Doug's Dynamic Drivel

Asia Times Online leads off an article on Goldman SAchs with the quote below, which they attribute to Thomas Jefferson

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Unfortunately had the writers, Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene, simply Googled part of that quote they would have found this page at monticello.org (The official site for all things Jefferson) which firmly denies this myth in the whole and states that perhaps part of it could be a paraphrase and another part a misquotation. It took me less than a minute to find that.

Earliest known appearance in print: 1937[1][2]

Other attributions: None known.

Status: This quotation is at least partly spurious; see comments below.

Comments: This quotation is often cited as being in an 1802 letter to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, and/or “later published in The Debate Over the Recharter of the Bank Bill (1809).”

The first part of the quotation (“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered”) has not been found anywhere in Thomas Jefferson’s writings, to Albert Gallatin or otherwise. It is identified in Respectfully Quoted as spurious, and the editor further points out that the words “inflation” and “deflation” did not come into use until 1864 and 1920, respectively.[3]

The second part of the quotation (“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies…”) may well be a paraphrase of a statement Jefferson made in a letter to John Taylor in 1816. He wrote, “And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”[4]

The third part of this quotation (“The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs”) may be a misquotation of Jefferson’s comment to John Wayles Eppes, “Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs.” [5]

Lastly, we have not found a record of any publication called The Debate Over the Recharter of the Bank Bill. There was certainly debate over the recharter of the National Bank leading up to its expiration in 1811, but a search of Congressional documents of that period yields none of the verbiage discussed above.

Look we all get sloppy at times but no one should get so sloppy, especially if they are trying to portray themselves as serious journalists, as to use a quotation that they have not verified to be true.

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