 This talk is on the corrupt origins of central banking in America and why I think that's an interesting topic and an important topic is, you know, I briefly mentioned in my talk yesterday the origins of antitrust and natural monopoly regulation and some of the research I've done over the years has to do with sort of curiosity over the origins of government institutions because it's often true that they're built on a big mountain of myths as far as, you know, what they are and the myths sometimes last for generations and it becomes the accepted truth. And so, you know, I found that the whole story that's in all the textbooks about antitrust is dubious and why any economist should have been skeptical about it is there's a huge literature on the actual enforcement of antitrust for a hundred years and, you know, article after article, book after book is about how it's been, you know, so counterproductive and actually harms competition rather than helps it. And the same with natural monopoly, you know, there used to be a journal that was very popular among economists called the Bell Journal of Economics. It was the Bell Telephone Company funded it and it had just hundreds and hundreds of articles about the problems involved in regulating public utilities. And so, and there were just generations of economists wrote all these articles about the inefficiencies caused by regulation of public utilities in the Bell Journal, but still they would argue that, but it was needed in the first place. You know, there was market failure. We needed regulation of utilities in the first place and then we put it in place and these foolish or stupid corrupt people messed it up. And so, and so, you know, I usually smell a big rat when I hear stories like that. Yeah, we messed up for a hundred years, but it was a good idea at the beginning. And with central banking, I began looking into central banking and of course, you know, many books have been written. There's some treatises, you know, Murray Rothbard's History of Money and Banking in the United States is great. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote a treatise of History of Monetary History of the United States. Richard Timberlake also wrote a treatise and Alan Meltzer wrote a History of the Federal Reserve. Alan Meltzer is a famous Carnegie Mellon professor who wrote from a Chicago school perspective for many years on monetary policy, monetary issues. And so, in all these books and articles, you know, catalog problems caused by the Fed and then there's stories about corruption caused by the Fed or central banking. You know, a recent example would be sort of an outrageous example when President Bush's Treasury Secretary, Paulson, Henry Paulson left Goldman Sachs and I believe it's in the U.S. Constitution that the Treasury Secretary must be an employee of Goldman Sachs. I'm pretty sure I'll have to check with Judge Napolitano about that, but it seems certain. To become Treasury Secretary, he orchestrates a bailout of the insurance company, AIG, which owed Goldman Sachs $18 billion. And they get, I don't know, what was it, the 80-some billion dollars from the government and they paid back Goldman Sachs. Henry leaves the government, goes back to Goldman Sachs, and I pick up the New York Times one day in the society section. I was on an airplane, so I'd read the whole thing. You know, he's again bored on a long airplane ride at the New York Times Sunday edition. And there's a big article about the big, beautiful, new $5 million house that Mrs. Paulson just bought, you know, her 10th house somewhere. And so, you know, there are stories like that about corruption. And so, but what was usually said is that it was a good idea at the beginning, there were market failure, the financial system was falling apart, we needed essential banking. But, you know, for the past hundred and some years, we messed up. And so, just like natural monopoly and just like antitrust, I smell a rat. And so, I looked in, started looking into the very origins. Murray Rothbard wrote a lot widely about this too. And in his book, The Mystery of Banking, he's, you know, there were two national banks before the Fed. There was the Bank of North America, was the very first national bank, and that was succeeded by something called the Bank of the United States. And the mover and shaker behind the first national bank was Financier Robert Morris, who some historians say he was the Financier of the American Revolution. Rothbard called him a defense contractor who made money off the American Revolution, which is more true, I think, about who Robert Morris was, a Philadelphia, very wealthy businessman, possibly the wealthiest man in America in the late 18th century. Okay. And so, after the American Revolution, he was a native of Liverpool, England. And here's what he and his big business compatriots in Philadelphia and New York, and Boston basically wanted. And I'm quoting Rothbard from page 192. 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. That would be corporate welfare for road and canal building. