“The Legalized Crime of Banking”
January 28, 2019
FROM Silas Walter Adams’s 1958 book The Legalized Crime of Banking and a Constitutional Remedy:
Stop and find your place in our present economic system – that is, are you a beneficiary; or, are you a victim? Are you a gainer; or, are you a loser? If you work for a living, with hands and/or head, or both; or, work for others for pay, you are a loser, the heaviest of all losers! You toil to provide man all his material wants, or to serve him, and you are paid with a cheap, inflated 25-cent dollar, which we persistently call a 100-cent dollar — a private dollar created by a private corporation. If you have earned your money either by producing something, working for yourself or as an employee, or in serving others, and through thrift and economy you have stored it away for the rainy day; or, if an honest man and would not take anything from another that you did not give in return an equal value of goods and/or service, you are doubly a loser; for the bankers’ constant stream of created new dollars pouring into circulation cheapens your dollar, and lowers its buying power. You get only a pound of coffee today for the same money you could buy four pounds of coffee in the thirties.
If you are on a pension, or living on your life’s saving, even on the coupons you have been clipping from World War II U.S. Bonds, you are a helpless loser, because bankers in the last 20 years have reduced the buying power of your dollar to one-fourth its 1935 buying power.
But, if you are a gambler, and live by your wits play the stock markets and otherwise take usury, take from others without producing or serving others, take that which you have not earned, you are a gainer; aye, more, an enemy of all honest, producing, serving, toiling people. You are the burden that is crushing to the earth the masses, the 99 and 9 of us.
[Adams, Silas Walter. The Legalized Crime of Banking: & a Constitutional Remedy (p. 20). Omnia Veritas Ltd. Kindle Edition.]
This book was available free in its entirety on the Internet Archive — until last week.