Other Schools of Thought

Recorded at Mises University 2009.

Within the space of days, we've been provided, courtesy of the Fed itself, with footage that perfectly distills the complete failure of Fed forecasting and planning, and audio that encapsulates splendidly the only thing that the Fed actually accomplishes: the destruction of money.

In the UK as well — thanks to nationalization, price controls, and government rationing of healthcare — thousands of people die needlessly every year because of shortages of kidney dialysis machines, pediatric intensive care units, pacemakers, and even x-ray machines. This is America's future, if "ObamaCare" becomes a reality.

Insufficiently educated in the history of economic thought, they do not realize that Keynesianism — down to the most technical details, like the concept of the foreign exchange multiplier — is mercantilism or, more precisely, John Lawism pure and simple.

When confronted with the fact that Keynes' solutions would never work in the long run, he would dismissively say, "In the long run, we're all dead."

This is green tyranny at its worst: waste, distortion, and violating liberty in the name of "saving the planet."

Fed economists — like mainstream macroeconomics in general — are intellectually bankrupt and clueless at best or dishonest propagandists at worst.

Nowhere in this document or in successive drafts by Mason and Thomas Jefferson do we read words that could lead the reader to conclude that the federal government ought to care for its citizens or that we ought to look out for one another or that a central government ought to violate our individual natural rights to freedom, independence, and property to achieve the absurdity of mandatory equal access, equal price, equal quantity, and equal quality of health care for all.

The whole idea is just plain dumb, not to mention incredibly ill-timed.

The two haute couture lines creating the most buzz are "Laissez-Faire," by Ludwig von Mises, and  "Après Moi le Déluge" by British export, John Keynes.