THE MIRACLE ON MAIN STREET:
Saving Yourself & America From Financial Ruin
by F. Tupper Saussy
Spencer Judd, Publishers, 6th edition, 1984,
softcover, 160 pp with illustrations. $15.00

MOMS: still true after all these years

by F. Tupper Saussy

Moments before I was to address an audience in Atlanta during the autumn of 2000, a gentleman shook my hand cheerfully and said “Mr. Saussy, I read Miracle On Main Street twenty years ago.” He paused a moment, then said, “and I want to thank you for ruining my life.”

Several people within earshot broke into laughter. Each said in his turn, “Me, too!”

Yes, MOMS did ruin a lot of lives, including my own. But in a necessary way, in the way maturity ruins adolescence, or Christ’s indwelling spirit ruins a life of evildoing.

MOMS ruined values and beliefs that had to die if one was to grow in integrity.

A Colorado paralegal once told me that he thought MOMS was “naíve.” I complimented him on getting the point. Doesn’t the law presume us all to be naive? Doesn’t the law expect us to believe it means what it says? Can’t we safely trust that no harm will come to us if we obey the law? Can’t we safely expect that those sworn to uphold the law will, in fact, uphold the law?

Thousands of readers picked up on MOMS’ naivety and, taking their cue from Barry Buxkamper’s cover painting, went out to the public offices determined to hold officials accountable under the clearly-stated monetary provisions of the Constitution.

The Constitution places responsibility for a sound economy on the state governments. As MOMS reveals, the framers of the Constitution unanimously said “No!” to the possibility that American citizens might ever be compelled to surrender their gold and silver coin for a paper currency.

The “No!” of the framers resounds through more than two centuries of Congressional legislation and Supreme Court decisions.

Ah, but the people have said “Yes.”

In the mid-1960s, perhaps still disoriented from JFK's assassination, they chose to permit Congress to shirk its duty to coin gold and silver. And a decade later, the people’s use of a national currency having no intrinsic value whatsoever permitted the states to evade their self-imposed task of preserving the inviolability of property rights in America. Popular assent to a kind of money the Constitution was written to prohibit forever was a triumph of ignorance.

The result has been catastrophic. You can attribute everything from the Vietnamese debacle to the USA Patriot Acts—forty years of societal disintegration—to the popular ignorance of state and federal governments’ duty to provide a national currency that cannot be expanded or contracted by committee or edict.

Had the people been alert and vocal, the constitutional monetary system would have eliminated any need whatsoever for the southeast Asian war, the central American wars, the Gulf War, the war on drugs and now against terrorism and soon against meaningful dissent—and their horrifying moral, emotional, physical, and political toll.

As long as our most outspoken political leaders and reformers continue to ignore the Constitution’s strict economic requirements on Congress and the states, things will only get worse.

Advocates of a better America push for relieving symptoms, when the true remedy is stopping cause. And the cause remains what it was back in the 1980’s heyday of MOMS: too few people are demanding that Congress and the state governments obey the intent and the letter of the Constitution’s monetary provisions.

The absence of rebuke is taken to mean the people consent to the disobedience. Jim Woods, who wrote the Foreword to MOMS, was a brilliant inventor for whom intellectual and personal freedom were tools of his trade. To Jim, Article I Sections 8 and 10 of the Constitution were the linchpin that held the whole American apparatus together. Keep the linchpin in place and the apparatus can run forever. Remove it and everything falls apart.

What MOMS pointed out, as had few other books before it, was that the linchpin had been removed by popular demand. We the People had permitted its removal. And now that we are suffering the certain symptoms of its absence, only We the People can put it back.

The Miracle On Main Street presents the simple directions, as good today as in the 1980s, and as good in the 80s as in 1789.