 This is the history of 19th century banking in one hour is a topic I was giving this topic because I've written a lot about this in parts of several books and in a couple of journal articles and so when I give it a try it's one thing that makes it kind of relevant is just last week I think the last week of the week before when Ron Paul quizzed Bernanke at the House Financial Services Committee hearing one of the comments that the Fed chairman made was that the Fed was in a supposedly an improvement on the unregulated banking system of the 19th century and and that was a statement of shocking ignorance from someone who claims to be an economic historian that that's what Bernanke's claim to fame was in academe when he was a Princeton professor his economic history claims to be an expert in the history of the Great Depression and as I told a guy I met at a bar who found out I was an economist I told him that Bernanke is an expert in an incorrect history theory of the Great Depression and you can be an expert in the theory that the earth is flat you know there were used to be a lot of experts on that and that's sort of what Ben Bernanke is but it's just shocking ignorance for him to say either that he was just purposely lying to say that there was an unregulated banking system in the 19th century that that was never true there wasn't a Fed but there was lots of government intervention and so I'm going to start at the beginning at the beginning of the American Republic this is the late 18th century as soon as the American Revolution was over there was a political cabal in America that essentially wanted to adopt the British mercantilist system in America and what was this system it was a system it was known as mercantilism in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and it was a system of subsidies direct and indirect to politically connected businesses a system of protectionism protectionist tariffs and it was a system that was financed in part by the Bank of England a central government connected bank and so after the revolution was over there were a lot of men in politics in America who saw that well this is how the elites in Britain became wealthy and powerful and we want to be wealthy and powerful the opposition to this was always Thomas Jefferson and the Jeffersonians the proponents at that time was Alexander Hamilton the America's first Treasury Secretary was the chief proponent of this and he was sort of the intellectual intellectual brains really of the Federalist Party the opposing party to Jefferson and the Jeffersonians looked at this and they correctly stated that you know we just fought a revolution against this system why would we want to adopt it here and that was the point they were making and of course the answer if they if they were to have been honest about it by the Hamiltonians they would have said they would have quoted Mel Brooks in the movie history of the world part 2 where Mel Brooks plays the king of France and he keeps saying over and over through the movie it's good to be the king and so if you're on the paying side of a mercantilist empire it's a bad deal might even be worth fighting a revolution to get rid of that but if you're on the collecting side it's good to be the king and Hamilton and his cronies wanted to be the kings and so they wanted to import this system and the whole system was premised on the existence of a government run bank sort of similar to the Bank of England so it would have been the British system imported to America Alexander Hamilton himself coined the phrase the American system to describe this British system that he wanted to bring to America and you know of course he grew up as a teenager he worked for slave-owning molasses traders and on St. Croix in the Caribbean and that that is sort of his educational background in economics and and so he observed how wealthy these men came as became as a part of the British mercantilist system and he thought that was the route to wealth he wasn't very well educated at all in economics I don't think he ever even read the wealth of nations and I in my book Hamilton's Curse I quote William Graham Sumner is saying the same thing Sumner wrote a biography of Hamilton in 1905 and so he was what he knew about economics what literally knew I think he learned from sort of propaganda pamphlets that were written by people who worked for the British mercantilists who spread propaganda in favor of protectionism and in these other policies but but it was his nemesis Jefferson who was well educated who did read the wealth of nations if you if you go into Monticello today which is Thomas Jefferson's home in Virginia right by the front door the first thing you see is a marble bust of Turgo the French finance minister whose name is upstairs in the Mises Institute in the library among all you know the famous precursors of the Austrian school and so it was Jefferson was well schooled in economics and that's why he opposed the central bank and so here's what Murray Rothbard said about this he wrote about this in his book the mystery of banking he said as soon as the revolution was over Hamilton was a part of the political cabal that was really headed by Robert Morris who was probably the wealthiest man in America at the time he was also a defense contractor during the the Revolutionary War he was a Philadelphia businessman and here's what Rothbard said that these people wanted quote I'm quoting 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 in short the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain and that was Murray Rothbard then he goes on to say an important part of the Morris scheme he calls this the Morris scheme was to organize and had 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 that was really the first central bank was called the Bank of North America and it only lasted about a year because it's currency was he had a monopoly and currency legal monopoly and currency issue and but it was so mistrusted that the currency became worthless in about a year and it was privatized but these people never gave up Rothbard refers to quote Morris's youthful disciple Alexander Hamilton and he was his youthful disciple and and Hamilton was quite the what would be the scientific term scientific term would be ask-kisser I think for Alexander Hamilton you know he was a young age is 20 years old and he's George Washington's aide to camp in the Revolutionary Army and and near the end of the American Revolution he when it was evident that the war was going to end Hamilton writes a letter to Robert Morris and the