a big fire out of the roots and just destroy it or else it'll take over your house. You can't do it. And I'm the same, my thinking is the same way with central banking. There are thousands of articles written about how to reform central banking and maybe putting better people in charge, smarter people in charge, better educated. The Fed and my university, maybe some of yours, they have the Fed challenge where a lot of our students go before a tribunal of Fed bureaucrats and they debate over how best to centrally plan the economy. And then the Fed bureaucrats, who of course are a bunch of idiots who are responsible for the crash of 2008, sit up there like Stalinist emperors and put out their judgment on these students and how wise they are and how good they are at central planning, basically. And I say these things to my colleagues who teach monetary economics. They don't appreciate it much, but that's the truth. And so you can't reform the Fed anymore than you can reform Kudzu or antitrust regulation because of the inherent nature of the beast. And so what I'm going to talk about is some of my research that shows it's sort of a direct link to my early research on antitrust. I published a paper many years ago called The Origins of Antitrust. It's online. You can look at it. And because I was getting sort of aggravated with these mainstream economists who kept telling the story that, well, there once was a golden age of antitrust, where there was rampant monopolization and market failure, cartels, and the government came to the rescue. And that always sounded kind of fishy to me. So I looked into it and I found, lo and behold, the industries that were accused of being monopolies were cutting prices and expanding output and inventing new products for 20 years in a row. They were the most competitive industries in the country. And so in this research I'm going to talk about today, I did something similar by looking into the very origins of central banking in America because I want this to be a sort of a look at it as sort of a counter to the arguments that monetary policy can somehow be the reforms. And maybe there once was a golden age of monetary policy when we needed a Fed. And I'm going to argue that, no, it always was an engine of corruption, among other things. And it always was designed to create boom and busts and to inflate big government even bigger than what the Constitution would allow. And it starts with the very first central bank in America. It was called the Bank of North America. It wasn't even the Bank of the United States. Some of you who may have studied this might think the Bank of the United States were the first. But it's called the First Bank of North America. And Murray Rothbard wrote about this in the Mystery of Banking. And this was the project of one of the wealthiest men in America during the time of the American Revolution, Robert Morris, a native of Liverpool, England. And here's what Murray Rothbard said, Robert Morris, who was a wealthy businessman from Philadelphia, why he wanted a government-run bank. And so think about this. They just fought a revolution against the British Empire financed by the Bank of England. And so there's a big group of people in America who wanted to bring an American version of the Bank of England to America. And so as you would expect, there was a lot of opposition to this. But Rothbard said, what they wanted was, quote, 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 public works, road building, canal building, and that sort of thing, government funded. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain. And so what happened was, after they fought a war to secede from British mercantilism, there was a clique in American politics led by Robert Morris and his young protege, Alexander Hamilton, to create the British and American version of the rotten, corrupt British mercantilist system that they had fought a war against. And I usually, when I first realized this, it reminded me of the Mel Brooks movie, History of the World. I forget if it was part one or part two of the comedian Mel Brooks, where Mel Brooks plays the king of France. And he's out there skeet shooting. And he has a gun in his hand, a musket. And he has a servant who has serfs, serfs. And they grab ahold of one of these guys by the feet, throw him up in the air, and the king shoots at him. And one of his aides, I'm paraphrasing, there's not the exact dialogue. We said something like a sire, a king, your highness, the peasants are revolting. And then Mel Brooks, the king of France, says something like they certainly are. Anyway, that's one of my favorite things. But in another scene, the big laugh line of Mel Brooks, he kept saying, it's good to be the king, good to be the king. And at the right point, in the right delivery, it was always really funny. Oh, of course it's good to be the king. But that's how I look at Morris and Hamilton and the Federalist Party in early America. They just fought this revolution against this rotten, mercantilist system. But they understood that if you're on the money collecting end of that system, it's good. It's good to be the king. But if you're on the paying end, like the American colonists were, not good. It might even be worth fighting an eight-year war to get away from