Our Threatened Freedom

What is Legal Tender

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Political Studies

Lesson: 78-169

Genre: Conversation

Track: 078

Dictation Name: Vol. F - Part 13- What is Legal Tender

Location/Venue: Unknown

Year: 1980’s – 1990’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] What is legal tender? This is R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.

The term, legal tender, refers to money, and it defines lawful money which is valid for all debts, public and private. Our paper money carries the term ‘legal tender’ on its face, and yet the term was once announced by great Americans as a fraud. The Reverend John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence declared that legal tender was a way of requiring, by law, that bad money, or bad checks, or paper money, be accepted as valid. If money is good money, no law is needed to make men accept it. If the money is bad and depreciating, men will try to hold their assets in other ways.

Another great American, Noah Webster, attacked the legal tender doctrine in 1790 with these words, and I quote. “A legal tender law is the devil. When I entrust a man a sum of money, I expect he will return the full value. That legislature which says my debtor may pay me with one third of the value he received commits a deliberate act of villainy, an act for which an individual, in any government, would be honored with a whipping post, and in most governments, with a gallows. But legislators can, with a solemn face of rulers and guardians of justice, boldly give currency to an adulterated coin and join it upon debtors that cheat their creditors, and enforce their systematic knavery with legal penalties. The difference between a man who makes and passes counterfeit money, and the man who renders his creditor 1/3rd of the value of the debt and demands a discharge, is the same as between a thief and a robber. My countrymen, the devil is among you.” Unquote.

Many other great Americans held this view, as for example, Patrick Henry. Daniel Webster held that the idea of legal tender is alien to the Constitution, which defines money as gold and silver.

Now what was once the constitutional and moral view of money is no longer heard in high places. Our view of money has changed, because our perspective is statism, not moral. The idea now is that money is good because the Federal Government tells us it is. This is the legal tender concept.

The founding fathers, however, held a contrary view. Money, they believed, is good only if it is good money, gold or silver, a recognized value. For them a state ordained legal tender was bad money and the worst kind of bad money.

We have come a long way from their opinion, and the difference spells a loss of freedom.

This has been R.J. Rushdoony with a report on our threatened freedom.