Posts byBrian Maher

The year is 1921. America is little more than two years removed from triumph on the Western Front. Warren Gamaliel Harding is its czar. And it is sunk in depression…

This scheme makes money a hot potato burning the hands of anyone holding it more than three seconds. It destroys savers. And it destroys the formation of capital that is the seed corn of future growth. It turns every principle of sound economics on its ear. It is not economics, in fact. It is anti-economics. Any economist proposing it should be stripped of his title.

Murray’s thesis is as simple and ringing as it is disturbing: the government has grown far too large to control. And neither the political process nor the Constitution can contain it anymore. Today’s American is more subject than citizen; he’s no longer the sovereign of his circumstances. The unaccountable, unelected regulatory state is his new master.

The Battle of Section 215 pitted the present-day Jeffersons of the American scene against the bigger government Hamiltons of the same American scene. Here we had the latest chapter in the timeless tug-of-war between liberty and security, between the individual and the state. It has never resolved in open, democratic societies. It may never fully be…