that. But it was not good. So to organize this, Murray Rothbard called it the Morris Scheme. It was to organize and head a central bank, which they did. They got the Bank of North America was given a monopoly in currency issue. And it was so unworthy and so untrustworthy that it only lasted two years. And nobody had any confidence in the currency. And so the bank was privatized. So that didn't work very well. But they never gave up. Look where we are today. We've got the Fed. They never gave up ever. 200 years later, they're still at it. Not the same individuals, but they're political descendants. And so Rothbard then says that Morris, after this happened, after the Bank of North America imploded, he called on what Murray called him his, quote, youthful disciple, Hamilton. And Hamilton knew nothing at all about finance and banking, economics, contrary to what the historians will tell you. He was a dunce on that. He never studied it. He worked as a clerk for some slave-owning molasses merchants in the West, in the Caribbean as a young man. But that's the only experience he had, really, with anything related to commerce, economics. And these were British mercantilists who he worked for in the British Virgin Islands. And so he learned about the British mercantilist system and political connections and political cronyism. And so in Ron Cherno's book, which is The Big Biography of Hamilton, he talks about this, about how Robert Morris chose the young Hamilton as his protege, because he had been George Washington's protege in the Revolutionary War. And he wrote George Washington and said, I would like Hamilton to be the Treasury Secretary. And George Washington turned to Hamilton at that point 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 Treasury Secretary, he's the richest man in the country, you got the job. And so Hamilton decided he needed to learn something about money and finance then at that point. And so here's what Cherno says. Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering. This is at the very end of the revolution. Pickering would later become George Washington's Secretary of State and Secretary of War. It had him send him some primers, 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 basically read some Cliff Notes-type books on commerce. Just enough to write a letter, an April 30 of 1781 letter to Robert Morris. This is Hamilton at the very end of the revolution, looking for a job, basically. This is how he introduced himself to the wealthiest man in the world. He was the assistant to the most powerful man in the colonies, George Washington. And he was thinking, well, what am I going to do when this war is over? I'll write a letter to the wealthiest guy in the country. See me, I'll work for him. So he wrote this letter saying, I've studied up on economics. And here's what I think we need in the letter. It's protectionist tariffs, a central bank, taxes on property, poll taxes, and a large public debt. He said, a national debt will be to us a national blessing, national debt. And the reason he said that, the reason he gave for calling the national debt a blessing, was that he believed the government needed to be much bigger than what the Constitution would allow. He believed this, certainly, with the Articles of Confederation, which was the first Constitution. And then also, when the actual US Constitution, the colonies seceded from the Articles of Confederation and created the US Constitution. And Hamilton thought even the US Constitution was too weak. He called it a frail and worthless fabric once it was ratified. But he thought a big public debt could take care of that, could counter that. And here was his theory, it was kind of Machiavellian. He thought that if the government would sell a lot of bonds to raise money, then it would be the wealthier people of the country who would be buying most of these bonds. They're the ones with the means to purchase all these bonds. And so they would have a personal interest in making sure that government always had enough revenue to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds. And so that you would create sort of a lobbying class for bigger government and higher taxes among the wealthy and more influential people of the country. It's sort of the opposite of today where the welfare parasite class is the big voting block for bigger government in the eyes of most politicians. But it was also the wealthy class in the eyes of Hamilton. And so these two worked together to lobby for a resurrection of a national bank, which they eventually did. Here's what Hamilton later said about why we needed a bank run by politicians. You know, there's a good idea for you. He said, 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 the Bank of England. So that's a good reason for having a bank run by politicians. We can get in more wars. And Hamilton spoke about the imperial glory that many Americans would achieve with more wars, especially a war against France. He was itching to start a war with France. And then he said, the tendency of a national bank is to increase public and private credit. The former gives power to the state for the protection of its rights and interests. So it balloons the state and it creates boom and bust cycles by creating too much private credit. He didn't