The Fed

It was the singular achievement of Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression to have demonstrated that the Great Depression was a crisis manufactured and prolonged by the attempts to stop an inevitable downturn.

If we want to avoid the next great depression, all such government interventions should cease.

Free-market advocates and economists must continue to struggle against these harmful economic myths.

With sound money and no central bank, the debate over our country's future would take on new meaning.

"The essential flaw of so-called supply-side economics — the policy both of the Reagan administration and of the present Bush administration — was the failure to face up to the need to reduce government spending."

As Murray Rothbard explained in The Case Against the Fed, business firms cannot be insured, and especially not fractional-reserve banks.

"The ability of most market indicators is found to be weak, while the ability of the skyscraper index to predict severe changes in the business cycle is strong."

Our only hope is to (1) accept up front a twenty-percent fall in American living standards for a people living beyond their means for the past twenty-five years on the delusions made possible by fiat money, and (2) simultaneously discipline the creature from Jekyll Island, a.k.a. the Federal Reserve System, not to create new money just to prop up asset-price bubbles.

Wise citizens would do well to stay tuned to the penny and observe what it reveals about monetary policy and the future of the dollar.

Hayek was arguing that whenever and wherever credit is expanded beyond market dictates by a central bank, the result will be economic distortion.