[lammaredder]

With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people.
-- Freidrich von Hayek

http://www.nobel-winners.com/Economi...von_hayek.html

Hayek's conservative thesis was that governmental control of or intervention in a free market only forestalls such economic ailments as inflation, unemployment, recession, or depression. In 1944 he suggested in The Road to Serfdom that mild piecemeal reforms and governmental manipulations inevitably lead to the kind of ultimate domestic disaster that paves the way for totalitarian takeover by a Hitler. Really? Just a matter of time. Apparently knowing history does not cause it to not be repeated.