Aristotle

The most hated sort of such exchange is … usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from its natural use. For money was intended as an instrument of exchange, and not as the mother of interest. This usury (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, … is of all modes of gain the most unnatural.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Philosophy of Money and Finance

Nelson W. Aldrich

Before the passage of this Act [Federal Reserve Act], the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York.  Now we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.

Charles A. Lindbergh Sr.

Why should Congress place a controlling agency [Federal Reserve System], employed for private gain, between the people and the Government of the United States? That is what has been done by giving to the banks the exclusive privilege of the use of the Government credit. Why is it proposed that the banker should take the merchants’, the manufactures’, and other notes, as well as the bonds of towns, villages, cities, States, and even the Nation’s bonds, to the Government and get currency, and at the same time refuse the producers themselves, the makers of the notes and obligations, an equal privilege? The absurdity of the Government giving away its own credit to corporations to exploit the people is incomprehensible. The bankers are not to blame. Congress is to blame for giving away the people’s rights and bestowing them upon the banks.
It is true that Congress possesses the authority and has the power to strip the banks of their exclusive monopoly, but the most of us have not the courage, and therefore we have the absurdity of the Congress of the United States giving to special interests the Government credit – the credit of the people – thereby forcing the people to borrow at exorbitant rates of interest the very money that their own Government issues on their own credit. The fiat of the Government is stamped upon the coins and the currency and then given to special interests and used as a means to pauperize the people. If the exclusive privilege were not given to the banks, then they would become the people’s natural agents, but with the exclusive monopoly they become the people’s masters.

Along with Senator Nelson Aldrich there was Congressman Carter Glass pushing to get the Federal Reserve Act passed in the House of Representatives. Carter Glass was a vicious racist and loved using the law and the power of the government to gain privileges that would otherwise be unavailable. He incorporated his belief of white supremacy and using the power of the government to grant special privileges into the Federal Reserve Act. And it should be noted that in over one hundred years at the highest echelons of power at the Federal Reserve System there has never been an African American, Hispanic American, or any minority representative. Here is a quote so you can better understand the mindset of one of the founders of the Federal Reserve System.

Carter Glass

Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose—to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution with the view to the elimination of every Negro who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the strength of the white electorate. … This plan will eliminate the darky as a political factor in this state in less than five years.

Edward Mandell House

December 19, 1912  I talked with Paul Warburg over the telephone regarding the currency reform.  I told of my Washington trip and what I had done there to get it into working order.

March 27, 1913  Mr. J.P. Morgan, Jr., and Mr. Denny of his firm, came promptly at five.  McAdoo came about 10 minutes afterwards.  Morgan had a currency plan already formulated and printed.  We discussed it at some length.  I suggested he have it type written [so it would not seem too prearranged] and sent to us today.

January 21, 1914  After dinner we [Wilson and House] went to the president’s study as usual and began work on the Federal Reserve Board appointments.

Louis T. McFadden

Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known.  I refer to the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.  The Federal Reserve Board, a government Board, has cheated the Government of the United States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay the national debt.  The depredations and iniquities of the Federal Reserve Board has cost this country enough money to pay the national debt several times over.  This evil institution has impoverished and ruined the people of the United States, have bankrupted itself, and has practically bankrupted our government.  It has done this through the defects of the law under which it operates, through the maladminisration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.

John Maynard Keynes

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become ‘profiteers,’ who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Ludwig von Mises

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion.  The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Carrol Quigley

In addition to these pragmatic goals, the powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.  This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.  The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.  Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

Friedrich August von Hayek

Inflation is probably the most important single factor in that viscous circle wherein one kind of government action makes more and more government control necessary.  For this reason all those who wish to stop the drift toward increasing government control should concentrate their effort on monetary policy.

Thomas Sowell

Despite all the political rhetoric today about how nobody’s taxes will be raised, except for “the rich,” inflation transfers a percentage of everybody’s wealth to a government that expands the money supply.

Moreover, inflation takes the same percentage from the poorest person in the country as it does from the richest.

That’s not all. Income taxes only transfer money from your current income to the government, but it does not touch whatever money you may have saved over the years. With inflation, the government takes the same cut out of both.

It is bad enough when the poorest have to turn over the same share of their assets to the government as the richest do, but it is grotesque when the government puts a bigger bite on the poorest. This can happen because the rich can more easily convert their assets from money into things like real estate, gold or other assets whose value rises with inflation.

But a welfare mother is unlikely to be able to buy real estate or gold. She can put a few dollars aside in a jar somewhere. But wherever she may hide it, inflation can steal value from it without having to lay a hand on it.

No wonder the Federal Reserve uses fancy words like “quantitative easing,” instead of saying in plain English that they are essentially just printing more money.

Andrew Jackson

I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal,  I will rout you out.

Daniel Webster

Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none have been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation – these bear lightly on the happiness of the mass of the community compared with fraudulent currencies and the robberies committed by depreciated paper. Our own history has recorded for our instruction enough, and more than enough, of the demoralizing tendency, the injustice, and the intolerable oppression, on the virtuous and well disposed, of a degraded paper currency, authorized by law, or in any way countenanced by government.