Let's pull this sentence out of the civic pieties of our time and see what's wrong with it: "We should all volunteer our time in charitable causes and give back to the community in a labor of love."

We can't argue with the instruction here, or the sentiment behind it. There is nothing wrong with giving and sacrifice. My argument is with the choice of language. It contains a word and three phrases the common usage of which can be highly misleading.

Voluntary

This word "volunteer" is used to describe a person who does things in service of others, and we all know the intent of the term. We speak of volunteering all the time. The United States has what is called the voluntary sector, which is supposed to refer mostly to nonprofit organizations that elicit nonremunerative employment.

There is great confusion about the gold standard, for the same reason that there is great confusion about the free market: hardly anyone understands it. This includes academic economists.

Let me get in my fiat monetary unit's two cents' worth:

There are proposals for various monetary systems that are in some way tied to gold. There have been a lot of these proposals over the centuries. They all have one thing in common: they are ignored today by academic economists, commercial bankers, central bankers, national governments, the general public, and CNBC. Well, perhaps not ignored. More like ridiculed.

One of the standard arguments against a gold standard is this: "There’s not enough gold to facilitate all of the transactions in a free market economy." This is an old criticism. It was a lot more popular before the desktop computer industry started cutting prices every year, while increasing product quality. These days, people expect falling prices in desktop computers.

What if they expected price cuts in all other industries?

If you have ever wondered what would happen if a relatively fixed supply of above-ground gold were the primary medium of exchange, this essay may help clarify things.

Most people have no conception of what you are about to read. They are not interested. They don’t know that their futures will depend heavily on the answers to these questions that will be adopted by the Federal Reserve System’s policy-makers. They think, "I can’t be bothered with monetary theory." Therein lies your investment opportunity.

Let me present a syllogism. 1. Theft is immoral. 2. Inflation is theft. 3. Fractional reserve banking is inflationary. 4. Central banking is government-guaranteed fractional reserve banking. 5. Immorality leads to judgment.

Therefore, we should expect. . . ?

Economists, other than Murray Rothbard's disciples, never associate the concept of theft with monetary inflation. They speak of theft in terms of reduced efficiency and increased transactions costs, not morality.

When it comes to avoiding morality, they are worse than lawyers. A lawyer might appeal to morality if he had a really weak case. This appeal might persuade a jury. An economist would rather lose the argument than appeal to morality. He regards the shame of invoking morality as personally more inefficient than winning the argument by an appeal to morality. Once you appeal to morality, academic economic theory collapses. Economics was the first science to be self-consciously designed to avoid moral questions.

A cartel is an organization made up of senior managers or their representatives in an industry.

In reading any dialogue, you know in advance that the guy asking the questions is the guy who wrote

The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent.