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Early in the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises warned against the consequences of granting the government control over the money supply. Such a regime inevitably creates money through bank credit that is not backed by real savings—a type of money that Mises termed “fiduciary media.”
In 1912, Mises wrote,
“Human action, unlike the movement of stones, is motivated.”
The mathematical method, like so many other fallacies, has entered and dominated present-day economic thought because of the pervading epistemology of positivism. Positivism is essentially an interpretation of the methodology of physics ballooned into a general theory of knowledge for all fields.
[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
Nicholas Biddle was the president of the American central bank that preceded the Fed. When his bureaucratic cradle was rocked, he quickly morphed into a Machiavellian monster.
The issue of private property rights in the EM spectrum (airwaves) arises occasionally. To my knowledge there is not much systematic work on this topic; the David Kelley & Roger Donway‘s 1985 monograph Laissez Parler: Freedom in the Electronic Media remains the best work on this, to my knowledge; and see also the Rothbard quotes appended below.
