There was no Federal Reserve when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America… indeed, it wasn’t until about four generations had passed (1913) that the U.S. set up the Fed, the income tax, and the direct election of senators.
(The president of the United States during Tocqueville’s visit, Andrew Jackson, reportedly commented that his proudest achievement in office was having blocked “the Bank.”)
But there’s no doubt that the modern Fed has an impact on American life and American democracy…. as Robert Scheer notes:
At home we are experiencing a social tsunami with the disappearance of a middle-class workforce of stakeholders who were assumed by observers as varied as Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville to be the very bedrock of America’s experiment in freedom. Many with jobs are struggling desperately to get by as the average workweek and pay scales fall, and countless workers find themselves settling for rewards well below their skill sets. Even those slim pickings…
View the rest of Scheer’s article at: “Bernanke: Full-frontal cluelessness,” Appeal-Democrat, 09 June 2011.
But recently, “marriage and family are declining in America,” writes the Heritage Foundation’s “Moral Liberal” (Charles A. Donovan). “This breakdown of the American family has dire implications for American society and the U.S. economy. Halting and reversing the sustained trends of nearly four decades will not happen by accident. The federal, state, and local governments need to eliminate marriage penalties created by the tax code and welfare programs and instead use existing resources to better encourage and support family life.”