say boom and bust cycles, but that's what it is. So if you're wondering, it's my hunch this is one of the reasons why so many New Yorkers have been flocking to this play on Broadway. Hamilton is that, you know, he's their big government guy. He's their favorite left winger. And a friend of mine who happened to be in New York City and visited Hamilton's grave, which is in this church yard right across from the 9-Eleven site from the Twin Towers site. He said he stood there and watched it for, this is Butler Schaefer told me this, stood there and watched it for about five minutes and there was no movement. So he felt safe enough to leave. The grave site, it's still there, I've seen it, I've been there, I saw Hamilton's grave. Okay, so the purpose of the America's first national bank, according to its founders, was one, to dispense corporate welfare and subsidies to politically connected businesses. And two, to grow the government, to finance government by disguising the cost of government through debt, debt finance. That's so, you know, if you have ever read the chapter on war in human action, I recommend everybody do it. It's one of my favorite chapters in human action. It very clearly states, you know, the basic economics that, you know, if you finance wars with taxes, there will be fewer of them and they'll be shorter. But if we finance them with debts, there'll be more of them and they'll be longer. And if we finance them with inflation, printing of money, that's the worst possible thing of all, because they all disguise the true cost of government. But the most explicit cost is there when you have to finance these with taxes. And so Hamilton, he favored this, this is why he favored this big debt to grow the government, okay? And here's a statement of what the Federalist Party was up to by Douglas Adair. He was the editor of one of the editions of the Federalist Papers. And here's what he said in the introduction to the Federalist Papers, Douglas Adair, the historian 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 the Congress by a lavish use of the spoil system that is giving government jobs when he was Treasury Secretary, giving 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. Sounds like the Clinton administration, doesn't it? Clinton Foundation or something like that. An example of what Adair is talking about is as Treasury Secretary, Hamilton nationalized the state debts, the federal government took over the state debts and he purposely created a huge arbitrage opportunity for the politically connected class because this was, of course, before the internet. And so the word went out among the political class that here's the plan, there's all these bonds out there, a lot of them are held by revolutionary war veterans who were paid in government bonds for their service in the war. And so all throughout the hinterland, there were all these bonds out there and they were being traded, some of them between two and 10% of par value. So the insiders, the congressmen, the senators, the executive branch people, the financiers like Robert Morris who were politically connected, they knew this. They knew that at some point the government was planning on paying par value, 100% face value of these bonds. But in the meantime, if you could go and buy them up at 2% of face value and then sell them at six months later at 100% of face value, you could make a good penny doing that. And so there was this mad rush, like a gold rush, up and down the eastern seaboard where the politically connected people like Robert Morris himself hired people to go and stagecoaches, boats, whatever, however they could go, up and down the eastern seaboard to buy up as many of these bonds as they could from whoever would sell them out there. And as a result of this, Robert Morris himself made, according to the New York newspapers, made $18 million. And this is before the 19th century. Okay, Governor George Clinton of New York made $5 million. Hamilton himself hired buying agents, bond buying agents in Philadelphia and New York. How corrupt is that? That sounds like an early Henry Paulson trick to get into the government and use it to enrich your company that you work and yourself like this. Talk about insider trading. You know, there's some real political insider trading there. Okay, and so this is what happened. And so, okay, so fast forward a little bit. After Hamilton is dead, Gary North once told me, by the way, that he once started up an Aaron Burr society. And their logo was not soon enough. Aaron Burr is the guy who shot Hamilton dead, by the way. So no love there. But so, and that was in 1804, in the year 1818, Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson wrote an essay describing what Hamilton and his party were up to regarding central banking. He said, Hamilton's financial system, and his financial system was a central bank, corporate welfare for internal improvements, road building and all that, and protectionist tariffs. Hamilton called it labeled at the American system and Henry Clay took that over after Hamilton died in the 1830s. But anyway, Jefferson said, Hamilton's financial system had two objects, first as a puzzle to exclude popular understanding. That is, to make government finance as confusing as can be so that even most members