INTRODUCTION

Few topics are as misunderstood today as the subject of money. Since the United States abandoned a gold-linked dollar over four decades ago, its policy establishment has slid into a dangerous ignorance of the fundamental monetary principles that guided it for most of its history. The bureaucrats and officials who set policy today know less about money than their predecessors did 100 years ago when the First World War erupted. Americans and the rest of the world are now paying the price.

Today’s system of fluctuating “fiat money”—whereby government manipulates the value of the dollar—has been behind the biggest economic failures of recent decades, including the financial crisis experienced by emerging countries in 2013 and 2014. Weak, ...

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