변창흠 "현금청산·서울역 쪽방촌사업 절차 합법…택지 20곳 확정"(종합) /뉴스1 jym5**** 소유주가 싫다는대 억지로 정부에서 뺏어가는게 그게 공산당이고 사회주의다. 사유재산권을 뺏는게 북한이다. 이런걸 공공의 이익이라는 말로 포장해서 국민들 재산을 수탈하는 문재인과 민주당 특히 주사파 놈들을 뿌리뽑아야 이나라가 발전하고 진짜 세계강국으로 도약할수 있다 아가리로 천지창조 하는 좌파들 말에 현혹되서 아직도 지지하는 대깨문들 빼고 공부좀 하고 세상을 좀 이성적으로 봐라. 아가리로 천지창조하는 좌파들. --->좌파들의 본질을 한 마디로 잘 표현했다. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CDC, mRNA 주사로 501명 사망과 11,249명 부작용 보고 . . . 디시인저장소 http://www.ilbe.com/view/11324006916 CDC는 백신으로 인한 부상과 사망을 추적 하는 미국 정부가 자금을 지원하는 데이터베이스 인 VAERS (백신 이상 반응보고 시스템)에 또 다른 데이터가 업데이트 되었다. ​ 이 데이터는 2021년 1월 29일까지 진행되며, 11,249 건의 부작용을 기록했으며, 여기에는 화이자와 모더나의 실험용 코로나 mRNA 주사 후 501명이 사망한 것으로 나타났다. 기록 된 501명의 사망자 외에도 응급실 의사 방문 2443명, 영구 장애 156명, 입원이 1066 명 있었다. 기록 된 사망자 중 거의 70%가 65세 이상이었다. ​ 이전에 보도한 바와 같이 VAERS보고 시스템은 자발적이기 때문에 관련 연구에 따르면 모든 백신으로 인한 부작용과 사망의 1% 미만만이 정부에 보고된다. https://www.nvic.org/CMSTemplates/NVIC/Pdf/FDA/ahrq-vaers-report-2011.pdf VAERS에보고 된 이러한 사례에서 수반되는 첨부 사항을 읽을 때 많은 의료 전문가들이 이러한 사례를 보고하는 것을 꺼려하는 것이 분명하며, 아마도 이러한 사례를 보고하는 것에 대한 영향을 두려워하는 것으로 보인다. ​의료 시설에서 신고를 거부했기 때문에 가족 구성원이 사망과 부작용 신고를 한 경우도 있다. ​ ​VAERS 데이터베이스에 기록 된 부작용과 사망에 대해 CDC의 공식적인 입장은 이들 중 어느 것도 코로나 mRNA 약물주입과 관련이 없다는 것이다. ​질병통제센터(CDC)에는 “백신 사망”이란 카테고리 조차 없기 때문에 사망 증명서에 “백신사망“으로 기록 된 사건이 ​​한 번도 없었다. ​백신이 일부 사람들에게 사망과 부작용을 일으킬 수 있다는 것을 인정하는 것은 제약산업에 불이익이 되기 때문일 것이다. ​ FDA 승인되지 않은 mRNA 주사 ​ 그럼에도 불구하고 FDA가 이 두 가지 실험 주사에 대해 비상 사용 허가 (Emergency Use Authorization, EUA)를 제공할 때 발표 한 지침은 이것이 FDA가 승인하지 않은 실험적“백신”이며, 이 주사에 대한 효과와 위험성을 알 수 없고 이 주사의 많은 부작용 중에는 사망이 포함되어 있다는 사실을 분명히 한 것이다. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ COVID-19 MRNA Shots Are Legally Not Vaccines — They’re Experimental Gene Therapies 코로나 MRNA 백신은 법적으로 따지면 백신이 아니다. 그것은 실험적인 유전자 치료법이다. https://humansarefree.com/2021/02/covid-19-mrna-shots-are-not-vaccines.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 탄핵안 부결 후 트럼프 성명서 저는 먼저 정의를 지키고 진실을 수호하는 지칠 줄 모르는 노력에 대해 헌신적인 변호팀과 다른 여러분에게 감사드립니다. 우리 모두가 존경하는 헌법과 우리 나라의 중심에 있는 신성한 법적 원칙을 자랑스럽게 지지해 주신 모든 미국 상원 의원과 위원회 위원들에게도 깊은 감사를드립니다. 우리의 소중한 헌법 공화국은 공정한 법치, 우리의 자유, 우리의 권리 및 자유를위한 필수 보호 장치에 기반하여 설립되었습니다. 미국의 한 정당이 법의 지배를 훼손하고, 법 집행을 비방하고, 폭도들을 환호하고, 폭도들을 변명하고, 정의를 정치적 복수,박해, 블랙리스트의 도구로 바꾸고, 자기에게 동의하지 않는 모든 사람과 관점을 취소하고 억제합니다. 저는 언제나 변함없는 법치의 옹호자, 법 집행의 영웅, 그리고 악의와 증오없이 그 시대의 문제에 대해 평화 롭고 명예롭게 토론 할 미국인의 권리를 가지고 있으며 앞으로도 그렇게 할 것입니다. 이것은 우리나라 역사상 가장 위대한 마녀 사냥의 또 다른 단계였습니다. 어떤 대통령도 이와 같은 일을 겪은 적이 없으며, 우리의 반대자들은 불과 몇 달 전에 우리를 뽑은 현직 대통령 중 가장 높은 수인 거의 7 천 5 백만 명을 잊을 수 없기 때문에 이 일은 계속됩니다. 저는 또한 이 매우 어렵고 도전적인 시기에 이 중요한 원칙을 용감하게 지지해 주신 품위있고 근면하며 법을 준수하며 신과 국가를 사랑하는 수백만 시민들에게 감사를 전하고 싶습니다. 미국을 다시 위대하게 만들기 위한 우리의 역사적이고 애국적이며 아름다운 운동이 이제 막 시작되었습니다. 앞으로 몇 달 동안 여러분과 나눌 것이 많으며, 우리 국민 모두를 위해 미국의 위대함을 달성하기 위해 함께 놀라운여정을 계속할 수 있기를 기대합니다. 이러한 일은 결코 없었습니다! 우리는 앞에 놓인 많은 일을 하고 있으며, 곧 밝고 빛나고 무한한 미국의 미래에 대한 비전과 함께 나타날 것입니다. 함께라면 이루지 못할 것은 없습니다. 우리는 하나님 아래에서 하나의 민족, 하나의 가족, 하나의 영광스러운 나라로 남아 있으며, 우리 자녀들과 다음 세대의 미국인들을 위해 이 웅장한 유산을 보존하는 것은 우리의 책임입니다. 여러분 모두에게 그리고 미국에게 영원히 하나님의 축복이 함께 하길 빕니다. - 도널드 트럼프 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 조지 윌의 엉성한 자유의 변론 컬럼니스트 조지 윌은 원래 자유주의자였지만 후에 변신해서 국가주권주의를 추종하는 보수주의자가 되었다. 그의 새 책 <보수주의 감성>은 다시 자유주의로 돌아온 듯 보이지만, 다양한 사상 속에서 길을 잃고 허접한 지적 유희로 끝나고 말았다. 조지 윌은 프린스턴 졸업 후 잠깐 자유주의자였지만, 영국 옥스퍼드 유학 후 토리 당의 가부장적 정치에 이끌렸다. 후에 그는 라는 책을 썼는데, 이 제목은 스탈린이 당의 지식인들을 “영혼의 엔지니어”라 했던 일을 상기시킨다. George Will's Tepid Defense of Freedom David Gordon The Conservative Sensibility by George F. Will Hachette Books, 2019 xxxix + 600 pp. The well-known Washington columnist George Will was long ago a libertarian, but he soon changed his mind, adopting instead a statist variety of conservatism. In The Conservative Sensibility, he returns to his libertarian roots, but the return is incomplete, and he ends up with a confused position that, in trying to do justice to competing goods, as he sees it, ends up in intellectual sloppiness. The great historian Ralph Raico, who knew Will in the late 1950s, tells the story of his early political beliefs: As it happened, at Princeton Bruce [Goldberg] also came to know another grad student, this time in political science, named George Will. Will was another run of the mill member