An Ingenious Substitute for Coins!

Aug 19, 2010 at 6:21 PM

By Josh Jackson

With a few hours to kill after arriving in Washington DC last week for the national Young Americans for Liberty conference, my fellow Auburn YALer and I decided to slip into the District to explore the arcade-style amusements of the National Mall.

After uneventfully passing through a metal detector at the National Museum of American History with an old 1980s model SLR camera (that with a telephoto lense easily contained the metal content of a typical handgun), we began to peruse some of the fanfare. Following a sickening stroll through a temple-like display to the mass-murder Lincoln, we were immediately intrigued by a small room titled "Stories On Money."

The room was lined with the various media of exchange used from Colonial to modern times. The following picture shows a blurb explaining the first attempts to manipulate Revolutionary War payments using paper money:

The caption reads:

Money for a New Nation: Fighting the American Revolution was expensive. Paper money--an ingenious substitute for coins--saved the day. At the war's end, people hoped for a coin-based economy, but precious metal remained hard to find. The first U.S. Mint private banks, states, and other entities all sought a dependable, expandable monetary system for a growing nation. They found a solution in paper money.

There is, of course, no mention of the subsequent inflation and economic malaise -- chronicled by Rothbard in A History of Money and Banking in the United States -- that quickly festered within the young colonies. Rather, the display dubiously illustrates a natural ape-to-man type evolution of hard metal to the air-thin toilet paper now called the Federal Reserve Note.

Of course, how dangerous it would be for the carnival goers of DC to awaken to any monetary parallels of the past to the present.

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