from http://towneforcongress.com/:

"Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money and control credit, and with a flick of a pen they will create enough to buy it back."

- Josiah Stamp, former President of the Bank of England

On November 22, 2009 I delivered some remarks after a rally and march at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.  Following my return from China, this was the first time I had the chance to speak publicly on the transition phase to sound money, and while there are plenty of FED critics, it is still rare to find solid ideas on how best to replace the FED, and furthermore, how such a transition be accomplished. Though stymied by government interventions in the short term, I believe the free market will win out in the long term.  For instance, there were probably over 100 people in the crowd I spoke to that possess physical gold and silver. The dollar-denominated prices of gold and silver continue to rise at blistering rates since 2001 as the collapse of the dollar and fiat currencies unfolds.

It is so very important to realize that what we are seeing is not so much the appreciation of gold and silver as it is the unmasking of the devaluation in the dollar by the central banks. My sincere thanks to the late Dr. Murray Rothbard where one day, while sitting in Shanghai skyscraper, a single mouseclick led me down the rabbit hole, and I began to start discovering the truth about the current dishonest monetary system.

"END THE FED.... Then What? - The Transition to Sound Money” is the title of my talk today, and it's a bit of an ambitious undertaking for a half an hour, but it's an important topic since all of us who gathered here to protest the Federal Reserve today need to also have a plan on how best to replace the FED and the fiat monetary system.  One note before I begin.  I openly acknowledge that my idea is at best a starting point, and I welcome a healthy debate on this topic.  I have given this particular topic quite a bit of research since first becoming aware that the dollar was not backed by gold about 2 years ago, and this past summer I attended Mises University, which is one of the very few places in the nation where one can study Austrian free market economics – the other two places being George Mason University in DC, and Grove City College in Pittsburgh.

In this talk I will first address what the goal is – as one must always begin with the end in mind. Then I will briefly discuss several transition ideas that are already present in literature, describe possible issues with each, and then spend the remainder of the time outlining my proposal.

http://mises.org/story/3787

The World of Salamanca

Mises Daily: Tuesday, October 27, 2009 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

The subject of the medieval period highlights the vast gulf that separates scholarly opinion from popular opinion. This is a grave frustration for scholars who have been working to change popular opinion for a hundred years. For most people, the medieval period brings to mind populations living by myths and crazy superstitions such as we might see in a Monty Python skit. Scholarly opinion, however, knows otherwise. The age between the 8th and 16th centuries was a time of amazing advance in every area of knowledge, such as architecture, music, biology, mathematics, astronomy, industry, and — yes — economics.

One might think it would be enough to look at the Burgos Cathedral of St. Mary, begun in 1221 and completed nine years later, to know there is something gravely wrong with the popular wisdom.

The popular wisdom comes through in the convention among nonspecialists to trace the origins of promarket thinking to Adam Smith (1723–1790). The tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans, because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in the year America seceded from Britain.

There is much this view of intellectual history overlooks. The real founders of economic science actually wrote hundreds of years before Smith. They were not economists as such, but moral theologians, trained in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, and they came to be known as the Late Scholastics. These men, most of whom taught in Spain, were at least as pro–free market as the much-later Scottish tradition. Plus, their theoretical foundation was even more solid: they anticipated the theories of value and price of the "marginalists" of late 19th-century Austria.

Read the rest of this article at Mises.org

Money in North American History

From Wampum to Electronic Funds Transfer

How did the United States develop into the world's richest and most powerful nation from an inauspicious beginning as a collection of colonies where currency was in such chronically short supply that all sorts of substitutes, e.g. tobacco and wampum, had to be used as money?

Apart from its intrinsic interest, history can often shed light on current political controversies. Many political disputes revolve around questions of economics and of all the matters that fall under the purview of economic history there is one that has had, and still has, a profound impact on many aspects of everyone's daily life, and that is money. This essay is based on a book on monetary history by Glyn Davies which contains a considerable amount of material on the financial development of the United States.

The reference is:

Davies, Glyn. A history of money from ancient times to the present day, 3rd ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002. 720 pages. Paperback: ISBN 0 7083 1717 0.

Click the title or here to read the article.