of the American intelligentsia, a “liberal” in the mold of his father, a well thought of professor of philosophy at Champaign/Urbana. Bruce, then the dynamic, genial propagator of our ideas, converted Will as well. Temporarily. Will left to study at Oxford, where he was seduced by the tradition of Tory paternalism he discovered there. Cecil Rhodes would have been pleased. George Will went on to compose Tory-statist pieces like those collected in his truly embarrassing book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, the title reminiscent of the Stalinist definition of Party intellectuals as “engineers of the soul.” When Nozick and I were still in touch, Bob once remarked of Will with a laugh that…[his] “idea of politics was to remake everyone in his own boring image.” I would add to Ralph’s characteristically excellent account that George Will’s father, Frederick Will, was an outstanding philosopher, in my view one of the best American philosophers of his time. (He wrote about, logic, metaphysics, and epistemology, not politics.) If only his son had his talent and wisdom! A good place to begin our investigation is with the “truly embarrassing book.” Will says that he has changed his position. People need to be educated in virtue, as he argued in Statecraft as Soulcraft, but he was wrong to think that this is, in the main, the task of the state. To the contrary, commercial society does the job far better: Another of the book’s themes was quite wrong. It was that the American nation was “ill-founded” because too little attention was given to the explicit cultivation of the virtues necessary for the success of a republic. In fact, the nature of life in a commercial society under limited government is a daily instruction in the self-reliance and politeness—taken together, the civility—of a lightly governed open society. Capitalism requires, and therefore capitalism develops, a society in which economic dealings are lubricated by the disposition and ability to trust strangers. (pp. 227–28) Not only is the free market better suited than the state to teach virtue, but the state is ill-equipped to do so. The most succinct summation of Hayek’s thinking is…from his last book…The Fatal Conceit. “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design”….The more complex society becomes, the more government should defer to the spontaneous order generated by the voluntary cooperation of freely contracting individuals. (pp. 246–47) It would appear that Will has executed a complete volte face. And not only that. Will now avers that people have inalienable natural rights. He goes so far as to say that [t]he concept [of the social contract] illustrated the idea that certain rights are so natural, so essential to human flourishing, that governments are instituted to “secure,” not to bestow, them. This, of course, is the language of the most important paragraph in humanity’s political history, the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. (p. 37, my emphasis) Does it not follow that not only is it a bad idea for the government to seize people’s property in a futile effort to design the economy, but it is also wrong, a violation of rights, for it to do so? Alas, for Will it does not follow. For him, rights do not delimit a sphere immune from the government’s interference but provide only a presumption against its doing so. The essential drama of democracy derives from the inherent tension between the natural rights of the individual and the constructed right of the community to make such laws as the majority deems necessary and proper. Natural rights are affirmed by the Declaration of Independence; majority rule, circumscribed and modulated, is constructed by the Constitution. (p. 150) The “progressives” have gone too far; rather than rely on a centralized administration, as they advocate, we should rely on the system of checks and balances in the Constitution, whose principal author was James Madison, of whom Will has an extraordinarily high opinion. Statecraft as soulcraft, then, is by no means out of the picture. “Therefore, although the