Gold Standard

From the book What Has Government Done to Our Money? Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

From the book What Has Government Done to Our Money? Narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Jay Taylor made the case that John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman were wrong and that Ludwig von Mises was right. Inflation and depression are caused by excessive credit creation. The Austrians advocate for a gold standard while bankers and politicians hate gold.

It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments.

To the extent that government agencies own a portion of the stock market they are engaged in central planning.

No man or group of men — including any group of men calling themselves "the government" — is morally entitled to initiate the use of physical force, the threat of force, or any substitute for force against any other man or group of men. The USA is moving increasingly away from a free-market economy and toward fascist totalitarianism.

This power to create money is what gives the president the chutzpah to go to war without seeking full financing or even much in the way of permission from Congress.

With the cumulative effects of inflation, the face values of our coins no longer has any relation to historic commodity value.

To Mises, freezing money supply did not represent, per se, a desirable money system, even though the consequences derived from it would make such a system appear more in line with a free market economy than the current system of relentless increase in credit and fiat money supply, controlled by the government.

I suppose that I wasn’t entirely aware of how hard-core Henry Hazlitt was on the gold question until re-reading