"This circulating medium has a natural tendency to lessen by degrees the value and the use of money, and finally to render it powerless; and consequently to sweep away all the crushing masses of fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition that are built upon it"
About this Quote
Warren is smuggling a revolution into what sounds like a technical observation about “circulating medium.” He’s not merely talking about money; he’s describing money as a kind of social technology that concentrates coercion. The sentence moves with the calm inevitability of a machine: the medium “naturally” declines, its value and use “lessen by degrees,” until it becomes “powerless.” That mechanical glide is the persuasion. If the collapse is natural, then it’s not a riotous fantasy but the next logical stage of history.
The real target sits in the brutal pileup of nouns at the end: “fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition.” Warren frames these not as personal moral failures but as load-bearing architecture “built upon” money. That’s a classic 19th-century radical move: shift blame from bad individuals to bad systems, then argue that replacing the system drains the evil with it. He’s also writing like an inventor: diagnose a design flaw, propose an alternative medium, expect the old one to become obsolete.
Context matters. Warren was an early American individualist anarchist who experimented with “labor notes” and time-based pricing (the “Cost the limit of price” idea). After the Panic of 1837 and repeated boom-bust shocks, “money” didn’t feel like neutral bookkeeping; it looked like a lever for speculation, debt peonage, and political capture. Calling money “crushing” hints at wage dependence and creditor power. His subtext is optimistic and severe: change the medium, and the moral atmosphere changes with it. Whether that’s naive is beside the point; the line works because it treats economics as engineering with ethical consequences.
The real target sits in the brutal pileup of nouns at the end: “fraud, iniquity, cruelty, corruption and imposition.” Warren frames these not as personal moral failures but as load-bearing architecture “built upon” money. That’s a classic 19th-century radical move: shift blame from bad individuals to bad systems, then argue that replacing the system drains the evil with it. He’s also writing like an inventor: diagnose a design flaw, propose an alternative medium, expect the old one to become obsolete.
Context matters. Warren was an early American individualist anarchist who experimented with “labor notes” and time-based pricing (the “Cost the limit of price” idea). After the Panic of 1837 and repeated boom-bust shocks, “money” didn’t feel like neutral bookkeeping; it looked like a lever for speculation, debt peonage, and political capture. Calling money “crushing” hints at wage dependence and creditor power. His subtext is optimistic and severe: change the medium, and the moral atmosphere changes with it. Whether that’s naive is beside the point; the line works because it treats economics as engineering with ethical consequences.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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