right to freedom exists prior to government, it depends for its enjoyment on institutions of civil society and government. Hence, statecraft is, inescapably, soulcraft, because education is, too” (p. 358). The state, it transpires, must not only provide public schools but other “public goods” as well. Will devotes several pages to praising Abraham Lincoln, one of his heroes, for promoting road building and other sorts of “infrastructure.” The Hamiltonian “American System” of Henry Clay is quite compatible with natural rights, as Will conceives them—but the government must not go too far. In foreign policy, also, Will first makes a sound point but then retreats. He rightly deplores Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to “make the world safe for democracy,” and in a mordant passage, he mocks Wilson’s messianic mentality. In 1912, he likened constructing his “New Freedom” to erecting a “great building” in which “men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.” Human beings as bees? God wants this because, as Wilson also said to an associate in 1912, “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States.” God or History. This was a distinction without much difference when a Presbyterian’s sense of the providential was melded with a progressive belief in teleological history. (p. 67) One can forgive Will much for this wonderful anecdote, also directed at a purveyor of teleological history: In 1963, when the Oxford University Press published the third and final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s admiring biography of Leon Trotsky, Oxford’s student Marxist club held a reception for Deutscher to celebrate the occasion. I was then a student at Oxford and attended this fete, where I heard Deutscher say: “Proof of Trotsky’s farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true yet.” (p. 259) Although he is quick to condemn the progressives who wish to impose American-style democracy on the entire world, ready for it or not, his own conception of foreign policy allows much room for intervention, and his “moderation” is no more than an all-too-familiar neoconservatism. Americans should not regret the fact that their nation’s foreign policy will always have a meliorist dimension. It flows from two premises. First, America has a mission to make the world better because the American model of a pluralistic commercial republic is a universally valid aspiration. And exporting the model is in the national interest because spreading bourgeois civilization, with its preoccupations with pluralism and prosperity, is a way to tranquilize an often murderous world. (p. 453) Will, it is apparent, lacks the analytic rigor of Rothbard, Raico, Nozick, and Goldberg, far to be preferred to Will’s “conservative sensibility.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 해즐릿은 왜 브레튼 우즈에 반대했나? 처음부터 해즐릿은 이런 사태(세계의 인플레 사태)가 올 줄 알았고, 그래서 브레튼 우즈에 반대해 경고를 했다. 그는 뉴욕타임즈에 익명으로 사설을 발표했는데, 몇 년 후에 사설들은 <브레튼 우즈에서 세계의 인플레까지>라는 책으로 출판되었다. 그는 1934년의 사설에서 금 본위제를 주장하면서, 그렇게 되면 점점 급격한 국가주의로 치닫고 있는 세계에서 국제적 협력의 관계로 회귀하게 된다고 설파했다. 그의 말대로 했다면 세계는 2차대전의 재앙을 회피할 수 있었을 수도 있었다. 1944녀 7월 1일 브레튼 우즈 회담의 대표들이 모였을 때, 해즐릿은 하이에크의 <지식의 문제>를 이용해 그들의 능력에 의문을 표했다. 그는 전후의 진정한 국제적 협력은 1930년대의 이념들로부터의 완전한 혁신이 있을 때에만 가능하다고 보았다. 해즐릿은 브레튼 우즈의 결과는 세계의 인플레이고 거대한 경제적 불안정이라고 내다보았다. 해즐릿의 예언자적 능력은 사실은 미제스의 책을 읽고 통화 경제학을 이해한 것 뿐이다. 법정 화폐 체제는 현재 문명을 파괴하고 있고, 포식자 국가의 몸집을 더욱 비대하게 만들어주고 있다. 건전한 화폐는 왜 중요한가? 우리의 문명이 모두 거기에 달려 있기 때문이다. Why Hazlitt Opposed the Bretton Woods System Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. The Bretton Woods plan for monetary reconstruction did not go as far as Keynes would have liked. He proposed a full-scale world central bank and a single paper currency for all nations, which he wanted to be called the "bancor," so there could be no escaping inflation. That plan is still awaiting implementation. As it was, the Bretton Woods conferees, under pressure from the United States—which wanted the dollar to be the bancor—took a compromise position. They would create not a gold standard—though it was called that for reasons of credibility—but Instead a global gold dollar standard. Or, more precisely, a phony gold standard. The Bretton Woods system established a gold dollar that was fixed at $35 per ounce. But it was the only currency so fixed. Every other currency could be a fiat currency based on the dollar. What this obligated the United States to do, as the main creditor nation to the world, was ship out dollars to the world while somehow maintaining the dollar's connection to gold. It was a prescription for disaster, as should be obvious. