The Fed

The only way out of this scenario is to reestablish the gold standard.

To avoid such economic crises and such unjustifiable redistribution of income from the many to the few, one has to end the legal interference that has created the present system.

There is still no such thing as a fair tax.

In sum, the real cause of continually rising food prices is the printing of money by world governments. And the real cause of actual food shortages is the prevention of profitable global trade in food by the ill-advised policies of the governments of the very people who are starving.

Brian Wesbury, chief economist at First Trust Advisors, offers in th

Gordon is incensed that a few "analysts," including myself and Professor Stan Liebowitz of the University of Dallas, have argued that the bursting of the housing bubble has caused the chickens to come home to roost, so to speak, after thirty years of government policy pressuring banks to make tens of billions of dollars in bad loans to people with low (or nonexistent) credit ratings.

What Rothbard was describing, as have other Austrian-school economists, was the business cycle — when "businessmen are misled by bank credit inflation to invest too much in higher-order capital goods," like land, plant and equipment.

In the present article I am not taking a stand on whether price inflation will be high or low in 2008.However I will say this: If you are revising your inflation forecasts downward because of your expectation of sluggish economic growth, you might want to rethink that logic.

Instead of decrying the penny, economists should recognize its potential to combat government inflation and advocate a return to an even harder currency. Coins may be expensive for the government to make, but this ensures that our money retains some value, regardless of what the government does. Do we really want free money?

The problem here is that the original Friedman thesis was wrong.