It was 1790 and the revolutionary National Assembly in Paris was worried.
Complaints were reaching the Assembly from all over France, that business was stagnant, sales were down, people were without work, and there was a great scarcity of money.
This was quite natural, because all business slows down when the prevailing source of Authority is under question. The Bastille prison had been taken the prior year by a revolutionary crowd and all sorts of ugly things were being said about King Louis XVI and his pretty young Queen, Marie Antoinette.
But this was the “Age of Reason” and the most educated, intelligent and reasonable people in France were members of the revolutionary National Assembly, which gathered daily in Paris.
The Assembly put their highly educated heads together and came to the conclusion that a scarcity of money was quite intolerable and that the Assembly must really do something about it.
“What do we have highly educated brains for, if we can’t solve the problem of a scarcity of money? Without a doubt, Reason can overcome this problem.”
So the members of the National Assembly thought about the problem of the scarcity of money, and came up with a splendid idea: “Let us create the necessary money, and things will go swimmingly.”
