Part of How Money Works – FAQ
Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”.
The quote above was really a paraphrase by Charles Binderup March 19, 1937 in the House of Representatives (Congressional Record – House 81:2528), who stated that “It was Henry Ford who said in substance this: ‘It is perhaps well enough that the people of the nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning’.”
The quote was also published in the April 19, 1938 edition of Social Justice and in a 1957 article “How Internationalists Gain Power” in the American Mercury, Russell Maguire also paraphrased Ford.
So there is no record of the exact quote by Henry Ford, but he did write the following in his 1922 book “My Life and Work” on page 179:
The people are naturally conservative. They are more conservative than the financiers. Those who believe that the people are so easily led that they would permit the printing presses to run off money like milk tickets do not understand them. It is the innate conservation of the people that has kept our money good in spite of the fantastic tricks which financiers play-and which they cover up with high technical terms. The people are on the side of sound money. They are so unalterably on the side of sound money that it is a serious question how they would regard the system under which they live, if they once knew what the initiate can do with it.
What he appears to be saying is that the people are not as stupid as those in power think they are, and even if the people understood how money works, how it is created, they would NOT be so stupid as to allow too much of it to be printed to make it worthless, which is the argument the powers that be, and the ill-informed, always make when presented with how money really works.