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ORIGINAL: Edwynn

I did not re-read the article just in this instance, no. I had already read it before some time ago. But primarily I have read numerous scholarly, peer reviewed articles and books on the history of finance and money, well researched works written by those in the field who know the subject well. This author does not meet those qualifications. What that article did not tell you is any of the surrounding economic conditions and circumstances, and especially not the macro and microeconomic repercussions of a currency that did not accommodate any other consideration but the exchange rate. Did the article tell you about the five different financial  crises in the 19th century? about the plethora of wildcat banks that issued their own notes in the first half of the century? about the farmers who suffered greatly from the ongoing depreciation in the latter half of the century? about the wild swings in GDP and unemployment? The ONLY thing that was mostly stable was the price of gold. Everything else suffered as a consequence, including prices of goods and services.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

Wars were financed long before central banking was promulgated.

It is a distinction without a difference. 

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ORIGINAL: provfivetine

That's all nonsense. Rothbard is a Columbia PhD and has a CV thicker than a phone book, which is all peer-reviewed.

He has written in stupefying detail about all of these events and certainly does understand the history:
The Panic of 1819
The Great Depression
Monetary History from Colonial Era to WWII

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Of course since she is routinely attacked by Paul Krugman, we know she speaks truth.

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ORIGINAL: mnottertail

No, not really.  Same way we do it today, taxes, bond of indebtedness, and those types of levies. 

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ORIGINAL: Edwynn

Which tomes no credible economists read, or in any case give any serious consideration. The only people who will publish his ongoing polemic (whatever factly sounding titles, that's all they are) are his compatriots at the Mises institute.

I go to the library and find the real thing.

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ORIGINAL: Edwynn


That's only because he was required to use bonafide creditable data and no hokum allowed as required by his professors in order to get the PhD. Even then I've never heard him referred to as a 'leading authority' on the subject beyond that paper, though 1819 does not in any case explain the entirety of 19th century financial history. All PhDs in that and several other subjects are expected to plow new ground in some way or another, so indeed they have their 15 minutes of being a leading authority if they go into detail where no detail has ever been delved before.

I'm sure the paper was pretty good, given the circumscribed environment of academic restraint on his soon to be revealed penchant for paintball gunning any and everything that could even potentially be ascribed "public" or "commonwealth" or "higher goal" or "advancement" or even just sniffed of rational thought. All the while, the intention was to be a soldier in the contra-social and counter-evolutionary and anti-cerebral Jihad of Miseslam, so as to get us back to our roots and do the limbic limbo dance once again, striving ever lower, not higher. That invention of fire thing is hard to let go of, the nostalgia being warm and attractive, I can imagine. Why did we ever propose to stray from our glory days?


Hey, brighter minds than his have joined cults. We were just speaking of this the other day in the McCarthyism/Fellowship/'Family' thread.