Bernanke, like the famous engineer Casey Jones, is often held up as a popular hero. However, Jones was the engineer of a major train wreck, which was due to his errors in judgment and his own overconfidence. Bernanke's current monetary policy is a train wreck waiting to happen.
Understanding today's convoluted domestic and international fiat monetary system frankly requires a great deal of time and study. In a sound money environment, on the other hand, there is little confusion or controversy.
Needless to say, those who benefit from bubble activities are not going to like this, since the diversion of real wealth to them from wealth generators will slow down or cease all together. A fall in economic activity in this case would in fact be the demise of various bubble activities.
The catch is that in order to file an appeal, the plaintiff has to pay a fee of two dollars. Justice Mahoney, O happy day, refused to accept the appeal because Federal Reserve Notes, which of course constituted the fee, are not lawful money. Only gold and silver coin, affirmed the judge, can be made legal tender, and therefore the fee for appeal had not been paid.
A rate of interest is established in the loan market which corresponds to a longer period of production; and so, although it is inadmissible and impracticable from an overall point of view, a lengthening of the period of production becomes at first profitable. But there cannot be the slightest doubt as to where this will lead.
Calvin Coolidge, on spending and taxation, was quite Rothbardian well before Rothbard. According to Amity Shlaes, “Coolidge didn’t favor tax cuts as a means to increase revenue or to buy off Democrats. He favored them because they took government, the people’s servant, out of the way of the people.”
What is, then, the best monetary policy? Mises argues that “A metallic money, the augmentation or diminution of the quantity of metal available for which is independent of deliberate human intervention, is becoming
the modern monetary ideal.” He adds: “The significance of adherence to a metallic-money system lies in the freedom of the
value of money from state influence that such a system guarantees.”
The publication of Ludwig von Mises’s Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel in 1912 marks a turning point in the history of economics, and of the Austrian School in particular. Mises contributed a great many original and penetrating arguments, each of which he articulated at its proper place within the edifice of an encompassing monetary treatise.
A transcription of a wide-ranging lecture, full of insight as well as humor, by the great Austrian economist and social theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, discussing the state, anarchy, democracy, monarchy, crime, security, and more. Delivered at the 2009 Mises University.
The actual aim of the recent flood of laws rendering cash transactions less convenient or limiting or even prohibiting them is to force the public at large to make payments through the financial system in order to prop up the unstable fractional-reserve banks and, more importantly, to expand the ability of governments to spy on and keep track of their citizens’ most private financial dealings.