richest man in the country and and so and what they write in a letter well he didn't know anything about economics and finance and so he asked a man named Timothy Pickering who would later become George Washington's Secretary of War who was known to know a lot about finance at the time what can I read to learn at least the language of finance and economics so Timothy Pickering gave him a few books enough to allow him to write a 30-page letter to Robert Morris and he pretty much said in the letter and I quote the letter in an article of mine that's in a quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics he pretty much said dear Mr. Morris I agree 100% with your economic plan for essential bank corporate welfare protectionist tariffs and a big public debt and so that's that's why I said the scientific term would apply to Hamilton all the way and so so here's the richest man in America the war is ending and he has George Washington's top assistant writing him saying after the war we need to get all this done we need to get all these things done and so Robert Morris writes George Washington and recommends when he's president when George Washington became president after the war and recommends Alexander Hamilton as Treasury Secretary and according to Ron Cherno the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Hamilton George Washington then turned to Hamilton and said I didn't know you knew anything about finance we never talked about it but he appointed him as a first American Treasury Secretary because Robert Morris said so and Robert Morris after all he must know something about money he's the richest man in the country and so so that's how he became first Treasury Secretary this was very similar to today you know when's the last time you heard of a Treasury Secretary who was not the head of Goldman Sachs so Robert Morris was the Goldman Sachs of the day who represented the Philadelphia and New York banking industry and so he put his man his puppet became the first Treasury Secretary well here's what Ron Cherno actually says he said Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering sent him some primers to read Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Morris that set for the full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank and so so this laid out this letter laid out their agenda and the agenda was subsidized corporations directly protectionist tariffs a big public debt and a national central bank to pay for it all and the big public debt was closely linked to the idea of a bank a central bank Hamilton himself was a very Machiavellian in this and the reason he gave for a large public debt being a virtue he called it a blessing that's why I called my book my book Hamilton's Curse there's another book out called Hamilton's Blessing about the public debt being a blessing why Hamilton thought it'd be a blessing was that the wealthiest people of the country would own the government bonds therefore they would become a powerful political lobbying force for higher taxes to make sure there was enough money in the Treasury to pay off their bonds and he wanted to link the wealthy to the government just as today we link the poor to the government through welfare he wanted them to be a permanent lobbying force because he believed the Constitution did not create nearly a big enough government you have to understand that the American Constitutional Convention Alexander Hammond Hamilton appeared and he laid out the plan of the Nationalist as they were called it was a permanent president who would appoint all the governors who would have veto power over all state legislation so it'd be a king essentially and and there would be no such thing as federalism or states rights that it would be a monopoly government in nations capital and of course that's why the Jeffersonians said well that sounds like the king of England why would we want that we just fought a revolution against that okay and so the purpose of the central bank was to fund all this and here's a and so the so that I'll tell the story well here's here's what another thing that Hamilton had in mind this is a quote from Douglas Adair and he was an editor of the Federalist Papers which makes the case for the US Constitution so Douglas Adair in 1980 this is a 1980 edition of the Federalist Papers describing Hamilton's role in all this he says and I'm quoting 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 as a party of government while at the same time he attempted to make the executive dominant over Congress by a lavish use of the spoils system 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 that's his description of Hamilton as Treasury Secretary he was building big government by using his post as a patronage office to buy the allegiance of various members of Congress for his agenda of bigger government than the Constitution would allow and so the one of the first things Hamilton did was they nationalized the war debt okay the states had financed the individual states had financed the the war through tax collections and issuing debt so there were all there was all these bonds that many of them were held by revolutionary war veterans who were paid in government bonds when they ran out of money and so at the time a lot of them were trading for as little as 2% of par value and so Hamilton and the insiders in the US Congress passed the law saying that these bonds would be redeemed at a certain date at 100% par value and so the insiders knew this but this was before the internet remember this is way before the internet and so what happened was the insiders the political insiders including Hamilton personally hired ships stagecoaches every means of transportation available at the time to go up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States to buy up all these bonds at 2 to 10% of face value because they and only they knew that in a couple of weeks they could turn around and sell and sell these bonds back to the government at 100% of face value here's how there's a biography of Jefferson and Hamilton by Claude Bowers famous historian who explains what happens here's what he's explaining this scene he says expresses with very large sums of money on their way to North Carolina were going for purposes of speculation and certificates they 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 so there was this mad dash to to go and buy up all these bonds from these unsuspecting bondholders and they did and Bowers writes about how Robert Morris himself made about 35 million dollars at the time through this type arbitrage