Wednesday, July 24, 2024

The American tradition of abolishing central banks

If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the privatization of shoe production, there would be cries of: "Who will make shoes? The government has always made shoes!" Well, America has not always had a central bank and in fact, the three precursors of the Fed - the Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States - were all abolished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In The Mystery of Banking Murray Rothbard explained how the Bank of North America was "Driven through Congress" by Rep. Robert Morris, a Philadelphia financier and a leader of the Federalist party.

The United States was to have "a British System without Great Britain." A key component of what Rothbard called "The Morris scheme" was "To organize a central bank to provide cheap credit and expanded money for himself an his allies." The Bank was given a monopoly privilege of its notes being receivable in all tax payments to state governments and the federal government, and no other banks were permitted to exist in the country! Despite these monopolistic privileges a lack of public confidence in the bank's notes led to their severe depreciation, so much so that the bank was privatized after about a year and a half.

Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke once proudly announced that Alexander Hamilton was the founding father of central banking in America and indeed he was.

The War of 1812 was then used as an excuse to bring back the bank to monetize the war debt.

Its opponents were by contrast "men from all classes," and "from all sections of the country," wrote Remini in Andrew Jackson and the Bank War.

So there are three examples in American history of central banks being abolished. 

https://mises.org/mises-wire/american-tradition-abolishing-central-banks 

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