PrintDecember 28, 2009
Money: Debauched, Debased, and Destroyed
Years ago, I was having a beer in the bar of a restaurant with an academic when he said something to the effect of "Money isn't real." On the contrary, he insisted, money's real because we agree that it's real. Money exists in an agreed-upon structure of trust, just as do contracts, ownership, and other abstractions, including the abstraction of value.But money's big problem is its tendency to suffer loss of value, a.k.a. inflation.One can think of inflation as either a decrease in the value of money or as an increase in the value of what money buys. But however one thinks of it, inflation is The Supreme Economic Evil. (Inflation in the Weimar Republic paved the way for Hitler.) And since government creates money and therefore controls the money supply, government is the main culprit where inflation is concerned.We're talking about the Federal Reserve. Some contend that the Fed prolonged the Great Depression and caused the inflation of the late 1970s. Some contend that the...(Read Full Article)
