Abraham weighed out the silver for Ephron which he had named in the hearing of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, currency of the merchants.
- Genesis 23:16
In his lecture “Money, Freedom and the Bible,” John Robbins argued that the manufacturing of money was not a proper function of government, because there is no warrant for this in Scripture. The Bible charges the civil magistrate with the duty to punish evildoers and reward the good. There is no mention of anywhere in Scripture of God granting civil governments the right to manufacture money.
The first time I heard this many years ago, I was shocked by this idea. “But all governments manufacture money,” I thought to myself. “If the government didn’t supply money, who would?” I continued.
Of course, my initial objection can be answered by pointing out that simply because a thing is done does not logically imply that it ought to be done. In the 18th century, David Hume famously made this point.
Secondly, concerning who would supply money in the absence of governments, the answer to this is the market would take care of this. As Robbins noted in his lecture, there is such an example of this in Genesis 23, where Abraham pays for the field to bury Sarah by weighing 400 shekels of silver, “currency of the merchant.” Note that it was not the currency of Pharaoh, nor the currency of the King of the Hittites that Abraham weighed out. It was the currency of the merchants. That is to say, it was a unit of money that arose from the common practice of the free market. Importantly, it was not a government issued currency, neither was it the product of a government licensed central bank.
For that reason, that it arose in the marketplace and was privately managed by the merchants who used it, the shekel weighed out by Abraham was an honest unit of money. The same cannot be said for sovereign currencies of our day. Not only do they fail to maintain purchasing power, but they are deliberately designed to lose value over time. To this author’s knowledge, there is not one honest currency in use today, including, and perhaps especially, the U.S. Dollar.
Last week’s post titled “This is Going to Hurt, Part 1: Honestly Facing our National Bankruptcy,” discussed the disastrous economic numbers coming out as a result of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Please note, I did not write, “the disastrous economic numbers coming out as a result of the coronavirus pandemic,” but, “the disastrous economic numbers coming out as a result of the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.” It is not the Chinese coronavirus that caused over 30 million Americans to lose their jobs in the past six weeks, it is decision, more accurately decisions, of various government officials that have led to this disaster.
But oddly, as I also noted, the stock market has rebounded even as economic activity has made record declines. How can this be? The short answer to this question is money printing on a mind-blowing scale by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.
My purpose in this post is to lay out in non-technical language what a central bank is and what it does. In subsequent posts, I shall illustrate the unbiblical, immoral nature of central banking by looking in detail at the origin, the workings and the disastrous effects Federal Reserve (the Fed) policy has had on our nation.
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Lux Lucet 