[Excerpt from Murray N. Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2005), part 4, pp. 400–24.] By the end of 1925, Montagu Norman and the British Establishment were seemingly monarch of all they surveyed. Backed by Strong and the Morgans, the British had had
The presidential election of 1896 was a great national referendum on the gold standard. The Democratic Party had been captured, at its 1896 convention, by the Populist, ultra-inflationist, anti-gold forces, headed by William Jennings Bryan. The older Democrats, who had been fiercely devoted to hard money and the gold standard, either stayed home
[”Revolution in Minnesota,” The Libertarian Forum , August 1, 1969.] The idea prevails that to favor gold or silver money is to be a mossback reactionary; nothing could be further from the truth. For gold (as well as silver) is the People’s Money; it is a valuable commodity that has developed, on the free market, as the monetary means of
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .] Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577) The honor — if that be the proper term — of being the first English mercantilist writer should have gone, for
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought , vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith . An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download .] The “Bullionist” Attack on Foreign Exchange and on the East India Trade Having survived the assaults of ignorant moralists before the
[Excerpted from What Has Government Done to Our Money? ] To understand the current monetary chaos, it is necessary to trace briefly the international monetary developments of the 20th century, and to see how each set of unsound inflationist interventions has collapsed of its own inherent problems, only to set the stage for another round of
The Free Market 4, no. 11 (November 1986) September 1986 is an historic month in the history of United States monetary policy. For it is the first month in over fifty years—thanks to the heroic leadership of Ron Paul during his four terms in Congress—that the United States Treasury has minted a genuine gold coin. Gold coins were the standard
The Free Market 5, no. 4 (April 1987) Not all hard-money supporters favor the gold-coin standard or any Treasury minting of gold coins. A few “purists” charge those of us who advocate a gold standard with being “gold socialists” because the Treasury would, at least initially, be minting the gold coins. Why not, they say, simply start minting
The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004) [Editorial Note: Price inflation now having reared its head in many sectors, despite constant downward pressure on prices from innovation and imports, and the business cycle continuing to plague the world economy, it is time to revisit a neglected classic from Murray Rothbard, an excerpt from a long study that
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