A Pro-Free-Market Program for Economic Recovery

I may have said this before, but Uncle George Reisman must be one of the most staggeringly intelligent men in the known multiverse. One of the few who ever possessed the intellectual cojones to stand toe-to-toe up against Uncle Murray, as one of Mises' select band of primary students, Uncle George is still producing immense pieces of work which are astonishing both for their brilliance and for their simplicity.

In this speech, delivered to the Ludwig von Mises Institute's Mises Circle in Newport Beach, California on November 14, 2009, Uncle George outlines a single coherent plan to end the current global financial crisis and establish a 100% gold reserve standard, with a handful of technical measures hinging upon turning the massive excess fiat reserves of the world's largest banks into 100% paper reserves, and then moving directly from there towards a 100% gold reserve standard.

He does acknowledge that politically this will be extremely difficult, because Keynesians and other Marxist clowns occupy most of the world's capitals, and most of the world's populations are similarly drenched in Marxist capitalist exploitation ideology, but that technically it is almost a perfect solution for killing two birds with one stone, i.e. ending the world depression and preventing all future deflationary and inflationary world depressions.

Whatever the case on the political difficulties of this (such as abandoning all minimum wage laws and curtailing special rights for trades unions), at least Uncle George makes it clear that there are solutions just sitting there waiting to be engaged. That we don't engage them is more a symptom of our overall stupidity in the world, caused by Marxist envy, than it is any fault of these methods.

You Marxists out there, reading this, certainly have a lot to answer for. I hope you're capable of understanding what Uncle George has to say. You might actually learn something useful.

In the meantime, Uncle George, we salute your immensity.

It certainly keeps me fully mentally occupied down the gym when I'm trying to knock out 20 kilometres on the static bicycle:



Silverlight Audio: http://mises.org/media/4240

Silverlight Video: http://mises.org/media/4270

Here is the text.