Lew Rockwell on War and Inflation
Here is a lovely tidbit from this speech by Lew Rockwell, founder and president of Auburn’s Ludwig von Mises Institute, presented on June 6th.
You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists and talk about the twentieth century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding U.S. militarism.
And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions. Keep in mind that this is only a problem for the state. It is not a problem for the people.
The inability of the state to fund its unlimited ambitions is worth more for the people than every kind of legal check and balance. It is more valuable than all the constitutions ever devised.
Very insightful, Don Lando. I had never looked at it in this way before.
The Bruce
June 10, 2008 at 7:03 pm
I would postulate that the single most important power of any government is its ability to mint currency and essentially create its own economy by doing so. Rome did much of the same to combat Hannibal in the third century BC.
Mein Schatz
June 12, 2008 at 1:39 am