that happened you know talk about insider trading this is this is political insider trading you know the first big example of it and so here's Jefferson observing all this and at the same time Hamilton is writing a big report to George Washington arguing that a bank run by politicians out of the nation's capital is constitutional Jefferson went back in and said well the Constitutional Convention debated this and rejected the idea of a bank and that would seem to be pretty conclusive evidence that it was not not constitutional it's not in the Constitution it's not part of the delegated powers of the Constitution Hamilton would at that point Alexander Hamilton invented the idea of implied powers of the Constitution he said yes it's there's no it's not an explicitly delegated power to the central government but if you read in between the lines it's implied somehow and you know Jefferson's view was that if you read in between the lines you'll see blank space there's nothing nothing there he was that was called strict constructionism and it still is but but Jefferson smoked out Hamilton on this of why he wanted a bank here and and we did get the bank the two men wrote reports to George Washington but the way we did get the first central bank was called the Bank of the United States was that George Washington owned a lot of land in Virginia it's known as Mount Vernon now his property in Virginia and they were moving the national capital from New York to Virginia Washington DC and George Washington wanted the national capital to be adjacent to his property and so they cut a deal George Washington said if you redraw the boundaries so that DC is adjacent to my property I'll vote for the bank and he did so that's how we got the first bank of the United States it wasn't on the strength of the arguments of Alexander Hamilton it was just a real estate deal that benefited George Washington and so so that's how we got it but but here's how Jefferson smoked out the purpose of this bank that Hamilton wanted you know this this arbitrage opportunity it was used to dish out special favors to members of Congress who would then vote for Hamilton's agenda of corporate welfare as subsidies for road and canal building companies cheap credit for businesses mostly in the Northeast protectionist tariffs that he wanted they had to buy the support of Congress and and the this arbitrage over the nationalization of that was their vehicle for buying votes but but here's what Jefferson recognized well Jefferson called it Hamilton's he said Hamilton's financial system had two objects and I'm quoting Thomas Jefferson here first as a puzzle to exclude popular understanding and inquiry that is it was so complicated sounding that the average person would have no way of understanding it and that is certainly true today and secondly as a machine for the corruption of the legislature so he understood that what he was all about in advocating a bank as he wanted he wanted a mechanism for corruption and here's another thing Jefferson said about Hamilton he said he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by one of two motives only force or interest self-interest force he observed in this country was out of the question and the interest therefore 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 political machine he means 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 self-interest and to look after a personal rather than a public good he's talking about the arbitrage and the money they made and the big problem facing Hamilton said Jefferson was that this was only a one-time scheme this was only a one-time vote buying scheme what he really needed was a permanent engine of corruption because they nationalized the debt once you can't nationalize it again they already had it you can't play this game over and over again to buy votes from member of Congress and so here's what Jefferson said some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived this engine was the Bank of the United States so Jefferson's opinion the whole case that Hamilton was making for the first central bank the Bank of the United States was that it could be used as an engine of corruption and then later on many years later you know Hamilton died in 1804 and in 1818 Jefferson wrote an article recalling a dinner that he had with John Adams and Hamilton himself and in a few other prominent people where John Adams the former president John Adams made the statement that he said he's talking about the British Constitution he said purge that Constitution of its corruption and give to its popular branch equality of representation and it would be the most perfect Constitution ever devised by the wit of man so if you get rid of the corruption in the British government it would be the most perfect Constitution in the world John Adams said at that point Hamilton interjects and objects to this and said no he said no the corruption in Britain is a virtue not a vice because it's that corruption that keeps government growing and getting bigger you need some corruption to have bigger government he actually said that you know it is in Jefferson in this article he says I swear in the graves of my children that this is the true story and so and so and so I think it's apparent you know the because the first Bank of the United States was tremendously corrupt as was the second Bank of the United States and and we did get the we did get the first Bank of the United States and in the first five years it created 72% price inflation in the first five years and it did and it was used to influence politics to an attempt to institute politics and it did so much of this it created so much economic instability and price inflation that Congress did not renew its 20-year charter it was given a 20-year charter in 1781 and then it was became defunct but then the war of 1812 came and so in order to monetize the war debt it was brought back in 1816 so we had the second Bank of the United States and so we're into the 19th century here and we start the 19th century with government banking so Ben Bernanke was dead wrong of when he said he equated laissez-faire and 19th century banking policy the second Bank of the United States here's Murray Rothbard's explanation of how of one of the driving forces for the the recreation of the Bank of the United States Rothbard says this in his history of money and banking in the United States the second Bank of the United States was pushed through Congress particularly by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander J. Dallas a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer