Also, the paper money they had in mind was still paper money backed by gold/silver. I'm not sure they even conceived of the idea of totally unbacked fiat currency. It would probably blow their minds what we're doing today.

Just from my memory, I believe their biggest concern was trust. For Democracy to work, the people have to have transparency of government. They talked about fiat-currencies making trust more difficult.

I asked ChatGPT for a few quotes to help back me up. I was a bit disappointed in the quantity and quality of them. Perhaps they weren't as outspoken about it is I'd thought. I read that Jefferson became louder about it much later, during the 1810's.

“The pestilent effects of paper money on the necessary confidence between man and man, on the necessary confidence in the public councils, on the industry and morals of the people…” — Federalist No. 44 (1788)

“Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.” — Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1819

It's the same dynamic: a demagogue democratic government will buy voters the exact same way a tyrannical regime needs to keep its controlling structure alive. It ends up being the exact same kind of government spending for the exact same purpose: buying enough of the population in order to be able to subjugate and exploit the other part. In both cases, due to the unproductive nature of the strategies, both a democratic and a tyrannical regime end up needing to emit more and more to support an ever increasing controlling structure in order to keep control under an ever increasing economic crisis. It's the exact same death spiral every single time.

I can't remember either, I listened to a bunch of his audiobooks and he definitely talked about how politicians rarely make a stand on reducing inflation as it's useful to print money for pet projects

I think the even bigger question is how does that look when inflation is accounted for.