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain. And when I talk about this, I usually make the point that this is absolutely true. The revolution is over. They just fought a revolution against the rotten British mercantilist system. And then they had these group of people led by Robert Morris who wanted to bring the exact same system to America. And you can understand why their political opponents, the Jeffersonians, were outraged at this and opposed it every step along the way. For that very reason. But when I first read about this, it reminded me of this old movie, I think of the history of the world, part two or part one. I forget what part. And Mel Brooks portrays the king of France during the French Revolution. And his laugh line in the movie is, it's good to be the king. He's sitting on a big pile of gold bars. It's good to be the king in the big laugh line. And that was basically their attitude that mercantilism is a rotten system if you're on the paying end. But if you're on the collecting end, it's pretty good if you're on that side. And these people wanted to be on the collecting end of the mercantilist system. After all, it existed in Europe for hundreds of years for a reason. It was very profitable to somebody. And these people wanted to be the somebody in America. An important part of the Morris scheme, I always love Rothbard's language, like scheme, racket. He wasn't afraid to call these things what they were, was, and I'm quoting again, to organize and head a central bank to provide cheap credit and expanded money for himself and his allies. The Bank of North America was deliberately modeled after the Bank of England. And so mercantilism, a short definition of mercantilism, it basically is a collection of policies that benefit producers at the expense of consumers, protectionism, corporate welfare subsidies, that sort of thing. Grants of monopoly franchises, all that. So that's mercantilism. And so they succeeded. They got the government to create this Bank of North America. And there was a law passed where no other banks were allowed to exist in the country. It was given literally a monopoly in banking. But the people became so suspicious of the currency that they were issuing, and suspicious that it was not backed by gold or silver, that the bank's currency became valueless. And the bank collapsed and was privatized in the year 1783. So it only lasted about a year because there was so little public confidence in this scheme, as Rothbard called it. But they never gave up. Long after Morris died, there was still a success of generation of mercantilists who wanted to impose mercantilism on Americans. And so Rothbard says he recruited a youthful disciple, a youthful disciple. And the youthful disciple was Alexander Hamilton, the young lawyer who had been George Washington's adjutant general and protégé in the American Revolution. So he was very close to the president, George Washington. And the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Hamilton, Ron Cherno, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Alexander Hamilton, he wrote how it was that Hamilton got the job as Treasury Secretary. So Robert Morris got Hamilton the job as Treasury Secretary by writing George Washington. And Cherno writes here that Hamilton mentioned this, and Washington knew about it because he got a letter from Robert Morris. In the letter, he turns to Alexander Hamilton and said, I didn't know you knew anything about finance. We never talked about it. But here he was, he wanted him to be the first Treasury Secretary. So what Hamilton did, here's what Cherno says, Hamilton brushed up on money matters. He didn't know anything. He knew less than anybody in his room about economics of his day. And had Colonel Timothy Pickering. This was a Massachusetts senator. He was a Secretary of State and Secretary of War under George Washington. So this was, and this was a man who knew something about economics. He was educated, Timothy Pickering. And Pickering sent him some primers, David Hume's political discourses, tracks written by the English clergyman and polemicist Richard Price. I'm sure you've all read Richard Price, the students of economics, whoever he was. And his all-purpose crib postal weights, universal dictionary of trade and commerce. So he wrote a dictionary. Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Morris that set forth a full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank. And in the letter, he basically said, I think it'd be a good idea if we did all these things that I quoted to you a minute ago that the Murray Rothbard said, you know, national bank, high protectionist tariffs, big public debt, and all that. And in the letter, it's an April 30th, 1781 letter to Robert Morris by Hamilton advocating protectionist tariffs, a central bank, taxes on land as property taxes, poll taxes, and a large public debt. And Robert Morris thought, this is great. I love this. And so he got the job. And so basically, Hamilton became the political water carrier for Robert Morris and the other big money people from New York and Philadelphia. Basically, that's why when they held the Constitutional Convention, and Hamilton showed up and advocated a king, he called it a permanent president. And they rejected it. He left in a huff and went back to New York. It wasn't even they stayed for a day or two and he left. Wasn't interested. Okay. And for example, Hamilton said this, I was among the first who were convinced that an administration by single men was essential to the proper management of the affairs of this country, management by single men, not single as opposed to married versus single, but one person, one person, a king. Okay. And so he became a big advocate of a central bank as you know, because that's what Morris wanted. And here's what some of the things that Hamilton began saying about the virtues of a national bank, quoting him, 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. How could you, how could you miss out on that? And he spoke of imperial glory, you know, a lot of, a lot of the British war mongers, you know, reveled in the imperial glory of war. And then he thought that Americans would also like that imperial glory. And but you need a bank, a national bank to do that. Okay. So in short, the purpose of the first bank was to grow the state bigger than the Constitution would allow and finance an empire. Okay. And so Jefferson was always very suspicious of Hamilton. He grew to hate the man, although he respected him as a, as a major intellect. And, and he was also very Machiavellian, you know, he was the reason why he wanted a large public debt. He called it a blessing, a large public debt, national debt. The reason he gave was that the wealthier people of the country would be the ones who would be buying government bonds. And they, they therefore would become a powerful lobbying force in favor of higher taxes than bigger government, because they would want to make sure there was always enough money in the treasury to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds. And so that was very, very, very, Nat Machiavellian. He was out in the open for this. Back, back in those days, politicians, I guess, were, were not quite as big a liars as they are today. They just come right out and said it. And it's, you know, it's on, it's all over the place in the history books. Okay. And so he was quite the Machiavellian. Here's how one of the editors of the Federalist Papers described Hamilton as Treasury Secretary. He said, with devious brilliance, Hamilton set out by a program of class legislation to unite the property interests of the Eastern Seaboard into a cohesive administration party while at the same time he attempted to make the executive dominant over the Congress by a lavish use of the spoils system that is handing out government jobs to supporters. So he couldn't get a king, but he wanted the executive branch to be dominant over the Congress or the judiciary. The next best thing to a king. In carrying out his scheme, Douglas Sardare wrote, the editor of the Federalist Papers, 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 has benefited from. And so he was using the money in the Treasury Department to pay off members of Congress and sort of the wealthier business people in the country for their political support. Political support for what? Political support for what Hamilton coined as the American system. This quote that I read at the beginning where they wanted protectionist tariffs, a national bank, and subsidies for corporations of all sorts. That was the British mercantile system, but Hamilton called it the American system. This was long before George Orwell wrote 1984. We would call that Orwellian now, but that word didn't exist in the late 18th century, of course, but it was Orwellian. It's black as white, night as day, light as dark. It's pretty much the same thing. And so that's what he did. And one of the first things that Hamilton did as president, and these are all things I'm explaining to you because the important part of this story is what Jefferson had to say about all this and its connection to the bank, to why we got a central bank. So what he did was the American Revolution was financed by the state governments. There was no national financing of it. In early America, each state thought of itself as a country in the same sense that Great Britain and Spain and France were countries. Virginia was a country, Massachusetts was a country, and they had a confederacy of countries that fought to secede against from the British Empire. And they raised what tax money they could, and they borrowed money also as states. Hamilton nationalized all this debt, all the state debt, most of it being war debt. And here's the way he nationalized it. The insiders in New York, the national capital was in New York City at the time. It was New York and Philadelphia, and then they created Washington DC out of, carved it out of Virginia. But the New Yorkers, the congressmen and the political insiders knew that there was a piece of legislation that was going to say that this war debt that was trading between two and ten percent of face value would be bought up at a hundred percent of face value at some point. And this was before the internet to all the young students in the class. This was long before the internet happened. And so what happened is the insiders, talk about insider trading, they hired stagecoaches, ships, boats, men on horseback, anyone and anything to go up and down the eastern seaboard buying up bonds mostly held by revolutionary war veterans because they ran out of money and they paid them in promises in government bonds. And these were trading between two and ten percent of face value, but the insiders knew that they can get their hands on these bonds that in a month or two they can cash them in at a hundred percent face value. Here's how, excuse me, there's a historian named Claude Bowers who wrote a book called Jefferson and Hamilton. Okay, he also wrote a famous book on the reconstruction called The Tragic Era, you know, post-civil war. But here's what he said about what happened next, expresses by which he meant stagecoaches. With very large sums of money on their way to the North Carolina, went for purpose of speculation in certificates, splashed and bumped over wretched winter roads, two fast-selling vessels chartered by a member of Congress who had been an officer in the war were plowing the waters southward on a similar mission. And so there was a mad scramble to buy up all these bonds and so these men became very