In 1690, Massachusetts Bay Colony embarked upon a short-lived experiment in unbacked paper money. It did not go well.

George Washington – surveyor, farmer, soldier, and statesman – never thought of himself as an economist but experience taught him a great deal about fiat (unbacked) paper money. When the Congress foisted it on his Continental Army and tried to pay for food with it, his men suffered privation.

By contrast, the nearby British ate well because they paid in gold and silver. Continue reading →

Vive la différence between British and French culture in two of the greatest playwrights in history. Britain has a rich literary heritage, but Shakespeare, “the Bard,” is widely recognized as the greatest writer in the English language. In France, a number of writers — Voltaire, Hugo, Proust, Flaubert — can compete for that title, but Molière is viewed as the most acclaimed writer of French comedy and satires, even more heralded than later satirists like Voltaire and Anatole France.

This year, specifically January 15, 1622, is the 400th anniversary of the birth in the heart of Paris of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, son of wealthy carpet-dealers, who became Molière. He is being honored by new statues, a postage stamp, a costume exhibition, and new staging of his plays, starting with the controversial originally banned version in 1664 of Tartuffe. Continue reading →

He sparked John Adams’s passion for independence.

February 5 marks the birth of the American who had the greatest hand in what became the 4th Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures – James Otis. Unfortunately, “one of the most passionate and effective protectors of American rights” is too-little remembered today.

Otis’ efforts applied the celebrated English maxim, “Every man’s house is his castle” – or, as William Pitt said in Parliament in 1763, that “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the crown” – to the colonies, in resistance to Crown-created writs of assistance. They were broad search warrants enabling customs officials to enter any business or home without advance notice, probable cause, or reason, which Otis asserted were unconstitutional. Continue reading →

George Mason considered a bill of rights so important that he refused to sign the Constitution and led the opposition to its ratification without one.

George Mason, “the father of the Bill of Rights.”

December 11 marks a milestone most Americans are woefully ignorant of. It is the birthday of George Mason, “the father of the Bill of Rights.”

Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Clinton Rossiter called “among the world’s most memorable triumphs in applied political theory,” which The Declaration of Independence echoed a few weeks later. Charles Maynes wrote that,

Mason’s revolutionary step was…reversing, in writing and in a supreme governmental document, the traditional relationship between citizen and state. Throughout history it had been the citizen who owed duties to the state, which in turn might bestow certain rights on the citizen…Mason argued that the state had to observe certain citizens’ rights that could not be violated under any circumstances. Mason thus set the United States apart from past constitutional practices. Continue reading →

In discussions surrounding of the world’s monetary systems today there is usually one thing almost everyone can agree on: that money should be controlled by the organizations we call “states” or “sovereign states.” Nowadays when we say “the US dollar” we mean the currency issued by the US government. When we say “the British pound” we mean the money issued by the regime of the United Kingdom.

This assumed need to have state-issued money has not always been the reality, of course. Indeed, the history of the rise of the state is a history replete with efforts by states to replace private-sector money with state-controlled money. Continue reading →

America planned a war with Mexico called War Plan Green,what was behind this?

During the 1910s, relations between Mexico and the United States were often troubled. . In 1912, U.S. President William Howard Taft considered sending an expeditionary force to protect foreign-owned property from damage during the Mexican Revolution that was taking place. Continue reading →

Advertisement to the Reader.

Author, Benjamin Franklin, 1749

It has long been regretted as a Misfortune to the Youth of this Province, that we have no ACADEMY, in which they might receive the Accomplishments of a regular Education.

The following Paper of Hints towards forming a Plan for that Purpose, is so far approv’d by some publick-spirited Gentlemen, to whom it has been privately communicated, that they have directed a Number of Copies to be made by the Press, and properly distributed, in order to obtain the Sentiments and Advice of Men of Learning, Understanding, and Experience in these Matters; and have determin’d to use their Interest and best Endeavours, to have the Scheme, when compleated, carried gradually into Execution; in which they have Reason to believe they shall have the hearty Concurrence and Assistance of many who are Wellwishers to their Country. Continue reading →

An image of the diary of John Claypoole, third husband of Betsy Ross (DAVID EDGE/David Edge)

It began with an unmarked, unremarkable box tucked in a corner of a garage in California. Inside, under miscellaneous letters and old high school yearbooks, was a smaller shoe box. Inside that, under old coins and a numismatist pamphlet, lay the 240-year-old diary of sailor John Claypoole, a Revolutionary War prisoner of war and later the third husband of the flagmaker known as Betsy Ross. Continue reading →

Navajo Code Talkers Day was established through a presidential proclamation by President Ronald Reagan on August 14, 1982.

