The US once planned to issue an independent and inherently debt-free Greenback, a form of money that was real with actual gold behind it. A bill would be a promissory note that could be turned in for the amount of gold it represented. Bankers would have none of it.
In an internal document circulated between private British and American banking interests, arguing against Abraham Lincoln's American Civil War plan to issue the form of currency the Founding Fathers advocated when they first conceived of this non-European but newly American experiment in democracy, wrote:
"...slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care of the laborers, while the European plan [of a central bank that operates on debt]...is that capital shall control labor by controlling wages.
"This can be done by controlling the money. It will not do to allow the Greenback as we cannot control that"
(The Hazard Circular, July, 1862).
(Zeitgeist addendum, minute: 22:40)
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