Chapter IV. Proposals for National Monetary Expansion

A smaller but more theoretically ambitious group looked past the states to a national inconvertible currency. Rothbard examines their schemes in detail: suspension of specie payments by the Bank of the United States, permanent abandonment of redemption, and the elaborate proposal of “An Anti-Bullionist,” who anticipated a specie-exchange standard with a government board regulating note issue against foreign exchange rates. Thomas Law of Washington emerged as the movement’s leading advocate. None of the plans reached a vote, but Treasury Secretary Crawford’s reluctant rejection of the idea provoked some of the sharpest monetary analysis of the era.