Conclusion

quantity of money in circulation in 1935, a quantity puffed up with the very bankers’ money which she so despised! She saw no contradiction.

If the State were to enforce 100% reserves on the banks, and if the

State were not permitted to issue unbacked, legal tender paper currency, the phony State and bankers’ currency would be forced out of existence.

Apparently Coogan’s hatred of gold was even greater than her hatred of bankers’ money. Gold is the real issue here; she is really an enemy of gold, and therefore she is the State’s best iend, rather than primarily an enemy of actional reserves. She called for something for nothing, the oldest monetary slogan of Satan: “And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread” (Luke 4:3).

Isaiah the prophet recognized currency debasement for what it was.

Unbacked paper money is merely an advanced and more subtle form of currency debasement, and far more dangerous, so what he told his people would be true sevenfold today: “How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.

Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves” (Isa. 1:21–23).

Currency debasement is a sign of moral decay. It is accompanied by corrupt governments and sinful leaders. But at least the average citizen can tell when the silver coins are being debased; with paper money such detection is difficult apart om economic signs in the price level. The good money, legally backed by a specified quantity of either gold or silver, looks just like the unbacked money. Yet Coogan would have no backing in metal for any of the paper. In short, she wanted a currency, in Isaiah’s words, of pure dross: no silver at all!

Conclusion

C  in the middle of the Great Depression. Her recommendations for economic well-being reflected most of the major errors of her day. She called for State-financed pensions. She wanted currency debasement to obtain full employment, an idea out of the Keynesian tool kit. The monetary quackery of the 1930s gets a hearing in

Coogan’s books, and by referring the reader to Soddy, she even brought in a bit of Technocracy, for Soddy admitted that he saw a great deal of

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truth in the Technocrat system. 91 She wanted “equitable” prices set by

Monetary Trustees, managed currency, and virtual financial monopoly by the State Treasury. Gold, which would resist the encroachments of the State, was her bitter enemy. She wanted to curtail bank money by stamping out the right of ee coinage and the right to write IOUs. Instead of the monetary inflation caused by actional reserve banking, she wanted to substitute monetary inflation produced by the State bureaucracy. But monetary debasement in any form is robbery, an enforced redistribution of wealth. She wanted to stop one kind of inflation only to inaugurate another. Her answer was no answer at all, at least not for the ee market.

Economic theory reveals the pages of economic nonsense contained in her writings. She knew this to be true, and she had a hatred for all economists. In her bibliographies, there is not one trained economist represented. She thought that all economists have merely aped Adam Smith’s system. She had no knowledge of the revolution in economics wrought by Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Mises, a revolution that threw out Adam

Smith’s mistakes and retained his accurate contributions. Yet she classified all economists as paid hirelings of the money trust. “Economist,” she wrote, “is the learned term still applied to those who write unintelligible discussions of money, prices, public finance, and so-called political science.” 92 So defined, Coogan was actually the world’s leading economist, for no more garbled, unintelligible, dangerous statist, pleading in the name of statistical science, could be imagined.

Gertrude Coogan was a Greenbacker. She favored Federal control over the monetary system. She hated the idea of the gold standard. She hated economic analysis. She hated bankers.

She personalized her enemies. In her view, anyone who deals with economic ideas is a tool of the money trust. Ideas were her real enemy, even more than gold. Her books are a mass of feeling, rather than accurate and careful economic analysis. Ideas were superficial for her; hatreds were the basis of her writings, not anything resembling ee market analysis.

Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt extends the main errors in Coogan’s books, and then adds more. But that is another issue, which I take up on my site in my department on Ellen Brown: www.GaryNorth.com.

91Frederick Soddy,Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, 2nd ed. (Hawthorne, California:

Omni, [1933] 1961), pp. 13–⒕

92Coogan, p. 20⒌

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