of Congress would have no idea what the heck is going on. And let alone the public, they just befuddle the public and then not let them be privy to how the system works. That's one. And secondly, this is Thomas Jefferson saying this. Secondly, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature, okay. What does it mean by the corruption of the legislature? Well, the purpose of this arbitrage policy of the nationalizing the debt was to get all these congressmen, make them rich. And if they're made rich by Hamilton and the federalists, they would be the followers of Hamilton and the federalists. Where did they want them to follow them to? They wanted them to follow them to a central bank, high protectionist tariffs and government subsidies for roads and canals and a big public debt. That's what they wanted them to vote for. That's why they made them rich through this arbitrage opportunity. But Jefferson went on to say that there's a problem here with these people in the problem that they had. He said this, and he understood what happened here in describing what happened to the bondholders, all these old veterans. He said the distresses of those people that is the original bondholders often obliged them to part with these for half, the fifth, even a tenth of their value. And speculators had made trade of cosening them from the holders by the most fraudulent practices and persuasions. So these slick New York banksters went down south and everywhere else and talked all these revolutionary war veterans out of their bonds, okay? And Jefferson goes on to say in this essay, 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 political enterprises. So he understood that the purpose wasn't just to make a bunch of people rich. It was to get them to owe you. You got to vote for me and I'll make you rich. You don't vote for me in our program, you're left out of all of this. You're not gonna be a part of this the next time we have it, okay? But the problem was that this was a one-time event. Hamilton's debt assumption policy was a one-time event. Here's what Jefferson said. He said, the political power created here would be temporary and it would be lost with the loss of the individual members whom it had enriched. So okay, they'll take a vote for a central bank, protectionism, government debt, but that'll only last as long as these men are still in power. They're gonna retire, they're gonna die off. And so Jefferson then said, and I quote, some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived. An engine of influence more permanent they would be able to use to finance the buying of votes from members of Congress permanently. Who would like to take a guess of what Jefferson had in mind of what that engine, corrupt engine of influence would be? A central bank and a bank run by politicians, of course, one way or the other. And that's what he said in Jefferson's words, quote, this engine was the bank of the United States. And that was the name of the next central bank, the bank of the United States. And there was a bit of a debate over that. George Washington was president and he asked Jefferson, who was the secretary of state to write his opinion on the constitutionality of a central bank and Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, they're his opinion of the constitutionality bank. And of course, the whole purpose Hamilton was in politics and was put in there in place by Robert Morris was to create a central bank. That's why he was there. So you know what he was gonna say. So they had this famous debate over the central bank and Jefferson pointed out that the constitutional convention debated this issue and rejected it. They voted down the whole idea of a national bank. And that would seem to be pretty good evidence that it's not constitutional, that the constitutional convention said, no, we don't want anything like this. And it's not, and so there's nothing in the constitution. The US constitution gives the federal government the right to coin money, but not to print currency, coin money, coin money. And even that George Washington sort of anecdote, they wanted to put his image on some of the coinage and he turned them down. He said, no, that's how the tyrants of Europe, it's one of the tools they had always used to solidify their political power over the people is to put their image on the coinage. And so he didn't want his picture to be on the coinage like the tyrants of Europe, but the appropriately, the first politician in America to have his mugshot on the coinage was Abe Lincoln on the penny. They used to have just trees and leaves and things, but he was the first politician to have his mugshot on the coinage anyway. Okay, so they had this big debate and it was obviously unconstitutional and this is where Hamilton, who was a lawyer of course, he invented the idea of implied powers of the constitution. It was with his debate with Jefferson over the constitutionality of a national bank. He basically said, well, yes, there are no delegated powers explicitly to create a bank run by politicians, but you need to read between the lines here. And Jefferson essentially said, I have read between the lines and there's blank space in there. And he didn't say that exactly, but that's the essence of what his argument was. And so that's