By John F. Di Leo -
What is a nation’s currency?
Ask an economist, and he’ll tell you that a U.S. Dollar bill, or a European Euro note, or a British Pound note, for that matter, is not really objectively worth its denomination. It’s just a piece of cotton paper, with a drop of ink and a magnetic strip. It’s not worth much. But it represents confidence in the nation’s economy, and it serves the economy as a means of exchange – a few pennies worth of decorated cotton serving to enable the purchase of a $1 loaf of bread, or a $10 lunch, or a $20 hardcover book, or a $100 dinner with the family.
But ask a social scientist, and he’ll tell you that a nation’s currency tells you something about the nation that issues it. What does a society value? What does it champion? What are its sources of pride? That’s what they’ll put on their currency.
Currency Around the World
British Pound notes all bear a picture of the current reigning monarch. The long-lived Queen Elizabeth II has adorned British currency for generations. The British banknote stands for tradition, for a nation’s pride in the glory of their ancestral system, a system that once ruled the ocean blue, an empire on which the sun never set, a past that was literally abandoned by elected representatives, early in Elizabeth’s reign.
Swiss Franc notes bear an assortment of wildly different images – a map of an Indian town, a symbol of a piece of music, a statue in France, a building in Italy. Perhaps as the world’s banking center, they want their banknotes to be as universal as the clients who trade them? It is a monument to diversity, and yes, a monument to culture, but oddly, not a monument to Switzerland.
Euro notes have been set up as the global rival to the United States Dollar. The European Union imagines itself a wiser, more modern replacement for America on the world scene – truly multicultural, utterly free of the “constraints” of political philosophy or religion, spared the expense and discomfort of a defense budget. And their currency? Quite intentionally, the Euro is bland, completely homogenous. A map of Europe on one side, a vague image on the other. A vague bridge that could be any of several bridges across Europe, a vague arch that could be any of several arches.
Their currency is meaningful, though in most destructive manner imaginable: as the European Union seeks to crush the individuality of their member nations, their currency seeks to homogenize them as well. Where the USA would show specific buildings, beaming with national pride – The Jefferson Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, the White House – the Europeans have consciously issued the world’s most generic money.
The United States Dollar
And what of the United States, by contrast?
The United States displays our most prominent political leaders on our currency.
The One Dollar Bill, first on any list of currency, bears General Washington, our first Commander-in-Chief, the man who could have made himself king but retired as a Cincinnatus, cementing the love of his grateful nation as a result. Among the nation’s most prominent businessmen, he left his business in the hands of others – at immense cost – to serve his country, again and again.
The Five Dollar Bill bears President Abraham Lincoln’s visage. Another self-educated genius like President Washington, he was raised in the territories and went from country lawyer to state legislator to president, making the difficult and controversial choice to fight to hold the Union together and end the Democratic practice of legalized black slavery in America, once and for all.
And the Ten Dollar Bill bears Alexander Hamilton’s portrait, one of the most significant financial figures in human history.
Let that sink in a moment. The United States had been a nation for a dozen years when he took office as our first Secretary of the Treasury… the economy in a tailspin throughout. Alexander Hamilton didn’t just end the depression; he redesigned our economy, to the extent he could with the powers authorized by the Constitution, paving the nation’s road to the prosperity of the nineteenth century.
Alexander Hamilton had been a student of economics since his arrival in the United States, voraciously devouring every book he could find on the subject, even though he was, by profession, a lawyer and soldier. He studied the work of Adam Smith, he studied the practical effects of the choices of both good and bad contemporaries like Jacques Necker and Charles Townshend. He studied the history of the Bank of England and the contemporary British system of international trade based on London factors. And he viewed them from the vantage point of an international trader himself; he had, after all, spent his teens as an apprentice merchant on St. Croix, working for the trading firm of Beekman and Cruger, even running the place in their absence when they travelled.
As the first Secretary of the Treasury under the new government under the Constitution, he accomplished several issues of incredible duration and importance:
- Alexander Hamilton restored the public credit (perhaps we should say, “established” the public credit, since the United States had never yet earned financial respect since the Founding). His bold measure – assuming the war debts of both the states and the federal government, and building a plan to pay them off, set the United States on a footing as a responsible economy at last.
- Alexander Hamilton organized the federal tax collection system. Customs commissioners and other tax collectors have been despised for millennia, not just because they collect the taxes that are legally owed, but because in so many countries – yes, even to this very day – Customs commissioners and other tax collectors manage to accept bribes, or shake down individuals and businessmen for more than is rightfully owed, pocketing the rest… In ancient Rome, and many other countries, that was even the legal standard for tax collection: a tax collector got his job by simply promising an amount to the government; anything he could collect on top of that quota, by any means, he could keep! Hamilton’s Customs Regulations and other standards for Treasury operations took his own real-world experience into account, so that he could build an honest tax system from the ground up.
- Alexander Hamilton’s system enabled the veterans of our War of Independence, finally, to receive their pay, and in the case of many, their pensions and compensation for injury. This was a surprisingly – and shamefully – political battle at the time, as many thought they could take advantage of the government’s poverty to justify paying these debts to our servicemen at a discount. Hamilton, Washington, and their political allies – the vast majority of whom had themselves served in the war, and therefore respected the sacrifice of our veterans – stood firm on this point: the government must pay these debts in full. Hamilton ensured that a government debt, once promised, would indeed be paid… a critically relevant issue even today, as we look on the crushing pressure of unaffordable pension obligations and an unfunded Social Security balloon on the horizon.
Alexander Hamilton did much more – he cofounded a private bank before his service as Treasury Secretary, and he willingly risked considerable political capital in organizing the chartering of a larger national bank, knowing it would be needed to establish and build the credit of a new and growing nation. He wrote the definitive study guide for the New York Bar Exam for young lawyers. He encouraged the rise of new industries by working with Congress to craft trade law that would reward domestic manufacture.
And he wrote political and philosophical documents, such as nearly two-thirds of the Federalist Papers, explaining and celebrating the laissez-faire system of limited government that this nation would establish with ratification of the Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton is on our currency for a reason. More than anyone else in American history, he is responsible for the economic system that our currency supports.
A case could be made for his visage to appear on every denomination of our currency; no case can possibly be made for his removal.
And yet, there is an ongoing effort to remove Alexander Hamilton from our Ten Dollar Bill, and replace him with someone else, someone less consequential, to meet some arbitrary quota, to score some political point.
Okay, Democrats, make your case. What other person in American history belongs on our currency more than Secretary Hamilton?
Or might this just be the first volley in a war to remove all the giants of our nation’s history from all of our currency? Is this just the beginning, and before you know it, the world’s reserve currency will simply display sweet paintings of scenery, statues, music, and graffiti, robbed of all patriotism, no different, no more awe-inspiring, than the vapid blandness of the Swiss Franc or the Euro?
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The American Left has worked so hard in recent generations to remove our Founding Fathers from our history books, our culture, our memory.
As long as their images remain on our money – on banknotes and coinage that we see and feel and experience every day – we have a chance to climb back from the abyss.
We must not let them succeed in their destructive effort to make us forget where we came from!
Copyright 2015 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer. His columns are regularly seen in Illinois Review.
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