Dr. Mark Thornton joins the show to discuss what might just be Murray Rothbard’s best book on money and banking: The Case Against the Fed. Written not long before his untimely death, this work is nothing less than a master class on the history of money; he sordid players and interests behind the creation of the Federal Reserve bank; the workings of demand deposits and fractional reserve, inflationism, and the monetary mechanics behind it all. The final pages of the short and penetrating book are especially fascinating, as Rothbard lays out a process for unwinding the Fed and paying off its liabilities using the federal government physical gold holding. End the Fed starts with understanding the Fed, and this book is vital for any lay reader.
Find the online version of the book at Mises.org/RothbardFed
The Mises Institute exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. These great thinkers developed praxeology, a deductive science of human action based on premises known with certainty to be true, and this is what we teach and advocate. Our scholarly work is founded in Misesian praxeology, and in self-conscious opposition to the mathematical modeling and hypothesis-testing that has created so much confusion in neoclassical economics. Visit https://mises.org