"The power to raise or depress the monetary unit of value is a power to destroy men's faith in the honor of a Government and its laws.....Their sense of betrayal, and their perception of the fact, are expressed by the non-equivalence in exchange often disclosed between the undebased coin and the debased coin, between the coin and the promise to pay converted into legal tender.....Not for the first 72 years of this country's history did Congress attempt to slip a legal tender issue past the people. That it did so during the 'imagined exigency' of the Civil War did not change the fact that it was a 'legalized injustice'.
No Executive and no Legislature is fit to be trusted with the control it involves over the earnings and savings of the people. No earthly sovereign or servant is capable of a just exercise of such authority to impair and pervert the obligation of contracts."
These words were spoken in 1885 by then Secretary of the Treasury Daniel Manning.
I am not as nearly educated on the subject of monetary policy as I would like to be, but what Daniel Manning said in 1885 seems to make a whole lot more sense compared to what I am hearing out of some folks in Washington in 2009.
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