The Return of America’s Anathema
As most American school children know, one of the chief complaints that the American colonists had against the mother country was that they were taxed without their consent. “Taxation without representation is tyranny,” a phrase often credited to the revolutionary James Otis, became an American maxim. Colonial Americans were anti-tax to begin with, but to be taxed by a parliament three thousand miles away without any say in the matter was intolerable.
The colonists revolted and after sacrificing their lives and treasure they defeated the pariah which is taxation without representation; and, consequently, the freest nation the world had ever seen was born. Victory, however, was short-lived, as taxation without representation was resurrected and transmogrified a little more than 100 years later, in 1913, in the form of the Federal Reserve System, America’s third and most menacing iteration of a central bank.
Technically, the Federal Reserve has no power of taxation. In fact, it is not even a governmental entity or agency. It is a bank composed of unelected officials who answer to their shareholders… and who once in a while appear before Congress to discuss a whole lot about nothing. How then does the Federal Reserve effect taxation without representation? Through its manipulation of the money supply, that is, through varying degrees of continual inflation. As even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admitted, “Inflation is a tax.”
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