It’s no secret that the state’s domination of education has resulted in widespread economic ignorance. Thankfully, an increasing number of students and families are escaping the public education system to pursue private alternatives and homeschooling. On Saturday, September 12, the Mises Institute met at the Westin Poinsett in Greenville, South Carolina, to discuss why government schools don’t teach sound economics.
Since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the value of the US dollar has steadily fallen. Now it is a tiny fraction of what it was in the days of our great-grandparents. Americans for the past century have been subject to a boom-bust cycle fueled by monetary inflation. This has enriched the government and its friends while impoverishing the productive classes.
The Misesian (TM): Jp, it was great having you as a speaker at our Mises Circle in Albuquerque. Can you explain for our readers the Sound Money Defense League and your work in promoting sound money efforts across the country?
Jp Cortez (JPC): The Sound Money Defense League is a national nonpartisan policy group working to remonetize gold and silver. We do that at the state and federal levels, primarily by advocating legislation that removes the legal disincentives to actually using gold and silver.
In 1920, Ludwig von Mises put forward a fundamental idea in an essay that would transform the economic debate of the twentieth century: an economy that lacks private ownership of the means of production cannot have market prices for capital goods and, therefore, lacks a rational criterion for deciding how to allocate them.
Washington’s China hawks have spent years warning that America must learn from Beijing: subsidize strategic industries, direct investment toward favored sectors, and mobilize the state to compete with a supposedly superior Chinese economic model, etc. There is just one problem. China’s own economic experience increasingly undermines the premise that America must imitate Beijing to remain competitive.
