Gas prices are at an all-time high. Rents are skyrocketing. Prices at the grocery store are surging. Prices of new and used cars are spiraling out of control. That’s what happens when the Federal Reserve debases the currency by inflating the money supply, which the Fed has been doing for the past several years and, actually, since its inception 109 years ago.
To address what the Fed has done — and continues to do — to our nation, we are holding an online conference entitled “End Inflation and the Fed” via Zoom this fall.
For 32 years, with the generous support of our donors, we have held conferences such as this one with the aim of raising people’s awareness of the principles of a genuinely free society. I am writing to seek your continued support of our efforts to advance liberty through the spoken word.
America once had the finest monetary system in history. It was one in which gold and silver coins were the nation’s official money, because our ancestors didn’t trust paper money. In fact, the Framers expressly provided for gold and silver coins in the Constitution. That excellent monetary system came to an end with President Franklin Roosevelt’s confiscation of gold during the Great Depression, a crisis that, as Milton Friedman and Austrian economists have documented, was a direct consequence of the Federal Reserve’s manipulation of the money supply.
Today, the Biden administration is blaming soaring prices on Russia, COVID-19, and greedy service-station owners. That’s pure nonsense. It’s just a way to avoid placing responsibility where it genuinely lies — with the Federal Reserve and its inflationary policies.
We mustn’t avoid the big elephant in the room that drives the Fed to print ever-increasing amounts of paper money — the massive spending spree that U.S. officials have engaged in during the past several decades. The spending has been — and continues to be — so massive that the amount of debt that federal officials have incurred now exceeds $30 trillion. That amounts to $242,986 per taxpayer. And that doesn’t even include Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements. Meanwhile, while American families struggle with soaring prices, Congress just approved more than $800 billion in additional taxpayer-funded largess to the military-industrial complex.For 32 years, The Future of Freedom Foundation has been warning against out-of-control federal spending, debt, and inflation. In fact, in 1990, the first year of publishing our monthly journal, we carried two articles by Richard Ebeling, who at that time was serving as FFF’s vice president of academic affairs, one entitled, “Free Market Money — Instead of Political Manipulation” and the other “On the Edge of Hyperinflation in Brazil.” You can read those two essays on our website and also purchase his great book entitled Monetary Central Planning and the State.
The Fed’s current plan to raise interest rates will do nothing but throw the economy into another recession as part of the boom-and-bust cycle that comes with a central bank. We don’t need any more destructive monetary band-aids for a system that is inherently defective and has caused so much damage. We need an entirely different monetary paradigm — one that is based on free-market principles and sound money.
In fact, as we continue to emphasize here at FFF, we need an entirely new political and economic paradigm of liberty for America, one based on the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and a limited-government republic, which will lead us toward peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
I hope you will recommend our work to others. We are offering a Summer special on gift subscriptions to our monthly journal, Future of Freedom — just $5 per year for the email/PDF version.
Yours for liberty,
Jacob Hornberger