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with having a gold standard in one country. The United States could do that now. But that was not what Bretton Woods established. The dollar was not convertible into gold at the domestic level. You could not go into your bank and exchange dollars for gold. It was only convertible on an international level, and only for governments, so that the United States was obligated to ship out gold instead of paper when it was so demanded. This established some limit on credit expansion at home but not enough of one. Few were courageous enough to demand gold from the empire. Yet it is clear just from this description of the plan that the pressure to spend and redeem would eventually lead the United States to go back on its word. It took some twenty years, long after the original crafters of the deal had left the scene, but economic logic could not be gainsaid. The breakdown really began soon after the plan was implemented. But most of the effects were disguised through currency controls. Once the 1960s came, and the expenses of LBJ's welfare-warfare state mounted, the Fed played its traditional role as the financier of big government. Pressure on the dollar mounted, foreign governments became more interested in the gold than the paper, and the whole cockamamie scheme unraveled under Nixon's welfare-warfare state. When the world entered the all-paper money regime, most economists said that the price of gold would fall from $35. The Austrians predicted the opposite. From the very beginning, Henry Hazlitt saw it all coming and warned against Bretton Woods. He took the job of editorial writer for the New York Times in 1934, after having been drummed out of the editorial spot at the post-Mencken American Mercury because he was Jewish. Mencken had called Hazlitt "the only economist who can really write," and the Times job was a good position for him, one for which he was well prepared. He would write mostly unsigned editorials, speaking for the paper and not for himself In fact, when many years later his editorials were collected in a book edited by George Koether, called From Bretton Woods to World Inflation, his archives were the only place that revealed his authorship. Because he was writing them in an institutional voice, his tone was moderated to some extent, a fact he later regretted. Even so, anyone today has to stand in amazement when reading the New York Times editorializing against loose money, paper currency, central banking, and the like. But that was what Hazlitt accomplished. He began his editorials in 1934 with a major call for the reinstitution of the gold standard. He urged that the United States and Britain jointly agree to a fixed gold standard. He said that this action would "symbolize a return to international collaboration in a world that has been drifting steadily toward a more and more intense nationalism." And truly, if one thinks about it, a world that had heeded Hazlitt's advice might have avoided the incredible calamity of World War II, the tens of millions of dead, the communization of Europe, and the bankruptcy and horrors the followed. And why? Because the nationalism about which he warned in 1934 would have abated, and all governments would have sought diplomatic rather than murderous solutions. Of course, his advice was not heeded, and the drive to destroy money and prosperity continued, all the way to the globalized holocaust of World War II. Now let us jump ahead, ten years after Hazlitt had written his first blast. Hazlitt was still advocating the same thing, not a system in