Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

John Mackey on the Fed and bailouts

The Wall Street Journal features an interesting interview with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey:
there’s one other institution John Mackey thinks needs a makeover—and that’s government. He describes what the Federal Reserve has done with massive money creation as “debauchery of the currency.” He thinks the bailouts were a travesty. ..”I don’t think anybody’s too big [...]

A false choice on the Fed and inflation

Economists publicly press the point that an independent Fed has a better track record in controlling inflation than a politicized Fed but Robert Higgs draws attention to

the undeniable fact that for more than a century before the Fed’s establishment, the purchasing power of the dollar fluctuated around an approximately horizontal trend line—that is, despite inflations [...]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on stimulus and monetary policy

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, whose writings display a unique combination of common sense and sophisticated epistemological awareness, has co-authored an opinion piece with Mark Spitznagel on the dangers of our culture of debt and misplaced trust in the economic experts of the government and the Fed. One does not need to completely agree with the authors [...]

Politicized money

Monetary policy is governed by the rule of men, rather than the rule of law. The results are what public choice theory would predict and monetary history has documented: booms, busts, and panics.

writes Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. in Money and the Present Crisis (PDF).
In the same issue of the Cato Journal about lessons from the [...]

Four prosperity killers

Whether you believe that the Federal Reserve’s recent monetary decisions represent the smartest response to the current financial meltdown or puts us on the road to third world hyperinflation, there seems to be little disagreement about the risk of high inflation (or even stagflation). To Larry Kudlow this means that all the elements are in [...]

The holiest of holy cows

The February 09, 2009 Issue of the American Conservative features a number of heterodox articles on monetary policy. In his article Fed Up: The Popular Uprising Against Central Banking, Thomas Woods writes about the holiest of holy cows of conservative and libertarian leaning think tanks:

The libertarian and conservative think tanks that liberally invoke the names [...]