Where did this thing called the Fed come from? Murray Rothbard has the answer here — in phenomenal detail that will make your head spin. In one extended essay, one that reads like a detective story, he has put together the most comprehensive and fascinating account based on a century’s accumulation of scholarship.
The conclusion is that the Fed did not originate as a policy response to national need. It wasn’t erected for any of its stated purposes. It was founded by two groups of elites: government officials and large financial and banking interests. Rothbard adds a third critical element: economists hired to give the scheme a scientific patina.
This excerpted chapter from Rothbard’s History of Money and Banking is as scholarly as it is hair raising. This is one economic historian who fears not naming names and assigning blame.
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Murray N. Rothbard made major contributions to economics, history, political philosophy, and legal theory. He combined Austrian economics with a fervent commitment to individual liberty.
The problem is not the inefficiency of a conscript army; the problem is the gross immorality — indeed, the massive criminality — of drafting young men ... to kill or be killed against their will.
Rothbard argues that genuine science in the social realm starts with clear logic about human action.
Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there came, on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.
Mises Institute, 2009
