Since the job that was actually assigned to [the Fed] by Congressman Carter Glass back in 1913 is now vestigial and long gone, and the financial system has been flooded with massive liquidity for decades on end, it might well be time to declare victory and let the free market take care of jobs, growth, inflation and prosperity. — David Stockman

August 26, 1938: Austria was under Nazi rule, and Czechoslovakia was feared to be next. The world was on the brink of a new war. In Paris, a room full of famed economists met to discuss the future of liberalism, the ideology that had shaped the West for the previous hundred years. Held in Europe and attended mostly by Europeans, it was at the behest of an American journalist.

Classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek and Richard Epstein have often claimed that the rule of law imposes strong constraints on the state’s regulation of private property. If they are right, this would be a highly effective argument against such regulation, as the rule of law is an ideal commanding wide respect, by no means confined to those of classical-liberal or libertarian inclinations.