In answer to questions put to him by Congressman Ron Paul, Bernanke supported trillions of dollars of theft, just as Social Security Commissioner James Cardwell misused the Constitution in the same way. In Hearings Before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 94th Cong., 2nd Session, May 26 and 27, 1976, we heard this exchange:
Senator William Proxmire: "...there are 37 million people, is that right, that get Social Security benefits?"
Social Security Commissioner James Cardwell: "Today between 32 and 34 million."
Proxmire: "I am a little high; 32 to 34 million people.
Almost all of them, or many of them, are voters. In my state, I figure there are 600,000 voters that receive Social Security. Can you imagine a senator or congressman under those circumstances saying, 'We are going to repudiate that high a proportion of the electorate?' No.
"Furthermore, we have the capacity under the Constitution, the Congress does, to coin money, as well as to regulate the value thereof. And therefore we have the power to provide that money. And we are going to do it. It may not be worth anything when the recipient gets it, but he is going to get his benefits paid."
Cardwell: "I tend to agree."
In other words, the government took money from taxpayers in the form of Social Security "contributions," and used that money for whatever government wanted. It's gone now. The government has no money. But the government promised to take care of all those old people. So the government simply prints up more money to send them their Social Security "benefits." Doing this causes everyone's money to be worth less. You thought you were going to have enough money to live in a nice house, but you're going to be sleeping in your car instead -- because the purchasing power of your money has been stolen by the government. It was given to Wall Street bankers who needed it because they made bad investments.
Americans don't understand this, so they will continue voting for politicians who promise them "money" when what Americans really want is purchasing power.
Back to current events. Here's Congressman Ron Paul explaining the laws of economics to Ben Bernanke, and Bernanke explaining to Ron Paul the laws of government theft.
To understand the Constitution's phrase "coin money," one needs to understand the meaning of the phrase, "not worth a continental." To pay the soldiers in the Continental Army, more money was printed up. The thinking was, "It may not be worth anything when the recipient gets it, but he is going to get his salary paid."
Soldiers were allowed to exchange these worthless pieces of paper for food and clothing, and merchants were required at gun point to give their goods to the bearers of these worthless pieces of paper. ("Gun point" here means a "legal tender" law enforced by the government's guns.)
In an introduction to his notes on the Constitutional Convention's deliberations in Philadelphia, James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," noted that one of the defects the Convention was assembled to remedy was that
In the internal administration of the States, a violation of contracts had become familiar, in the form of depreciated paper made a legal tender.
If I make a contract with you to mow your lawn, and you promise to pay me a certain number of "Continentals" or "dollars" for my work, and at the time I mow your lawn I anticipate that I can buy a certain number of gallons of gas with that "money," but by the time you actually pay me, that "money" can only buy half the number of gallons of gas that it could when we made the contract, then the contract has been "impaired," and you have effectively stolen that number of gallons of gas from me, just as surely as if you drove off without paying at a gas station.
Madison said the new Constitution was going to fix this problem of depreciating paper money. Accordingly, Madison and the other delegates included a provision in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits paper money, or the emitting of "bills of credit." (Art. 1, § 10, ¶ 1) That provision reads:
No State shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make any thing but gold and silver a legal tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex-post-facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts; or grant any title of nobility.
In Federalist Paper No. 44, possibly the most authoritative source for constitutional interpretation, Madison explained the provision with these words in an attempt to sell the proposed Constitution to the American people:
The extension of the prohibition to bills of credit must give pleasure to every citizen, in proportion to his love of justice and his knowledge of the true springs of public prosperity. The loss which America has sustained since the peace, 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 an enormous debt against the States chargeable with this unadvised measure, which must long remain unsatisfied; or rather an accumulation of guilt, which can be expiated no otherwise than by a voluntary sacrifice on the altar of justice, of the power which has been the instrument of it. ... No one of these mischiefs is less incident to a power in the States to emit paper money, than to coin gold or silver. The power to make any thing but gold and silver a tender in payment of debts, is withdrawn from the States, on the same principle with that of issuing a paper currency.
The "true springs of public prosperity" are not the "expansion of credit" (creating new money out of thin air) by the Federal Reserve.
Article 1, Section 8, clause 5 of the Constitution gives Congress (not the Federal Reserve) the power:
To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
In the video, you can hear Congressman Paul emphasize the word "coin."
After the Constitution was ratified, THE COINAGE ACT OF 1792 was passed by Congress, specifically defining the "dollar" as a certain amount of gold or silver.
Is there even a plausible argument that this part of the Constitution gives Congress the right to have the Federal Reserve print up new dollars to bail out incompetent Wall Street investors? That the phrase "regulate the Value thereof" was intended by Madison and the Framers to mean "reduce the value to ZERO?" The Federal Reserve has already stolen 95% of the value of the dollar since the Fed was formed by bankers in 1913.
Every Congressman who voted for the "bailout" and who has not publicly opposed the creation of credit by the Federal Reserve has violated his oath to "support the Constitution." He has voted to steal from Americans for the benefit of special interests. As Madison said, this is a moral issue.
This issue is at the very heart of the current crisis. Most Americans are oblivious to what the Constitution says. They went to government schools and are victims of educational malpractice. That's why we consistently vote for politicians who promise us "money" and "easy credit," while stealing our purchasing power. Stealing it from "ourselves and our posterity."
2 comments:
When the country is voted in by people that either don't care or deceived there is nothing really freedom can do.
Well written! I stumbled across your site while researching the Constitution and sound money.
Thank you for explaining some parts of the Constitution in a way that is easily understood.
Rock on my Libertarian, Ron Paul-loving brother!
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