and close friend counsel and financial associate of Philadelphia merchant and banker Stephen Gerard reputedly one of the two wealthiest men in the country Gerard was the largest stockholder of the first Bank of the United States and during the war of 1812 Gerard became a very heavy investor in the war debt of the federal government as a way to unload his public war debt Gerard began to agitate for a new Bank of the United States who he could sell his bonds to and so that that was one of the moving forces behind why we got the second Bank of the United States nothing you know no market failure story was even attempted to be told about the second Bank of the United States and so we got this monster back and so and this is 1816 and who here knows the title of Murray Rothbard's doctoral dissertation at Columbia University the Panic of 1819 and so you don't have to be an econometrician to make the argument that causation equals the correlation equals causation but but Rothbard explains why there is causation here that the Bank was brought back in 1816 inflated the currency created a boom and the boom busted in 1819 and so you had the first massive unemployment in American history in the cities where you had he writes of how in Philadelphia the employment went from 9500 to 1500 people that during the panic of 1819 so and that was the first really large-scale unemployment and so the so the bank the second Bank of the United States came off with a big bang creating a boom and bust and and price inflation at the same time roughly doubled the price level in a couple of years with after the War of 1812 was concluded okay so and people all over the country knew about this and the the so the second Bank of the United States opened up branches started opening up branches all over the place and the people of Ohio were especially upset about this they were especially upset about the fact that this this corrupt machine was appearing in their state and so at one point they had the Bank of the United States opened up two branches in Ohio state of Ohio state of Ohio then imposed a $50,000 a year tax on each branch and and this is where eventually the Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall made this a statement that the power to tax is the power to destroy and one of his one of his decisions and what he was referring to is the power to tax the Bank of the United States is the power to destroy it Marshall was a proponent of the Bank of the United States he was slavishly devoted to Hamilton and Hamilton's Hamilton's ideas and Hamilton's political agenda he was a nationalist like like Hamilton and so and of course the people in Ohio said well yeah that's right that's the whole purpose of this tax to tax it out of existence you know shoot away and so the state of Ohio attempted to collect this tax $100,000 so they sent an armed Marshall to the Bank of the United States office with a big chest carrying a big hope chest you know with them to put all the loot in and he did he crawled up over the counter you know with his guns on his on his hip and took $100,000 out of the vault and carried it off to the state treasury and and this sort of thing led to lots of litigation and the other states did the same thing for example Indiana and Illinois amended their state constitutions to prohibit the Bank of the United States from operating there North Carolina Georgia Maryland Tennessee and Kentucky imposed heavy taxes just like Ohio did and their purpose was to get rid of this this thing and and of course this is a good example of how the central government sets itself up they have this Constitution but of course the politicians who are appointed to be black robe deities that I mean I mean Supreme Court Justice sorry of course they always support the government and so John Marshall got there and says well the Bank of the United States is constitutional it's not unconstitutional but in those days we Americans didn't look at the Supreme Court Justices as black-robed deities who would announce like like Moses carrying that the 10 commandments from the mountain you know they didn't treat them like that they treat them like just another gang of politicians Andrew Jackson was president at the time and he pretty much said thanks for your opinion John but my opinion is different and we have three branches of government not one we have the executive branch which is me the president we have the Congress they have equal say on constitutional matters and then we have the your judicial branch and then we have the people of the states on top of that and that was the thinking in America at that time and so you know it wasn't written in stone and so so of course as a result Jackson did veto the rechartering of the second bank yeah there was a famous battle the best book on it is called and Andrew Jackson and the bank wars by Robert Remini I guess I could print his name here that's the author's name Andrew Jackson in the bank wars and so and then here's here's what Jackson said in his veto when he vetoed it this is part of Andrew Jackson's veto of the second bank of the United States you know we're into the 1830s now in the 19th century says it is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often been the acts of government to their selfish purposes distinctions in society will always exist under every just government quality of talents of education or wealth cannot be produced by human institutions but every man is equally entitled to protection by law but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions to grant titles gratuities and exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful the humble members of society who have neither the time or the means of securing like favors to themselves have a right to complain of the injustice of their government if government would confine itself to equal protection it would be an unequal unqualified blessing in the act before me to recharge of the bank of the United States there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles and that's Andrew Jackson so he was he was recognizing that the bank was being used as an engine of corruption and the bank proved it to you during the battle the bank was financing the political careers of proponents of the bank Daniel Webster I quote Daniel Webster Webster as writing a letter to Nicholas Biddle the head of the Bank of the United States is saying if you want me to continue my support of your bank in Congress you better send me my stipend so he was literally being paid Henry Clay resigned as Secretary of War to