oh they were plenty upset about the tea taxes but the crack down on colonial script certainly screwed over the american colonies and btw england as well dear ben franklin was right for the wrong reasons first of all the colonies were not prosperous compared to england proper second the issuance of colonial script had nothing to do with full employeement in fact it is almost inconceivable he would make that claim it sounds like a modern keynsian was creating an urban legend otoh the lack of sufficient circulating monetary instruments was economically crippling imagine trying to buy your supplies by offering ious on your own name and then trying to market exchange the paper as the merchant who took the iou the most common problem in the world is when a government prints too much money the effects are a complete disaster there are a lot of incentives that push governments into doing this even though it is incredibly stupid so almost all the literature talks about that but you can also screw an economy over by taking all the money out of circulation the fundamental cause of the american great depression was exactly this courtesy of the federal reserve board i don t think shifting the power to print money to the bank of canada had much effect and canada is still a prosperous country original message from fork admin URL mailto fork admin URL on behalf of gary lawrence murphy sent saturday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER am to mr fork cc fork URL subject re sed s united states roman empire g f fork list mr writes f free trade and free markets have proven their ability to lift f whole societies out of poverty i m not a f socio political history buff does anybody have some clear f examples china ooops no wait scratch that there is one counter example that i can think of but it may not be precisely free trade markets when ben franklin first visited england he was asked why the colonies were so prosperous ben explained that they used colonial script a kind of barter dollar and increasing the supply of script ensured complete employment the british bankers were furious and immediately lobbied parliament to clamp down on the practice within a few years the colonies were rife with unemployment and poverty just like the rest of the empire according to questionable literature handed out by a fringe political party here in canada the founding fathers had no real complaint about tea taxes it was the banning of colonial script they were protesting if this is true then it comes right back to the forces that killed ned ludd s followers as to why popular opinion believes they were protesting a tea tax the same pamphlet claimed that canada was also a prosperous nation until by an act of parliament in the late NUMBER s or early NUMBER s the right to print money was removed from the juristiction of parliament and handed over to the bank of canada i ve wondered about all this certainly the timeline of the collapse of the canadian economy fits the profile but there are oodles of other causes for example spending money like we had NUMBERm people when we only had NUMBERm anyone have any further information on this gary lawrence murphy garym URL teledynamics communications blog URL biz URL computers are useless they can only give you answers picasso 