[Editor’s note: With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence comes many attempts to use the text of the Declaration to support modern political ideologies. Perhaps the most common misuse of the Declaration’s text is to warp the meaning of the phrase “all men are created equal.” Modern egalitarian agendas are thus applied to the text of the Declaration in ways that depart thoroughly from the actual meaning as applied by Jefferson in the eighteenth century.

In his writings, Milton Friedman blamed the Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression of the 1930s. Friedman believed that the US central bank failed to inflate enough money into the banking system to prevent the collapse of the money supply and the economy. The money supply M1, which stood at $28.264 billion in October 1929, fell to $19.039 billion by April 1933—a decline of almost 33 percent.

“Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, & parents from their children, & compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it?

Can an act be virtuous if it is compelled? Can a society be considered moral if an action deemed impermissible for one person becomes permissible when performed by another? If authority alone can transform vice into virtue, morality loses its claim of universality, and what remains is a doctrine of exemptions.

Economic distress is on almost everyone’s mind lately. Inflation, high prices, stagnant wages, declining purchasing power, inequality, and recurring financial crises are often treated as separate problems requiring separate government solutions. The Austrian School begins elsewhere. From Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk through Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Murray Rothbard, Austrian economists argued that these problems are frequently connected consequences of interventions that distort the signals by which a market economy coordinates itself.

There is an old and familiar saying about difficult personal or social situations. When a weak or broken personality is faced with a difficult or dire situation the individual ignores the problem and pretends to be confident and cheerful about what is to come. Here, the individual is said to be “whistling past the graveyard.”