Someone sent me a video called “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars.” Within three minutes I had to turn it off. It begins with a fake quotation from Ben Franklin, arguing that the most important driving force of the American Revolution was the British prohibition on paper money in the colonies. (Not to mention that the Currency Act was not even close to the driving force behind the Revolution.) Then the narrator quotes Rothschild, and this quotation is another fake. So the first two quotations of the whole video are unverified. Why should I keep watching?
My advice to Greenbackers: if the only sources for a quotation are other Greenbacker sites, it’s probably a fake. Have some decency as a researcher and seek out the actual source before repeating a quotation.
The narrator keeps emphasizing “private central bankers.” His problem is that the central banks aren’t socialistic enough? My problem is that they’re creations of government and are given government-granted special privileges. He libels the free-enterprise system by claiming that these government-privileged institutions are “private central banks.” They are not.
The gist of all this is that our problems stem from “private central banks,” and that if only we had fiat money being issued directly by government, we could live debt-free, have no war, etc.
Check out my “Why the Greenbackers Are Wrong,” which examines a couple of their major claims in detail.
And by the way, the topic raised in the video is not a foolish one, but it is handled in a cartoonish way, to say nothing of the inaccuracies. For a sound treatment of the question, read Murray Rothbard’s “Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy.”