the insidious idea of implied powers. Once you go down that route, then the powers of government or whatever any politician can imagine and make the case for it's implied somehow, okay. And so we did get the bank. George Washington, the story goes that he cut a deal with a federalist on this bank. He said, if you move the, they were in the process of moving the nation's capital from New York to Washington DC. And he said, if you move the border of DC to the edge of my property in Mount Vernon in Virginia, then I will vote for this bank. I will sign the legislation for this bank. And so they did. And so my reading this, it seems like this debate didn't even matter. It was just a sort of a corrupt political deal between George Washington, who was quite the wealthy real estate investor and the federalist party to do this. So we got, that's how we got the first bank in the United States. And so the whole purpose of it was always corruption, to be an engine of corruption to finance politics, to finance, to make people rich, insider trading deals and so forth, and to provide cheaper credit to politically connected businesses. And of course that has led to a lot of boom and bust problems. And so they got this bank and what did it do? The first bank of the United States, Rothbard wrote about this also, the result was, I'm quoting, quote, the outpouring of credit and paper money by the new bank of the United States was an increase in prices of 72% from 1791 to 1796. And so it immediately created price inflation and boom and bust cycles and sure enough, political corruption, they used the money, treasury deposits in the bank to finance the political careers and campaigns of politicians who favored the bank and were Hamiltonians and federalists. And as a result, it was so corrupt that it had a 20 year charter and the charter was not renewed 20 years later. Okay, and so in 1811 it was not renewed and the War of 1812 came along and after the War of 1812 was over, the Bank of the United States was resurrected. They got the second Bank of the United States to monetize the war debt from the war. And so it went back into being in January of 1817 and does anybody here know the title of Murray Rothbard's doctoral dissertation? The Panic of 1819. So the Bank of the United States, and I've always thought it's not just a coincidence that they resurrected the Bank of the United States in 1817 and then we had the Panic of 1819 and Murray wrote about how for the first time in American history, people observed large scale unemployment where there was something like a 75% loss in employment in Philadelphia and places like that in manufacturing such as it was in those days in the shops in cities like Philadelphia. And so it immediately created that and it had another 20 year charter. So that was 1817. And so by the time you get to the 1830s, it did more of the same. More corruption, more boom and bust cycles created by this Bank. Daniel Webster, we're talking in American history here in the 1830s. He was one of the prime supporters of a national bank. And in one of my books, I quote a letter from Daniel Webster threatening Nicholas Biddle, the head of the Bank of the United States saying, you'd better send me my retainer if you expect me to continue in the Senate supporting the Bank of the United States. So it was like a letter from Don Corleone if you read this, your money or your brains will be on this piece of paper, your sort of thing. And also Henry Clay who was the leader of the Whig party at this era, he became the big proponent. Hamilton is long dead, hold your applause please. And Henry Clay became the big proponent. And so Clay, to show how rotten and corrupt this always was, he's the big proponent of national bank. He was also, if you read the biographies of him, he was a big gambler in Washington, D.C. And he had run up $40,000 in gambling debt, 40,000 bucks, this is in the 1830s. And so they gave him the job. He resigned from the government, the secretary of state, he resigned and to become the general counsel of the Bank of the United States. And according to his biographer, within just two years, he was very well paid, not only in salary, they gave him vast tracks of land that this bank had owned, and case by case payments for cases he had litigated. And so within two years, he made much more than a $40,000. And that's pretty big money. All the writing I've done about the Civil War era and all that to put it in perspective. I remember reading that even in the 1860s, 30 years later, the governor of Illinois made 3,000 a year. That was his salary. So this is $40,000 in two years in the 1830s. So this was a huge amount of money that it was made. And so Henry Clay did very well. That's so you can understand why he would be a proponent of the bank. But his great nemesis was Andrew Jackson, and Andrew Jackson understood all this. Murray Rothbard kind of liked Andrew Jackson. And so if you read some of Murray's works on American economic history, his big book, A History of Money and Banking in the United States, he's very favorably disposed toward the Jacksonian political movement. He thinks it was largely very libertarian political movement, although Murray was, his knowledge was so encyclopedic, of course he knew that Jackson, being a politician, did a lot