Politics & Power Quote by Martin Van Buren

A president calling the government-bank relationship "injurious" is not hand-wringing; it is a political weapon aimed at a very specific enemy: the Second Bank of the United States and the broader idea that public authority should underwrite private finance. Van Buren is writing in the long shadow of Andrew Jackson's bank war, when "connection" had come to mean not cooperation but capture - a pipeline where credit, patronage, and policy flowed to the well-positioned.

The phrasing is careful. He doesnt accuse bankers of villainy or government of incompetence; he frames the arrangement as structurally corrosive to "both". That matters. It lets him sound like an impartial custodian of the public good while advancing a partisan project: sever the tie, and you restore democratic legitimacy. "In reality" signals that the defenders' argument - stability, order, national development - is a polite cover for a dependency that distorts incentives. Banks take reckless risks when they can count on state favor. Governments lose moral authority when their fiscal tools look like giveaways to financiers.

The kicker is "the community at large". Van Buren invokes the majority not as a sentimental flourish but as a balancing weight against a concentrated institution. In an era of panics, tight credit, and widening suspicion of elites, he is betting that voters will accept volatility now in exchange for sovereignty later. Its the antebellum version of a familiar claim: separating public power from private finance isnt anti-business; its anti-oligarchy.