"Under deflation, it is those non–wealth generating activities that end up having the most difficulties in serving their debt, because these activities were never generating any real wealth and were really supported or funded, so to speak, by genuine wealth generators."
"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."
– Wilhelm von Humboldt
However one may turn the matter, one cannot discover any reason why an ideological distortion of truth should be more useful to the bourgeoisie than a correct theory.
"Deflation is one of the great scarecrows of present day economic policy and monetary policy in particular,"
Aristotle concedes too much to those who discriminate in favor of the purely intellectual, and he tends to denigrate the practical life.
"Because there is no link between the 'revenue' acquired by government agencies and the costs they incur, there is no way of utilizing the yardstick of profitability to evaluate whether agencies are performing a useful function."
"The Rothbardians level an objection, saying the free bankers are ignoring an important real-world consideration; then Woolsey assumes away the problem and declares that he has met the Rothbardian objection."
The right alternative is not yet another and more global experiment in paper-money inflation.
Rothbard sees much of economic history as a product of government interventions in the market.
So the basic strategy of trying to convert the king led inexorably to at least a broadly utilitarian approach to the problems of freedom and government intervention.
