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h/t LRC: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/05/no_author/a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/
Book Review: Ron Paul's End the Fed Condenses a Lifetime of Wisdom and Experience
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/
Nathan Lewis (15 May 2014)
Ron Paul is now retired from professional politics, leaving a need for at least one Congressperson who you feel isn’t fundamentally BS-ing you. Oddly, he found a lot of political support for his unfashionably libertarian plain-speaking. People apparently found it more appealing than the usual favors-for-votes propositions upon which most politicians base their careers. In the end, he basically had to fire himself, declining another run for office at age 77.
Much of his extraordinary term in office revolved around the topic of money, which itself is remarkable.
[... more at link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/ ...]
I’ve talked about the need for a “shelf of books,” that are contemporary and correct, and which can serve as the conceptual foundation for whatever monetary system may eventually replace our present arrangements. No old books and no books that are so full of fallacy as to be unusable, no matter how well-meaning the authors may have been. People actually understand these things significantly better today than was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, although unfortunately that improvement has not been well documented in print.
One reason why we still have floating currencies today is that people just didn’t understand these things at all in the 1970s. You would think that after twenty years of extraordinary prosperity during the 1950s and 1960s with the Bretton Woods gold standard arrangement, and a decade of inflationary disaster in the 1970s with floating fiat currencies, that people in the U.S. might have been a little favorable toward the Classical (gold-based) monetary approach that the U.S. had pursued for the previous 182 years. Nope. Paul recounts his experience at the 1981 Congressional Gold Commission:
“Henry Reuss, chairman of the House Banking Committee, attended one meeting and left in a rage. He couldn’t stand one minute of serious consideration of the importance of gold.”
That was a typical response from other supposedly knowledgeable people at that time. The ignorance of that era is breathtaking — especially considering that the U.S.’s gold standard era had ended only ten years previous.
I’ve added End the Fed to my personal “shelf.” I might quibble with some of the details and historical interpretations — particularly regarding some of the nitty-gritty procedures of how to set up and run gold-based currencies, my personal area of focus — but that is not particularly important. End the Fed provides a big-picture view, of how rotten money leads to rottenness throughout government and society as a whole. And, it does so in an accessible way, from someone who has seen it happen first-hand over decades.
Paul argues that the present system may disintegrate before too long — indeed, he doesn’t expect much positive progress in monetary affairs until then. The understanding in this book helps insure that the next phase of the long evolution of humans and money won’t suffer from the failings of the post-1971 floating-currency system, or, for that matter, the flawed Bretton Woods gold standard arrangement that preceded it. The stupidity of Henry Reuss in 1981 would seem … as stupid as it actually was.
When the time again comes to discuss the topic of Classical and Mercantilist approaches to money (in practice, gold-based or floating fiat money), it would be nice if people at least understood what they are talking about.
[... see link for full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/ ...]
Book Review: Ron Paul's End the Fed Condenses a Lifetime of Wisdom and Experience
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/
Nathan Lewis (15 May 2014)
Ron Paul is now retired from professional politics, leaving a need for at least one Congressperson who you feel isn’t fundamentally BS-ing you. Oddly, he found a lot of political support for his unfashionably libertarian plain-speaking. People apparently found it more appealing than the usual favors-for-votes propositions upon which most politicians base their careers. In the end, he basically had to fire himself, declining another run for office at age 77.
Much of his extraordinary term in office revolved around the topic of money, which itself is remarkable.
[... more at link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/ ...]
I’ve talked about the need for a “shelf of books,” that are contemporary and correct, and which can serve as the conceptual foundation for whatever monetary system may eventually replace our present arrangements. No old books and no books that are so full of fallacy as to be unusable, no matter how well-meaning the authors may have been. People actually understand these things significantly better today than was the case in the 1960s and 1970s, although unfortunately that improvement has not been well documented in print.
One reason why we still have floating currencies today is that people just didn’t understand these things at all in the 1970s. You would think that after twenty years of extraordinary prosperity during the 1950s and 1960s with the Bretton Woods gold standard arrangement, and a decade of inflationary disaster in the 1970s with floating fiat currencies, that people in the U.S. might have been a little favorable toward the Classical (gold-based) monetary approach that the U.S. had pursued for the previous 182 years. Nope. Paul recounts his experience at the 1981 Congressional Gold Commission:
“Henry Reuss, chairman of the House Banking Committee, attended one meeting and left in a rage. He couldn’t stand one minute of serious consideration of the importance of gold.”
That was a typical response from other supposedly knowledgeable people at that time. The ignorance of that era is breathtaking — especially considering that the U.S.’s gold standard era had ended only ten years previous.
I’ve added End the Fed to my personal “shelf.” I might quibble with some of the details and historical interpretations — particularly regarding some of the nitty-gritty procedures of how to set up and run gold-based currencies, my personal area of focus — but that is not particularly important. End the Fed provides a big-picture view, of how rotten money leads to rottenness throughout government and society as a whole. And, it does so in an accessible way, from someone who has seen it happen first-hand over decades.
Paul argues that the present system may disintegrate before too long — indeed, he doesn’t expect much positive progress in monetary affairs until then. The understanding in this book helps insure that the next phase of the long evolution of humans and money won’t suffer from the failings of the post-1971 floating-currency system, or, for that matter, the flawed Bretton Woods gold standard arrangement that preceded it. The stupidity of Henry Reuss in 1981 would seem … as stupid as it actually was.
When the time again comes to discuss the topic of Classical and Mercantilist approaches to money (in practice, gold-based or floating fiat money), it would be nice if people at least understood what they are talking about.
[... see link for full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanl...ondenses-a-lifetime-of-wisdom-and-experience/ ...]
