Daniel Keys Moran Quotes
The most interesting thing about the idea of money is that it makes it possible to measure something in previous ages we couldn't be sure about, and that something is power.
Moran, Daniel Keys. "Essays." Daniel Keys Moran, 2001, www.danielkeysmoran.com.
There has always been a fear of inflation and currency debasement by governments. Since ancient times, rulers issued coins and when they were made of cheap metals like copper or iron, the ruler could mint as much as he wanted and when he did so the value went down. By using only precious metals, gold and silver, for coins, there would be a natural restraint on government. Garfield was one of those who believed that we should always have money of gold and silver. The United States would use that principle for the next century even backing its paper money with gold and silver. In the Nixon administration the United States abandoned the gold standard. Today, it is the ability of a country to produce things that maintains value of paper money which has been supplanted in many cases by electronic money.
See {583710} for his grandchild’s variation.
In Rhodes’ era money not only bought and influenced politicians but it enabled rich people and their companies to have their own armies and follow their own foreign policy. The British government has a long history of finding a proper balance of control over British wealthy men and her companies doing everything from enforcing the law to invading other countries. Without the companies, the management of the huge empire would have been too expensive and with them, the citizens and the government lost control of foreign policy. In the end, the latter was unacceptable and the British Empire was just too Expensive to maintain where so any nations wanted independence.
See {627027} for an earlier expression of this point.
The majority of the Supreme Court has voted 5-4 that a corporation cannot be limited in the amount of money it spends on an election campaign as curtailing the money that is spend is tantamount to curtailing the amount of speech and spending money to elect a candidate is a form of political speech. Stevens made a major distinction between money and speech and challenged the logic that conflated the two. The nation was polarized on this issue, with liberals and conservatives on both sides of the question.
The last sentence echoes a quotation of Napoleon. See {630664} .
The alternative would have been for the colonies to borrow English money at high interest rates and use that. Or use money from private banks (which occurred later.) Many conservatives are today a little shocked that some of the American Colonies just printed money with no backing but it worked—at least at the local level. A Boston Bank for example, would take a large commission for a Bostonian to convert Pennsylvania money into Massachusetts money. So it was not a very good system for trade between colonies and International trade. But English money was used for that. The colonists pragmatically got the “best of both worlds” and paid as little interest as they needed to. This system is essentially what we use today on a national scale with no gold or silver backing of the money.
Daniel Keys Moran, also known by his initials DKM, is an American computer programmer and science fiction writer.
