In discussing the Mises Institute’s June 24th full-page Wall Street Journal ad entitled “Who Needs the Fed?” on talk radio recently most of the interviewers naturally expressed skepticism over whether the Fed could ever actually be abolished and a gold-and-silver standard reinstituted. It reminded me of something Murray Rothbard said about this. If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the privatization of shoe production, there would be cries of: “Who will make shoes? The government has always made shoes!”
Well, America has not always had a central bank and in fact, the three precursors of the Fed — the Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States — were all abolished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
It happened then, and it can happen again. Continue reading
Do you remember how painful the Great Recession was? 2008 and the years immediately following were definitely a very dark chapter in our history, but a new study has actually found that the percentage of Americans that worry they won’t be able to pay their bills is actually higher today than it was back then.
Well, here’s an interesting historical repeat. Apparently, it took the Roman Empire about 200 years to reduce the value of its currency, the silver Denarius, by 95%. As shown in the chart below, the silver content of the Roman currency had been nearly 100% at the peak of the Empire in 65 AD, but by 268 AD the coin had been clipped and debased so thoroughly that it was comprised of less than 5% silver. 
Cryptocurrency, which has exploded in popularity in recent years, is digital ‘money’ which lies beyond the control of central banks and governments.
As I am sure you are aware, we have entered tumultuous times. In this article we are going to consider the Big Picture and what it means to us as investors.
I’m not much into the economic area. It’s far from being my long suit. But I caught an item on the news this morning that grabbed my attention. It talked about how, in our present day, most young couples cannot afford to buy a home. With Biden’s inflationary policies running amok the American dream of owning your own home and setting roots down in your own community is now “out of reach.” I noted, awhile back, another news item I saw about how most young folks in the 25 year old age bracket are still living with their parents instead of getting out on their own. It’s lots cheaper. 
The magazine was DISCOVER, October 1998.
I have written to you more times than I can count about how the US government’s own budget officials forecast a $20 trillion increase in national debt over the next ten years.
The historical embodiment of monetary freedom is the gold standard. The era of its greatest flourishing was not coincidentally the 19th century, the century in which classical liberal ideology reigned, a century of unprecedented material progress and peaceful relations between nations. Unfortunately, the monetary freedom represented by the gold standard, along with many other freedoms of the classical liberal era, was brought to a calamitous end by World War I. 
