A Misesian Century

Tuesday, February 05, 2013 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

[This talk was delivered on January 26, 2013, at the Jeremy S. Davis Mises Circle in Houston, Texas.]

In December, it will be 100 years since Congress authorized the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Throughout that century the Fed has enjoyed broad bipartisan support. That’s another way of saying the Fed never appeared on the political radar until Ron Paul broke the rules by actually campaigning against it in 2007.

The Fed was supposed to provide stability to the financial sector and the economy at large. We are supposed to believe it has been a wonderful success. A glance at the headlines over the past five years renders an unkind verdict on this rarely examined assumption.

Last year we observed another important centenary—the 100-year anniversary of the publication of Ludwig von Mises’s pathbreaking book, The Theory of Money and Credit, written when the great economist was just 31. The end of an era was approaching as that book reached the public. A century of sound money, albeit with exceptions here and there, was drawing to a close. It had likewise been a century of peace, or at least without a continent-wide war, since the Congress of Vienna. Both of these happy trends came to an abrupt end for the same reason: the outbreak in 1914 of World War I, the great cataclysm of Western civilization.   To Read More….