be the general counsel for the Bank of the United States because he had $45,000 in personal debt in 1825 40 $45,000 in 1825 he was known as a big gambler Henry Henry Clay so in two years he made more than $45,000 in legal fees from the the Bank of the United States being being their lawyer and so and so in all that proved to a lot of people that well this is an engine of corruption but that of course is exactly what what Hamilton wanted so he was doing exactly what he wanted to do and so so the bank was defunct and we had this era from about roughly the late 1830s until the 1860s with no central bank sometimes it's sometimes referred to as free banking the government deposit of Treasury of revenues tax revenues was called the sub-treasury system and all during this time the Whig party was created around the same time right the early 1830s and one of their top objectives was to bring back the Bank of the United States it always was and in my writings of Lincoln on Lincoln I quote Michael Holt from the University of Virginia is a historian who had a big fat book the history of the Whig party it's about this stick and he says that no member of the the Whig party was a more vociferous a proponent of bringing back a central bank than was Abraham Lincoln and he made stump speeches all the time for candidates who are running for office who are central banking proponents and in fact Lincoln himself when he was in the state legislature in Illinois there's a story about him told by David Donald David Donald is a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Lincoln he taught at Harvard for many years he just retired a few years ago David Donald and his book is called Lincoln and I and one story he tells in there is that in Springfield Illinois there was a law that had suspended species payment and so the Illinois banks could issue they could inflate and this law was about to go out of existence on December 31st and so if the legislature went home January 1st now the banks were required to to have gold and silver mostly gold and redeemable for currency that they had issued and Lincoln and the Whigs wanted to prevent this they didn't want they wanted to keep the suspension of species payment in they didn't want it to end and so the story David Donald tells is that Abe Lincoln himself was this is in the 1830s he was already the leader of the Whigs in Illinois he bolted for the door because if they couldn't vote to adjourn they couldn't adjourn they had to have a quorum to vote on everything and but the Democratic Party had placed marshals at the door and locked the door it couldn't get out so Abe Lincoln literally jumped out the window and another window and David Donald said that the Democrats then started calling him link a leaping Lincoln and and his merry band a follower and the other Whigs supposedly did the same thing they jumped out the window and when I was in Springfield Illinois a couple years ago and the old State House is still there it's a museum now and so I walked over there to see and that was a long drop I saw the window he dropped out of there and it was a but he was six foot five so he probably could have probably hung by his fingers and and dropped down and did it but it tells you how you know even early on in my in my book the real Lincoln I quote Lincoln's speech when he first entered politics I could paraphrase it he says my politics are short and sweet like the old woman's dance and he said I'm favor of a high protectionist tariff a bank and subsidies for an internal improvements that is corporate welfare for railroad companies it was called internal improvements and that's it that's what he says why that's why I'm in politics but the bank was the key the bank who was with the pay for all this this stuff and so and of course Murray Rothbard explains what suspension of species payment means the thing that the Whigs like Lincoln spent their lives trying to get in the 19th century and here's what he says in what has government done to our money the bluntest way for government to foster inflation is to grant banks the special privilege of refusing to pay their obligations while yet continuing in their operation while everyone else must pay their debts or go bankrupt the banks are permitted to refuse redemption of their receipts and that is redemption for gold at the same time forcing their debtors to pay when their loans fall due so you have to pay up when your loan falls due but if you go to the bank the same bank and say I'd like gold for my money they say get lost you know the hell with you a more accurate the usual name for this is a suspension of species payments a more accurate name says Rothbard would be quote license for theft for what else can we call a government permission to continue business without fulfilling one's contract okay so so you put your money in the bank the bank says we'll give you gold when you want your money back and then a year later the government says oh we're going to suspend species payment and the bank says no we're not going to give you your gold the gold that you gave us for this currency for these pieces of paper you know license for theft and that's the sort of thing that Lincoln and the Whigs fought for and so and so by the time you get to the 1860s we didn't get someone answer that phone please by the time you get the 1860s none of this had succeeded the Jeffersonians had thwarted all of this president after president after president had vetoed banking bills tariff bills 1857 was the high watermark of free trade in America tariff rate was as low as it ever was in the 19th century there was no central bank there there was no federal subsidies for railroads or anybody else there had been some state subsidies but they were all such disasters that every state had amended its constitution to prohibit the use of tax funds for the corporations to do anything and that all changed and during the Civil War when Lincoln the Lincoln administration enacted the national currency acts and the legal tender acts they created the green backs that were not backed by gold at the time or silver for that matter at the time allowed them to print money during the Civil War the price level doubled roughly in the northern states in the southern states did the same thing but in a much greater scale inflation was like 2000% a year in the southern states during the Civil War and so in the legal tender acts you know monopolize the currency they impose the special tax on any existing competing currencies and the Secret Service was created to police that the origins of the Secret Service was