Free Republic

For a man facing daily attacks for his activism and liberal vision of the world, George Soros was in a curiously buoyant mood on a sunswept afternoon in Marrakesh. He had just visited South Africa, home to his first philanthropic foray in the late 1970s, when he funded black students under apartheid. This time he learnt that Soros-backed investigative media and civil society groups had helped thwart an allegedly corrupt nuclear power plant contract with Russia. “It was a tremendous boost to reinforce my belief that we are doing something right,” says Mr Soros. “We haven’t stopped having a beneficial...

"The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency," said Lord Keynes. Ben Bernanke disagrees. A student of the Depression, the Fed chair appears far more fearful of deflation -- a vicious cycle of falling prices, debt defaults, home foreclosures and rising unemployment. