A Caveat Against Injustice

A Living Voice forward by F. Tupper Saussy

Any student of the economic system of the United States ought to be familiar with United States monetary law. Since all laws in this country must flow in pursuance of the United States Constitution, the student should base his study of monetary law on the economic provisions contained in the Constitution.

It's not widely known that the Constitution deals with economics. Indeed, most people are surprised to learn that the sole purpose of the Constitutional Convention, as described by Alexander Hamilton in a report to Congress in 1786 recommending that there be a convention was to take into consideration the trade and commerce of the United States.

What was wrong with trade and commerce in the United States? They were being twisted all out of shape by an inflating balloon of an elastic currency, the very stuff the Federal Reserve provides today.

Our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation (1781), was severely deficient in the economic rights department. The Articles empowered Congress to emit a paper currency, while allowing the states to retain their power to make this paper a legal tender in payment of debts, that is, to compel people to use the stuff. The result? A warping of personal and business relations in the United States that drove George Washington (and God knows how many other folks) to depression and nervous exhaustion. Suffering the compounded agonies inflicted by a paper monetary system of uncontrollable value fluctuations. Washington wrote these dismal words to James Madison on the eve of the Convention:

"The wheels of government are clogged, and we are descending into the vale of confusion and darkness. No day was ever more clouded than the present. We are fast verging into anarchy and confusion."

The deliberate purpose of the 1787 Constitutional Convention was to stop the ravages of a fluctuating medium of exchange by obligating government to maintain reliable medium of exchange. President Andrew Jackson validated this fact in his Eighth Annual Message to Congress, December 5th, 1836, just 47 years after the Constitution was ratified by the states.

...It was the purpose of the convention to establish a currency consisting of the precious metals. These were adopted by a permanent rule excluding the use of a perishable medium of exchange, such as of certain agricultural commodities recognized by the statutes of some States as tender for debts, or the still more pernicious expedient of paper currency. The "permanent rule excluding the use of the pernicious expedient of paper currency" is an exquisitely framed piece of legislative machinery. In article I Section 8, the Framers gave Congress the power

...to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standards of Weights and Measures. In Article I Section 10, the Framers denied the states any power to coin and issue money. More importantly, they denied the states the power to ordain-in payment of debts-the use of anything but the money Congress was empowered to coin. The substance of that coin is named in the denial:

No State shall coin Money, emit Bills of Credit, make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in payment of Debts. Through the Framers, then, the People of the United States appointed the states to be custodians of the American monetary system. If Congress ceased coining gold and silver, causing gold and silver coin to stop circulating, the states would be unable to compel their citizens to pay any debts, public or private. It was the responsibility of an ever-vigilant union of states to keep Congress coining gold and silver, thereby preserving interstate commerce, preserving the very Union itself.

The power the states had reserved under the Articles of Confederation, the power to make anything a legal tender, is a marvelous power indeed. The power to compel people to accept something of no intrinsic value in exchange for something of value is the power to rob people of their property "secretly," as John Maynard Keynes put in the 1920's, "and unobserved."

The United States Constitution is one of the few written compacts between people and government that actually dragged the power out into the open for all to see and condemn. In the 44th Federalist Paper, James Madison eloquently explained why the States were giving up their power to compel citizens to use either federal or state paper money:

The loss which America has sustained from the pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people, and on the character of republican government, constitutes and enormous debt against the States chargeable with this unadvertised measure, which must long remain...an accumulation of guilt, which can be expiated no otherwise than by voluntary sacrifice on the alter of justice of the power which has been the instrument of it.

The states' voluntary sacrifice hastily rescued our forefathers from the vale of confusion and darkness, unclogged the wheels of government, brightened the day, and restored peace and order. A mere nine months after the " permanent rule excluding the pernicious expedient of paper currency" was ratified by the states, the December 16th 1789 edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette was able to say:

Since the federal constitution has removed all danger of our having a paper tender, our trade is advanced fifty percent. Our monied people can trust their cash abroad, and have brought their coin into circulation.

And in June, 1790, a little more than a year after ratification, a much happier George Washington was able to write his friend the Marquis de LaFayette that

Our revenues have been considerable more productive than it was imagined they would be. I mention this to show the spirit of enterprise that prevails.

"The writers of the constitution knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote in Article I Section 10 paragraph 1 'No state shall... make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts. ' People able to barter with gold and silver coin control government and are free. Loss of the right to trade in gold and silver coin enslaves people to the creators of psychological 'money.'": -Merrill Jenkins, Sr., Money - The Greatest Hoax on Earth

"The voice of legislators is a living voice." -10 COKE 101 (England)

II The Framer who perfected the design of our country's monetary system was a man who had spent most of his life struggling with-and publicly condemning-a fluctuating medium of exchange.

That man was Roger Sherman (1721-1793), a delegate from Connecticut. It was he who, on August 28th, 1787, proposed that the states sacrifice the power to participate in paper money schemes. When it was counter-proposed that the states allowed by Congress make other things than gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts, we're told by James Madison that Sherman exclaimed, "We are making these measures absolute. This is a favorable crisis for crushing paper money. If the consent of the Legislature could authorize emissions of it, the friends of paper money would make every exertion to get into the Legislature in order to license it.".

The reader of Madison's Notes on the Debates of the Convention would naturally infer that Sherman was prejudiced against paper money. But where is any material explaining why Sherman disliked paper money? None can be found. There's a black hole in history where Roger Sherman's monetary philosophy should be.

It's been estimated that there are more than 500 million copies in print of Karl Marx's Manifesto of the Communist Party and Das Kapital. How many billions of impressions of Marx's monetary philosophy have been etched into human consciousness nobody can calculate. He is celebrated as the founding father of the Communist movement and is regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of all time not only in the communist countries, but also in most American colleges and universities, where he is Required Reading in many sociology, history, economics, and philosophy courses. Karl Marx (1818-1883), of course, was a friend of paper money. He held that a central bank empowered to emit paper money and compel the people to use it was essential to government's control of individual property.

We don't have to estimate how many copies of Roger Sherman's only book there are in existence. There are considerably fewer than 500 million. In fact, there are only two. Only two copies of A CAVEAT AGAINST INJUSTICE left in the world. Think about it. Five HUNDRED MILLION that say paper money is good vs two that say paper money is evil.

Admitted, other people have written that paper money is evil.But they weren't the Framer of the United States Constitution's monetary clauses.

Read the rest here... http://bornagainclassics.com/Books/ACaveatAgainstInjustice-Shermann/