To save our economy from destruction and from the eventual holocaust of runaway inflation , we the people must take the money-supply function back from the government. Money is far too important to be left in the hands of bankers and of Establishment economists and financiers. To accomplish this goal, money must be returned to the market economy,
Money is a crucial command post of any economy, and therefore of any society. Society rests upon a network of voluntary exchanges, also known as the “free-market economy”; these exchanges imply a division of labor in society, in which producers of eggs, nails, horses, lumber, and immaterial services such as teaching, medical care, and concerts,
We have already described one part of the contemporary flight from sound, free market money to statized and inflated money: the abolition of the gold standard by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and the substitution of fiat paper tickets by the Federal Reserve as our “monetary standard.” Another crucial part of this process was the federal
[This article is featured in chapter 79 of Making Economic Sense by Murray Rothbard and originally appeared in the September, 1985 edition of The Free Market ] It was a scene familiar to any nostalgia buff: all-night lines waiting for the banks (first in Ohio, then in Maryland) to open; pompous but mendacious assurances by the bankers that all
The Free Market 4, no. 2 (February 1986) I: Keynesians and Fixed Exchange Rates, 1944–73 The world is in permanent monetary crisis, but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another. We go back and forth from fixed paper rates to fluctuating rates, to some inchoate and
The Free Market 4, no. 9 (September 1986) In the last few months, the Reagan administration seems to have achieved the culmination of its “economic miracle” of the last several years: while the money supply has skyrocketed upward in double digits, the consumer price index has remained virtually flat. Money cheap and abundant, stock and bond
The Free Market 4, no. 11 (November 1986) September 1986 is an historic month in the history of United States monetary policy. For it is the first month in over fifty years—thanks to the heroic leadership of Ron Paul during his four terms in Congress—that the United States Treasury has minted a genuine gold coin. Gold coins were the standard
The Free Market 5, no. 4 (April 1987) Not all hard-money supporters favor the gold-coin standard or any Treasury minting of gold coins. A few “purists” charge those of us who advocate a gold standard with being “gold socialists” because the Treasury would, at least initially, be minting the gold coins. Why not, they say, simply start minting
[ Previously unpublished online; Faith and Freedom 1, no. 4 (March 1950) .] Citizens of the old Roman Empire distrusted paper currency and refused to accept anything but gold or silver coin as money. So the rulers found themselves barred from inflating the money supply by the unobtrusive method of printing additional currency. But the Roman
Volume 2, No. 3 (Fall 1999) The financial elites of this country, notably the Morgan, Rockefeller, and Kuhn, Loeb interests, were responsible for putting through the Federal Reserve System, as a governmentally created and sanctioned cartel device to enable the nation’s banks to inflate the money supply in a coordinated fashion, without
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.