There is a long history of monetary experience, writes Garet Garrett. It tells us that government is at heart a counterfeiter and therefore cannot be trusted to control money, and that this is true of both autocratic and popular government. The record has been cumulative since the invention of money. Nevertheless it is not believed. There is also a history of sound money, and if its lessons are likewise disregarded, what shall one conclude but that monetary delusions are, by some strange law of folly, recurring and incurable? There was a century of sound money. During one hundred years preceding World War I, government touched money hardly more than to establish standards of weight and measure, to lay down the laws of liability and to license bankers. In that century the wealth of the world increased more than in all preceding time of economic man.

A great mystery to me is why Garrett’s novels aren’t better known, and, indeed, seemed to have vanished as a cultural presence, even within the libertarian movement. It is something of a miracle that we were able to publish them at all, and bring them before the public anew.

I finally found a clue to a missed opportunity here in John Chamberlain’s A Life with the Printed Word (Regnery, 1982)

In Justin Raimondo’s fun and lively book Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, he makes an argument that I did not find convincing.

Please read the descriptions here and here, if only so you know what Garrett achieved with these two works, which, for reasons I cannot comprehend, were lost to history. 

David Veksler has a blog on Mises.com in which he details the technology behind Mises.org/com. It makes for great reading.

[A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. By Glenn Greenwald. Crown Publishers, 2007. Xiv + 303 pages.]

The key passage in Glenn Greenwald’s masterly book appears on page 186:

[World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday, 2007. 230 pages.]

Norman Podhoretz, an eminent authority on the novels of Norman Mailer, has for decades postured as an expert in foreign policy as well. It is not too much then, one might have supposed, to expect him to possess an elementary knowledge of European history. Any such expectations are soon disappointed. We find in his latest effort this surprising remark:

There’s no doubt that prosperity has smiled brighter and brighter on the last four generations. My grandparents, like many newly arrived from the Hell of Central Europe, lived in the attic above their ramshackle store. Their grandchildren however ramble around in what they would consider a mansion, fit for Polish nobility. My daughter, in the real estate business, tells stories that shock the skinflints of my generation: She routinely sells million dollar homes. One Million Dollars! How much did Versailles cost Louie XIV?

The new issue of Chronicles contains the usual odd mix of anti-statism and statism blended into a strange brew that recalls the Free Silver Populism of the late 19th century (down with taxes and up with inflation! Down with Wall Street and up with protection! ). There are good articles, such as Doug Bandow’s attack on the government census, and Ted Galen Carpenter’s warning against military intervention in the Sudan.