April 5, 2011
By Anthony Gregory
4/4/2011
Last month, Alan Greenspan told a House panel that the current financial crisis has shown he had “made a mistake” in trusting the free market to regulate itself. As a true free marketer, I took offense at this. Here he was, the former head of the Federal Reserve, the governmental monopoly of the money supply, implying that what he had championed was free-market capitalism.
Of course, a true free market would mean a separation of money and state. There would be no Fed, no central bank, no legal tender laws. Private currencies would be free to compete with one another. Money originally emerged as a market mechanism and it could and would again be completely managed without government intervention of any kind. What most of us here would expect to happen is to see gold and other precious metals once again take the role as the premier money in our economy.
This all brings us to the major myth behind the Fed: That it is the center of our free enterprise system. In fact, it is the exact reverse. It is the state’s tool for socializing and intervening in the most crucial of all commodities in an exchange economy — money itself. Going back to the Hamiltonians who always wanted a national bank to fund their pet corporate welfare projects, the central bankers and their advocates have always been the great enemy of free markets in America. Read More
