Crazy Kook

William Leggett was an infamous Jacksonian purist editorial writer in the 1820s and 1830s who held a solid free market democractic political position. The vast bulk of his political writing (from the late 1830s) focus on the tremendous depression of the period, the Panic of 1837. Leggett severely critisized the inflationary paper standard of the Second Bank of the United States and squarely blamed the money monopolists for the country’s economic woes. I am undergoing a thorough research project of his thought and the thought of his contemporaries and ran across this particularly glowing gem (among many, many others):

”
That the price of flour is not the result of combination, but of causes which lie much deeper, we fully believe. One of those causes is a deficient crop; but the chief cause of the enhancement in price, not of that article alone, but of every variety of commodity, is the vast inflation which the paper currency has undergone in the last two years. It is not that exchangeable commodities have risen in value, but money, or that substitute for money which the specially privileged banks issue, has depreciated. The fluctuations in the currency must necessarily occasion equal fluctuations in money prices; and these fluctuations must necessarily be exceedingly oppressive to many, since all commodities do not instantly rise and fall in exact relative proportion, but require, some a longer, and some a shorter time, to be adjusted to new standards. The clergyman and the accountant on stated salaries, the tradesman who sells his articles according to a price fixed by ancient custom, and very many others, cannot immediately increase their demands as the price of other things increase; and such are affected most injuriously by the continual augmentation of paper money, resulting from the incorporation, every year, of whole herds of specially privileged bankers.

The true way to make flour cheap, and beef cheap, and all the necessaries of life cheap, is, not to attack the dealers in those articles, and strew their commodities in the streets, but to exercise, through the ballot boxes, the legitimate influence which every citizen possesses to put an end, at once and forever, to a system of moneyed monopolies, which impoverish the poor to enrich the rich; which, building up a class of lordly aristocrats on the one hand, and degrading the mass into wretched serfs on the other; and which has already exercised a vast and most pernicious influence in demoralizing both the educated and the ignorant classes of society—both those who fatten on the spoils of the paper-predatory system, and those from whose very blood the spoils are wrung.”

Leggett’s political writings can be found in a collected edition here: http://www.econlib.org/library/Leggett/lgtDE.html

And think: he had the misfortune of predating the Austrian School by more than 30 years!–such brilliance can only be admired.

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