>"Free of the obligation to redeem in gold debts contracted in paper, the Bank of England could in theory print as much paper money as it liked. This enabled th

>"Free of the obligation to redeem in gold debts contracted in paper, the Bank of England could in theory print as much paper money as it liked. This enabled the government to run up huge debts to finance the war against the French." War debts... the historical version of today's quantitative easing! <g> Character A: "It's a war debt!" Character B: "No, it's quantitative easing!" Character C: "Hey, you're both right!" <g> >"While printing more money might sound like a good thing, its effect was inflation, increasing the cost of living during a period of scarcity, poor harvests and rising unemployment. As a popular journalist, Cobbett was one of the first to link the poverty of the people to the ‘money-mongering’ juggle. Week after week in his Political Register, Cobbett attacked the system of paper money and public finance. The articles were collected and published as a book in 1815, Paper against Gold. By July 1817, he claimed to have sold 150,000 copies. The people were poor, Cobbett reasoned, because they had to pay crippling levels of indirect taxation on everyday items to pay down the exorbitant interest on the debt. Worse still, the many wars waged by the British in the 18th century had created a class of idle creditors who were able to enrich themselves by charging high levels of interest which the government was forced to to agree to finance its costly wars." It's amazing just how well history repeats itself... <g>