of evil things in his life as well. But if you look at what he did when he vetoed the recharter of the Bank of the United States, that's something that he should have been applauded for, in Murray's view and in my view, certainly. So he had this big, big battle with the proponents of the bank all over the country. And he had a lot of help too, did Andrew Jackson. In the state of Ohio, for example, the Bank of the United States opened up two branches in the state of Ohio. And the people of Ohio, by this point, didn't want it. It was the 1830s, early 1830s. They had known that this, it created economic problems, it created boom and busts, it corrupted their politics. And so the state of Ohio imposed a tax of $50,000 a year on each branch of the Bank of the United States in the state of Ohio. And when they refused to pay, they sent armed marshals to the banks, carrying a big, empty chest, a big chest. And they went in there, and they went into the vaults and helped themselves to $100,000 and walked out, guns on their hip. So a legal bank robbery by state marshals. And of course, this created litigation. The state of Maryland did a similar thing, placed a heavy tax. And so, and that's where the Supreme Court case, McCulloch versus Maryland came from, that where Chief Justice John Marshall, who was a slavishly devoted Hamiltonian, in his opinion, in this case, was literally plagiarized from Hamilton's report on a bank, Central Bank, word for word, it was almost identical, big, long sections of it that were there. And that's where he coined the phrase, the power to tax is the power to destroy. And the people of Ohio were saying, well, yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, you caught on. Yeah, that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to destroy this bank by taxing it out of existence. And that's where that comes from. That was the meaning of the power to tax is the power to destroy. So this sort of thing helped. And by the way, at that point, when John Marshall said, therefore this bank is constitutional, Jackson wrote an opinion of his own. And he essentially said, thank you for your opinion, but my opinion is different, and I'm the president and you're just a judge, so there. And so, before the American Civil War, it was not true that five government lawyers with lifetime tenure had the sole responsibility of telling everybody in the entire country what their liberties were to be. That's a system we live under now. But in those days, it was common knowledge that we had three branches of government, not just a lawyerocracy at the Supreme Court. We had a president, we had a Congress, we had the judiciary, you know, and we also had the people of the States. They had a say in these things, like the Ohioans and the people in Maryland, their legislature, that did these things. So this idea that we have sort of black-robed deities telling us what our freedoms are in this country really didn't come about until after the Civil War. They had judicial review for a long, long time. John Marshall invented that out of thin air, by the way. There's nothing in the U.S. Constitution that says that, anything about that. And he just came up with this, the Hamiltonian judge, John Marshall. And so when Andrew Jackson vetoed the resurrection of the Bank of the United States, he accused it of this, of quote, subversive of the rights of the States and dangerous to the liberties of the people. That seems to me to be a good enough reason to veto something if it subverses the rights of the States and the liberties of the people. That's a pretty good reason. And the history profession hates him for this. As part of my research, the next question I asked myself, well, what do the historians say about this? Who have written about Andrew Jackson? I know they would, if they could dig his body up and hang him, they would do that. Because he critiqued the engine of corruption that creates the finance's big government force. So that's basically my story, and I'm sticking to it, that the origins of central banking were always meant to be corrupt. So when you see things like Paulson, the Bush's Treasury Secretary, who leaves Goldman Sachs, becomes US Treasury Secretary, he organizes a $180 billion bailout of the AIG insurance company. And Goldman Sachs had $18 billion in claims against AIG, which it got out of the bailout money. Then he leaves the government and goes back to Goldman Sachs. And I read an article in the New York Times about how his wife then went out and bought her a self-yet another $5 million house in the Hamptons. It doesn't get much more rotten and corrupt than that, but that was always the idea. That was always the purpose of central banking. As Jefferson smoked these people out 200 years ago when he wrote that essay, he knew exactly what it was. So all the talk about fine-tuning central banks and making them work more efficiently and so forth, as opposed to a free market and money and a gold standard is a big bunch of Fui, it always has been. And this is the tactic I take by looking at the corrupt roots of it. And so that's about all I was gonna say for today with this story, but I think we have about five minutes or so for questions, brilliant declarations or announcements of anybody who happens to be running for president or