wealthy. Among the men who became wealthy, Robert Morris himself made 18 million dollars. This is this is in the late 1700s, 18 million dollars. Governor George Clinton of New York made five million dollars. Hamilton himself purchased the bonds through buying agents in Philadelphia and New York. And so then in steps Jefferson, Jefferson is watching all of this and observing all of this and he wrote an essay and on February 4th, 1818, Thomas Jefferson wrote an essay about Hamilton's financial system. He says this, Hamilton's financial system had two objects. First, as a puzzle to exclude popular understanding and inquiry, secondly, as a machine for the corruption of the legislature. What he was talking about is Hamilton had written these big long-winded reports that are typical of lawyers in which he was. One was called Report on Manufacturers, then there was a report on the National Bank and they were very long-winded and obtuse and filled with all sorts of language that no one would understand hardly. And so Jefferson is saying, well, the purpose of these these reports is to confuse the public and befuddle the public, bamboozle the public so they wouldn't know what on earth is going on with their money. But the second purpose Jefferson said was corruption. And so what was he talking about? Well, Jefferson had come to the conclusion that after watching this arbitrage that was orchestrated by Hamilton, that what he was doing was buying votes for members of Congress. When he made these politicians millionaires in the 18th century and millionaires, well, they would vote for whatever he wanted them to vote for, protectionist tariffs, existence of a national bank, subsidies for road building corporations, whatever they want. After all, he's the man who made them wealthy. Okay, so that's what he's talking about. And here's what Jefferson said about Hamilton. He vowed, Hamilton did, the opinion that man could be governed by one of two motives only, force or interest, that is self-interest. Force he observed in this country was out of the question. Okay, it's not a totalitarian state. And the interest therefore of the members must be laid hold of to keep the legislature in unison with the executive. They remember Hamilton wanted a king, but we didn't get a king, so there's a big problem there. You've got the legislature to deal with. How can you get the legislature and the king, the president to be one? Well, bribery. Okay, in other words, the interest therefore of the members must be laid hold of to keep the legislature in union with the executive. And with grief and shame, it must be acknowledged that his machine was not without effect. That even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sorted enough to bend their duty to their interests and to look after personal rather than the public good. So that was Jefferson. Okay, the way Jefferson put it, was men thus enriched by the dexterity of a leader would follow, of course, the chief who was leading them to fortune and thus become his zealous instruments. They would vote for whatever he wanted to vote for. Okay, but the big problem Jefferson said was that this was a one-time only deal. This arbitrage, the nationalization of the debt was a one-time thing. You know, and members of Congress will retire, they'll die. What was the average age of a man back then, 45, something like that. And so this couldn't be a permanent engine of government. You need something more permanent there. And what might that be? Okay, in Jefferson's own words, he said, quote, some engine of influence more permanent must be contrived. And he's not saying he wants this permanent engine. He's saying, in Hamilton's view, some permanent engine of influence must be contrived. And what might that be? Well, he next talks about a dinner that was held at Monticello Jefferson's home would be with himself, Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, John Adams, and US Attorney General Edmund Randolph. This is in 1791. Okay, and Jefferson wrote on this essay, he said about what he wrote in. He said, for the truth of which I attest to the God who made me, so honest to God, this is the truth about what happened at this dinner. And so they're having a conversation and John Adams, the president, John Adams, the president says, he's talking about the British Constitution. He says, purge that constitution of its corruption and give to its popular branch, the legislature, equality of representation that is with the executive. And it would be the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man. So there's John Adams saying the British Constitution is a perfect system if it weren't for the corruption. Alexander Hamilton steps in and says, oh no, it's the corruption that makes it perfect. He says this, whereas he says, purge it of its corruption and give to its popular branch equality of representation, and it would become an impracticable government. As it stands at present with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed. That was Hamilton. He said, no, we want corruption. We need corruption because government is too small without corruption. You need corruption. After all, when the Constitution was ratified, Alexander Hamilton threw a fit and denounced it as a frail and worthless fabric because it didn't create a big enough government that he wanted. He was constantly badgering George Washington saying we need a government of more energy. I quote him in my book saying that several times. And so how can we achieve this? How can we achieve this permanent regime? Well, there's