to police counterfeiting you know competition in other words for the green backs that were created and so we didn't get a central bank per se but we had we moved a big step in the direction of the nationalization of the money supply nevertheless and so you know it's yet another yet another reason why Bernanke doesn't know what he's talking about when it refers to the 19th century as some sort of laissez-faire period in banking and here's how I'll read to what a few people said about this this this was a huge victory for the the Hamiltonians who had morphed into the Whigs and then the Republicans by the 1860 and here's what let's be one more quote here well maybe it's of course the Republicans were ecstatic about this but the regio one quote from some of the ecstatic Republicans oh yeah there's a historian named Heather Cox Richardson she wrote a book called the greatest nation on the earth yeah how arrogant is that it's about it's about America during the Civil War years and the domestic policy during the Civil War greatest nation on the earth she quotes John Sherman Senator John Sherman was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee so he was very instrumental in getting the National Currency Acts passed he was the brother of General Sherman the military general there's they're both from Ohio and here's what he said it was the Republican Party's objective with the National Currency Acts he says it was quote to nationalize as much as possible even the currency so as to make men love their country before their states all private interests all local interests all banking interests the interests of individuals everything should be subordinate now to the interest of the government at Senator John Sherman chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the most powerful man in Washington on economic matters during the Lincoln administration and he of course was still in the Senate in 1890 when they named the antitrust law after him so he was he was there quite a long time okay and so there was a an opponent there was a Democrat named Lazarus Powell from Kentucky a member of Congress and here's what he said of the National Currency Acts the result of this legislation is to utterly destroy the rights of the states it is asserting a power which is carried out to a logical result would enable the National Congress to destroy every institution of the states and cause all power to be concentrated here in Washington DC and of course Alexander Hamilton where he alive would have said well sure that's the whole point of this is centralized power the same with the income tax when income tax came along in 1913 it you know gave the government of Washington so much money that the states became just mere appendages because they could easily buy off any any state government with all that money the New York Times on March 9th 1863 wrote an article about the legal tender acts they said this the legal tender act in the National Currency Bill crystallized a centralization of power such as Hamilton might have eulogized as magnificent so that was always the game to centralize power in Washington that's how we got Hamilton scheme of we don't have a permanent president but they're all pretty much the same anyway whether it look whether that the figurehead is Barack Obama or George W. Bush they pretty much all work for Goldman Sachs and in various other special interests as far as that's who they always put in charge of the money anyway and so so it doesn't really matter so we we got we eventually did get Hamilton's highly centralized monopoly government and this and the nationalization of the currency really was it now so so what was the effect of these national currency act we did still have the gold standard after after the Civil War and there were periodic suspensions of species payment there were there were state governments that oppose all sorts of regulations like branch banking restrictions on banks that that that created problems a lot also so there's not only federal regulation of banking there was state regulation of banking and there were some economists some pretty prominent economists who evaluated this whole system the national currency acts and what they did eventually and this was in Anna Schwartz was one of them you know Anna Schwartz was you know one of the most famous monetary economists of the 20th century she just died a couple years ago if not a year ago or says pretty recent and she wrote she co-authored the famous book with Milton Friedman a monetary history of the United States but there was a book of readings on monetary history that Anna Schwartz was the principal author of this one article and this whole system that was enacted in the 1860s until the Fed was created in 1913 here's how they characterized it as it was characterized by quote monetary and cyclical instability for banking panics frequent stock market crashes and other financial disturbances that's that's how they described it so in other words it behaved just like what when we had the Bank of the United States first Bank of the United States and the second Bank of the United States it created it gave boom and busts price inflation stock market crashes and so we had the same thing with government regulation of banking in the 19th and the late 19th century even without the Fed as far as that's concerned okay and so well time is running out but that's that's sort of my one hour rundown of 19th century banking and explanation of why Ben Bernanke is full of it when he says let's say fair banking was say it was improved upon by the creation of the Fed in 1913 and I think time is about up I have oh no we have time I'm I'm looking at the wrong thing I think we have time for Q&A then that's all I wanted to say you know if anybody has questions about anything I can't answer questions about anything but you can ask them I thought I heard I thought she passed away okay okay well I'm glad to hear that that's like somebody told me she died that's maybe they told me she retired and thought she was dead because she retired I don't know okay that's pretty good she I like the antishwarts yes man yeah I read it quite some time ago and I thought it was a little too conspiracy theory oriented even for me and there's some bad economics in it I would rely more on Murray Rothbard's monetary history of the United States I think he knew orders of magnitude more than that about this than the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island even though he probably had some things right the Mises Institute has had two Fed conferences on Jekyll Island