It is to our collective detriment that, eight long, painful, underemployed, increasingly indebted, more societally divisive years on, few if any of these lessons seem to have been drawn by the Powers-that-Be.
…The general confusion, and the introduction of paper money, infused in the minds of people vague ideas respecting government and credit. We expected too much from the return of peace, and of course we have been disappointed. Our governments have been new and unsettled; and several legislatures, by making tender, suspension, and paper money laws, have given just cause of uneasiness to creditors.
By these and other causes, several orders of men in the community have been prepared, by degrees, for a change of government; and this very abuse of power in the legislatures, which, in some cases, has been charged upon the democratic part of the community, has furnished aristocratical men with those very weapons, and those very means, with which, in great measure, they are rapidly effecting their favourite object.
And should an oppressive government be the consequence of the proposed change, posterity may reproach not only a few overbearing unprincipled men, but those parties in the states which have misused their powers.
Letter from the Federal Farmer to the Republican, Oct 8th 1787
After a blizzard of unco-ordinated initiatives and the usual spate of grossly unintended consequences, state intervention in the banking system seems to have reached a near apotheosis this week as the authorities finally seek a comprehensive solution to the extraordinary bank-on-bank run which has so roiled world markets in recent months.
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