What did Benjamin Franklin say about paper money?

Paper money was a subject very close to my heart — and, I confess, close to my purse as well, since my own fortunes were entangled with it. In 1729 I wrote an anonymous pamphlet, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, arguing that a healthy trading country requires a fitting quantity of money in circulation. As I put it there, “There is a certain proportionate Quantity of Money requisite to carry on the Trade of a Country freely and currently; More than which would be of no Advantage in Trade, and Less, if much less, exceedingly detrimental to it” I grounded the whole argument in the nature of value itself. Gold and silver, I observed, have no fixed worth — their value rises and falls with their scarcity. A more honest measure is labour: “the Riches of a Country are to be valued by the Quantity of Labour its Inhabitants are able to purchase, and not by the Quantity of Silver and Gold they possess” The pamphlet stirred considerable controversy. The wealthy disliked it, as I admitted in my autobiography, because it strengthened the popular clamor for more money. But time vindicated the cause. As I wrote looking back, “The utility of this currency became by time and experience so evident as never afterwards to be much disputed” I was also rewarded, I should add with some amusement, by being hired to print the money — a profitable job indeed, and a fine illustration of what a pen can earn.