How Have the Mighty Fallen
The current COVID-19-inspired crisis has yielded a golden opportunity to take a scientific look at underlying social forces. (By scientific, I refer here not to natural science, but to analysis, the objective appraisal from the proverbial 30,000 feet, which is of course scarcely possible for mortal flesh, but at least is an aspiration.) What it…Continue Reading “Hayek versus Hegel in the Age of COVID”
It is Wednesday, April 22nd. I remember another one, in 1970: a bright, warm, sunny day, not unusual for that time of year in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and a special day at Lynnhaven Elementary School. It was different – for one thing, we did not arrive in the usual school bus, but at our own…Continue Reading “Earth Day 1970”
In the system we have now, we do use both a reserve restriction and an asset restriction. But, the modern reserve restriction has changed fundamentally, and has nothing to do with the monetarist understanding of reserve restrictions, except in a purely formal sense. In the day of specie convertibility, reserve restriction had a definite functionality….Continue Reading “Fact and Fiction on Reserve Requirements”
In a comment posted under an article by my friend Jerry Bowyer (Where’s the Hyperinflation?), “ps61penn62prin64” writes that “private currency monetary systems… are doomed to fail the interest of American citizens.” Bowyer’s article discusses the sizeable increase in the money supply generated by the Fed, and how this has — or has not — affected…Continue Reading “Private Issue of Money — the Root of Our Monetary Problem?”