It’s official! United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday that he is kicking off Andrew Jackson from the $20 banknote and is replacing the former president with abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Meanwhile, statist Alexander Hamilton will stay on the $10 bill.
As part of a 10-month discussion, Lew will appease women’s organizations who want better representation on U.S. fiat currency. At the same time, he’s also appeasing big fans of Hamilton, including former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda.
For those who wanted a woman on the $10 bill, the Treasury will modify the back of this banknote with an image of women suffragists.
The new bill is scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, which is the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
Bernanke claimed that it would be a shame to get rid of Hamilton because he was “the best and most foresighted economic policy maker in U.S. history.” (SEE: Forget the Hamilton-$10 idea! Let’s abolish fiat currency altogether)
However, it’s a darn shame to get rid of Andrew Jackson, who ended the central bank of his time. It isn’t really a surprise that the powers at be would want to eliminate Jackson from the currency since he knew what would happen to a country with a central bank.
Jackson eloquently wrote about the various dangers that come from having a central bank, particularly the inflationary and political ramifications. But as Robert Tracinski opined, “Andrew Jackson didn’t want to be on your central bank notes, anyway.”
Here is what Jackson wrote when announcing the shutdown of the central bank:
“Their power would be great whenever they might choose to exert it; but if this monopoly were regularly renewed every fifteen or twenty years, on terms proposed by themselves, they might seldom in peace put forth their strength to influence elections or control the affairs of the nation.”
As Thomas DiLorenzo penned, Americans “live in Hamilton’s country,” a country with big government, central banks and centralized power.
It’s too bad, though. Jackson would have served as a constant reminder of the dangers of central banks.
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