And what exactly did I miss? Your claim that the country is bankrupt when it’s not? Did the Treasury miss an interest payment for the first time since 1790? I must have missed it.
Your intimation that depressions only became a problem with the creation of the Fed? I suggest you look up “Long Depression”.
The non-sequitur that we’ve survived 137 years?
I suggest you omit the ‘duh’ when you’re having trouble making a point that is something beyond emoting, the duh just highlights your struggle.
Pelham is correct. The United States is not bankrupt, nor even near bankruptcy, even if our true national debt is ten times the official count.
Where he’s wrong is in his analysis of the benefits of a Fed. It is an incumbency protection racket. It works to protect banks from the free market effects of their bad moves and it protects them from a nefarious government which manipulates markets to benefit political cronies.
Take a look at the pre-Fed era when very real market cycles wiped out entire gains and made fortunes. It was harsh, but it prevented socialism. The Fed exists to temper the natural market cycle. That attenuation gives a free hand to socialist policies and benefits incumbency.
It’s often mis-ascribed as an era of crony capitalism. It was in part as government colluded with crony capitalists, particularly the disastrously wasteful railroad expansions. Yet we also have examples of railroad expansion without government cronyism. Take a look.
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/James_J._Hill
Few people know about James J. Hill, so I’m not surprised that Pelham and others maintain the AP US History perspective on that era. AP Economics also teaches the same lies about economics that every incumbent and Keynesian wishes Americans to know.
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Robber_Barons
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller
Rockefeller did for that era what the Internet, Walmart and fracking has done for ours. Rockefeller dropped the price of oil from 58 cents a gallon to 8 cents a gallon. Oh, that awful deflation. But this is the good kind, due to productivity improvements.
http://fee.org/the_freeman/detail/john-d-rockefeller-and-the-oil-industry
https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/summer-2008/standard-oil-company/
You might enjoy this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Vw6uF2LdZw
Good article from an unusual source: http://www.philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/seven_myths_about_the_great_philanthropists
Here’s a little on the Gilded Age: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
My hope is that Pelham and others will wipe the sleepers from their eyes and unlearn the historical mis-education most Americans suffer under.