Ellen Brown loves to quote famous Americans who favored unbacked paper money: Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, Garfield. The problem is, none of these famous people favored paper money. They opposed it.
She quoted a bogus quote of Franklin's. She has finally admitted under the pressure of my article that she had already dropped this quotation in her 2010 edition. She had not previously revealed on her Website that she had been suckered by some Greenback author into accepting this bogus quote. She had also not described all of the time and trouble this bogus quote caused her when re-writing those chapters in which she had relied on it to support her case.
I also caught her quoting only part of Franklin's opinion of the paper money "Continentals" during the American Revolution, which fell to almost zero value -- the only hyperinflation in American history. She blamed currency speculators and British counterfeiting for this collapse in value. Benjamin Franklin didn't. He blamed fiat money.
Here is what I wrote about what she wrote.
She quotes a letter from Franklin. Here, she makes a blooper that boggles the imagination: "Franklin wrote from England during the war. . . ."Folks, Franklin was not in England during the war. Had he been in England, he would have been imprisoned in the Tower of London. There was a revolution going on. He was in France. I am quoting from the 4th printing of her book. Not one of her readers spotted this blooper and warned her. So, she got caught by me. This sort of thing is always embarrassing to any author who expects to be taken seriously. But I digress.
Here is what she quotes:
The whole is a mystery even to politicians, how we could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it. The currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine. [Web of Debt, p. 43]To this, she added the following: the scrip "evoked the wonder and admiration of foreign observers, because it allowed the colonists to do something that had never been done before. They succeeded in financing a war against a major power, with virtually no "hard" currency of their own, without taxing the people (p. 43). In short, this was something (war) for nothing (no taxes). A miracle of paper money!
She does not tell us where Franklin's statement appeared. I think there is a reason for this silence. Someone might find the original and read all of it. I did. It was easy. Anyone can use Google to search for a direct quotation. I found it in two minutes. It appears in Volume 8 of Jared Sparks's 19th-century collected works of Franklin. It was a letter to Samuel Cooper (22 April 1789).
Read what Franklin wrote before he got to the brief passage that lawyer Brown decided to present to the jury (her readers). Does this sound like no taxation?
I received your valuable letter by the Marquis de Lafayette, and another by Mr. Bradford. I can only write a few words in answer to the latter, the former not being at hand. The depreciation of our money must, as you observe, greatly affect salary men, widows, and orphans. Methinks this evil deserves the attention of the several legislatures, and ought, if possible, to be remedied by some equitable law, particularly adapted to their circumstances. I took all the pains I could in Congress to prevent the depreciation, by proposing first, that the bills should bear interest; this was rejected, and they were struck as you see them. Secondly, after the first emission, I proposed that we should stop, strike no more, but borrow on interest those we had issued. This was not then approved of, and more bills were issued. When, from the too great quantity, they began to depreciate, we agreed to borrow on interest; and I proposed, that, in order to fix the value of the principal, the interest should be promised in hard dollars. This was objected to as impracticable; but I still continue of opinion, that, by sending out cargoes to purchase it, we might have brought in money sufficient for that purpose, as we brought in powder, &,c. &,c.; and that, though the attempt must have been attended with a disadvantage, the loss would have been a less mischief than any measure attending the discredit of the bills, which threatens to take out of our hands the great instrument of our defence.The Congress did at last come into the proposal of paying the interest in real money. But when the whole mass of the currency was under way in depreciation, the momentum of its descent was too great to be stopped by a power, that might at first have been sufficient to prevent the beginning of the motion. The only remedy now seems to be a diminution of the quantity by a vigorous taxation, of great nominal sums, which the people are more able to pay, in proportion to the quantity and diminished value; and the only consolation under the evil is, that the public debt is proportionably diminished with the depreciation; and this by a kind of imperceptible tax, every one having paid a part of it in the fall of value that took place between the receiving and paying such sums as passed through his hands. For it should always be remembered, that the original intention was to sink the bills by taxes, which would as effectually extinguish the debt as an actual redemption.
It is clear that lawyer Brown's high opinion of the Revolution's paper money was not shared by Franklin.
(I made a typo, which I have fixed in the original -- and noted that it is a fix. I typed 1789, not 1779.)
Here is her response.
6. Ignoring a negative statement by Franklin on the "Continentals"Ignoring a negative statement? Please! And the statement you cite is from 1789. The statement I was quoting in their favor was made during the Revolutionary War. We all know they went bad by the end of the war. I also said that one problem with the Continentals was that they weren't all issued as legal tender; many were issued as debt. So at the end of the war, there was a debt owed.
So, my typo made her look even worse. She grabbed onto "1789" as if it were a life-preserver for her case. It is in fact an anvil. She sinks. Franklin's statement was made in the middle of the war. It had two years to go.
Putting "Please!" as a rhetorical gesture does not change the fact that Franklin hated the Continentals from the beginning. Or, as lawyer Brown might say, "Puuulease!"
She says that I was wrong to cite a letter written in 1789. She says that she was citing a completely different source. Notice, however, that her source document could not possibly have existed. She said originally (without a footnote) that the statement appears in a letter written from England. I caught her in the single most obvious blooper in her book. He was in France. She even admits that I got her:
On Franklin being in France rather England, point taken; I'll add that to my errata file, thanks.
But, if he did not write this from England, then she obviously has no primary source document to support this supposedly independent quotation -- independent of my verbatim citation of his 1779 letter. If she had seen the oroginal letter, she would have known that it was not "postmarked" England.
The exact phrase that she cited in her book -- the currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine -- appears in his 1779 letter. It appears nowhere else. She is trapped. She thinks that yelling "Please!" will let her escape from my trap. It doesn't.
She had no wartime letter from England in front of her when she wrote her book. My guess is that she got the quotation from some undocumented Greenbacker book. In any case, she failed to offer a footnote. She figured that the quote just had to be real. It was real. I showed when wrote it. I directed readers to the complete document, where anyone can read it. In it, he attacked the Continentals. He said that, from the beginning, he wanted the paper money tied legally to interest paid in precious metal coins: "hard dollars."
I caught Brown in a whopper of an error. She still refuses to face up to it. She still does not tell us in what collection of primary sources this phantom wartime letter appears. There is a reason for this: the document in question, with the exact phrase, was written in 1779. If she had a copy of the phantom letter, she would have cited it. That would have shut me up. But she has no such letter. It never existed.
Ellen Brown is not a scholar. She is not a reliable amateur historian. She is a lawyer who is in way over her head on a topic that she does not understand. She is frantically trying to evade my criticisms. She cannot do it.
She cannot hold her own in am open debate. Day by day, I am showing the extent to which she is intellectually defenseless. I shall continue to do so.
I do admit that I was wrong in my original accusation: She Deliberately Skipped Over an Important Quotation from Franklin on the "Continentals". She did not deliberately skip over it. She never bothered to trace down the source of the quotation. She believed some Greenbacker book. However, at this point, her continuing refusal to accept the truth is deliberate. It is also futile. It is downright silly.
Her followers are resting on a week reed. They of course do not want to be told this by anyone, especially not by a gold coin standard-promoting Ph.D. in history who knows how to use primary source documents. Their leader is an incompetent economist and an even more incompetent historian. They don't want to be told this. To have followed anyone this incompetent reflects poorly on their own intellectual vulnerability. Nobody wants to admit that he is one of the rubes on which Ellen Brown has successfully put the shuck.
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