In May of this year I reached my 83rd birthday. I have spent the last
thirty years promoting educational freedom and, in particular, home
schooling. It is my strong belief that you cannot have a free society
without educational freedom. A government education system simply
creates the means for the government to indoctrinate the nation’s
children in whatever philosophy the government wants. We have seen this
scenario in operation wherever governments have wanted to impose
totalitarian power over their citizens.
So far, in the United States, no political group has succeeded in
imposing a totalitarian form of government over our people. Our
separation of powers has made it difficult for any political group to
achieve total power. Our Constitution guarantees our citizens freedom of
speech, freedom of religion, and freedom to own firearms. In the area of
education, Americans have the right to create private schools and to
educate their children at home. As long as these freedoms are maintained
by a vigilant citizenry, we shall not have a totalitarian system of
government.
But recently we find government’s heavy hand intruding itself in areas
where economic freedom is being hotly contested, particularly in the
area of banking.
The function of banks in a free society is crucial to that society’s
economic well-being. In the early days, before regulation, the banks
stored savings in terms of gold and issued loans in their own banknotes.
Credit is the essential fuel of economic progress. And so we must have
it. But as in every human endeavor, banks and their depositors are also
susceptible to error and fraud.
For example, our earliest banking panic, in 1810, was brought on by
over-generous lending policies. Does that sound familiar? The Panic of
1837 resulted, with specie payments being suspended, causing many bank
failures and a depression that lasted until 1844. In 1856, the Farmer’s
Almanac published an extensive list of “Worthless and Uncurrent Bank
Notes in New England.” Twelve banks in Boston alone were listed.
Forty-one banks in Maine were listed as having worthless bank notes.
Yet, the country survived.
There were bank panics in 1873, 1884, 1893, and 1907. During all these,
the country survived without government intervention. But with the
growth of a huge industrial economy, the large investment bankers in New
York decided that what the United States needed was a European-style
central bank. They held a secret meeting at Jekyll Island, GA, and
mapped out a plan for getting Congress to create the Federal Reserve
System. It would be sold to the American people as a means of preventing
further financial panics. The law creating the Federal Reserve was
passed in December 1913. In reality, the new central bank was nothing
more than a cartel of the big national banks to control the financial
system of the United States.
Thus we continued to have financial panics. There were 825 bank failures
between 1914 and 1929 and 1,947 failures by the end of 1933. So, from
1913 to 1933, there were 12,714 state bank failures. By 1933 there were
14,771 banks in the United States, half as many as in 1920. The banking
holocaust of the early 1930s—9,106 bank failures, 1,917 of them national
banks, in four years—culminated in a nationwide bank moratorium in March
of 1933, and the enactment of more government regulation.
And yet, our capitalist system survived. During the Depression many auto
companies went out of business. But those that survived—like General
Motors, Chrysler, and Ford—managed to produce cars the public wanted, at
very moderate prices. The Depression had also created deflation, a
lowering of prices on everything, since money was hard to get. The
Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center
were built during the Depression. Great bridges and highways were also
built. And Hollywood did a booming business.
World War II got us out of the Depression and led the U.S. into its
great post-war prosperity. Since then we’ve seen the growth of a huge
consumer economy, spurred on by easy money provided by credit cards. And
when money is easy to get, the greedy get greedier. The technological
revolution created thousands of new millionaires. Ordinary Americans by
the millions were investing in the stock market, in mutual funds, in
retirement accounts. And to spread the American dream, Congress passed
laws requiring banks to finance the mortgages of risky borrowers.
The result? A great financial blow-up, not seen since the Depression.
But instead of letting the market sort things out, our leaders in the
White House and Congress have decided to use this crisis as a pretext
for destroying our capitalist system and imposing more socialist-style
government control over our lives.
The nation has survived as a free society through all of the financial
crises of the past. And it will survive this one, if it is allowed to
follow its natural course. That is the lesson that history teaches us.
Education expert Sam Blumenfeld’s Alpha-Phonics reading program is
available on www.samblumenfeld.net. His latest book, The
Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection, is about the Shakespeare authorship
mystery.
