As Mark Thornton has shown, the big legislative change that FDR made at the start of his presidency, the decision that affected every single American citizen from one coast to the other, was the repeal of the thirteen-year hell of Prohibition.
From endless wars to the administrative state, the modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face.
Just as kings debased coins to help pay for their wars, the Fed used inflation to help pay for US participation in World War I. It did so by creating and issuing dollars in return for government debt.
These regulations have a clear message: "You don't know what is good for you so you must be forced to do what the government thinks is good for you."
Mises grounds his balance-of-payments analysis on the insight that it is a monetary concept.
When liberty and capitalism were born over a millennium ago, states were small, decentralized, and weak. By restoring natural rights and civil society, the state will recede once again.
A store of value is not necessarily a medium of exchange, and in our current fiat money system, gold is not money. But it has most of the desirable properties of money, and there is much to learn form the process of how it became money in the past.
Mises's firm anti-inflation view—and his recommendation for a return to sound money (that is, free market money)—rested on his awareness of the disastrous consequences of an inflationary policy
The task at hand is the study of the problems of the determination of prices and interest rates. This task requires a sharp distinction between money-certificates and fiduciary media.
Joe Salerno provides a brief description of fractional reserve-banking, identifies the problems it presents in the current institutional setting, and suggests a potential solution.
