Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Since the Continental currency was backed by neither silver nor gold, its value declined exponentially, and by the war’s end, very few would accept it as payment. All fiat money is the same, and each time the government issues such currency, it lies to us all, both by pretending that the arbitrary amount at which it prices the paper is its actual worth and then by portraying that paper as a stable currency that the American people will be able to use in the future. “Not worth a Continental” is a phrase meaning “of no value.”

With the lesson of the Continental in mind, the Founding Fathers summarily rejected the proposal to grant Congress the ability to “emit bills of credit.” Rather, they drafted Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5 of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power “[to] coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of Foreign coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures” (emphasis added). Then, in Section 10, they prohibited the states from coining money and from “mak[ing] any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” Thus, since Congress is prevented by the Tenth Amendment from assuming any powers not delegated to it, the printing of paper money, known as bills of credit, since there is no specific authorization, is prohibited by the Constitution.

When Congress printed Greenbacks during the Civil War, and they lost half their value within two years, the loss led to a series of historic decisions by the United States Supreme Court. In the 1869 case of Hepburn v. Griswold, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase stated:

[M]ost unquestionably there is no legal tender and there can be no legal tender in this country under the authority of this government of anything but gold and silver, either the coinage of our mints or foreign coins at rates regulated by Congress. This is a constitutional principle and of the very highest importance . . . Congress has no power to substitute paper or anything else for a coin as tender in payment of debts. (emphases added)

Consider that Chief Justice Chase had, in his prior position as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, helped to formulate the Legal Tender Act of 1862, yet when asked to adjudge the Act’s constitutionality, he admitted that it was not derived from any constitutional power, and he caused the Supreme Court to invalidate it. As a governmental official, he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet he was able to draft a law that he himself would later admit to be unconstitutional.

Similarly, Rexford G. Tugwell, a member of FDR’s “Brain Trust,” who later became a Nuremberg prosecutor and ended his career as a Columbia Law School professor, stated, “To the extent that these [New Deal] policies developed, they were the tortured interpretations of a document [i.e., the Constitution] intended to prevent them”3 (emphases added).

The same day that Hepburn was decided, two new justices were appointed to the Supreme Court. And only a year later, in the cases of Knox v. Lee and Parker v. David, the Supreme Court overruled the original legal tender decision. Straying from its one-year-old precedent, the Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision voted to reverse Hepburn v. Griswold and upheld the constitutionality of Congress’s claimed power to print money during times of war. And the final nail in the coffin of real money, based on hard currency, came swiftly thereafter with the case of Juilliard v. Greenman (1884), which upheld the constitutionality of fiat money even in peacetime, noting that “making the notes of the United States a legal tender in payment of private debts” is “included in the power to borrow money and to provide a national currency.”

Inexplicably, the Supreme Court went from the notion that Congress not having the power to make anything except coins legal tender was a constitutional principle of the very highest importance, to claiming to read into the Constitution the exact opposite principle, that Congress had the implicit right to emit bills of credit because it had the right to borrow money! Two opposite opinions by the same Court can only mean that someone lied or someone changed his mind on a matter of the highest importance, considering that the Constitution was not rewritten between 1869 and 1870.

In a telephone interview, Lawrence Parks, a noted expert on the legal tender cases, stated that a currently sitting justice on the Supreme Court has privately admitted to him that the 1870 Legal Tender Case was improperly decided and deeply flawed. Yet, the Supreme Court has done nothing to stop this sham from being perpetrated by our government. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once claimed that “this is something best left to the politicians.”4

Somehow, though, Congress allowed itself to read between the lines and find its power to emit bills of credit and then, even more astonishingly, to grant that right to a private corporation. In A.L.A.Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935), the United States Supreme Court held that Congress is not permitted by the Constitution to abdicate, or to transfer to others, the essential legislative functions with which it is vested. Considering that Congress has been given the right to regulate the value of money, and thereby the monetary policy of the United States, where did it get the power to delegate this enumerated power to a private entity like the Federal Reserve? Whatever Congress’s reasons, since that delegation in 1913, the dollar’s value decreased by 93 percent.5 From 1789 to 1913, without a central bank with real power or lasting duration, the dollar’s value increased by 13 percent.

The Birth of a Monster

The Federal Reserve scheme was not born in 1913, but rather has its roots with the proposals for a central bank dating to the earliest years of America. Alexander Hamilton, who wanted George Washington to be a king and thus serve for life, was a proponent of a large, centralized government and wanted to establish