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This is the fiftieth anniversary of the demise of the gold standard and the beginning of the current fiat paper standard. Many will say “good riddance” to gold and “thank goodness” for the “good ole greenback”! Reflection, however, produces an alternative conclusion. To be sure, the opinion of current experts places great weight on paper money.

Aron Ravin, a self-described “nudnik,” who writes for National Review thinks so and I suspect others do as well. This thinking, however, is that of an ever-shrinking minority and it is hard to imagine the pro-legalization trend being reversed. Nevertheless, let’s look at the arguments and why he claims libertarians are so wrong on this issue. 

Wouldn’t it be nice to permanently rid ourselves of economic crises? In a previous article, I showed that the waste of the boom and the cost of the bust are brutal even using the best recovery policies available. Here I unveil the reason for the ongoing boom-bust cycle and how to eliminate the cycle crisis permanently. Most people think that the

Austerity works. We know what it is and don’t like it, but it works. It usually means cutting your consumption and spending, paying down your debts, pawning assets, and working more hours to restore your economic situation. You might invoke “austerity” because you lost your job, your house burned down, or you have an unexpected child on the way.

Along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig , Ben Bernanke was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics today. The three have written extensively on the need to bail out the banks in times when the economy is in corrective mode, generally after a long period of monetary injections. Bernanke was Chairman of the Federal Reserve when he pushed for the

Mainstream economists view the economy as fickle, unstable, and always in danger of utter collapse. They see the outlook as very bleak if not for the enormous existing superstructure of government intervention, including constant stimulus of “aggregate demand.” In their minds, this essential stabilization would also include the existing intricate

My  previous article demonstrated how the free market solves a boom-bust crisis and is the only solution, its effectiveness depending upon the magnitude of the crisis and, more importantly, how much the government intervenes in response. The bigger the problem created by the Fed, the greater the crisis and the more government intervenes, and the

As we enter the holiday season stock owners have been the big losers of 2022, but jobs are still plentiful and nominal wages are rising rapidly. The Wall Street Journal reports “Stiff Demand Drives Gains in Jobs, Wages” (December 4). Faced with a stagnant stock market, nothing bolsters confidence more than the plethora of job openings, seemingly

The Federal Reserve has a legal dual mandate to minimize unemployment and price inflation. The current “dual” between the two mandates is to reduce price inflation by increasing interest rates to increase unemployment and kill businesses to choke off aggregate demand. This has been the most important economic and investment issue this year and

Abstract: The rise of socialism has been one of the more dramatic movements in US politics in the modern era, with recent Gallup polling indicating that 39 percent of Americans (and 65 percent of Democrats) hold a favorable view of the political economic ideology. Upward trends in the popularity of political economic ideologies such as socialism