Who hasn’t heard of the Industrial Revolution, the historical turning point that created modern society, for better or worse? Economist Donald Boudreaux has described this as the “hockey stick of human prosperity,” which launched the average person from subsistence to relative prosperity. Boudreaux credits the specialization and trade that characterized the eighteenth century. Likewise, he credits Adam Smith for describing the causes of modern prosperity, calling him the father of modern economics. This is a frequently told story, but is it true?

The Federal Reserve has declared its program of monetary expansion (formerly referred to as inflation) over in an effort to fight rising prices (currently referred to as inflation). As Murray Rothbard explained, “Government intervention brings about bank expansion and inflation, and, when the inflation comes to an end, the subsequent depression adjustment comes into play.”

The Federal Reserve has sabotaged the economy since 1913 with its socialistic interventions. Every single boom created via its artificial credit expansion has resulted in disaster, which includes the Great Depression, which was caused by nearly a decade of inflation that begun as an effort to help finance the government’s involvement in World War I.

An essay by Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that for Robinson Crusoe, an isolated castaway, “the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct,” of social cooperation, “simply not arise,” but when “Friday, arrives on the island,” Crusoe, for the first time, must interact with others, either competing or cooperating for scarce resources.

In a recent article, Charles Hugh Smith claims that the landfill economy has put our society in crisis. Here’s how he describes the “landfill economy”:

For more than a century, the process of political centralization and state building in the United States has entailed convincing a large portion of the population that the federal government must be the final arbiter of the moral righteousness of every law and policy adopted in every state. The idea began as a novel concept in the nineteenth century when federal policy makers began to use it as a tool of asserting federal control over states. If federal institutions regard a state policy as conforming to federal notions of “rights,” then the policy is allowed to stand.