The Scandal of Money Quotes

“If the government controls, guarantees, channels, or directs investment, it is not capitalism. Pivotal to the investment process is interest rates. For entrepreneurs to control capital, interest rates must reflect its real cost rather than merely the cost of printing money. Otherwise the money printers will dominate investment.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“The economy is a test and measurement system, and it requires reliable learning guided by an accurate meter of monetary value.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“much of Silicon Valley’s investment has gone to some eighty “unicorns,” with valuations over a billion dollars, which have shunned the overregulated U.S. public market. This is a bizarre and unsustainable situation. Venture capital cannot function without liquidity events. Unless the United States follows China and begins to deregulate its public companies, China will soon take the lead in venture capital as well. The”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“The economy is a test and measurement system, and it requires reliable learning guided by an accurate meter of monetary value. The”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“All entrepreneurial and technological ventures, according to a canonical paper by the productivity theorist Robert Gordon, face the closing of the world’s “productivity frontier.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“To the Austrian economics of subjectivity, time provides an objective foundation.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Devoid of the outside influences of capital and technology, the source of bitcoin value becomes the pure irreversible passage of time.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“The point about bad money is not that it converges with the worth of the paper it is printed on. It is worse than that. Falsifying the information basis of all prices, it stultifies entrepreneurs, deceives savers, and fosters tyranny. Interest”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“In 1976 Friedman suffered a crippling intellectual trauma that for the rest of his life seriously affected his thinking. The king of Sweden awarded him a Nobel Prize for economic science, specifically for his errors—his monetary theory and his permanent income hypothesis.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“With currencies and interest rates far more volatile than the economic activity that they guide, the horizons of investment and commerce had to shrink proportionally with real economic knowledge.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Ever since the millennial crash, the United States has been buffeted by currency shocks, interest-rate gyrations, and financial device bubbles. Government fashions move “investment” from real estate consumption to climate distractions. It was technology alone that saved the world economy.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Warren Buffett summed up the conventional view with his usual pith: “Gold gets dug out of the ground . . . we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. . . . Anyone from Mars would be scratching their head.”2”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Piketty would impose a progressive annual tax on capital. By a static analysis, such a tax might reduce the yield of capital to the rate of GDP expansion and thus eliminate the bias toward top-heavy accumulation by elites. Upholding the secular stagnation theory of permanent growth slowdown, he naturally focuses on depressing the return to capital. Taking money from the rich and giving it to government might seem to address “inequality.” But by putting capital into the hands of the least productive users of it—politicians—he would aggravate the very stagnation he warns against.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Egalitarians never seem to understand that promoting economic equality in theory means promoting resentments and polarization in practice, making everyone worse off. —Thomas Sowell (2016)”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“The invention of reliable and recognizable timepieces—clocks and bell towers—liberated workers from the bondage of piecework, which entails regimentation to count the pieces and favors quantity over quality, slavery over free labor.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“thus has been the only commodity whose future price is always equal to the spot price plus the rate of interest over the time period. A million paper dollars held since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Bank was created, would be worth $20,000 today, down 98 percent. A million dollars of gold in 1913 would now be worth $62 million.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“President Obama’s friend and counselor Ta-Nehisi Coates, from his perch atop the bestseller lists and at the pinnacle of power in America, denounces the American Dream, in terms that echo Obama’s previous spiritual guide, Pastor Wright in Chicago, as a “genocidal weight of whiteness.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“Republicans have been running on tax-cut proposals since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Tax-rate reductions and simplifications are urgently needed. But again, there is no mention of the key problems of a global economy in decline—of the acceptance by economic elites of inevitable and irremediable stagnation. We have not faced the fact that the Federal Reserve’s capacity to command growth is a god that has failed.”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does

“The source and root of all monetary evil [is] the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. —Friedrich Hayek”
― George Gilder, The Scandal of Money: Why Wall Street Recovers but the Economy Never Does