and including one in the room where the Fed was created and they have the pictures of all these guys who are the conspirators and you walk into the room and you can swear that the eyeballs are moving back and forth when you see all these big portraits of these people and there's a big conference room there but I wouldn't use it as a textbook in a classroom you could read it if you want but there are a lot better sources of the origins of the Fed than that one because there's some bad economics in there that I didn't like so it doesn't but any book I read though I don't I don't expect every book to be perfect I read you know a lot of the economic history research I do I force myself to read dozens of really bad books but there's always some good information in them it's well documented footnoted and and you can make use of it and you can learn things about it and and you can and if you understand economics you can you can interpret some of these historical events differently from these historical authors sometimes so I'm not saying you shouldn't read that book but it's not one of my favorites on that that whole topic and someone up here had a hand up next the question was why did Alexander Hamilton want big government well what one reason was his financial benefactors wanted it they wanted a central bank they would subsidize their businesses and he was their emissary to the government and and he became a he was a lawyer and in the way usually works is you know once you leave the government your law firm gets all kinds of businesses from those those companies and you become very wealthy and so and so that's that's you know financial interest right there and Hamilton also talked a lot about imperial glory he wanted to invade France for example and he said it would give it would give America imperial glory and Hamilton you know of course Jefferson was terrified at this because he knew that all war was a waste of blood and treasure and so and here he had Hamilton wanting a central bank to finance more wars that's why for example when Jefferson was president in the British started kidnapping American sailors and stealing American ships to help themselves out with their their war with France Jefferson had chose the lesser of two evils he put a trade embargo on because the alternative was another war with England and he thought a war with England would be an unmitigated disaster whereas a trade embargo is just a disaster an economic disaster and then he had to know that there would be a lot of cheating on the trade embargo anyway but but but he was so anti-war that that's what he did and so but Hamilton wanted wanted war and he need big government for when he a lot of money for wars he really wanted to invade France and they had they had to work very hard to to avoid a war with France right after the war with England occurred and so he was quite the egomaniac and I thought the imperial glory was what he talked about a lot he complained constantly to George Washington that we need a government of more energy and if you read the biography of him by William Graham Sumner he was a type of person that did not either did not understand or did not like the fact that the invisible hand worked pretty well he thought that he had to have his hand and everything in the US economy or else it wouldn't work he was that type of person and he had the authority he was Treasury Secretary and so so he was sort of a compulsive central planner in terms of his mentality if you if you read about him yes sir I think he had his hand up in the back yeah yeah yeah that's a pretty good summary of it I think secrets of the temple yeah I read it a long time ago when it came out but I don't think you know that's that's pretty good that's pretty good summary I would agree with you there yes sir well he did stabilize pretty fast after the panic of 1819 you know that the Fed the the well I won't use that for the period when when when Jackson vetoed the rechartering rechartering of the second bank the United States both Richard Timberlake is you know one of the few people have written a treatise on monetary history of the United States there's Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz there's Murray Rothbard's history of money in banking and there's Richard Timberlake's book and that's really the only three treatises there are on the monetary history of the United States Alan Meltzer has written the history of the Fed but it's not a monetary history of the United States you know comprehensive but Timberlake in his book says that that period from the end of the second bank the United States until Lincoln's introduction of the National Currency Acts was the most stable monetary system America ever had even though it wasn't perfect and Jeffrey Hummel says the same thing Jeffrey Hummel is the historian who's written a lot on banking history he had he had a real good article in the Journal of Libertarian Studies some years ago on the on this period of banking that he writes a sort of repeats it in his book he has a book called emancipating slaves and slaving free men which is about the Civil War the American Civil War but he has a big section on banking history in there that's drawn from his earlier publications and so these are two pretty good monetary historians who make a good case that it wasn't a perfect monetary system but it's probably the most stable monetary system that has ever existed in America the critics of this era say that grossly exaggerate what were called wildcat banks there were banks that said well yeah we'll redeem your the car currency in gold but you have to go to the branch bank out in skunk guts Alabama to to get it and this will be out in the middle of nowhere where only a wildcat would live you know a mountain lion and but of course people are not that stupid if they say you can yeah we'll give you gold for your for for the pieces of paper we'll give you a gold back but you have to travel 500 miles through the jungle to get it you know they were they weren't that important they existed there were con artists who tried to set up banks like that that's true but it's a minor thing it was a minor thing but the the critics of free banking always grossly exaggerate wildcats they'll just say didn't you ever hear wildcat banking as though as though that existed everywhere but it wasn't it was a very minor thing and so and it's really kind of dishonest for them to say that but I think Timberlake and Hummel make a better case that this was state more stable than the than any other system wasn't perfect but it was pretty stable