“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.”
~ Someone, supposedly Thomas Jefferson
Edit: ~ "Thomas Jefferson" changed to "~ Someone, supposedly Thomas Jefferson"
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]
To be fair, within the Constitution there is a clause where the Gold standard is required for all debts and tender (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_Clause), of which Thomas Jefferson wrote the majority. Even if he didn't say it himself, the sentiment was strong enough between all parties that it was included in the beginning.
It's worth noting here that The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.
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.
Benjamin Franklin knew Smith personally, and was present at the drafting of the Constitution, so there is at most one degree of separation. I haven't actually read Wealth of Nations myself, but its worth noting that a lot of compromises had to be made on all sides to encourage states to actually join (IIRC the income tax was originally illegal because the initial wording implicitly said that slavery couldn't be taxed out of existence, and this was intentionally worded to encourage southern states to join).
It's more like they were familiar with the Theory of Moral Sentiments^. This work lays out the foundation of the Wealth of Nations and lays out an explanation of The Invisible Hand. From the Section 'Sixth Sense':
"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?*
The trouble is that the nominally risky thing -- allowing banks to create a lot of money -- has already happened. Consumer debt is very high. Most of the borrowed cash is now in the coffers of corporations that never spend it, which keeps inflation low, but also keeps anyone from using that money to pay back what they borrowed. So they just pay the interest. Which they can do as long as rates are low.
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.
Edit: ~ "Thomas Jefferson" changed to "~ Someone, supposedly Thomas Jefferson"