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Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Hardcover)
by Thomas E. Woods Jr. , Ron Paul
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Author: Thomas E. Woods Jr. , Ron Paul
Publisher: Regnery Publishing; First Edition edition
Pub. in: February, 2009
ISBN: 1596985879
Pages: 194
Measurements: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01749
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1596985872
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- MSL Picks -
If you really want to know how our economy works and how government policies and the federal reserve screw up the free markets this is the book for you. Austrian economic theory and historical observations show you that what is happening to the economy now has happened before and what the causes are and what the real solutions are. This should be required reading for every senior in high school and everyone who votes. The boom and bust cycles of our economy will stop once the voters know the cause and remedy which this book shows and tells. Parents need to make sure their kids at some time read this book, and we the voters need to insist that our elected officials read this book and wise up! Just ask yourself one question. How can a Government that is in debt (or anyone) get out of debt by incurring more debt? That is exactly what today's government (who work for the people) is doing and they call it a stimulus package for the economy and it is necessary to bring us out of a recession. It can't work! It won't work! It will make things worse! The laws of economics are just as absolute as the laws of physics. You can try and cheat them but eventually the chickens will come home to roost. You are now seeing it unfold before you. Knowledge is power! (From quoting Thrustin Pierce )
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Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Ph.D., is the New York Times bestselling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. A senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing editor of The American Conservative magazine, he and his family live in Alabama.
Thomas E. Woods Jr. is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. He is the author of nine books, including Who Killed the Constitution?: The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R. C. Gutzman) and the New York Time bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Woods won the $50,000 first prize in the 2006 Templeton Enterprise Awards for The Church and the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy. Woods edited and wrote the introduction to four additional books, including Murray N. Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right and We Who Dared to Say No to War: American Antiwar Writing from 1812 to Now (with Murray Polner). He is also the author of Beyond Distributism, part of the Acton Institute's Christian Social Thought Series. Woods lives in Auburn, Alabama, with his wife and three daughters, and maintains a website at ThomasEWoods.com.
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From publisher
If you are fed up with Washington boondoggles, and you like the small-government, politically-incorrect thinking of Ron Paul, then you'll love Tom Woods's Meltdown. In clear, no-nonsense terms, Woods explains what led up to this economic crisis, who's really to blame, and why government bailouts won't work. Woods will reveal:
- Which brave few economists predicted the economic fallout-and why nobody listened
- What really caused the collapse
- Why the Fed-not taxpayers-should have to answer for the current economic crisis
- Why bailouts are band-aids that will only provide temporary relief and ultimately make things worse
- What we should do instead, to put our economy on a healthy path to recovery
With a foreword from Ron Paul, Meltdown is the free-market answer to the Fed-created economic crisis. As the new Obama administration inevitably calls for more regulations, Woods argues that the only way to rebuild our economy is by returning to the fundamentals of capitalism and letting the free market work.
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David M. Kinchen (MSL quoted), USA
<2009-05-06 00:00>
Santayana's aphorism could be applied to the myriad of TARPs, bailouts, stimuli and other programs now being put into place by the federal government to solve the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, in the view of Thomas E. Woods Jr., author of "Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse" (Regnery, 194 pages, plus three-page foreword by Rep. Ron Paul, R-TX, $27.95).
Woods argues persuasively in this slim book that government intervention in the past - including both Herbert Hoover's and Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to the 1929 stock market crash - only prolonged the Depression. He points to the 1920-21 post World War I recession - a "forgotten depression" that he says was worse than the current one - which ended without the frantic moves by the Federal Reserve system that characterize the current recession.
He writes: "Not surprisingly, modern economists [translation: mainstream, Keynesian economists] who have studied the depression of 1920-21 have been unable to explain how the recovery could have been so swift and sweeping even though the federal government and the Federal Reserve refrained from employing any of the macroeconomic tools - public works spending, government deficits, inflationary monetary policy - that conventional wisdom recommends as the solutions to economic slowdowns."
A devotee of the Austrian School of economics and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, Woods, who has a Ph.D from Columbia University, says that if you believe in the free market, you cannot support the Fed, "one of the most intrusive interventions into the market." Before the Federal Reserve Act was passed during the Wilson Administration in 1913, free market economic approaches limited panics, depressions and recessions to relatively short durations, Woods argues - and he supplies succinct descriptions of past meltdowns.
If you don't want to go all the way back to 1920-21, how about what the Japanese call the "lost decade," the period of the 1990s when the Japanese government used all of the approaches we're told are necessary in the U.S. to spend the way out of a similar meltdown, driven by many of the same elements, including a massive real estate bubble.
"Ask Japan how their trillions of yen economic stimulus packages worked for them," Woods says. "They still haven't recovered from their government's intervention 18 years later." Interventions in Japan included pouring more concrete to build unneeded roads than the U.S., in a country with a fraction of the land mass of the U.S. and less than half the population.
What the heck is the Austrian School of economics? Wikipedia says: "Austrian School economists advocate the enforcement of voluntary contractual agreements between economic agents, but otherwise the smallest imposition of coercive force (especially government-imposed) on commercial transactions.
"Although often controversial, the Austrian School was once influential dating back to the early 20th century...The Austrian School derives its name from its predominantly Austrian founders and early supporters, including Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Ludwig von Mises. Prominent Austrian School economists of the 20th century include Joseph Schumpeter, Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard and Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek... The Austrian School now lies outside the mainstream."
Lying outside the mainstream is no problem to Woods, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, AL.
