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I hope no one minds if I voice a concern that is not related to Southboro.

I am a history buff and have taken the trouble to read the Constitution itself which is rather brief. The history books discuss the debates that occurred during its creation and ratification. I am afraid the fears of the anti-federalists have been borne out over the years.

As I like to tell the story, when “we” beat the British at Yorktown in 1781, the thirteen former British colonies became independent, sovereign states, in the sense that they were in effect sovereign nations. They lived under an agreement called the Articles of Confederation until 1787 when representatives from each met to modify that agreement but instead decided to write a constitution instead creating a government over the states!

They had their reasons in doing so as well as concerns. One reason they did so was because states were erecting tariffs on trade among the states which might have been meant to “protect” a local business from competition, but made costs of goods more expensive for consumers.

Another reason was that some debtors persuaded their local state politician to strike out a clause in their contract so they could repay loans in paper currency rather that in the coins of gold or silver which they had borrowed and initially agreed to repay in kind.

But perhaps the main concern of some of the Founders was to try to assure that their children would never live under a tyrant again as they had just endured under King George the Third. They wisely granted only certain powers to the Congress and reserved all other powers to the states or to the people (see the Tenth Amendment)

Now one of the powers granted was the power to coin money and to regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standard of weights and measures. They had just experienced a hyperinflation of the Continental, a paper currency created in 1775 to pay the men who joined the fight against the British and who were promised that the Continental would be redeemable in the future, but that promise was never kept.

So no power to create a paper currency was granted and in the first Coinage Act of 1792 you will discover as I did by googling it, that a dollar was defined as a coin containing 371 grains and four sixteenth of a grain of silver. In addition the penalty for debasing the currency was death.see paragraph nineteen.

In Article 1 Section 10 it states that only gold or silver coin will be tender for payment of debts. So it is evident that Constitutional money was gold and silver coins. If you wonder how we have ended up instead with Federal Reserve Notes you may enjoy reading Timberlake’s Constitutional Money:A review of Supreme Court Monetary Decisions which explores the nine such decisions which have subverted the Founder’s careful attempt to protect what would have been sound money.

Another book which explores the history of central banking in America and the secret meeting set up by the banker J.P. Morgan in which the Federal Reserve System was written in 1910 and passed into law in 1913. Since then the purchasing power of the dollar has eroded over 97%. G. Edward Griffin’s : The Creature From Jekyll Island is being widely read in the libraries across the country.

One more thing about the Founder’s attempt to keep their children free. They included an oath of office which is taken by all elected officials, Congressmen and Senators and Supreme Court Justices as well as the President. You know the one. Its right there in the Constitution itself. But so far hardly anyone thinks to ask those running for office just what the oath means to them and what specifically they intend to do to keep their oath. That is about to change.

Two organizations sprung into being in 2008 in the colleges and universities across America and the world. Even in some high schools too. One is called Students For Liberty and the other is Young Americans For Liberty. They are growing with the promise that they will continue to grow as they recruit others to join them in learning about what went wrong and what needs to be done to restore our children’s liberty and freedom in the years ahead.

http://www.studentsforliberty.org
http://www.YALiberty.org

Knowing these organizations of bright young college students exists enables me to sleep a little better confident that my grandson, who is only three, will be able to live in the kind of America we all knew years ago when we were children ourselves, before the cost of living started its rise as unconstitutional interventions by our elected leaders, who ignored the meaning of their oath, led them astray with resultant crushing national debt, weakened dollar, high unemployment, entanglement in foreign wars, failed schools which do not teach the ideas needed to understand what caused the country to go off the rails and what ideas are necessary to restore our limited constitutional Republic.