[A selection from Deflation and Liberty.]

The production of money in a free society is a matter of free association. Everybody from the miners to the owners of the mines, to the minters, and up to the customers who buy the minted coins — all benefit from the production of money. None of them violates the property rights of anybody else, because everybody is free to enter the mining and minting business, and nobody is obliged to buy the product.

The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism. While the Levellers are often characterized as a quasi-socialist movement, the aim of my research is to restore the Levellers to their classical liberal heritage, and to find out to what extent they were in fact libertarian.

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I was recently told that I could clear up all of my misconceptions on the issue of health care by reading a single article by Steven Brill: “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us.” Mr. Brill’s article, which graced the cover of Time magazine last year, weighed in at over forty pages.

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“Everything popular is wrong” — Oscar Wilde’s famous quote can be supported by economic theory. One of the seemingly neglected aspects of malinvestment is the effect it has upon the popular perception of products, services, and lifestyles.

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Anyone reading the regular Federal Open Market Committee press releases can easily envision Chairman Yellen and the Federal Reserve team at the economic controls, carefully adjusting the economy’s price level and employment numbers.

Most commentators are of the view that the massive monetary pumping of the Fed during 2008 prevented a major economic disaster. The yearly rate of growth of the Fed’s balance sheet jumped from 3.9 percent in January 2008 to 150.9 percent by December of that year. The federal funds rate target was lowered from 3 percent in January 2008 to 0.25 percent by December of that year.

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In Greek myth, Sisyphus was punished in Hades by having to eternally push a boulder up to the summit of a hill, only to have it roll down each time and to have to start over. This is an apt representation of the hopelessness of state revolution and reform, as can be revealed by bringing together the insights of two great libertarian anarchist scholars.

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This article is adapted from a portion of the Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture, delivered at the 2014 Austrian Economics Research Conference by James Grant.

The latest GDP report indicates a slowdown in overall economic activity in the first quarter of 2014. Apologists for the Obama administration attribute the recent slowdown to unusual winter weather. Some have even suggested that the first-quarter slowdown sets the stage for rapid economic growth for the remainder of this year: there is pent up demand and untapped potential productivity, they claim.