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    social security is a ponzi scheme..., 2011-08-19 01:01:06 | Main | You might notice that the dere..., 2011-08-22 20:42:59

    oligarchy forever:

    William Hogeland:

    Robert Morris' [the founding father, who declined Washington's appointment to Sec. Treasury and suggested Alexander Hamilton in his stead, etc.] ... daily effort was to crush the American popular-finance movement and elevate the bondholders. ... While Morris and the other investors (yes, "other" -- Morris was not only Congress’s Superintendent of Finance but also perhaps the biggest investor in the congressional debt he "superintended") portrayed their bondholding in terms of patriotic sacrifice, the investing class had actually turned up its nose when Congress first offered bonds in 1776, at a measly 4%, payable in Congress’s poorly managed currency. The investors came in only when Morris arranged for a French loan to underwrite federal bonds at 6%, payable in bills of exchange issued by big European banking houses and backed by their metal reserves, as good as gold. And he got Congress to accept its crap currency in exchange for the bonds! Quite a payday -- for the banking and creditor class.

    Morris did manage to attract investors -- by and large the friends of Robert Morris. He kept the French deal secret but leaked it to his cronies, establishing a blue-chip sector of founding public debt held by high-finance government insiders. Morris then spent a decade trying to get that debt funded via national taxes, "opening the purses of the people," as Morris put it, in order to pay a small group of investors reliable 6%, in the equivalent of metal, tax free.

    ... The important point is that both liberaloid and rightist claims on founding positions are always, by nature, unnuanced, thus false, because the realities of founding positions don’t support anyone’s hopeful foregone conclusions regarding politics today.

    The brain trust ... who framed the Constitution in order to grow the nation by funding a domestic national debt sought deeply regressive taxation and the consolidation of wealth.


:: posted by buermann @ 2011-08-21 16:05:20 CST | link





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