Federal is Imperial

and empires are toxic masculinity

The Fourth of July celebrates that brief moment in time when the colonies won back the right to create internal currencies and before they found out that was a joke.

In Matt Ehret’s article below, he states that “As early as 1729, Franklin codified a system of banking tied not to the worship of money or markets but rather internal improvements which argued for the creation of colonial scrip (not controlled by private central bankers). These insights … preceded the later work by his protégé Alexander Hamilton who established the American system of Political economy.”

Canada's Failure to Accept Ben Franklin's 1776 Challenge Must Be Corrected

Matt and I have gone back and forth on this before, that he sees Franklin’s and Hamilton’s economic systems as the same. I commented that Franklin did establish colonial scrip but Hamilton destroyed the hope of bringing it back, which the Revolutionary War had been fought for:

… in following Franklin's example, we should be designing 'land-backed money' for local exchange and debts, issued and controlled by commonwealths around 200K people, which he called colonial scrip.

Or should we be promoting a global form of money backed by precious metals, called specie, so that local gov'ts are forbidden to use any other form of credit or currency for local exchange and debts? This is Hamilton's system that repaid the debts to France and his mentor, the banker Robert Morris, by foreclosing on the farms of Revolutionary War veterans for unpaid taxes while not allowing them to issue back wages for their war service in a local currency. This is the system that destroyed the sovereign people of Appalachia, my birth home, by giving hundreds of thousands of acres free to Robert Morris, of land that they'd established as homesteads and cultivated.

You say Franklin argued for a colonial scrip but that's misleading. He was the leading designer and advocate of the scrip that made Philadelphia a model of success, so much that when he argued to export the model to Europe, dismayed by the poverty in Ireland, the merchants passed The Currency Act forbidding it. That, and not taxes, was the cause of the American Revolution according to him. And after the War was won, your hero Hamilton worked with the merchants and bankers to reinstate the exact terms of the British Currency Act by forbidding Franklin's system in the Constitution. Whether they were in thrall to American bankers like Morris or British bankers was the only difference with Hamilton's death. The cause for which they'd fought had already been lost.

With respect, Matt, you're rewriting history to promote what you see as the current solution. We can disagree on what the answer is now, but don't destroy Franklin's greatest invention to do it.

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As I write in a chapter of my book called The Short Eventful Life of Sovereign Money:

By 1781, Robert Morris stepped into the newly created role of Superintendent of Finance. First he devalued the Continental and then extracted $2 million in specie from the States. Finally he suspended all pay to enlisted soldiers and officers, declaring that they would be paid when a peace treaty was signed. The Paris Treaty was signed in 1783 and ratified in 1784, but pay was not forthcoming. Meanwhile, veterans owed back taxes on their farms for the time they had been away fighting. Adding injury to injury, the bankers were rushing tax foreclosures through a complicit court and evicting families from the homes and farms for which they'd fought.

In 1783, before the Paris Treaty was even ratified, Alexander Hamilton had already drafted 2300 words of a new Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation and make sure control of money and taxation was centralized. But he withdrew the motion for lack of support. And for three more years the banker-led government withheld two years of military pay so they could steal the farms and homesteads. Then:

In 1786 Western Massachusetts farmers and veterans, led by Daniel Shays and Luke Day, surrounded the court to stop tax foreclosures. They demanded that an issue of liberty money be created by the state to pay the back wages promised veterans. A militia was sent to disperse the rebellion, but the militia also consisted of farmers and veterans, who ended up joining the protest. The angry crowd grew to 800 militia and 1200 protesters before the frightened court finally adjourned without a single foreclosure.

Shaken to his core, Samuel Adams drew up the Riot Act, immediately suspending habeas corpus and proposing execution for rebellion. George Washington wrote, "Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them."

Shays and Day planned to keep the snowball rolling by raiding the federal armory. While they were gathering men, Governor Bowdoin and the Boston merchants put in £6000 of their own money to hire 3000 mercenary militiamen from counties in Eastern Massachusetts. On the day prior to the planned attack, Luke Day sent Shays a note postponing for 24 hours. Bowdoin’s men, however, intercepted the note. When Shays reached the armory, the forewarned militia easily defeated his solitary troops, having fortified the armory's defenses. …

Seeing the popularity of the resistance, the merchant-bankers in the Massachusetts legislature wasted no time in passing the Disqualification Act barring anyone who had participated in the rebellion from voting or running for office. Four thousand people signed confessions in exchange for amnesty, and the financiers were reimbursed for the expense of the mercenary militia. [57-59]

That led to the Annapolis meeting where merchants and bankers embellished Hamilton’s draft and overstepped their charter to set up a Consitutional Convention. There is no greater scoundrel and traitor to the cause of sovereignty for which Americans fought than Alexander Hamilton.

