The US Senate will soon vote on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s nomination to a second term. One of the senators opposing Powell is Elizabeth Warren. I don’t often agree with Senator Warren, but I do agree with her assessment that Powell is “dangerous.” However, Warren actually doesn’t understand what makes Powell, or any Fed chairman, intrinsically dangerous to liberty and prosperity.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell is given credit for popularizing the “Pottery Barn” rule of foreign policy. Though he denies using that exact phrase, in arguing against what became the disastrous 2003 US attack on Iraq Powell made the point that, as in Pottery Barn, “if you break it, you own it.”
Fedcoin is inevitable. Yet many issues surround it while the Federal Reserve continues engaging the public and experts on this matter. The Board of Governors recently issued a report: Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Information detailing various ideas without definite conclusions.
It starts with the Executive Summary:
Big Tech. Big Pharma. Big food. Big banks. Big oil. We’ve got questions about all of them. Big Tech is surveilling us and stealing our privacy. Big Pharma is exploiting us and poisoning us. Big food is compromising our health and fitness. Big banks are destabilizing boom-and-bust machines. Big oil is destroying the planet.
Most commentators are currently preoccupied with large increases in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is labeled as inflation. The yearly growth rate of the CPI stood at 7.0 percent in December against 6.8 percent in November and 1.4 percent in December 2020.
In 2016, I published a book titled Lines of Liberty, which featured great quotations about liberty from those who had been active and important in promoting it. To this day, one of my favorite quotes in that book is from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
