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Arguments From Centuries-Old Authority

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Most of the reading I’ve done about the period suggests that claims about the framers hating paper money are accurate. To expand on Matt’s point a bit, the real lesson here is that this kind of “originalist” argument is just stupid. Obviously, we’ve learned a great deal since 1787, and moreover American political economy is so radically different there’s no reason to privilege what the framers believed about the relative merits of paper and metal money at all. Unless the framers specifically and unambiguously prohibited something in the Constitution — which is not the case here, unless you think the money supply is wholly unrelated to interstate and international commerce — there’s no reason to put any more weight on the framers’ opinions about paper money than we put on their opinions about slavery and white supremacy. That is, their arguments are worth considering only to the extent that the arguments remain relevant and persuasive, which in this case they definitely aren’t.

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