Mike Gray points out that the current problems in the U.S. financial sector, while disturbing, are nothing new. In fact, they’re a manifestation of a long-term cultural problem: the failure to recognize who truly should have authority over the nation’s money.

 The unconstitutional rule of elite "experts" over the nation’s money supply is a powerful example of the Progressive belief that a free people cannot govern themselves and thus must have their money and personal investments managed and manipulated by their "betters."

We’ve already been here:

The Government is in the banking business as never before. Against its will it has been made the backer of horsethieves and card sharps, bootleggers, smugglers, speculators, and swindlers in all parts of the world. Through the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks the riffraff of every country is operating on the public credit of this United States Government.

A recent article informs us that the crisis on Wall Street—and its cause—is nothing new.

To read the comments of Rep. Louis McFadden (Chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee for over ten years and an implacable foe of the Federal Reserve System) to the House of Representatives in the early years of the Great Depression, you’d think he was speaking about events in 2008 instead of 1932:

Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks, hereinafter called the Fed. The Fed has cheated the government of these United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the nation’s debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Fed have cost enough money to pay the national debt several times over . . .

This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of these United States, has bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our government. It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladministration of that law by the Fed and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it . . .

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory money lenders. In that dark crew of financial pirates there are those who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket; there are those who send money into states to buy votes to control our legislatures; there are those who maintain international propaganda for the purpose of deceiving us into granting of new concessions which will permit them to cover up their past misdeeds and set again in motion their gigantic train of crime.

Much of this sounds all too familiar:

The United States has been ransacked and pillaged. Our structures have been gutted and only the walls are left standing. While being perpetrated, everything the world would rake up to sell us was brought in here at our expense by the Fed until our markets were swamped with unneeded and unwanted imported goods priced far above their value and made to equal the dollar volume of our honest exports, and to kill or reduce our favored balance of trade. As agents of the foreign central banks the Fed try by every means in their power to reduce our favorable balance of trade. They act for their foreign principal and they accept fees from foreigners for acting against the best interests of these United States. Naturally there has been great competition among foreigners for the favors of the Fed. . . .

What we need to do is to send the reserves of our National Banks home to the people who earned and produced them and who still own them and to the banks which were compelled to surrender them to predatory interests. . . .

Mr. Chairman, there is nothing like the Fed pool of confiscated bank deposits in the world. It is a public trough of American wealth in which the foreigners claim rights equal to or greater than Americans. The Fed are the agents of the foreign central banks. They use our bank depositors’ money for the benefit of their foreign principals. They barter the public credit of the United States government and hire it out to foreigners at a profit to themselves. . . .

All this is done at the expense of the United States government, and at a sickening loss to the American people. Only our great wealth enabled us to stand the drain of it as long as we did. . . .

We need to destroy the Fed wherein our national reserves are impounded for the benefit of the foreigners. We need to save America for Americans.

McFadden ended his speech by invoking Scriptural imagery:

What is needed here is a return to the Constitution of the United States. We need to have a complete divorce of Bank and State. The old struggle that was fought out here in Jackson’s day must be fought over again. The independent United States Treasury should be re-established and the Government should keep its own money under lock and key in the building the people provided for that purpose. Asset currency, the device of the swindler, should be done away with. The Government should buy gold and issue United States currency on it. The business of the independent bankers should be restored to them. The State banking systems should be freed from coercion. The Federal Reserve districts should be abolished and the State boundaries should be respected. Bank reserves should be kept within the borders of the States whose people own them, and this reserve money of the people should be protected so that the international bankers and acceptance bankers and discount dealers cannot draw it away from them. The exchanges should be closed while we are putting our financial affairs in order. The Federal Reserve act should be repealed and the Federal Reserve banks, having violated their charters, should be liquidated immediately. Faithless Government officers who have violated their oaths of office should be impeached and brought to trial. . . .

Unless this is done by us, I predict that the American people, outraged, robbed, pillaged, insulted, and betrayed as they are in their own land, will rise in their wrath and send a President here who will sweep the money changers out of the temple.

McFadden’s 1932 prediction never came to pass.

[Editor’s note: Added to his other prescriptions, McFadden’s calls for a gold standard would indeed have pulled the United States out of the bad recession it was suffering in 1932 and prevented it from falling into the Great Depression. However, although a stable and flexible money supply is essential to a well-functioning economy, posession and trading of physical gold is not essential to the maintenance of it. What is certainly essential is that the people, through the Congress, have authority over the creation of money.]

Fast forward to today: Did either of the two leading candidates for president seem willing to "sweep" the "moneyed vultures" out of the temple? Of course not. There could be no greater indication that neither party really stands for the people.

—Mike Gray