It is well-known that bureaucracies, especially governmental bureaucracies, have an unparalleled ability to suffocate innovation. Perhaps not as well known is the ability of those same institutions to ignore systematically well-documented, empirically supportable precepts about how the world really works.
Each year at this time, schoolchildren all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.
It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning.
I: Keynesians and Fixed Exchange Rates, 1944–73
December 31, 1999
Today as we enter the 21st Century we should pay tribute to the Statue of Ellis Island. This grand symbol of our government’s power and majesty was not always so grand. Only twenty years ago the Lady was a broken, corroded heap of copper and iron. Even her name, Liberty Enlightening the World, was outdated, nearly forgotten, and seriously in need of modernization. The old makes way for the new; it has always been so.
One of the highlights of my professional career occurred recently when I had the opportunity to talk with Professor F. A. Hayek at his vacation home in the Austrian Alps. It was an unforgettable experience. Since the death of Ludwig von Mises in 1973, Professor Hayek has been the acknowledged dean of the “Austrian” school of economics, which teaches individualism, laissez-faire economics, and the gold standard. He is now 86 years old, but sharp and alert, and still working hard on a number of projects.
September 1986 is an historic month in the history of United States monetary policy. For it is the first month in over fifty years—thanks to the heroic leadership of Ron Paul during his four terms in Congress—that the United States Treasury has minted a genuine gold coin.
It is a common myth that the near-disappearance of the whale and of various species of fish was caused by “capitalist greed,” which, in a short-sighted grab for profits, despoiled the natural resources—the geese that laid the golden eggs—from which those profits used to flow. Hence, the call for government to step in and either seize the ownership of these resources, or at least to regulate strictly their use and development.
Winter is here, and for the last few years this seasonal event has meant the sudden discovery of a brand-new category of the pitiable: the “homeless.”
I’ve lectured about “The Origin, Nature, and History of Money from an Austrian Perspective” in the United States a couple dozen times. But until it actually happened last November, I never expected to do it in socialist Poland.
I spent a week there, living with and interviewing activists in the Polish underground. I entered and exited the country legally, but my itinerary and escorts were provided by a new opposition group called the Freedom and Peace Movement.
