Steve Forbes‘ latest contribution to the magazine that bears his name considers the prospects for a Cyprus-style bank account seizure in the United States.

Don’t put it past our politicians to try it in a financial emergency. The breaking of contracts by the U.S. government, unfortunately, has happened before, and what’s under way in Cyprus shows that feckless politicos will continue to try such things.

In 1933–34, amid the depths of the Great Depression, the U.S. government seized the American people’s gold holdings. From that point, until 1975, it was illegal for Americans to own gold, other than in some forms of jewelry or collectors’ coins. In the panic of the Depression years the courts upheld this unconstitutional confiscation. Yes, people received dollars in return for their holdings of the yellow metal, but the dollar itself was formally devalued by 40%. Moreover, the U.S. government abrogated private commercial contracts containing the so-called gold clause, which allowed creditors to receive payments in either dollars or gold.

In the early 1970s President Richard Nixon annulled contracts selling soybeans to Japan. This was done for domestic political reasons: U.S. soybean buyers had been complaining about the high prices, and Nixon felt keeping the product here would mollify them. Of course, the real reason that the prices of soybeans and other agricultural commodities were rising was that Nixon and the Federal Reserve were deliberately undermining the value of the U.S. dollar. (Japan responded by investing in Brazil, which became one of our major soybean competitors.)

In 2009 the Obama Administration pushed through a brazenly political restructuring of bankrupt General Motors and Chrysler, and huge payoffs were made to the United Auto Workers, a pro-Obama union, at the expense of bondholders. Banks signed off on the deal because they had no choice—their survival depended on the whims of Washington. Once again the courts turned their backs on this patently unconstitutional exercise.

There have been rumblings from some revenue-hungry Democrats about finding ways to tap into individuals’ retirement accounts.