Edit: ~ "Thomas Jefferson" changed to "~ Someone, supposedly Thomas Jefferson"
* No documentation ties it to its putative originator.
* Its earliest known reference did not appear until long after the death of its supposed originator.
* Multiple sources are claimed for its origins.
* Contextual information indicates the words are of more recent origin than claimed. (deflation/inflation)
1. https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/pri...
2. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bank-shot-2/
One of the “Rules of Misquotation” outlined by Ralph Keyes in his 1992 book on that subject is that axiom that “Famous dead people make excellent commentators on current events.” Given the fear and uncertainty engendered by the current economic situation, and the disgruntlement expressed by many Americans at the thought of providing taxpayer-funded government bailouts to financial institutions and other large corporate entities (such as the auto industry), it was only a matter of time until someone trotted out a quotation (apocryphal or otherwise) from a respected, long-dead figure demonstrating that this whole economic mess was both predictable and inevitable. And one could hardly find a more hallowed figure in U.S. history than Thomas Jefferson to deliver this message, warning us from across the centuries that predatory banks and corporations would eventually impoverish us all. [snopes]
Perhaps the people who drafted the US Constitution would have had a chance to read Smith by 1787, but I can't imagine they would have really had a chance to fully digest and internalize the ideas being presented. They were almost certainly working from a firmly mercantilist mindset.
"Hutcheson had abandoned the psychological view of moral philosophy, claiming that motives were too fickle to be used as a basis for a philosophical system. Instead, he hypothesised a dedicated "sixth sense" to explain morality. This idea, to be taken up by David Hume (see Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature), claimed that man is pleased by utility. "
I think this is one of the first places to move away from a labor theory of value to a utility theory of value. I'm a dummy though so who knows.
Edit: Publication on or before 12 April 1759 should have had plenty of time to be read and discussed before the Contract Clause?*
^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Moral_Sentiments
The only way out of this is to get enough cash into the hands of regular people that they can use it to pay down their debts at the same time as interest rates increase to provide the incentive to do that. Either that means the money corporations are warehousing has to somehow get paid out as wages (which would require some kind of major e.g. tax policy change), or some other new money has to be created by the government and not banks (by fiat rather than as debt) and then transferred to regular people via a UBI or similar.
In the meantime we can pretty much keep kicking the can down the road by keeping interest rates low for an arbitrarily long period of time. We could even go further into it, because the lower interest rates are the more debt load people can carry. But that keeps increasing the amount of idle cash in the corporate coffers. Something something wealth inequality.