The Jeffersonian Prescription for Political Economy
Can any serious student of history doubt after Hamilton wrote his Report on Public Credit, and the United States Congress established a charter for the First Bank of the United States, that we set ourselves on a perilous course, whereby public debt and taxation could subsume the national economy, and continually aggrandize the federal government at the expense of the states and the people? As John Taylor's Inquiry lamented, all the Hamiltonian system did was contrive a system whereby the people pay needless interest on the circulating medium to a private banking cartel, and to perpetuate the fraud the federal government eventually passed legal tender laws.
Jefferson in a moment of reflection declared in 1798:
Jefferson in a moment of reflection declared in 1798:
I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government; I mean an additional article taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing. I now deny their power of making paper money or anything else a legal tender. I know that to pay all proper expenses within the year would, in case of war, be hard on us. But not so hard as ten wars instead of one. For wars could be reduced in that proportion; besides that the State governments would be free to lend their credit in borrowing quotas.
—Thomas Jefferson
