That is the headline on the 30th anniversary issue of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, which this morning is, as it has been every other week for the past generation, being savored among the savvy. The latest headline sits atop one of the newsletter’s classic editorials. “Since 1917,” it quotes its analyst, Charley Grant, as reporting, “the ceiling has been raised 107 times. Expressed as a compound annual rate of growth, the debt ceiling has risen by 8.4%, the nominal GDP by 6% Twenty-nine more years on this track and the debt ceiling would be the size of the GDP.”

Grant’s also quotes President Van Buren as saying that the “creation in time of peace of a debt likely to become permanent is an evil for which there is no equivalent.” It is Grant’s view that it would “do the quality of debate a world of good if someone would move to reduce the ceiling, not to raise it.” We’re all for it. We comprehend it runs against what is being received by the Republicans in the way of political advice, which holds that confronting the debt ceiling would be a kind of suicide of the party. We’re not so sure.

We’ve been reading of late about not only Van Buren but also the titan in whose wake the Little Fox of Kinderhook acceded to the presidency. It was Andrew Jackson who fought — and won — what is known as the Bank War, meaning the campaign against the Second Bank of the United States, as our second attempt at a central bank was known. We wouldn’t want to take any thing away from Old Hickory, who was born with an incredible will, but it was his good fortune to confront a bank whose very charter of existence was set for a fixed term.

When a weak Congress bowed to the threats and machinations of the Second Bank, all Jackson really had to do was wield the veto. This is in sharp contradistinction to the threat from our modern central bank, which wasn’t set up under a limited charter; it just keeps existing, which is why the debt ceiling is suddenly so important. It serves as a kind of analog to charter renewal. It is a device around which Congress can say that it just doesn’t want to play the game any longer, that it has come to see that the central bank has become too powerful.

Jackson and Van Buren remind that such a confrontation wouldn’t be the first time. It’s an era that needs to be studied. We’ve marked the point before, in “Bernanke and Biddle.” The end of the Second Bank of the United State ushered in an era of state-chartered institutions that issued all sorts of currency, much of it of poor quality. There is a movement today, embryonic to be sure but nonetheless a start, to make way for the issue of competing currencies to the scrip being issued by the Federal Reserve.

This is a movement that needs to be nurtured, particularly if the Congress flinches again and raises the debt ceiling. Jackson grasped the whole picture. He fought the monetary fight on every front. He had deep and abiding convictions. He talked about it in constitutional terms. He would have understood down to the ground the point that Carolyn Baum is making in her column today about the phoniness of the argument that the federal government would have to default on existing debt rather than on other, non-debt obligations. Its income each month vastly exceeds its interest obligations.

Grant’s Interest Rate Observer supplies some reasons that a hypothetical congressman from an imaginary “district of Wall Street” might give to support “a cause so quixotic as a reduction — just a small, newsworthy, symbolic reduction — in the statutory debt limit.” It offers that fact that the Federal Reserve is buying bonds at a rate that, at $1.02 trillion a year, which represents more than 100% of what the federal budget bureau projects to be the deficit this year.

Also, Grant’s references Andrew Dickson White’s famous tome “Fiat Money Inflation in France.” That’s the book in which the first president of Cornell University told the story of how France destroyed its currency and set the stage for the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Could it happen here? We may be a long way from that, but the chances increase with every uptick in the debt ceiling. So, on the 30th anniversary of our favorite newsletter, we say in respect of James Grant and his collagues, “vive le Grant’s.”