By following the principles of "mainstream" economics - he has particularly harsh words for New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a mainstream economist at Princeton University - the government and the media created the myth that people should not question the government's response - whether it be the Bush Administration's rushed through bailouts of last summer and fall, or the current Obama Administration's trillion dollar measures - but leave it up to experts, Woods says.
Perhaps the most radical proposal in "Meltdown" is Woods' suggestion that the Federal Reserve system should be scrapped, along with government involvement in mortgage institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. He is supported in this by Ron Paul, who writes in the foreword: "The Federal Reserve and its manipulation of money and interest rates have failed."
Woods says: "If you believe in the free market, you cannot support the Fed, one of the most intrusive interventions into the market. If you believe in the free market, you cannot support central planning of money, the very lifeblood of the economy. If you believe in the free market, you cannot support government price-fixing, including the fixing of interest rates."
Speaking of money - and it's particularly appropriate in light of all the gold and silver promotions seen on TV commercials these days - Woods would like to see a return to gold and silver as a basis for money. No, he doesn't want a return to the gold standard that existed in the U.S. prior to 1933; instead he wants gold and silver to be one of the choices people in a free market economy can select. Already, he writes in his chapter on money several institutions marketing precious metals have issued debit cards -- what most people use nowadays anyway - to access the gold or silver they own.
Woods quotes free-market economist Henry Hazlitt, who "in saner times wrote editorials on economic topics for the New York Times": "The tremendous merit of gold is, if we want to put it that way, a negative one: it is not a managed paper money that can ruin everyone who is legally forced to accept it or who puts his confidence in it. The technical criticisms of the gold standard becomeutterly trivial when considered with this single merit."
The ideas in "Meltdown" will sound extreme to anyone immersed in mainstream, Keynesian economics, but supporters of the Austrian School can justly say that if a system doesn't work, it's time to consider alternatives. After all, one definition of insanity is doing something that has failed in the past, expecting a different result this time.
"Meltdown" is a jargon free, mathematics formula free approach to a form of economics that makes sense to people, once they read about it and learn its principles. Woods provides a list of resources in his book, which includes notes and and index. As a supporter of libertarian economics - and someone who would like to see Fannie, Freddie and the Fed disappear - I recommend this book without reservation.
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From quoting a guest reviewer, USA
<2009-05-06 00:00>
As always, Thomas E. Woods Jr. has given us an excellent, concise, well written, very didactic, easy to understand, even entertaining book. Everybody should read it, and pass the good word around.
Like in The Church and The Market, the author uses the book's subject to give us a concise, simple, never boring explanation on such topics as the origin of money, interest rates, the School of Vienna, and in a way, how people (and therefore the world) actually think and act.
Even those who are not naturally attracted by those subjects should read this book, for it is very good at making simple, easy to grasp, and entertaining matters that have a direct impact on our lives. |
From a guest reviewer, USA
<2009-05-06 00:00>
One cannot improve on the review of this book, which is the introduction by Dr. Ron Paul. Woods, in a short space, unravels the fibers of this "crisis not to be wasted", which the experts on CNBC can't seem to get their minds around. He stands proudly on the shoulders of Mises, Hayek, Rothbard et al and sees the hard truth.
Whether it be Fed Reserve quantitative easing, Fannie and Freddie's shenanigans, too big to fail(the Greenspan Put), moral hazardous mortgage modifications, etc.; Young Tom explains why the government cure does nothing but harm the patient. It's the Fed, Stupid!
A truly topical discussion point is the explanation of the Panic of 1907. It is the Panic that apologists for The Fed use as justification for the "lender of last resort". After having read it carefully, I understand better the Rothbardian conclusion: the Fed issues prolonged and nationwide recessions and depressions; in order to avoid the brief and regional effects of bankruptcies. That's its quintessential task.
I admit this was a slow read for me, because it is disconcerting to be shown how easily this boom and bust could have been prevented.
In a nation in which envy is a virtue, this book is a must read. Alas, one more thing Keynes was wrong about: in the long run, we weren't all dead. Some of us are alive and not so well in WhimBamWay.
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From a guest review, USA
<2009-05-06 00:00>
This is, in short, a fantastic book. Not only does Mr. Woods slay the myths surrounding the current crisis, he slays the general myths surrounding other crises as well (e.g Japan in 1990s; U.S panic of 1819, 1907). Many in the U.S have been conned into thinking that the central premise of Keynesian theory ( government spending) is true and is all that truly matters.
The "masters of the universe" (our political leaders and keynesian economists) conveniently leave out the importance of capital, its accumulation, and the importance of savings into the bigger economic picture. T. Woods not only discusses these variables, but he discusses how and why they are important.
Mr. Woods makes a great case through historical and empirical evidence. For example, he discuses U.S banking history from the early 19th century and he uses statistics from the governments own databases. This is both difficult and essential in making an airtight case against the dominant economic dogma of our time.
I have been a believer in classical economic theory for many years (e.g belief in limited government, belief in free trade, belief in private property, and free and private enterprise). I, however, had the same problem that classical economists had for at least the last hundred years; I could not account for the business cycle. Mr. Woods, specifically in this book, and the Austrian school generally fills in the crucial missing piece: the Federal Reserve and the manipulation of the money supply.
And this is ultimately Mr. Woods greatest contribution not just to economics but to the current debate: the fed's manipulation of the money supply leads to distortions and the misallocation of resources in the greater macro economy that lead to phony booms and painful busts. Mr. Woods has helped me turn the corner with that critical analysis. He will help others as well.
This is a must read!!!
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