Why We Do, What We Do...!!!
It is the obligation of the schools, colleges and universities to make Americans competent to see what is coming before it strikes them down. Judging from the current state of the American political economy, the education establishment has failed in its mission. It is difficult to believe that despite the amount of money spent on education and research at all levels, the collapse of the financial and economic system at the beginning of the 21st Century could not have been foreseen. The pronouncements by the highest officials of the federal government and corporate America, that the economic and financial debacle in this decade is a surprise to them, is utterly astounding.
Had the principles on which the American Republic was founded been taught in the schools, and the warning by the founding fathers not to vary from these principles been heeded, Americans would not today find themselves with a Congress that works to the detriment of the freedoms bestowed upon the American people by the U.S. Constitution.
The founding fathers accepted the universal monetary standard in use for thousands of years to be used also as the monetary standard for the individual states. They included an express provision in the U.S. Constitution to bind the states to this standard. The federal government, by establishing a central bank in 1935 to issue an irredeemable national currency, changed the monetary standard favored in the U.S. Constitution. Not a single government of any of the individual states had a voice in this federal decision. The monetization of government debt, a practice about which the founding fathers explicitly warned, is the reason the American political economy is in a desperate situation. Selling U.S. Treasury debt year after year over decades has caused the interest debt to compound to an amount larger than the accumulated original debt. This has rendered the national currency no longer viable, and placed the American economy on the edge of a precipice.
While there was a time when federal politicians could have prevented the current economic and financial debacle, it is now too late to return to a prosperous economy without creating major hardships in the process. Hard decisions are necessary to return to a viable monetary system, along with "free markets", if a high living standard is to be preserved for the American people. After going in the wrong direction for decades, the country has to find a way to extricate itself from a serious threat to its survival.
Is the situation hopeless? No, it is not. The Congress can get this country out of its present predicament, if it returns to the original 1913 Federal Reserve Act by reversing modifications of the original Act made by the Banking Act of 1935. However, the Congress will not do so, unless the American people or the individual state governments demand it. To make this possible, Americans must know the true choices before them. If they seek to inform themselves by looking to a college education, to explanations from the television news or the financial press, they will find that they are being pacified, rather than being informed.
The San Francisco School of Economics, through its annual Economic Education Program, attempts to educate Americans to make proper choices by teaching the immutable principles recognized by the founding fathers. Starting with clear terms and definitions, the courses expound fundamental economic principles, recount the history of banking in the United States, describe the monetary systemand taxation system intended for the American people by the founding fathers, and explore the founders' warnings about "Democracy".
Did the founders really want a "living, breathing constitution"?
We pose this and many other questions to provoke Americans to reflect on their choices at the time of elections.
The class room is the Clipper Ship Conference room on the Mezzanine Level of the Chancellor Hotel
