Yankee paper money & war-mongering in the Colonial era

The difference between then & now.....Dates

via SNN

The history of US aggressive war-making has been closely linked to central banking, inflation and government debt. These are the ways that US wars have been funded. The history of this link has been traced by Dr Murray Rothbard, a New York professor, author and one of the leading economists and libertarian theorists of the twentieth century, to the Massachusetts Colony. Rothbard credits the Yankees of Massachusetts with the distinction of being the first people in the history of the world to fund aggressive war by printing paper money. The Massachusetts Colony was accustomed to hiring mercenaries which they sent out on raids against the prosperous French people of Quebec. The mercenaries were allowed to keep a portion of what they could steal from the Quebecers. After being repelled by the French colonists, the Yankee plunderers went back to Boston and demanded payment. Rather than raise taxes on its people, the Massachusetts government simply printed up un-backed paper currency (which quickly de-valued and left those holding the paper currency with an increasingly worthless piece of paper). The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (one of the branches of the US central bank) on its website credits Massachusetts with in 1690 “issue[ing] the first paper money in the colonies which would later form the United States.” The other colonies learned from the example of Massachusetts and began printing their own worthless paper currency to fund various government programs. Finally the British Empire stepped in and put a stop to all this monetary inflation.

In April of 2010 Dr Thomas DiLorenzo, the author of The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, gave a speech entitled “War and Inflation: Financing the Empire” in which he proceeds from the above early example of the Yankee’s penchant for money manipulation and imperialism to the Hamiltonians and Federalists to the Whig Party, Lincoln’s Republicans, the Progressives and on down to today. The pattern is unmistakable, as is the desire by people like Hamilton, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt and those of their ilk to expand the power and control of the US government, use it to benefit their friends and supporters, and re-organise society as they see fit. If you think about it, there are very strong connections between this mentality and that of the Yankee founding fathers in Massachusetts.