August 14, 2021 marked the very first Navajo Code Talker Day as an official holiday in Arizona. During WWII, 400 Navajo men used their language to create a special code that was used to compose and transmit messages. The code was never broken. These Navajo men participated in every major Marine operation in the Pacific Theater. During the bloody fight for Iwo Jima they fired off more than 800 messages in the heat of battle that were crucial to victory. The code talkers are credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives and shortening the war. Continue reading →

Remarks in Congress: AN ASTOUNDING EXPOSURE
Quotations from several speeches made on the Floor of the House of Representatives by the Honorable Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania. Mr. McFadden, due to his having served as Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee for more than 10 years, was the best posted man on these matters in America and was in a position to speak with authority of the vast ramifications of this gigantic private credit monopoly. As Representative of a State which was among the first to declare its freedom from foreign money tyrants it is fitting that Pennsylvania, the cradle of liberty, be again given the credit for producing a son that was not afraid to hurl defiance in the face of the money-bund. Whereas Mr. McFadden was elected to the high office on both the Democratic and Republican tickets, there can be no accusation of partisanship lodged against him. Because these speeches are set out in full in the Congressional Record, they carry weight that no amount of condemnation on the part of private individuals could hope to carry. Continue reading →

Since August 15, 1971, the US dollar has been completely severed from gold. President Richard Nixon suspended the most important component of the Bretton Woods system, which had been in effect since the end of World War II. Nixon announced that the US would no longer redeem dollars for gold for the last remaining entities that could: foreign governments. Gold redemption had been made illegal for everybody else, so this action finally ended any semblance of a gold standard for the US dollar.

In Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs showed how in the twentieth century the US government grew in size and scope primarily during crisis periods like wars or economic depressions. The powers gained during those periods were often advertised as “temporary,” but history shows that governments rarely relinquish powers. This “ratchet effect” applies to the way Nixon “temporarily” suspended gold redemption in 1971 – the resulting regime of unbacked fiat dollars remains in effect today. Continue reading →

“I cannot tell you that Hitler took Austria by tanks and guns; it would distort history.

If you remember the plot of the Sound of Music, the Von Trapp family escaped over the Alps rather than submit to the Nazis. Kitty wasn’t so lucky. Her family chose to stay in her native Austria. She was 10 years old, but bright and aware. And she was watching.

“We elected him by a landslide – 98 percent of the vote,” she recalls.

She wasn’t old enough to vote in 1938 – approaching her 11th birthday. But she remembers.

“Everyone thinks that Hitler just rolled in with his tanks and took Austria by force.”

Not so… Continue reading →

In the thirties, the government paid unemployed writers, artists, and journalists to produce a series of guidebooks for the country. What story did they tell?

The Federal Writers’ Project thrived under the unlikely leadership of the rumpled, melancholic journalist Henry Alsberg, who had deep roots in literary and political bohemia.Photograph by Harris & Ewing ~ Courtesy Library of Congress

For a long time now, the New Deal has been our best—sometimes it seems like our only – model for an American government that sets aside obeisance to unfettered capitalism and comes to the aid of its people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made no apologies for this approach, but he did try to explain it. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity,” he said in 1936, accepting his party’s renomination, “than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” The New Deal, he argued, had to counter “the privileged princes” – a small class that had “concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor – other people’s lives.” Americans weren’t used to this kind of language from the White House, nor to the kind of direct interventions that went with it. And yet, today, there’s a hunger for precisely this sort of soberly optimistic, crisis-induced collectivism. Bernie Sanders, in his broadsides against economic inequality, often sounds like Roosevelt at his most class-conscious. The architects of a plan to link jobs to federal investment in alternative energy dubbed it the Green New Deal… Continue reading →

Turns out it’s even more special!

Archivists at the American Philosophical Society suspected the rare engraving may have been more than a “cheap Victorian facsimile,” but it took quite a while to make sure.

American Philosophical Society’s head of conservation Anne Downey (left) and Patrick Spero, director of the library, open their copy of the original Declaration of Independence ordered up by President John Quincy Adams in 1820, but not completed until 1823. ~ TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer

The archive of the American Philosophical Society, consisting of an ever-expanding universe of 13 million manuscripts and 350,000 bound volumes and periodicals, with images and audiotapes proliferating on a daily basis, has reached the point where it is its own universe.

So it should be no surprise that APS, founded in 1743, has discovered that it possesses an exceedingly rare engraved copy of the Declaration of Independence ordered up by John Quincy Adams two centuries ago, and given to the society in 1842 by Daniel Webster. The society has just announced the discovery. Continue reading →

July 16, 1862, Congress and Lincoln begin legislation to deport all people of color from the U.S. and it’s territories. Later, on July 21, Lincoln signed and an act approving $500,000 to begin “colonization”, AKA deportation.

37th Congess. (US)
No. 148. REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION, In the House of Representatives, July 16, 1862:

“It is useless, now, to enter upon any philosophical inquiry whether nature has or has not made the negro inferior to the Caucasian. The belief is indelibly fixed upon the public mind that such inequality does exist. There are irreconcilable differences between the two races which separate them, as with a wall of fire. The home for the African must not be within the limits of the present territory of the Union. The Anglo- American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him, and not for the negro. A home, therefore, must be sought for the African beyond our own limits and in those warmer regions to which his constitution is better adapted than to our own climate,and which doubtless the Almighty intended the colored races should inhabit and cultivate.

Much of the objection to emancipation arises from the opposition of a large portion of our people to the intermixture of the races, and from the association of white and black labor. The committee would do nothing to favor such a policy; apart from the antipathy which nature has ordained, the presence of a race among us who cannot, and ought not to be admitted to our social and political privileges, will be a perpetual source of injury and inquietude to both. This is a question of color, and is unaffected by the relation of master and slave.
Continue reading →

Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish “Walden”?

An illustration of Henry David Thoreau in a pond: Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished? – Illustration by Eric Nyquist

In the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin. Continue reading →