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silver to back it upit had been loaned out several times over. The central-or government-banking systems became the norm all over Europe.

Upon the founding of the United States, there was much discussion-and actual disagreement-about the need for a central bank. The Constitution gave the Federal Government the power to mint standardized units of gold and silver and many wanted a central banking system with which the government could obtain necessary operating expenses. Having lived with the abuses rampant in Europe, however, there was equal opposition to such a system. Several central banks were chartered for short periods of time, and problems were sufficient to guarantee that their charters were not renewed once they expired. Since the nature of money, as with any commodity, is to have periods of shortage in one area and abundance in another, there were occasional problems with not having a system of centralized banking. This was the reasoning given, in 1913, to enact the Federal Reserve Act to charter a central banking system. This concept was so unpopular in much of the country that many political careers were decided on the one act of voting for the Federal Reserve Act.

The Federal Reserve is neither federal nor a reserveit is privately-owned by several large banking houses with a chairman appointed by the President. The United States no longer takes taxes and revenues collected to run the government: instead, all operating funds are borrowed from the Federal Reserve, who collects all taxes. All money is printed by the Fed', who charges us both for the printing and for interest on the loan, which we are supposed to pay back with our taxes. All this might work except, for two things: We have continually allowed changes in the banking regulations which allow banks and other financial institutions to loan, in some cases, one hundred times the amount of real money they actually have on deposit. And, in the past 60 years, we have removed the paper dollar from the gold standard on which it was based: since gold and silver is a finite commodity-and the US government doesn't have all of it-when their need for more money surpassed their supply of gold and silver, we removed ourselves from the gold standard'. This happened in bits and pieces. First, the US government sought to standardize the value of gold per ounce to prevent the natural ups and downs of supply and demand. However, fixed-price gold soon becomes scarce as not enough new' gold is mined to allow for

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