According to many, the key cause of a general increase in prices is inflationary expectations. For instance, if there is a large increase in the prices of oil, individuals, it is held, will start forming expectations for higher inflation ahead. Consequently, individuals will speed up their purchases of goods and services at present thereby raising the demand for goods and services. This, it is held, will set-in motion general increases in prices.

The following speech from a renegade Fed chairman is excerpted from The Flight of the Barbarous Relic.

There should be a sign on the front of the Eccles Building in Washington saying, “We work for the elites—the commercial bankers and government—at the expense of everyone else. Try and stop us.”

Let’s try, shall we?

The genius of his 1790 debt assumption was not fiscal, it was psychological. When he forced the federal government to absorb the states’ war obligations at par, speculators who had bought Revolutionary War certificates at ten cents on the dollar suddenly held federal bonds worth face value. They had not bought America out of patriotism. They had a position in it.

Ever since the sanctions onto Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, combined with real domestic economic anxieties of the post-pandemic era and declining institutional trust, a handful of libertarians and a mix of anti-war conservatives and the far-left have been announcing that de-dollarization was inevitable, prompted by BRICS’s desire to pursue a gold-backed currency.

For more than a century, modern societies have operated on a remarkably persistent assumption: that greater administrative capacity inevitably yields better outcomes. More information, more regulation, more coordination, and more sophisticated planning are widely believed to generate greater prosperity, security, and ultimately greater human progress. This conviction has become so deeply embedded in contemporary governance that it is rarely questioned.

As Murray Rothbard pointed out again and again, the government has no business getting involved in education. In a free market society, people are at liberty to establish whatever educational institutions they wish, and so long as they can secure sufficient funding, they will stay in business. They are free to set up their own standards on whom to hire as faculty. Matters are entirely different if the government gets involved. Then, people must conform to its demands, whether they want to or not.