People are increasingly seeing the many flaws of the economic orthodoxy that has been preached to them by academics and governments alike.
Where this ends no one knows, including the keepers of the orthodox flames.
Our hope here is that there will be a reversion back to what was simply considered normal for large periods of human history, including most periods of great improvement in standards of living, which is that sound money is a linchpin of a fair and sensible economic system.

If the world economy is going to be pulled ahead by an Asian locomotive, the U.S. had better start figuring out how to reserve some good seats on the train.

Back in 1884 there was a financial crisis that was, “triggered by an overflow of gold abroad, as foreigners began to lose confidence in the willingness of the United States to remain on the gold standard.” As Jim Grant describes, the crisis was “the real McCoy — ‘the wildest kind of panic raged, and securities were thrown overboard regardless of price.’” In those days there was no Federal Reserve, no lender of last resort, no central bank (or multiple central banks) to flood the market with liquidity and cheap credit. So, left to the market, the overnight money rate rose to 4% — per day! (That’s a higher rate than your local payday-loan store offers these days) But the crisis only lasted three weeks, writes Elmus Wicker in Banking Panics of the Gilded Age. The current crisis? Three years and counting.

When the Fed’s defenders champion its independence, what they mean is independence from democratic institutions. It turns out not to be so independent of the large banks.
In most of the world, government and banking tend to be highly entangled. I read Niall Ferguson as saying that this entanglement historically came about because governments were financing wars. One of the dubious achievements of the Progressive movement was convincing Americans that such entanglement is necessary in a modern economy that did not need to finance wars.

We confuse charisma with competence, rhetoric with results, celebrity with achievement. We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape blame. And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

To propose the abolition of central banking is indeed crazy today – just as, say, proposing the abolition of slavery was crazy in 1812, or proposing the abolition of military conscription was crazy in 1952. The dominance of the unexamined premises of too many Right-thinking Serious people in the past suffocated practical efforts to fundamentally reform the way labor was supplied to plantation owners and, later, to the military. Similar unexamined premises today suffocate practical efforts to fundamentally reform the way money is supplied to the economy.

It’s hard to think of a single tax, or a single regulation, that doesn’t end up privileging some vested interest at the expense of the general population. The reason governments keep growing is because of what economists call ‘dispersed costs and concentrated gains’: people are generally more aware the benefits they receive than of the taxes they pay.

The bouts of famine that still haunt Africa were routine throughout history and the globe. These were ended only when, only where, and only to the extent that bourgeois culture and its adornments – chiefly, reasonably free entrepreneurial markets – flourished. To recognize this fact is to rob western busybodies of sexy agendas; but it is also to point the only way toward real prosperity for Africans.

But wait: why on earth would Congress advise violent militarised reactions against its own peaceful constituents? The answer is straightforward: in recent years, members of Congress have started entering the system as members of the middle class (or upper middle class) – but they are leaving DC privy to vast personal wealth, as we see from the “scandal” of presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s having been paid $1.8m for a few hours’ “consulting” to special interests. The inflated fees to lawmakers who turn lobbyists are common knowledge, but the notion that congressmen and women are legislating their own companies’ profitsis less widely known – and if the books were to be opened, they would surely reveal corruption on a Wall Street spectrum. Indeed, we do already know that congresspeople are massively profiting from trading on non-public information they have on companies about which they are legislating – a form of insider trading that sent Martha Stewart to jail.