All Posts Tagged With: "gold standard"

Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman, who died last month at age 94, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. The 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and an early associate of FEE, Friedman did more than any single person in our time to teach the public the merits [...]

1Dec2006 | | 4 comments | Continued

Book Reviews – December 2006

  • The Ethics of the Market
    by John Meadowcroft Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  • Peddling Panaceas: Popular Economists _in the New Deal Era
    by Gary Dean Best Reviewed by Burton Folsom, Jr
  • Philosophers of Capitalism: _Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond
    by Edward W. Younkins Reviewed by Aeon J. Skoble
  • Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in _Black America
    by John McWhorter Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Dec2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

From the Armistice to the Great Depression

When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered.  To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, [...]

1Dec2006 | | 0 comments | Continued

John Maynard Keynes: The Damage Still Done by a Defunct Economist

Seventy years ago, on February 4, 1936, the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) published what soon became his most famous work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Few books, in so short a time, have gained such wide influence and generated so destructive an impact on public policy. What Keynes succeeded in [...]

1May2006 | | 40 comments | Continued

Government, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Banking

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This paper was delivered at a conference on “One Hundred Years of Dollarization, or a Century without a Central Bank: The Case of Panama,” sponsored by Fundación Libertad in Panama City, Panama, on November 12, 2004. There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout [...]

1Feb2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Hazlitt on Gold

Henry Hazlitt concentrated much of his thinking and writing on the topic of money, producing two books and dozens of articles and columns on the subject. His writings during the dark years following World War II, published on the editorial page of the New York Times and in Newsweek, offered intelligent readers ammunition against the [...]

1Nov2004 | | 1 comment | Continued

Book Reviews – September 2004

The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright Princeton University Press • 2004 • 304 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling One of the most profound insights of economics is that the activities of billions of people can be coordinated without central direction and without most of these [...]

1Sep2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

Book Reviews

Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences by Gene Smiley Ivan R. Dee • 2002 • 169 pages • $24.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef Recently, I found myself in an e-mail argument with a friend who is intelligent and  well-educated—but not in economics. I had made the point that the best macroeconomic policy is one [...]

1Sep2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Dreaded D Word

Deflation is a much-feared economic phenomenon, perhaps because it is most often associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s or with the recent troubles in Japan. and yet deflation has not always been coincident with periods of depression. The general record of the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast to that of the twentieth, was [...]

1May2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter Bernstein

Wiley & Sons · 2000 · 432 pages · $27.95 Reviewed by Lawrence Parks When it comes to disparaging gold, Peter Bernstein can’t be outdone. Among other traducements, he blames gold for: the institution of slavery; having “torn economies to shreds”; the Great Depression of the 1930s; and many other “horrors.” In Bernstein’s view, people [...]

1Nov2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Greenspan: The Man Behind Money by Justin Martin

Perseus Publishing · 2000 · 284 pages · $28.00 Reviewed by Alexander Franco He has been called the second most important man in America and the nation’s most enigmatic public official. Yet the public knows little of Alan Greenspan’s personal life or of the secretive inner workings of the Federal Reserve System. Justin Martin has [...]

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Economics on Trial

The Laffer Curve—the theory that when taxes are too high, reducing them would actually raise tax revenue—is dismissed. “When Reagan cut taxes after he was elected, the result was less revenue, not more,” reports Mankiw in his popular textbook.2 Never mind that tax revenues actually rose significantly every year of the Reagan administration; the perception is that supply-side economics has been discredited.

1Feb2000 | | 0 comments | Continued

Money and Gold in the 1920s and 1930s: An Austrian View

Joseph Salerno is a professor of economics in the Lubin School of Business at Pace University. In consecutive issues of The Freeman, Richard Timberlake has contributed an interesting trilogy of articles advancing a monetarist critique of the conduct of U.S. monetary policy during the 1920s and 1930s.[1] In the first of these articles, Timberlake disputes [...]

1Oct1999 | | 7 comments | Continued

Money: The Great Gold Robbery

The New Deal established much of the moral framework of contemporary political life. Though some of the programs and policies of that era have been terminated, the moral heritage of the New Deal continues to permeate American government and political thinking. In 1936 Franklin Roosevelt declared, “I should like to have it said of my [...]

1Jun1999 | | 3 comments | Continued

Money in the 1920s and 1930s

Richard Timberlake is a professor of economics retired from the University of Georgia, and author of Monetary Policy in the United States, An Intellectual and Institutional History (University of Chicago Press, 1993). This article is the first in a series. One of the most enduring and troublesome mysteries in economics is money: how it is [...]

1Apr1999 | | 3 comments | Continued

A Golden Comeback, Part III

“A free gold market . . . reflects and measures the extent of the lack of confidence in the domestic currency.” —Ludwig von Mises In the past two columns, I’ve highlighted the uses and misuses of gold. Despite occasional calls for a return to a gold standard, the Midas metal has largely lost out to [...]

1Nov1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Bank Deregulation and Monetary Order by George Selgin

Routledge • 1996 • 288 pages • $69.95 Parth Shah is an economics professor and president of the Center for Civil Society, New Delhi, India. The classical gold standard is generally considered to be the only monetary system consistent with the principles of laissez faire. In that system, the currency issued by the government is [...]

1Dec1997 | | 0 comments | Continued
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