Gasoline Prices Are Not Rising, the Dollar Is Falling | Forbes

Louis Woodhill explains.

Quantitative Easing Explained

You're invited | LewRockwell.com

The historic first hearing of Chairman Ron Paul's monetary policy committee, to expose the Fed as the prime creator of unemployment and so much human suffering, will take place at: 10:00AM on Wednesday, February 9, 2011, in Room 2128 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the main hearing room of the Financial Services Committee. The witnesses include the eloquent Austro-free-market stars Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College and Richard Vedder of Ohio University.

The Fed itself, and at least three big banks, lobbied against Ron's chairmanship. Republicans who share their fear of the truth worked with Paul Ryan, chairman of the "Budget" Committee, to schedule hearings with Bernanke at the exact same time as Ron's, to try to diminish the significance of Ron's. Ryan, btw, is the fair-haired boy of the Republican leadership who gave the boring response to Obama's boring State of the Empire Address. Like the Republican leadership, Ryan talks about cutting spending, but that is only a ruse. Ryan is a big-government neocon, and so naturally supported TARP, Bush's prescription drug welfare, his wars, and the empire.

I don't believe this insider trick will work against Ron, because his support comes not from the regime or the Republican leadership, but from the grassroots. I think the Paulians will pack Ron's hearings, and not only to show their support for him against the power elite. These hearings will have huge significance in the fight against the Fed, the fractional-reserve banksters, and other destroyers of our prosperity and freedom. It will also be a lot of fun!

Reposted from LewRockwell.com

Photos: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), chairman of the House subcommittee on Monetary Policy, top left, and Ben Bernake, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Requiem for the Dollar | The Wall Street Journal

James Grant Mourns the Loss of the Gold Standard - WSJ.com:

Money Bomb

How not to prevent a recession

by William L. Anderson

I recently heard a radio interview with a prominent economist who was defending Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's moves to shore up the markets on Wall Street. Bernanke, the economist said with emphasis, had spent years studying the "mistakes" of the Fed during the Great Depression and was not going to repeat the "errors" that the Fed directors committed from 1930 to 1933.

The "errors" of which the economist spoke were outlined by the late Milton Friedman both in his 1963 A Monetary History of the United States (written with Anna Schwartz) and his popular Free to Choose (with Rose Friedman), published in 1979. According to Friedman and his coauthors, the economic collapse that occurred in the United States from 1930 to 1933 came about because the Federal Reserve System failed to act in the face of bank failures and banking panics, leading to a massive contraction in the amount of money in circulation, which ultimately led to the calamity.

Friedman made his arguments as a means to counteract the common explanation of the Great Depression — that it was the result of the "internal contradictions" of capitalism. The typical explanation, popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith as well as the gaggle of Keynesians that proliferated in US universities, was that the capitalist system tends toward "underconsumption" or its evil twin, "overproduction."

(Galbraith held that underconsumption occurred because the income "gap" between the wealthy and poor grew during the 1920s — another "natural" outcome of capitalism — while John Maynard Keynes and his followers held that private investment spending was volatile because of the "animal spirits" of investors. The system had a built-in, self-multiplying, downward spiral whenever private investors were unwilling to throw more money into the economy.)

Those who blamed the Great Depression on the "failures" of the free market were all too happy to come up with their own "solutions," including attempts to cartelize the entire US economy or to force up wages via increased minimum-wage legislation or through the endorsement of expanding labor unions. Some, like Galbraith, went further and advocated out-and-out socialism and central economic planning. The free-market system, they have argued, is too inherently unstable to be left to its own devices. (This is the same argument that Paul Krugman makes twice a week from his perch on the New York Times op-ed page)

Thus, Friedman was seeking not only to explain why he believed the Great Depression occurred, but he also was trying to defend the free-market system, or at least was trying to defend most of the free market system. There was one portion of the system that was prone to failure, he argued, and that was the monetary system.

For more on this article, go to the Ludwig von Mises Institute's Website