the reason for the central bank. And here's what Jefferson said about this. He said Hamilton was so bewitched and perverted by the British example as to be under thorough conviction that corruption was essential to the government of a nation. And that is why he wanted a central bank. See, the bank would be a permanent engine of corruption, like it was earlier. It could be used to fund politicians, to dish out all sorts of benefits, to provide cheap credit to politically connected businesses who would then round up support for you. And so all of these people who were paid off, the members of Congress and various citizens out there who were supporters of the government, they needed money to pay them off. And of course, a national bank run by politicians would be just the trick. It would be just a thing. And so Thomas Jefferson's interpretation of why the original proponents of a central bank, wanted a central bank, was that it would be an engine of corruption. Those are Jefferson's exact words, an engine of corruption. And so the point I make from my beginning remark is that if you understand this history, then, and you see things like Henry Paulson leaving Goldman Sachs, going into the government, into the Treasury, and then the Fed financing an $80 billion bailout of people who owed his company money, that sort of thing was always the purpose of a central bank. It's not just that there are corrupt people from time to time who get in there and corrupt the system. The system was built to be like that. And it's inherent in the system. It's not just a quirk. It's not just a quirk that happens over and over again for 200 years, in other words. What a coincidence. Okay. And so that's what it was. And so we got that, the Bank of the United States. And that's an interesting story too. If you read some of the history books about how we got the Bank of the United States, Jefferson and Hamilton had a debate. They each were asked to write their opinions of this to George Washington. And of course, Jefferson was opposed to it. He pointed out that they debated having a national bank at the Constitutional Convention and rejected the idea. And that would seem to be pretty good evidence that the founding fathers of America did not want a national bank. But then Hamilton came back and said, well, if you read between the lines, there are implied powers of the Constitution. Not just the delegated powers in Article 1, Section 8, but there are implied powers. And Jefferson came back and essentially said, I've read between the lines and there's just blank space. I don't see anything in there. He didn't use those exact words, but that's in effect what he said. But George Washington did sign off on it. And you can read in the history books of how he owned a great deal of land in Virginia, Mount Vernon. And they were in a process of creating Washington, D.C. And he told the Federalist Party leaders, his party, that if you extend the border of Washington, D.C., right to Mount Vernon, I'll sign off on the bill for this bank that you want. So he did that. So it was a horse trade or a log rolling between George Washington and the leaders of the Federalist Party. So we've got the Bank of the United States. And it had a 20-year charter. And the charter was not renewed because, guess what, it created massive corruption and economic instability. And so it was not renewed after the first 20-year charter that existed. And then the War of 1812 came. And to monetize the debt of the war, they resurrected the Bank of the United States. The Second Bank of the United States came into being in 1816, mostly to monetize the debt that had been run up from the war, the War of 1812. And Hamilton is dead by this time. Jefferson lived until 1826, I think he was. But Hamilton died in 1804, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr. And our friend Gary North used to have started up a little society called the Aaron Burr Society. And they made ball caps, he told me, it said, not soon enough. It was sort of the logo on the ball cap of the Aaron Burr Society. And so anyway, so we get the Second Bank of the United States. It's 1816, 8 January of 1817 that's created. And who remembers the title of Murray Rothbard's Doctoral Dissertation that's published as a book, Panic of 1819. And I always thought it was just a little more than just a coincidence that we had the Bank of the United States created in the 18th of January of 1817. And we have the first major depression in America in 1819. It was called Panics back then. It was Herbert Hoover who decided that depression would be a more a better word than panic. So we call them depressions and recessions, but they were called Panics back then. And so the Bank of the United States existed again. But then its biggest enemy became Andrew Jackson. When Andrew Jackson was president in the late 1820s, he vetoed the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States. And there was a big battle with the Bank and the supporters of the Bank who were powerful people like Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Daniel Webster was from the Massachusetts Senator, was a big supporter, and he was also on the take from the Bank. Henry Clay, by the way, resigned from the government, a position in government to become the general council of the Bank of the United States because he had run up $40,000 in gambling debt in Washington, DC. And this is in the 1820s, $40,000 in gambling debt. And so in two years, he made enough money from being the lawyer for the Bank of the United States to pay off