I have posted this Alan Greenspan essay from 1966 a number of times on AgTalk. If you have read it before, I apologize. But it always seems to me when the discussion comes up of some of these financial points there are still a number of people that believe the current system we are under is and has been the ultimate system and that is why we have it. Quite far from the truth. The system we are now under is really the temporary result of failed policies from the past that became permanent by default. When Nixon closed the gold window by making the dollar no longer convertible to gold, the proclamation was "temporary". It was done because of the failure of the Bretton Woods agreement because the US had inflated the money supply far beyond what we could meet in the way of our obligations. We defaulted. Essentially we had a currency failure. The only reason we still have the US dollar today is because we were the worlds super power and no one was about to bomb us to get their money back and there was really no good alternative as most nations still depended on the US for leadership. We pretty much screwed them and there was not much they could do about it.

I'm getting off on a tangent. If you read this Alan Greenspan essay it explains how the conventional explanation of what caused the great depression is wrong, how the current system is set up to silently steal ordinary citizens money, and what system worked pretty well before 1900. This is all before he became Fed chair. Why he did what he did as Fed chair we can only guess. His tenure was a vast departure of what he claimed to believe in this essay. And he still stands by it.

Ron Paul in private conversation with Alan Greenspan (I believe shortly after Greenspan retired) ask him if he were to write that essay today if there is anything he would change. He replied to Ron Paul "not a word".

There is tremendous wisdom and history in this essay. I wish everyone could read it and take it to heart. Having read it again recently, it stood out to me even more than when I read it a number of years ago.

Economic Freedom

John