Brendan Greeley

However, they also all had a sinking fund.

which was basically, it was a promise to take in silver and gold in tolls and port duties at their various ports.

And then from time to time, sink those dollars, buy them back with silver and gold.

There was a coin sitting on the edge of this.

This was true in New York.

This is true in New Jersey.

This is true in Pennsylvania.

This is true in Maryland.

And so to just say they printed these dollars up

And they made sure they were counterfeitable, and they wrote on the back, "'Tis death to counterfeit."

That came from the Benjamin Franklin shillings.

If I ever get a tattoo, that's the tattoo.

And then taxed them back in.

There's a lot of work being done, and the dominant theory of that among historians is it was given money, it was given value because you had to tax it back in.

The problem is in order to believe that, you have to ignore the infrastructure that they put in place of the sinking fund to make that money have value.

And you have to assume they didn't know what they were doing.

This is my frustration with economic history.

It often assumes that people in the past didn't know what they were doing with money.

Right.

They just sort of stumbled into it.