Changing the truth?


Words mean things. Sometimes the wrong things. Especially when someone is trying to undermine the free market.
Kevin D. Rollins has some amazing things to say about undermining free markets by changing the definitions.

Timberlake (225) answers that the "interwar gold standard was not a gold standard. It was an entirely different system than the pre-1914 gold standard that had existed for 100 years. Timberlake brings in Leland Yeager to make the case: "The gold standard of the late 1920s was hardly more than a façade. It involved extreme measures to economise on gold… It involved neutralization or offsetting of international influences on domestic money supplies, incomes, and prices. Gold standard methods of balance-of-payments equilibrium were largely destroyed…"

In other words, it was Fed policy, not the gold standard that precipitated the Depression...

If this sounds familiar, it should.

It gets better.

Ignacio Briones and Hugh Rockoff investigate the larger question of free banking in their article, "Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Free-Banking Episodes?" Like "the gold standard," they find that the term "free banking" has been used to describe monetary systems which had various levels of freedom from regulation, but none of which was totally free from government tinkering (315). None achieved the total free market in money envisioned by Hayek...

Or, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride,

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Wed - November 28, 2007 at 05:03 AM  Tag


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