Under such a money system, speculation, with all its accompanying demoralization, would rapidly depart from all classes of society.
Victoria C. Woodhull
The Public Record
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women's suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency, some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because according to the Constitution she would have been too young to be president if elected.
gutenberg.org
Theories regarding this branch of social science have been about as destructive to the proper development and understanding of the science as religious theories have been to that of a proper appreciation of the functions and the benefits…
The advantages of a currency which, instead of possessing the capacity of redeemability, is at all times convertible into something that is itself productive, cannot fail to be appreciated by all who have given any attention to the science…
Though this is comparatively a new proposition, and one that but very few minds think a possibility, it nevertheless is just as possible and just as essential—and more so—as all other absolute and arbitrary standards are, that have been…
To guard the people against all apprehension of such a result ever being possible, there should be a measure placed upon this currency that will at all times make it just as absolute in its measure of value as the pound is in its measure…
The labor which the people of this country are capable of performing, then, is the real basis upon which money should be formulated, and, as in practice, the results generally are annual in their return, this basis should be measured by…
Money is the medium of exchanging commodities, and when diverted from its legitimate use and is made an end, results will ever follow which must be detrimental to the general interests involved.
Because this has been lost sight of and it has been invested with other functions, it has been possible for it to be converted to uses which at times, in culminating, have almost turned the world topsy-turvy.
It is a means, because it was invented to assist the people in performing something that could be performed without, but not so well without it.
First and most important—most important because it is the determining point which gives all that follows tangibility—is, that money, in its primary uses, is a means and not an end.
A national currency, then, should be a representative of that which it is its sphere to exchange; that is to say: a currency dollar should stand for a certain amount of the different products, which have been produced at the expense of a…
If this is a true definition of money, the only legitimate money it is possible to have is something that naturally grows out of the uses it is required for.