Money, Currency, Coins, Banking and Law

An Anthology of essays:

1. Gold And Silver As Standards Of Value
   
2. A New System Of Paper Currency
   
3. Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations, And Frauds.
   
4. Our Mechanical Industry, As Affected By Our Present Currency System
   
5. The Law Of Prices
   
6. Considerations For Bankers, And Holders Of United States Bonds
   
7. Constitutional Law, Relative To Credit, Currency, And Banking.

Lysander Spooner came form the flinty farmland of rural New England. He was born January 19, 1808, on his father's farm near Athol, Massachusetts, the second child and second son in a family of six sons and three daughters...America boomed during the 1830's as canals opened vast new areas for settlement. Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo led the expansion along the Erie Canal which, when finished in 1825, connected Lake Erie with the Atlantic Ocean...How did it happen, Lysander Spooner wondered, that the country had been so financially exuberant in 1836, and a lost bankrupt by 1840?...Sorely disappointed by his Ohio Prospects, Lysander Spooner sought out another avenue to wealth and freedom in the heart of America's expansive business world...After his post office venture failed, Lysander Spooner returned to the family farm in Athol, where he took up the question of slavery...Before all else, Lysander Spooner remained a lawyer... Having presented ideas on banking, slavery, and the law, Spooner still remained poor, continuously threatened with poverty... With the end of the Civil War, America passed over a great watershed... In 1881, Daniel McFarland, Spooner's friend, wrote how "painfully sorrowful and maddening, Lysander, to reflect that you, who have worked so hard and given so much valuable thought to the world, have bee kept in poverty..." Through his youth and old age Lysander Spooner followed the voice of freedom...

Excerpt:

GOLD AND SILVER AS STANDARDS OF VALUE:
THE FLAGRANT CHEAT IN REGARD TO THEM.

All the usurpation, and tyranny, and extortion, and robbery, and fraud, that are involved in the monopoly of money are practised, and attempted to be justified, under the pretence of maintaining the standard of value. This pretence is intrinsically a false one throughout. And the whole motive for it is to afford some color of justification for such a monopoly of money as will enable the few holders of gold and silver coins (or of such other money as may be specially licensed and substituted for them) to extort, in exchange for them, more of other men's property than the coins (or their substitutes) are naturally and truly worth. That such is the fact, it is the purpose of this article to prove.

In order to be standards by which to measure the values of other things, it is plain that these coins must have a fixed and definite - or, at least, something like a fixed and definite - value of their own; just as a yard-stick, in order to be a standard by which to measure the length of other things, must necessarily have a fixed and definite length of its own; and just as a pound weight, in order to be a standard by which to measure the weight of other things, must necessarily have a fixed and definite weight of its own. It is only because a yard-stick has a fixed and definite length of its own that we are enabled to measure the length of other things by it. It is only because a pound weight has a fixed and definite weight of its own that we are enabled to measure weight of other things by it. For a like reason, unless gold and silver coins have fixed and definite - or, at least, something like fixed and definite - values of their own, they can serve no purpose as standards by which to measure the values of other things.

The first question, then, to be settled is this, - namely, what is that fixed or definite value (or something like a fixed or definite value) which gold and silver coins have, and which enables them to be used as standards for measuring the values of other things?

The answer is that the true and natural market value of gold and silver coins is that value, and only that value, which they have for use or consumption as metals, - that is, for plate, watches, jewelry, gilding, dentistry, and other ornamental and useful purposes. This is the value at which they now stand in the markets of the world, as is proved by the fact that doubtless not more than one-tenth, and very likely not more than one-twentieth, of all the gold and silver in the world (out of the mines) is in circulation as money. All the rest is in plate, watches, jewelry, and the like; except that in some parts of the world, where property in general is unsafe, large amounts of gold and silver are hoarded and concealed to prevent their being taken by rapacious governments, or public enemies, or private robbers. Leaving these hoards out of account, doubtless nine-tenths, and very likely nineteen-twentieths, of all the gold and silver of the world are in other forms than coin.

And as fast as new gold and silver are taken out of the mines, they are first carried to the mints, and made into coins; then they are carried all over the world by the operations of commerce, and given in exchange for other commodities. Then the goldsmiths and silversmiths, in every part of the world (unless among savages), are constantly taking these coins and converting them into such articles of plate, jewelry, and the like as they have call for. In this way the annual crops of gold and silver that are taken from the mines are worked up into articles for use as regularly as the annual crops of breadstuffs are consumed as food, or as the annual crops of iron, and cotton, and silk, and wool, and leather are worked up into articles for use.

1834-1877