Jeff Tucker pointed out that gas prices were falling about a month ago and they’ve fallen almost a dollar since then. I just paid $2.12 for premium this weekend, and see that the national average is about where it was 3 years ago. As Doug French notes: this is “good news for those of us who buy things.”

The Best of Kathryn Muratore

Writes Guido Hulsmann in the preface to his Mises Institute monograph Deflation and Liberty (pdf):

In the present crisis, the citizens of the United States have to make an important choice. They can support a policy designed to perpetuate our current fiat money system and the sorry state of banking and of financial markets that it logically entails. Or they can support a policy designed to reintroduce a free market in money and finance. This latter policy requires the government to keep its hands off. It should not produce money, nor should it appoint a special agency to produce money. It should not force the citizens to use fiat money by imposing legal tender laws. It should not regulate banking and should not regulate the financial markets.

It should not try to fix the interest rate, the prices of financial titles, or commodity prices. Clearly, these measures are radical by present-day standards, and they are not likely to find sufficient support. But they lack support out of ignorance and fear.

We are told by virtually all the experts on money and finance—the central bankers and most university professors—that the crisis hits us despite the best efforts of the Fed; that money, banking, and financial markets are not meant to be free, because they end up in disarray despite the massive presence of the government as a financial agent, as a regulator, and as money producer; that our monetary system provides us with great benefits that we would be foolish not to preserve. Those same experts therefore urge us to give the government an even greater presence in the financial markets, to increase its regulatory powers, and to encourage even more money production to be used for bailouts. (more…)

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.