Liberty Maven

Many of the early settlers of his nation had fled Great Britain to escape the tyranny and mercantilist economic system they had endured, and ultimately ended up in a bloody Revolutionary War to assert their independence.  But still there were those, such as Alexander Hamilton and Robert Morris who pushed hard to adopt Great Britain’s central banking system, modeled after the Bank of England.  Thomas DiLorenzo, author of Hamilton’s Curse has written an article on this subject for the Ludwig von Mises Institute:

Central banking has been a corrupt, mercantilist scheme and an engine of corporate welfare from its very beginning in the late 18th century. The first central bank, the Bank of North America, was “driven through the Continental Congress by [congressman and financier] Robert Morris in the Spring of 1781,” wrote Murray Rothbard in The Mystery of Banking (p. 191). The Philadelphia businessman Morris had been a defense contractor during the Revolutionary War who “siphoned off millions from the public treasury into contracts to his own … firm and to those of his associates.” He was also “leader of the powerful Nationalist forces” in the new country.

The main objective of the Nationalists, who were also known as Federalists, was essentially to establish an American version of the British mercantilist system, the very system that the Revolution had been fought against. Indeed, it was this system that the ancestors of the Revolutionaries had fled from when they came to America.

Continue reading the article at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.