The men who came forward to fight the Redcoats were paid with a newly created paper currency called Continentals. I believe they were promised that someday it would be redeemable, meaning exchanged for a real coin, but that promise was never kept.
In Article 1 Section 8 among the only powers granted to the new Congress by the Founders is one which states: "shall have the power to coin money and establish the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to fix the standard of weights and measures." The reason "foreign coin" is mentioned is because those were the current money of that period and consisted of coins made in Britain, France and Spain, in fact the most common was the Spanish milled dollar whose average content of silver was just what the new U.S. Dollar was defined as containing in the First Coinage Act of 1792: 371 grains and four sixteenth of a grain of silver.
The fact that no country in the world today has a gold standard shows that all countries followed the example of the U.S.by no longer backing their own currencies with gold and silver, since Nixon foolishly closed the Gold Window in August 15th 1971. Gold backed currency is hated by politicians who wish to be able to create money out of paper and ink so they can spend more than they take in in taxation from those who produce.
One reason the Founders sought to create a Constitution with a strong central government endowed with the power to tax was to replace the Articles of Confederation of the thirteen former colonies which did not have the power to tax, and that is why the Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the Constitution. Still no power was granted in the Constitution to create a central bank such as the Federal Reserve System.
Take heart, there is a movement in the colleges to recruit young men and women whose lives are ahead of them, and whose minds are open to the wisdom of rational thinkers, such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A Hayek, Bastiat, the Austrian School of Economics, Ayn Rand, David Kelley, The Objectivists, Jacob Hornberger, The Atlas Society, The Ayn Rand Institute, Café Hayek, Foundation For Economic Education, Future of Freedom Foundation, Students For Liberty, Young Americans for Liberty, the Independent Institute, Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, Institute of Humane Studies (theIHS.com) and more.
Their numbers are growing close to exponentially and they are on a couple of thousands of college campuses and growing.
So there is hope that the day will come where most educated voters will no longer be confronted with the kind of choices we have had over the last century at all levels of government. Did any one notice that Gary Johnson received as many as 4.8 million votes in the last election for president despite being ignored by the media. Did you know that the Libertarian Party first presidential and vice presidential candidates in 1972 received an Electoral College vote. The man who cast that vote had done his doctoral dissertation on the Electoral College system and the woman Tonie Nathan who received that vote for vice president was the first woman in American history to have gotten an Electoral College Vote!
