Today in Supreme Court History, as Reason notes, marks July 10, 1832 — the day Andrew Jackson killed the Second Bank of the United States with a veto message that was more campaign broadside than constitutional argument. I did not live to see it; Jackson's presidency came forty years after my time. But I spent enough years arguing about paper money in Philadelphia to know what happens when the discipline on the issuer is removed.

Here is the principle, stated plainly: paper money is a tool. A hammer in the hand of a careful carpenter builds a house; the same hammer swung by a man in a rage brings the house down. The Bank's charter imposed a discipline — imperfect, I grant you — on the state banks that issued notes. Remove the discipline, and those banks issued freely. The result, by inference from what any student of that era knows, was a spectacular inflation, then a spectacular contraction, and then the Panic of 1837. The small farmer and the city tradesman who held those notes lost real wealth. The man who owned land and could wait out the storm lost nothing permanent.

Jackson's veto message, according to the Reason entry, argued against the Bank on grounds of privilege and inequality — that it served wealthy Eastern and foreign stockholders at the expense of ordinary Americans. That is not a frivolous argument. I was never a friend of concentrated financial power myself. But there is a difference between reforming an institution so that it serves the public more honestly and simply destroying it because the crowd applauds the destruction. The first is statecraft; the second is theater with a long bill.

What disciplines the issuer? That is the question I would put to any monetary arrangement, then or now. Colonial Pennsylvania's paper money, which I defended in my early writing, worked tolerably well because it was issued against land — a real asset — and in quantities proportionate to the colony's commerce. It was not perfect, but it was anchored. A bank note anchored to nothing but the political courage of the next administration is a slow tax on everyone who saves.

I would note, without pretending to have witnessed it, that this argument has not aged out of relevance. Every generation faces some instrument — a state bank note, a government bond, a digital token, a credit product — whose issuer claims it is sound and whose soundness depends entirely on whether anyone is willing to ask hard questions. Jackson thought he was liberating the common man. He was, in my inference, removing the only referee in the room, and the common man paid for it at the market stall when prices went wild.

Here, then, is the counsel I would offer any working person reading this: before you cheer the destruction of a financial institution, ask what replaces the discipline it imposed. Applause is free. Depreciated money is not. And if someone tells you the new arrangement requires no discipline because trust will suffice — keep your savings in something they cannot print.