When There is No Money
The first booklet in the Beers treatise corpus and the foundation layer’s anchor. Beers argues that the Constitution authorized Congress to coin metallic money and to borrow money, but not to create paper legal tender; that paper currency was constitutionally prohibited and not exercised by the federal government until the Civil War era; that the government’s claim to issue paper currency derives from its sovereign character over the District of Columbia, expanded post-Civil-War to the states by legal fiction; and that the people, whose labor and property back the currency, are the true creditors of the system.
The structural inferences depend on a permanent post-Civil-War “conqueror” relationship between the federal government and the states/inhabitants — the load-bearing premise across seven of the eleven treatises. The principal doctrinal anchor is Thorington v. Smith, 75 U.S. 1 (1868), which on direct reading addresses temporary wartime occupation doctrine applied to Confederate-controlled territory, not permanent post-1865 federal-state relations. See the post-Civil-War permanent-conquest finding for the detailed verdict.
Per-treatise triage cycle pending — claims have been pre-extracted in notes/beers-treatise-01-extraction.md and the cross-cutting cases verified at the survey-anchor level.