Inflation

President Trump is reportedly considering former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and one-time presidential candidate Herman Cain for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. 

Several major central banks around the world, including the Federal Reserve in the United States, have set a goal of two percent price inflation. The problem is, what central bankers are targeting is a phantom that does not exist.

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was one of the most influential economic theorists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures.

Venezuela is an official Socialist Utopia disaster area. (It would be nice if Team Bernie Sanders and his Democrat cohorts were paying attention – but who are we kidding.)
The United States State Department issued a travel warning back on September 18 (which still appears to be in place). The news, meanwhile, is chock full of horror stories for the people of Venezuela – the victims of full government’s inexorable conclusion.

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.