mercantilism and fascism I think mercantilism more sort of morphed into fascism there's the there's an author named Michael Lind who wrote a book of essay edited a book of essays on economic nationalism and he actually says this but he he doesn't even realize that he's he's explaining how the mercantilist ideas of Alexander Hamilton eventually migrated to Europe and Japan he even mentioned Japan and influenced the Japanese and German policymakers in the early 20th century and so here Michael Lind is a defender of economic nationalism and in the Hamiltonian agenda but in his book he he doesn't recognize he says it he lays out you know the names of the people who advocated these ideas and brought them to Europe of course they started in Europe and they came to the United States and then they went back to Europe because of Hamilton's influence and prominence and also Japan they became popular in Japan sort of central planning and so you know economic fascism basically was private property and private enterprise was permitted but it was heavily controlled and regimented by the state so that only serve purposes that would serve the state mercantilism wasn't that extreme in central planning it was pretty much a system of subsidies but it wasn't central planning it wasn't the king didn't say no sorry you can't make soap we want you to grow wheat instead or something like that but that's what fascism was it was you could have private enterprise but it was only to serve whatever Hitler or Mussolini wanted it to do to produce if they want to produce tanks and bomber aircraft that's what you would produce with your manufacturing business the mercantilism wasn't wasn't quite like that but there is similarities yes sir yeah oh yeah he thought he thought the the question is did Hamilton think the big government was good for society well he he was probably as instrumental as anyone in getting the constitutional convention going to where the states seceded from the original constitution they seceded from the Articles of Confederation which he had condemned as too weak because they did not give the federal government taxing power at all all the taxes came from the states and so at the Constitutional Convention he wanted a king a permanent president as I said and when he didn't get it he stormed out of there and when the Constitution was finally ratified he denounced it as a frail and worthless fabric those are his words and so even though he was the author of the Federalist Papers and he said all sorts of nice things in the Federalist Papers he he spent the rest of his life trying to subvert the Constitution and I describe how he did that in my book Hamilton's Curse and so he thought the government needed to be much bigger and more powerful he he wanted a standing army Jefferson did not Jefferson fought him tooth and nail over a standing army because Jefferson understood as everyone did at that time that the standing armies of Europe were always used to intimidate the citizens it wasn't they weren't defending them against invaders they were intimidating the citizens to pay taxes they were essentially an army of tax collectors and it convinced me that that was true of Hamilton when I read it when I read about what he did during the whiskey rebellion there were farmers in Pennsylvania that were growing wheat and Hamilton as Treasury Secretary was instrumental in putting a special tax on wheat and these farmers were making whiskey out of wheat out of grain because they decided it was too too heavy and cumbersome to grow wheat and transport it across the state to Philadelphia and New York and sell it there from Western Pennsylvania and so they made whiskey instead and then there's a special special tax on whiskey the whiskey tax and they thought of their being discriminated against so they revolted Hamilton talked George Washington into conscripting getting getting governors to conscript 15,000 men to ride up to Western Pennsylvania to put down the whiskey rebellion it was called the tax rebellion and in Claude Bauer's book about this the officers were all bondholders from the Eastern Seaboard but the soldiers were conscripts so they went up and Hamilton himself rode there up there and he became they finally rounded up about two dozen tax protesters made them walk clear cross from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in the winter some of them with bare feet and they put them on trial with Hamilton as the judge he decided he wanted to hang them George Washington pardoned all of them and so the tax protesters won the tax put and they didn't pay the tax and didn't go to jail but that's what convinced me that the reason why Hamilton wanted a standing army was a standing army of tax collectors just as existed during the American colonies that was one of the big complaints the in the Declaration of Independence he has sent swarms of officers to eat out our sustenance that's what Hamilton wanted he wanted swarms of officers to collect all of his taxes he imposed a personal property tax that created the Shays rebellion in New England you know the whiskey tax created another tax rebellion and so he was he was a a hyper energetic statist who didn't believe anybody could get along without his control and his finger being on their their behavior and he needed a lot of tax he was a Machiavellian too there's even a book on Hamilton called the American Machiavelli about him and so that that's who he was and and he was so and he must he was very brilliant he must have been sort of a Sven Galli type character because I've read what John Marshall says about him and it's a lot of a lot of John Marshall's writings that the Chief Justice sound like a 13 year old girl writing about her first boyfriend it's kind of sickening and even John John Marshall's famous statement on the constitutional constitutionality of the Bank of the United States the big passages of it are verbatim from Alexander Hamilton's report on on the bank to George Washington and the exact same words in both things and so he was really slavishly devoted to his agenda and that's why you there's a good book ranks American presidents by Ivan Eland it's called recarving Rushmore and he gives John Adams a very very low ranking among all the presidents for two reasons he's he signed the the Sedition Act which made free speech illegal in America and he appointed John Marshall as Chief Justice and so Ivan Eland says for those two reasons John Adams should be like number 48 something of all the president way down there the president let's see I think we're about out of time it's 2 30