No doubt, the costs of a return to "sound money" — that is ending the government money-supply monopoly and returning the supply of money to free-market forces — would most likely be substantial. It would most likely entail a severe loss in output and employment, given that inflation has been allowed to have a say in the allocation of scarce resources for decades.
That Doherty has been badly misled by his credulity and by his investigative and interpretive derelictions is substantiated in an oddly telling review of his book by Fink protégé Tyler Cowen who, according to Doherty (2007, p. 579), "arose from the George Mason University, Koch-funded, Austrian economics program, and is currently president of the [Koch-funded] Mercatus Center."
Finally, the dramatic collapse of Communism and the Cold War in 1989, and the subsequent rethinking among both conservatives and libertarians, has recently aroused interest in The Betrayal.
We do know, however, that free people are better able to adapt and prosper than unfree people, in whatever situation the future holds.
So long as one exercises discretion in accepting information from Wikipedia, and so long as one's research extends beyond the Wikipedia article to the sources it cites, Wikipedia is an exceptional resource that is unique to our generation.
No person or group of people is without value — not even those whom our own government chooses to label the enemy.
At least it will give us something to do until we figure out where next to hitch up the engine of inflation. At which point we can once again cast off the hair shirts, put on our gladrags, and throw another wild, exuberant, but ultimately destructive, orgy of high living and hot money — and devil take the hindmost!
In addition to being a history of the Old Right, this book is the closest thing to an autobiography of this extraordinary man that readers can expect to see.
If we adopt the principle that the government can do what it wishes to cope with present needs as it understands them, then we repudiate, not some legal technicality, but the basic principle of the American Revolution.
