1987 – G. Edward Griffin Home
Author - “The Creature from Jeckyll Island”
As I mentioned in my 1982 Rush Limbaugh encounter Wes's talk show program had been canceled around 84. By 85 or 86 he was back in business at another station. One of our mutual interests was the history of the Federal Reserve system and we got into many discussions about that topic which at the time was still considered taboo. I had become a disciple of Murray Rothbard's work on central banking and the Fed . Rothbard had claimed that the Fed had sowed the seeds of the great depression by inflating the dollar in the 20's in an effort to prevent Great Britain from going bankrupt because of their WWI expenses. The more we inflated our dollar the less gold was drained out of England. This led to the deflation of the 30's after the inflation bubble had to be burst in 1929.
Occasionally Wes would broadcast notices of upcoming local political gatherings and we would attend. At one of these meetings I met a man who said he had been listening to Wes and my conversations about the Federal Reserve and we got into a conversation about it. I considered the abolition of the Federal Reserve the most important issue facing the nation as I felt it was impossible to have a moral financial system with a fiat currency whose supply could be inflated at will by our own version of the Politburo. The man was in agreement and said that he was moving to California and was going to get licensed as a financial advisor and write a book about the history of the U.S. Central banking and Federal Reserve system.
In 2003/4 while I was in Federal Prison in Butner, NC an inmate in the cell next to me had a catalog of unusual books that had trouble being published through the more popular channels. One of the books in the catalog was named “The Creature from Jeckyll Island” and was about the Federal Reserve. I expressed an interest in the book and my friend did also and he ordered it. As I read the book cover I learned that the author had become a Certified Financial Planner in 1989 and lived in California. I realized that he was the man who had listened to Wes and I in 1987 and whom I had met at the political function in Fort Myers, Florida.
It was a fascinating book and just the kind of education that I thought was necessary for the general public to understand just how destructive the Federal Reserve System is. Although their mission is to provide stable prices the value of the dollar has declined 95% since their inception. In fact they were created to inflate the dollar to finance England and the U.S.'s efforts in WWI on the backs of the masses, to force all banks to inflate at the same rate so the northeastern banks could inflate without losing customers to the more prudent western banks, and to devalue wages to counter the rising power of the newly formed unions. The Fed's very existence can only lead to instability in prices and explains the dot com, stock market, real estate bubbles and the world wide meltdown in 2008 not to mention the expansion of power granted to the Federal government and the US attraction to war in the 20th century.
I have since googled Mr. Griffin on the net and found that when I met him he had already written at least nine books and produced seven films.
In 1789 the founders guaranteed to U.S. Citizens a silver backed currency to prevent the inflation that had decimated the country during the revolutionary war from ever happening again. They also removed state barriers to interstate commerce and allowed no internal taxation. In 1793 an impoverished butcher's son from Germany arrived in New York City and in 20 years became the richest man in the world.. Maximum wealth creation occurs when people are left free to pursue their own self interest in a land with a stable currency. If we want to get back to a wealth creating society we need to abolish the Federal Reserve and reestablish an asset backed currency.