Monetary Theory

A more realistic view is that a housing boom and bust happened to strike a fragile financial system whose fragility was worsened by ill-conceived government interventions.

A satisfactory explanation of business fluctuations must not be built upon the fact that individual firms make bad investments.

It is true that there is such a thing as the corn-hog cycle and analogous happenings in the production of other farm products. But the recurrence of such cycles is due to the fact that the penalties which the market applies against inefficient and clumsy entrepreneurs do not affect a great part of the farmers. These farmers are not answerable for their actions because they are the pet children of governments and politicians. If it were not so, they would long since have gone bankrupt and their former farms would be operated by more intelligent people.

Instead of addressing the Depression though the proven expedient of private-bank-issued scrip, the Roosevelt administration's plan involved suspension of the gold standard, followed by devaluation and the abrogation of the gold clause, cartelization of the banks of the country, the National Recovery Act, the Wagner Act, the alphabet-soup agencies, Social Security, and the beginning of an ever-expanding government.

Keynesianism ignores the fact that government spending must come either from tax dollars or from the printing presses, both of which harm the common man. Instead, Keynesianism promises that we can all pick one another's pockets — and all get rich doing it!

There is as much work to be done as there are unfulfilled desires.

Money and wealth are distinct, and we should not assume that a fall in the stock indices necessarily means that "that money" has now been transferred someplace else.

Anderson's contribution to economic theory is summed up in his two books: Social Value and The Value of Money.

"There can be no such thing as a Keynesian state on the gold standard, any more then a cocaine addict or compulsive gambler can be on a strict budget."

From Part I of A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II: “The History of Money and Bank