Henry Charles Carey: People Profiled in Economics and Banking

ByPrimary Researcher

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Executive Summary

  • An originator of the American School of Economics, which placed the people of the country ahead of elite interests.

Introduction

An advisor to Abraham Lincoln and the 19th-century leader of the American School of Economics. This is a school of economics that most economists have never heard of.

Carey’s View of the British Private Banking System

Carey viewed the British private banking system as the opposite of the US system that should be (and for much of its history) was based upon government-issued debt-free money. This is explained in the following quotation

“to Henry Carey, they were all victims of the British system a form of political economy based on free trade and the gold standard. He wrote in harmony of interests in 1851, two systems are before the world one looks to underworked working under paying or exploiting the Hindu and sinking the rest of the world to his level, the other to raising the standard of man through the world to our level one looks to populism ignorance and depopulation and barbarism.”

Carey was tutored by Benjamin Franklin. He saw the same things that Franklin did, notably the success of the colonial script. His view is explained in the following quotation.

“Carey came to consider free trade and the gold standard to be twinned financial weapons forged by England for its own economic conquest. His solution to the gold drain was for the government to create an independent national currency that was non exportable one that would remain at home to do the country’s own work. He advocated a currency founded on a national credit, something he defined as a national system based entirely on the credit of the government, with the people not liable to interference from abroad. Like the wooden tally his paper money would simply be a unit of account that tallied work performed in goods delivered as Thomas Edison reasonably observed in an interview reported in the New York Times in 1921.”

Source: The Web of Debt

https://www.amazon.com/Web-Debt-Shocking-Truth-System/dp/0983330859