which strong currencies subsidize bad policies, but a system in which each nation maintains the integrity of its own currency. That requires not centrally planned integration but the opposite. Instead of promising to intervene to bail out bad debt, nations should swear not to intervene. Only this path prevents moral hazard and maintains the gold standard. He wrote as follows: "the belief that only a rich nation can afford a gold standard is a fallacy." Gold is suitable for every nation, he explained, provided it has something to sell. He concludes with these words before the Bretton Woods conferees gathered: The greatest single contribution the United States could make to world currency stability after the war is to announce its determination to stabilize its own currency. It will incidentally help us, of course, if other nations as well return to the gold standard. They will do it, however, only to the extent that they recognize that they are doing it not primarily as a favor to us but to themselves. It is remarkable to realize that these words appeared in a New York Times editorial! We have here a world far removed from the Keynesian drivel of Paul Krugman. Put simply, there is no justice in this world when Hazlitt, who was correct, gets shoved out and his successors are of a school of thought that was completely wrong. Keep in mind, too, that this was written one month before the opening of the conference. In the weeks that followed, Hazlitt was hot on the trail for news on what was coming. He seized on the statement of principles. It expressly permitted a change in the gold value of member currency on a unanimous vote from government. Hazlitt spoke with a passion as follows: This is a provision which would permit world inflation. Experience has shown that it is extremely unlikely that any government will wish to raise the unit gold value of its currency….The political pressures from time immemorial, and particularly in the last three decades, have been in the direction of devaluation and inflation. Even before the delegates met, he correctly saw that the uniformity provision was not a limit to inflation but rather a license. If one country devalues, it sees the value of its currency fall on the international exchange. But if this is done in cooperation with everyone else, the country can avoid the penalty. This is precisely what accounts for the decades-old drive for international cooperation in monetary affairs. It is the same driving force behind why the Fed was concocted. So long as the system is decentralized, each bank or each country must deal with the fallout from its own bad policies. But if you centralize the system, bad policies can be more easily swept under the rug, with the costs widely dispersed throughout the system. Or as Hazlitt wrote, "it would be difficult to think of a more serious threat to world stability and full production than the continual prospect of a uniform world inflation to which the politicians of every country would be so easily tempted." Two days later, still before the conference opened, Hazlitt nailed it and explained precisely why Bretton Woods could not last. Under the plan, the creditor nations—meaning the United States and Britain—would pledge themselves to buy the currency of net debtor nations in order to keep the currency value at parity. Even if other countries devalued their currencies, the United States would be on the hook for buying it to maintain the fixed paper-to-gold ratio. This is precisely what led to the undoing of the entire system from 1969 to 1971. This, my friends, is prophetic. Hazlitt was not just speaking for a sector of opinion here. So far as he could tell, and so far as anyone has been able to discern since these days, Hazlitt was completely alone in speaking these truths. No one else joined him, at least not in the United States. France had Jacques Rueff, who famously denounced the entire scheme. Switzerland had Michael Heilperin, who stood firm for the gold standard. Hayek in London actually submitted to the Bretton Woods delegates a draft plan for a real gold standard for