Barbarians at the Gate
Alan Greenspan returns to his libertarian roots more and more each day. The stunner quote: "We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it's usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity... There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard." Link. As the article points out, Greenspan has joined a number of gold-standard fans: Jim Grant (considered by many the most-influential finance journalist today), World Bank president Robert Zoellick, and Howard Buffett (Warren's dad). Not a bad fan base for a mere "barbarous relic." I gotta believe it makes Paul Krugman apopleptic with rage. All the idiocy. No one, of course, besides him can see with crystal clarity. If the rest of the world would merely fall in line with Keynesianism, everything would be just fine. We haven't, you see, really given it a thorough try. It's like Communism. It just hasn't been implemented properly. We need Krugmanites to do it, and then everything would be just fine. * * * * * * * New Book. Walter Williams has published his autobiography, Up from the Projects. I recently vowed not to buy any more books, since I've been enjoying visits back to books that I read long ago (two are linked below) and re-reading passages. But I might have to make an exception for this book. The WSJ discussed the book with Williams. It's a good article and worth reading, but the title says it all: The State Against Blacks. * * * * * * * Funny Conan: "A new study found that nearly 1 out of 3 people can't resist using Facebook while in the bathroom. I'm just grateful they're not using Skype."