his $40,000 debt and then some. And so you can do the math of how much money that would be today of that. So it led to all this kind of corruption. So Andrew Jackson comes along and says this. There's one of the things he says about the Second Bank of the United States. He said, every monopoly and all exclusive privileges are granted at the expense of the public. And that the many millions, which this act, that is the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, proposes to be stow on the stockholders of the existing bank, must come directly or indirectly out of the earnings of the American people. And he says, these stockholders were profiting from their connection with the government only and not any productive efforts on their part. And so there were private stockholders and then it was also partly capitalized by tax dollars. I think 20% was capitalized by tax dollars. And it was an engine of corruption. And so he vetoed the rechartering of the bank. But he also had help along the way. There's an interesting story here about the state of Ohio, what they did when when they tried to open up two branches of the Bank of the United States in the state of Ohio. The people of Ohio did not want this because they knew there were Jeffersonians in their opinion of a national bank and they knew it spelled economic instability and corruption. And so they imposed a tax of $50,000 a year on each branch of the Bank of the United States. And the Bank of the United States refused to pay. So they sent armed marshals into the banks with big chests to fill up with money. And they did. They walked into the vaults, took $50,000 out of the vaults and left over this. And other states objected to the Supreme Court case, McCulloch v. Maryland, which the judge has talked about or will be talking about, was involved in this too, where Maryland wanted to tax this out of into oblivion. And that's where John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the United States came up with this phrase, the power to tax is the power to destroy. But the people in states like Ohio and Maryland wanted to destroy the Bank of the United States by taxing it out of existence from the state level. That's where that comes from with John Marshall. And so he had help there. And if you want to read Andrew Jackson's veto message, you can just Google Andrew Jackson, why US Bank was closed. And you can read it online. It's very interesting. You never see a politician say anything like that these days. After I read this thing, I was curious as to what historians had to say about this. And if you pick up the history books, it's pretty much uniformly derogatory comments about what an ignorant old farmer Andrew Jackson was. But it sounds like it could have been written by either Jefferson or Murray Rothbard, the condemnation of a special interest in the bank, or maybe co-authored by the two of them. And I think it's one of the great statements ever made by an American politician, Andrew Jackson's veto of the Bank of the United States and his condemnation of all of this, which of course is why the historians hate it and don't like him. And as you all know, Trump has a huge picture of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office. Every time I see him on TV and he's in the Oval Office, I think it's the Oval Office, a big picture of Andrew Jackson. I don't know if it's because he knows about the bank or that Andrew Jackson was hated by so many people like him. Maybe that's why a kinship with that might be. And so that bank was defunct. This was by the early 1830s. By 1840, there was no longer a national bank. Although Lincoln imposed sort of nationalized the currency with the National Currency Acts and the Legal Tender Acts in the 1860s, but we didn't get the Fed until 1913. So we went all this way. I don't have time to talk about what went on in the meantime. Although Richard Timberlake's book, his treatise on monetary history in the United States, he argues, as to a few other people, that this period from 1840 to 1860s was probably the most stable, monetarily stable period of American history. It wasn't perfect. There were bankruptcies and things, but he argues that compared to the rest of history, that it was probably the most stable monetary system we ever had in the United States. There were competing currencies like the word Dixie. We're in Dixie now. The South is known as the land Dixie. There's even a song Dixie. Well, the Dixie was the $10 note published by New Orleans Bank. That's 10 in French. And the Dixie was so stable that it was even used in Minnesota. In my last trip to New Orleans, I actually saw they still have the building that was once a bank that issued that currency. There's a little plaque on the side of this old building that was once a bank. And so we had competing currencies like that for quite a while. But that was all snuffed out when Lincoln passed the National Currency Acts and the Legal Tender Acts. They imposed a tax on competing currencies. So it's hard to business. If you and I are in business and we each have an ice cream stand and the government has a big tax on your ice cream stand, but not mine, that's a bit of an advantage. And so if I'm in the government, I'm going to make sure that I can drive you out of the market with my tax. So that's what happened. And so that's that's my story for now. And I'm sticking to it that that there always was the purpose of central banking always always was, at least in part, corruption. And so it's not just an accident. It's inherent in the class dismissed.