The enemies of your enemies may also be your
enemies.
Just because
someone joins you in opposing some government policy or political movement is
no guarantee that this person shares anything more than your opposition. He may
in fact be a lot more dangerous to you than the opposition.
Anarchists
prior to the Russian Revolution were allies with the Bolsheviks in their
attempt to overthrow the czar. After the revolution, when Lenin came to power,
he made sure that the anarchists were shipped to Siberia or were executed. They
would have been wiser to put up with the czar.
For
approximately 60 years, I have been aware of the Left-wing movement that has
systematically infiltrated the Right. I first became aware of this in 1958. My
father was an FBI agent. It was his job to monitor a Marxist organization known
as the Socialist Workers Party. He also occasionally monitored the Communists.
One of his informants was a conservative. Anyway, he called himself a conservative.
After he had ceased being an informant, my father occasionally invited him to
our home.
The
ex-informant was an affable fellow. In a discussion with me, he saw that I had
conservative leanings. At a later meeting, he handed me a paperback book, Money
Made Mysterious. I had been reading The Freeman for a few
months by then. I was getting to know something about free-market economics. I
was aware of arguments in favor of the gold standard. Those arguments persuaded
me. As I began to read this book, I was presented a different line of
reasoning. It was a defense of unbacked paper money -- fiat money. The book was
a compilation of articles from the far-Right magazine, The American
Mercury. The book is still being sold. If you should ever want to read it,
The Unz Review website has published the original articles for free. They
are here. (Amazingly, the author, Paul Stephens,
switched sides. He became a strong supporter of the gold standard. I started
writing for The Freeman in 1967. In 1973, he started writing
for it. These articles also appear on Unz's site. They are worth reading.)
That was my
first encounter with the Greenback movement. It would not be my last.
THE
GREENBACKERS
The movement
was born in the aftermath of the Civil War. The war had been partially funded
in the North by the issue of fiat money, known as greenbacks. The South had
financed far more of the war by the issue of similar paper currency. This led
to hyperinflation in the South. It did not in the North, which had not issued
as much fiat money.
Greenbackers
were (and are) populists who favor an expanding federal government that is
funded solely by the issue of paper money. They insist that this will cost
taxpayers nothing. They insist that this will strengthen the economy. The money
should be issued by Congress. They trust Congress.
The Greenback
movement was part of the left-wing reform movements after the Civil War. They
became part of the populist movement. They even had a political party. It
merged with the Populist party in 1892.
These people
became prominent during the battles against the establishment of the Federal
Reserve System. They hated banking because banking charged interest. They
wanted debt-free paper money. They hated the banks. Opponents of the Federal
Reserve who were in favor of the gold coin standard found themselves in an
alliance with people who were far more hostile to the gold standard than the
Federal Reserve's founders were in 1913.
There was
another attempt of these leftists to capture the conservative movement during
the late 1930's. The most prominent greenback or, father Charles Coughlin,
became an opponent of Roosevelt. He originally had supported Roosevelt. His
influence became considerable. He was an opponent of bankers. Verbally, so was
Roosevelt, although he had been a corporate bond salesman prior to his election
as governor of New York in 1928. Conservative opponents of Roosevelt's
unilateral destruction of the American gold coin standard at 1 AM on the Monday
morning after his Saturday inaugural address found enemies in their camp.
This
infiltration has gone on for over a century. It is still going on.
MY EARLY
ENCOUNTERS WITH GREENBACKERS
I have followed
this movement from the sidelines ever since 1958.
I was a rarity
in southern California in the 1960's: a hard-core conservative college student.
I began to come across more and more books and articles favorable to Greenback
economics as I became more familiar with the conservative movement.
I majored in
history in college. I read more about the Greenback movement in my
upper-division years in college. In my graduate school years, I pursued the
matter in greater detail.
In 1965, I
wrote a privately circulated paper on books written by a Greenbacker in the
1930's whose books were still circulating in the conservative movement. I later
published this paper in my book, An Introduction to Christian Economics (1973),
chapter 11. You can read it for free here. An updated version of this article was
published as a book in September 2010 by the Mises Institute. You can read it
for free here.
Shortly after
this, I was invited to speak to a local meeting of the John Birch Society. I
spoke on gold and the gold standard. There, I encountered a pair of
Greenbackers. It was obvious to me that they had been doing their best to
persuade Birch members of the Greenback position on money. I could see that one
of them, a woman, was seething at my presentation on the benefits of the gold
standard. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
The
Greenbackers continue to infiltrate the far Right. They have worked especially
hard to take over the Patriot movement, which opposes the IRS and the income
tax.
ELLEN
BROWN
In 2007, a
greenback lawyer named Ellen Brown self published her book, The Web of
Debt. I began seeing favorable references to it on conservative websites. I
recognized immediately that this book was following the agenda of the greenback
movement that had begun a century earlier. It was ostensibly an attack on
fractional reserve banking. But it was in fact a promotion of fiat money issued
by Congress.
I decided I had
to write a refutation of her book. I devoted something over 100 hours to a line
by line refutation. I published them in late September 2010. The first group
of 31 articles, refuted her historical documentation
supporting her economic views. The second group of 21 articles, dealt with her economic errors.
She responded
in an email to a few of my criticisms of her historical statements. I wrote
responses to all of them, which I linked to in updates of my original articles.
She did not bother to respond after that.
Six weeks
later, she switched sides. She had made a reputation within far-Right circles
as an opponent of the Federal Reserve System. In late November 2010, she became
a cheerleader for Bernanke's QE2 policies. I immediately wrote about her
switch. My article is here.
She was a
leftist and a statist from day one. But she gained followers on the Right. They
could not distinguish conservatism from statism, any more than my father's
ex-informant could in 1958. I used to receive outraged emails from them. How
dare I critique their guru?
On January 24,
2019, Truthdig published her glowing article on the German government's
promotion of the green energy agenda. Truthdig
is a popular Left-wing site. The German government owns a bank that
has lent money to companies that produce solar and wind based electrical power
generation. It has lent this money at the low interest rates. You can read her
article here.
You can read
more about her in my department devoted to her: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department141.cfm.
CONCLUSION
Sadly, the Right, including the Alt-Right, is
filled with people who are emotionally opposed to the federal government, but
who have little intellectual understanding of economics. The Apostle Paul
described such people: zealots without knowledge (Romans 10:2). They are easy
targets for statists with agendas presented in the name of nationalism,
patriotism, and traditional values. Be aware of this before you get on someone
else's bandwagon. The bandwagon may be headed into the arms of some federal
bureaucracy.