The Stunning Lack of Historical Curiosity of the 100%-Reservers

By -
A main "historical method" of the 100%-ers seems to be to imagine how they think free banking would have worked, and then to assert that it actually worked that way. e.g. "I imagine that no fractional reserve accounts ever had a 'when available' clause, and therefore, none did!"

Here, George Selgin uses actual warehouse receipts and actual fractional reserve notes to make nonsense of Rothbard's claim that FRB notes were "counterfeit" warehouse receipts.

A sub-species of the above "method": I often see 100%-ers "correcting" George on how free banking worked. Here is what you are up against: Sandy Ikeda told me that he once stood with George in the Bobst Library at NYU. George indicated a huge wall of books on money and banking, and said: "I'm going to read every one of those." Sandy concluded, "And you know, I think he pretty much has."

You, 100%-reserver, have read three articles at Mises.org on the subject. Don't be an ass and try to tell George he doesn't know how free banking actually functioned!

Comments

  1. August7:58 PM

    When you make fun of the 100% reserve guys, I feel like you are making fun of a relative who has special needs. Yes, free banking will allow the people to decide how much fractional reserve banking they are down with, but stop punching the down's syndrome kids in the belly already!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah8:34 PM

      August, I understand, but if they just back off insulting George and whatnot, I'd lay off their belly.

      Delete
  2. Bob Murphy10:38 PM

    If only Rothbard and Salerno had read some books. Damn.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more