21 car century insurance: One vote I insist you cast

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Whenever there's a crisis, you can be sure of one thing: the federal government and its lackeys will come up with an explanation that exonerates it, and will push that version of events until it becomes something "everybody knows."

So "everybody knows" that the reason for the crash of 2008 wasn't federal housing policy or the central bank it gives a monopoly to -- why, it was insufficient regulation! If only we had given the feds power to crack more skulls, we could have avoided it.

There isn't a stitch of truth in any of that, but it's the standard view you'll hear in all mainstream outlets.

These outlets have a similarly fact-free version of the Covid story, in which you are the villain and the Fauci regime is the hero.

Just yesterday I was reminded that the Great Depression is another example of this phenomenon: Ron DeSantis made a favorable remark on X about Calvin Coolidge, and an obnoxious account called "Secular Talk" (it should be called Leftist Talk) lectured him that Coolidge's policies had caused the Great Depression.

People like this claim that the tax cuts of the 1920s skewed income toward the rich, and this meant people couldn't afford to buy things, etc.

There's a lot to say in response to that, but we'll point just to an empirical fact: the Great Depression actually came in the midst of a dramatic upward trend in the share of national income devoted to wages and salaries in the United States -- and a downward trend in the share going to interest, dividends, and entrepreneurial income.

And as I show in 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask, the consumer-goods sector suffered the least damage in the Depression -- the opposite of what we should expect if a drop-off in consumer purchases had been the culprit.

And then of course we get "the gold standard led to the Great Depression." The U.S. wasn't even on a full gold standard after World War I, but that doesn't stop the midwit population from blaming it. Why, if only we'd had a "flexible" currency -- i.e., a currency they can debase and steal from you with -- we could have avoided it!

Well, we actually did have that in the 1920s, and that was exactly the problem.

The person to read on this is not Milton Friedman but Murray Rothbard, specifically his book America's Great Depression.

Friedman will tell you that we had the Depression because the Federal Reserve didn't do enough. So the "free-market" explanation is that there wasn't enough intervention? Doesn't that sound a bit off to you?

Rothbard, by contrast, uses Austrian business cycle theory to show that the inflation of the money supply in the 1920s (New York Fed Governor Benjamin Strong called it giving a "coup de whiskey" to the stock market) set the economy on a trajectory that had to end with a downturn.

It did not have to extend into a decade-long depression, though; for that part, we can thank federal policy that was supposed to ameliorate the depression but (as usual) had the opposite effect.

The bad guys sure do hate gold, though. They demonize it in the textbooks and lecture you about it whenever you wonder if the dollar ought to be tethered to something after all.

They hate it because it restrains them from printing money out of thin air and quietly expropriating you. They hate it because it means "experts" can't direct the economy via "monetary policy." Those of us who favor sound money don't favor this monetary policy over that monetary policy: we oppose "monetary policy," period.

But now that gold no longer functions as money (money, says Ludwig von Mises, is the most widely accepted medium of exchange, and in our day that is obviously not gold), the bad guys still hate it -- partly because, if you buy gold, you are casting a vote of no-confidence in our economic planners.

I myself own some gold not because I expect it to triple in value tomorrow, but because it has an indisputable track record over the centuries, and I do indeed have more confidence in that track record than I do in any Fed chairman.

If you read my writing, you don't need me to tell you this. You're almost certainly on board already. But there's still one thing I can advise you on that you may not have thought of.

I am a fan of being paid to do things I was going to do anyway. Our friend Jeff Deist, whom you know from his time as president of the Mises Institute, now works with Monetary Metals, where I actually earn an interest return, around four percent, on my gold.

I'm going to hold the gold anyway, so why not earn four percent on it, and let it compound?

My gold works for me; it isn't allowed to be a lazy bum. Neither should yours. Check it out:

https://www.monetary-metals.com/woods

Tom Woods