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Although Matt didn’t respond to my first comment, a reader named William Pritting answered, linking articles on Hamilton, the Bradbury Pound, John Titus and a YT called Mommy, Where Does Money Come From? In an expanded comment he detailed how he thought national economies should handle home loans, credit cards, car loans, business loans, gov’t agencies, tariffs, and welfare. He also cited an article on How Ben Franklin caused the Revolutionary War to which I responded, “Exactly!” and linked my book with a chapter on that. William replied:

I kinda favor my Monetary solution detailed in the reply below.

After a cursory look at your book on Amazon, do you think all 8+ billion people can be grouped into units of 200,000 people, with each unit using its own currency/scrip? I have trouble seeing that becoming a reality.

I answered:

Does size not matter, in your opinion? The point of disagreement is whether Franklin and Hamilton agreed on the size of a sovereign entity that's able to issue its own currency. …

And it's certainly your prerogative to reject my last decade of researching this based on a cursory reading. But you do understand that for me to abandon everything I've read and thought in favor of some links you're throwing out there would be self-negating.

William wrote:

In my humble opinion, I do think you are wasting your life trying to convince people to give up their established independent sovereign nation-states and re-group into “community-nations” of only 200,000 people.

To which I countered:

Haha! I will need to quote you on that. Glad that you're humble enough to tell other people they're wasting their lives based on a few moments that you, from your position of superiority, have spent understanding their lifework. I think this fits best under my series: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/mansplaining-economics. Imagine what you would have said if you weren't so humble!

William shot back:

How many people have bought your book and agreed with your proposal, besides the one person from Norway who left an Amazon review?

As an informed consumer, the summation on the back cover of your book in no way induced me to want to give you any of my money to read your irrational and nonsensical proposal.

You might want to take up knitting or crocheting or finger painting.

I rejoined:

Nothing like doubling down, William, just in case anyone thinks I might have been misinterpreting how insulting your statements were from the first. And the decidedly feminine activities you suggest as alternatives is an excellent illustration of your misogyny and disdain for women in masculine realms like economics. I never took your statements personally—how could I when you clearly knew next to nothing about me or my ideas?—but it will be useful to show other women the ways in which men dismiss them.

And although Matt and I disagree on this point, he did say that my intro was 'the best example he'd read of Platonic thinking' when he and Cynthia got my book. So there are smart people who take what I have to say seriously, even when we disagree.

William’s final shot was:

Economics is not your forté.

Just kidding. He then added for good measure:

No intelligent person is going to take your proposal seriously.

So, my non-intelligent and nonsensical friends, I offer this as an unusually clear-cut example that empire-thinking goes along with toxic masculinity. In fact, as I’ve said before, the two are redundant. Toxic masculinity assumes the right to dominate others and tell them what to do, as William did in his model instructing all the nations of the world in how to run their economies. And it rejects and ridicules the feminine-sized economy centered around the family, with a network that’s bottom-up or lowercase federal rather than top-down or uppercase Federal. Imagine thinking that communities are smart enough to run themselves.

And thank you to the particularly irrational T Jacobson, for leaving such a nice review on my book, which William graciously pointed out to me! Don’t worry, my sequel will be on finger-painting or how to crochet your own dunce cap.

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Although I didn’t mention it in the video, this is an excellent first hand account of J6 that also goes into the history of the American colonies, and covers the reasons for the Stamp Tax and Tea Tax. I’ll be talking about the J6 portion in a future episode but wanted to link it here for fine quotes like this:

The colonists rightly saw these tyrannical edicts for what they were: an attack upon their very ability to earn a living. The seeds of the American Revolution were sown not because 3% taxes were too high, but because these taxes represented an insidious agenda to undermine the ability of the colonists to live as a free people. The parallels to our own predicament should be obvious.

What was at stake then is what’s at stake now: the ability to earn a decent living, to chart our own destiny, and to speak our mind without fear of reprisal.

Requiem for a J6’er

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To follow up, I suggest The Constitutional Convention Coup:

Should we invoke Article 5 and call a new Constitutional Convention? This episode looks at the original con-con as a con and a coup against the Articles of Confederation and State Constitutions written by the people. I examine why the term 'anti-Federalist' is Orwellian double-speak for those who supported a federal government against the centralizers. The Framers were primarily motivated by direct taxation to fund a standing army in peacetime, and the protection of slavery. When people praise the Constitution, they usually mean the Bill of Rights—which were the condition under which the States ratified. But instead of their dozens of substantive changes, Madison wrote what he called his "nauseous project of amendments" to nullify and neuter the opposition.

and a pre-Substack on Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix?

Responding to Russell Brand's interview called On Fearlessness and Fighting Power, I nominate Vandana as Spirit Mother Earth Goddess and suggest Ganesh as her consort. I predict that we're at the end of 100 generations of patriarchy and should enter the matrix—the womb or place of origin—to imagine what comes next. I look at fear as the opposite of love, and the social distancing that says fear IS love. I cite another fearless Indian woman, Arundhati Roy, on the fighting power of the Maoists or Naxalites. I propose India's 1.3B people as 4000 self-governing commonwealths and end with a dream of Red King Kong and the Winged Green Dragon in which they have tea and solve climate change.