every nation. It was completely ignored. Only Hazlitt was on the front lines in the United States, by himself, writing constantly and passionately day by day to make a difference. More remarkable still, he was able to voice these lone opinions via the institutional voice of the New York Times. That was quite the accomplishment, a real testament to his own power to persuade. All of his thoughts that I've so far reported were penned before the monetary conference had even met. He had already spotted the core problems of the proposed plan and explained how it would unravel. On July 1, 1944, when the representatives first gathered, he greeted them with a punch in the nose. He questioned their competence, employing what would later be called the Hayekian knowledge problem. Here are his words from the editorial written the day the conference opened: it would be impossible to imagine a more difficult time for individual nations to decide at what level they can fix and stabilize their national currency unit. How could the representatives of France, of Holland, of Greece, of China, make any but the wildest guess at this moment of the point at which they could hope to stabilize? The delegates must have read that passage and spewed their morning coffee across the table. Too bad that more of them didn't choke on their crumpets. Hazlitt further said that the conference was planning to solve a problem by not realizing what the problem was. The issue, he said, is not a lack of currency value parity but rather the policies that are driving down the value of the currency in weak countries. He writes that it is of course possible to temporarily fix any price. But in the long term, it proves impossible. He offers the analogy of a stock share that is worthless but nonetheless sells for $100 each. It is possible to maintain a high price, but when the resources of the buyer run out, the stock price will drop. There is no force on the planet that can keep a falling price from dropping once the resources to maintain it are gone. Of course, this insight is a short summary of nearly all economic policy of our times. Whether the subject is houses, stocks, or wages, the goal of the stimulation packages has been to maintain high prices that cannot be maintained. As for the resources to make the high prices stick, in our day, the answer is to create ever more phony money to engage in this make-believe program. In the midst of the Bretton Woods proceedings, Hazlitt hit the American delegates with another punch in the nose. He made fun of how the Americans, in particular, are under the impression that they can solve any problem in the world by setting up a machinery in the form of an organization. It could be an organization to make water run uphill or to keep rocks from falling, but the Americans are under the belief that if the president is behind anything, anything can be accomplished. He states the contrary truth very bluntly. The restoration of peace and prosperity will not come from setting up another organization but rather by abandoning protectionism, capital export restrictions, important quotas, and competitive depreciation of currencies. America's greatest contribution, he wrote, would be to further balance its budget and halt deficit financing. As for the American love of machinery, he writes that "genuine international economic cooperation after the war will be possible only if there is a profound change from the ideology of the Thirties." As the proceedings dragged on, Hazlitt turned out to have foreshadowed the newest development. The delegates had not only planned to create the IMF but also create what was then the predecessor to the World Bank: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The whole project, wrote Hazlitt, "rests on the assumption that nothing will be done right unless a grandiose formal intergovernmental institution is set up to do it. It assumes that nothing will be run well unless Governments run it." Toughening his rhetoric, Hazlitt goes after Keynes by name, drawing attention to his preposterous claim that it would be invidious to