Tyranny in America has many birthdays. There are many Rosemary’s Babies in America’s past and they live on in America’s present. In 1862, Congress gave birth to the Legal Tender Act. And we are almost to 2013, which is the 150th birthday of the National Bank Act of 1863 and its successor in 1864. Lysander Spooner had these in mind in 1877 (Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations, and Frauds):
“Perhaps we may conclude that the right to live, and to provide ourselves with food, clothing, shelter, and all the other necessaries and comforts of life, necessarily includes the right to provide ourselves with money; inasmuch as, in civilized life, money is the immediate and indispensable instrumentality for procuring all these things. Hence we may perhaps conclude that a people who surrender their natural right to provide themselves with money, practically surrender their right to provide for their own subsistence; and that a government that demands such a surrender, or attempts to take from them that right, and give it as a monopoly to a few, is as necessarily and as plainly the mere instrument of that few, as it would be if it were to require the people to surrender their right to follow their occupations as farmers, mechanics, and merchants, and give all these occupations as monopolies into the hands of the same few to whom it now gives the monopoly of money.”
8:32 am on September 6, 2012
