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The future of Flock cameras: left the house during a pandemic lockdown? Expect a summons in the mail. Exceeding your "carbon footprint" by driving too much? Expect a ticket in the mail.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/high-cost-automated-flock-camera-surveillance-state

Rothbard collects the smaller remedies that circulated during the depression, chief among them internal improvements as relief for the unemployed. Pennsylvania's legislature debated a $660,000 roads appropriation defended explicitly as a jobs program, with one sponsor arguing that public debt was harmless because it would "circulate among the members of the same body." New Jersey took up the Delaware and Raritan Canal; North Carolina's Archibald Murphey proposed financing improvements with new paper money. A lone Pennsylvania representative asked why the men demanding the projects would not fund them with their own capital.

Rothbard draws the threads together and challenges the standard historiography. The inflation-versus-hard-money battle cut across region, class, wealth, and occupation—in Tennessee, the two opposing camps were led by wealthy cotton planters from the same city, and several inflationist governors reversed themselves after seeing their paper depreciate. He traces the lasting consequences: the protective movement's 1824 victory, the discrediting of state inconvertible paper, and the conversion of Jackson, Benton, Polk, Kendall, and Condy Raguet to hard money during these years. He closes by arguing that the Panic of 1819 helped launch American economics as a discipline, and left a permanent mark on how the country thought about money, debt, and depression.

The depression revived a dormant tariff movement and turned it into something close to a crusade. Rothbard follows Matthew Carey and the Philadelphia protectionists as they organized conventions, flooded Congress with memorials, and pressed the claim that free trade caused depression and protection would restore full employment. A high tariff bill was narrowly defeated in the Senate in 1820, along with companion measures to tax auction sales and end credit on import duties. The free-trade opposition, centered in the export-dependent South and New England shipping, countered that tariffs would deepen the collapse in commerce and agriculture, and that burdens on consumption should be reduced in a depression, not raised. The protectionists lost in 1820 and won in 1824.

The hard-money response held that excessive bank credit had caused the depression and that only rigid specie payment could end it. Rothbard catalogs the remedies proposed: confining banks to commercial cities, prohibiting small-denomination notes, barring interbank borrowing, forfeiting charters at the first refusal to redeem. Virginia's statesmen—Jefferson among them, along with Spencer Roane and the editor Thomas Ritchie—were the most uncompromising. This chapter also documents the American formulation of the currency principle and a monetary theory of the business cycle several years ahead of Thomas Joplin in England, and traces the hostility to the Second Bank of the United States that came from hard-money and soft-money camps alike.

A smaller but more theoretically ambitious group looked past the states to a national inconvertible currency. Rothbard examines their schemes in detail: suspension of specie payments by the Bank of the United States, permanent abandonment of redemption, and the elaborate proposal of "An Anti-Bullionist," who anticipated a specie-exchange standard with a government board regulating note issue against foreign exchange rates. Thomas Law of Washington emerged as the movement's leading advocate. None of the plans reached a vote, but Treasury Secretary Crawford's reluctant rejection of the idea provoked some of the sharpest monetary analysis of the era.

Because banks were chartered by the states, the monetary fight was fought mainly in state legislatures, and Rothbard follows it across the Union. Proposals ranged from the modest—permitting failing banks to suspend specie payment while continuing to operate—to the radical creation of state-owned banks and loan offices issuing inconvertible paper. Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee went the full distance. Some states even attempted to outlaw the depreciation of bank notes by statute. The results converted several prominent inflationists, including future leaders of the Jacksonian hard-money movement.

Rothbard sets the stage with a portrait of a young agrarian republic transformed by the War of 1812. Foreign trade collapsed and domestic manufacturing surged; loosely regulated state banks multiplied, issuing notes with little specie behind them; credit poured into western land purchases at inflated prices. When the Second Bank of the United States reversed course and forced contraction, the whole structure came down. This chapter supplies the economic environment for everything that follows, and answers a question of lasting theoretical interest: was 1819 a genuine business-cycle depression of the modern type?

The debtors' plight was the most visible face of the depression, and the most politically explosive. Rothbard traces two distinct battles: the federal question of the $23 million owed on public land purchases, where Congress and President Monroe moved to forgive interest and permit relinquishment; and the state-level fight over stay laws and minimum appraisal laws, which spread through eight and four states respectively. Relief advocates argued that the rising purchasing power of the dollar had made repayment unjust. Their opponents answered that shielding debtors would destroy creditor confidence and prolong the very depression it aimed to cure.

Rothbard opens by establishing why the Panic of 1819 matters: it was the first American crisis that could not be pinned on a specific act of government, and thus the first that looked recognizably modern. Confronted with something new, Americans went searching for causes and cures in newspapers, pamphlets, and legislative halls. Rothbard explains that the editors of the day were among the nation's leading economists, and that their debates form a rich and largely untapped record of a people learning to think about depression for the first time.