discriminate between member nations based on their credit worthiness. Hilariously, Hazlitt sums up the plan for the World Bank with this general observation: "world economic revival will not necessarily flow from a plan under which taxpayers are saddled by their own Governments with losses from huge foreign loans made regardless of their soundness." After the meetings closed, the debate on ratification began. Hazlitt made it clear what was really at stake: the freedom of the individual vs. the plans of government. "These agreements presuppose," he wrote, "a world in which the type of government controls developed in the Twenties and Thirties are to be expanded and systematized. What is contemplated is a world in which international trade is State-dominated." Hazlitt must have felt intense pressure in these days. There are times in politics when the state and its paid experts make everyone feel as if some proposed plan is absolutely necessary for survival, and to be against it is tantamount to treason. In our own times, it was this way during the NAFTA debate, the WTO debate, and the debate on the creation of such bureaucratic monstrosities as the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration, or the drive for wars in the Middle East, or the hysteria for TARP et al. To be the outlier is to elicit heaps of scorn and derision. It was the same with Bretton Woods during 1944 and 1945. No one ever found a logical problem or a factual error in what Hazlitt was writing. They didn't bother to. The point was that this was a mega priority for the international elite and no respectable paper could really oppose the plan. As a way of showing that he was not a lone critic, Hazlitt began to write about other critics, who were very few in number. He seized on a small criticism offered by any journal or any association and highlighted it. But the critics were thinning, and every time one reared its head, he was summarily slapped down. All the while, the defenses of Bretton Woods were getting more extreme, with claims that if it didn't pass, the world would fall apart. The supporters were more and more open about their antimarket ideology, as when Secretary Morgenthau openly said that business can't run foreign exchange. It is up to the governments of the world to do it. Hazlitt drew attention to these statements and also the open statements by Keynes that Bretton Woods amounted to the opposite of a gold standard. Hazlitt wrote his most poignant rhetoric in these days, claiming that the result of the monetary plans would be world inflation and massive economic instability. The internal pressures were increasing on him, as letters started arriving from London and DC to object to what the paper was saying. Hazlitt clearly saw the writing on the wall but still stuck to his guns all throughout the spring of 1945 as Congress was debating and preparing ratification. Finally, the publisher of the New York Times had had enough. Arthur Sulzberger came to him and said, "When 43 governments sign an agreement, I don't see how the Times can any longer combat this." Hazlitt began to pack his bags. After he left, his revenge was a massive article on the subject in the American Scholar, published later that year. Then he wrote the book that would become the biggest selling economics book of all time: Economics in One Lesson. His goal with this book was to propagate the core principles of economics, so that anyone could do what he had done, which was see the fallacies of the logic behind crazy government schemes. He wrote the book in record time and got it out the door as soon as possible. Of course it was a blockbuster. It remains to this day our bestseller book. In 1967, Hazliltt also had a last laugh, if it is a laughing matter to see your worst predictions come true. Hazlitt was now a syndicated columnist with the Los Angeles Times. He wrote about the unraveling of the system, which finally happened in 1969. By 1971, the entire world was on a fiat-money paper standard and the result has been nothing short of catastrophic for societies and economies, which have been