In discussing the Mises Institute's June 24th full-page Wall Street Journal ad entitled "Who Needs the Fed?" on talk radio recently most of the interviewers naturally expressed skepticism over whether the Fed could ever actually be abolished and a gold-and-silver standard reinstituted. It reminded me of something Murray Rothbard said about this. If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the privatization of shoe production, there would be cries of: "Who will make shoes? The government has always made shoes!" 

Well, America has not always had a central bank and in fact, the three precursors of the Fed — the Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States — were all abolished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It happened then, and it can happen again.

In The Mystery of Banking Murray Rothbard explained how the Bank of North America (1782-1783) was "driven through Congress" by Rep. Robert Morris, a Philadelphia financier and a leader of the Federalist party. The agenda of the Federalists, said Rothbard, was "to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that in Great Britain, against which the colonists had rebelled." That would have included a powerful central government with a king or "permanent president," as Alexander Hamilton said, that would "be built up by high taxes and heavy public debt . . . high tariffs . . . a big navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports, and launch a massive system of internal public works" (aka pork barrel spending). The United States was to have "a British System without Great Britain."