The Fed

I will continue to repeat that all people will be made better off in the long run by lowering taxes, easing regulations, stopping fiscal-policy interventions, and not giving the state the power to print fiat money.

Instead of addressing the Depression though the proven expedient of private-bank-issued scrip, the Roosevelt administration's plan involved suspension of the gold standard, followed by devaluation and the abrogation of the gold clause, cartelization of the banks of the country, the National Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, the alphabet-soup agencies, Social Security, and the beginning of an ever-expanding government.

In the real world, of course, the real danger of credit expansion and the boom-bust cycle comes from fiat money and fractional-reserve banking.

Governments have caused the monetary and economic debacle by taking control of money production.

"There can be no such thing as a Keynesian state on the gold standard, any more then a cocaine addict or compulsive gambler can be on a strict budget."

"Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?"—Ayn Rand

Bankers who engage in fractional-reserve banking really do create "money out of thin air." Austrian economics is superior to Marxism in every respect.

The argument of sticky wages does not justify the existence of a central bank. Market prices, including wages, are flexible enough to smooth out macroeconomic disturbances.

In the early 1700s, France turned on the taps of paper-money inflation.

Unless Hugo Chavez's government suddenly ends spending and returns to a free market, the most likely conclusion to current events in Venezuela is a crisis of interventionism, as the bolívar collapses and the government finds it more and more difficult to fund itself.