thrown into unrelenting chaos. To be sure, Hazlitt was not, as he said, the "seventh son of the seventh son." He wasn't born with some amazing prophetic power. What Hazlitt did was read Mises and come to understand monetary economics. It sounds easy until you realize just how rare these talents were in his day and in ours. There is another aspect to what Hazlitt did. He could have very easily relented or just stayed silent. It took moral courage and incredible intellectual stamina to tell the truth as he did when the whole world seemed to be against him. But so far as he was concerned, this was why he was put on the earth and why he got into writing in the first place: to tell the truth. He wasn't threatened with jail or violence. The only thing he had to fear was the derision of his colleagues. What truth teller in the history of the world hasn't faced that? We might ask ourselves: why is it important to revisit this history now? As regards the details of Bretton Woods, it is extremely important to understand that this was not a genuine gold standard. It was a fake gold standard managed by an unworkable plan cobbled together by governments. It is the height of absurdity that supply-siders and others have for years been pining for a return to Bretton Woods and calling it a return to the gold standard. A new Bretton Woods would fail as surely as the first one did. It would certainly not be a step in the right direction to reinstitute Bretton Woods. That Bretton Woods was called a gold standard was an exercise in obfuscation. It happened for the same reason that NAFTA was called free trade or the FTC is said to protect competition. The state has long used the language of liberalism and the market economy as a plow to push through its opposite. The gold standard was an early victim in this war over words. A genuine gold standard is implemented currency by currency. It provides for domestic, on-demand convertibility. It allows for banks to fail on their own. It has no central banks. It surely has no international monetary institutions for lending bankrupt governments money. This is the only way toward real stability. Hazlitt said it in the New York Times and it remains true today. If we want an impenetrable system of money and banking, we should follow Rothbard (Hazlitt once told me that the greatest achievement of the Mises Institute was to give Murray a "suitable platform.") and completely privatize the system, permitting private coinage of any money. This would be all the more viable in our own times, with digital payment systems and global communication. In fact, I'm quite sure that had the state not intervened, the internet would have already put together a competitive system of currency and banking that would exist completely outside the state's purview. A very viable means of reform we could undertake right now is for the state to simply do nothing. The dollar might be beyond salvation at this point, but money itself is not, of course. Money is an essential part of the market economy, so therefore let us let the market make it and manage it. The stakes are impossible to overstate. Fiat paper money is destroying civilization right now. It has fueled the predator state. It has destabilized markets. It has wrecked balance sheets and distorted financial markets. It has wrecked the culture by leading the whole world to believe that prosperity can come as if by magic, that stones can be turned into bread. It might yet unleash a ravaging inflation that will be welcomed by dictators, despots, and cruel tyrants. How important is sound money? The whole of civilization depends on it. We must accept no compromise. Down with government plans. Down with international commissions. Down with attempts to manipulate and control that always end in robbing us and making us poorer than we would otherwise be. We should embrace no more and no less than what the old liberals of the 18th and 19th centuries championed. All we ask is laissez-faire. This essay was adapted from a longer version published in June 2010. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------