something like that. Any questions or comments? You're all too tired, you're all at the sky bar last night so you're all still hungover, I assume. Or your ears are still ringing from listening to Bob Murphy do karaoke. Maybe that's the problem. And you haven't heard a thing that I've said. Cool. So what you say the American Revolution was just because the upper gentry weren't involved in mercantilism in England? And they wanted to work on the American Revolution? Well, he's asking if the American Revolution was because the upper classes were not involved in mercantilism. Well, in my, you know, I've written about this, you know, the revolution, the taxes weren't that burdensome, but the direction they were going in with taxation without regulation was clearly abusive of the colonists. And so I don't think there's any one cause of any war like that. So I wouldn't say that this was the cause of the revolution. But then after the revolution, there were these two factions, the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians. It was the Hamiltonians in the Federalist Party who wanted to bring the whole rotten British mercantilist system here as long as they could be in charge of it. And that's why Jefferson thought Hamilton was not only just wrong, but he was evil. Because he was dangerous, because he was very smart, very brilliant, and he was corrupt. And another thing I didn't mention in the talk, that there was a famous dinner with, imagine this, you know, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and John Randolph having dinner at Jefferson's house. And Jefferson had a winery, so they're probably into their cups at this point. And John Adams, who was the president, said that if it weren't for the corruption of the British system, it would be the most perfect constitution in the world. The British, the unwritten constitution, but it's a constitution. Hamilton interjects. These are the words of Jefferson. Hamilton interjects and says, oh no, it's the corruption that makes it the perfect system because it's the corruption that grows government bigger than it would otherwise be. And so that dinner conversation, Jefferson said is what convinced him that Hamilton, he called him a monarchist, bottomed on corruption. Because at the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton wanted a king, a permanent president, he called it a king. They just fought a war against the king. But not only a king, but a king that would oversee a thoroughly corrupt government on purpose, corrupt on purpose. And so there was a big division there. And the Jeffersonians prevailed until the Civil War. The Civil War, we got the National Currency Acts, the Nationalized Money Supply, we got 60% tariffs, average tariffs that lasted for 60 years. We got the railroad subsidies by the government and it opened the door to corporate welfare. And so that was pretty much the end of the old Jeffersonian idea. We didn't get the central bank. We got the National Currency Acts and the Legal Tender Acts, but that was the precursor to the Fed. That was the next step to getting the Fed, I think, in that era. And we'll be one more and then we'll take a break. Why were the holders of war bonds willing to sell their bonds so cheap to the aristocrats? Why would they just hold them? I assume they needed the money because a lot of them were just ordinary yeoman farmers who had no money, had little money. And they were soldiers in the Revolutionary War when the Continental Congress didn't have the money to pay them. They paid them in promises of these and they probably thought that these were pretty much worthless. After all, they had seen the value go from all the way down to in some cases, less than 10% of what the face value was. So I imagine they thought, I might as well get something while I can or this can be worth zero pretty soon. They didn't know that the government was planning on paying the holders of the bonds face value in the near future. That's why I said it was before the internet where you couldn't find out this information. Why did the value of the bond drops so far in the first place? Oh, mistrust of the government, I assume. People have mistrust of the government. And when the bond, I lived in Maryland for many years, they would always brag about the high bond rating they had in Maryland, but it's a high tax state. They would tax the pants off the public to make sure they'd pay off all the bonds that they issued. So yeah, the bond holders, the Wall Street bankers would always give them a very high bond rating because it was the high tax state. But if you're not very good at raising enough tax money to pay this off, then the bond rating goes down and the value of the bonds go down. And that's probably the situation they were in at the time. The Federalist Party, by the way, when under Washington, they ran up a huge debt already and so they had already went on a wild spending binge as much as they had, much more than what the Constitution would have allowed to begin with. That's why I quoted Adair, the historian, Adair there. So I guess we're about out of time. It's time, I believe they have a free whiskey hour now as a stand for four o'clock to five o'clock. So a whiskey tasting. We do that every Wednesday at Mises University. So have at it. Thank you.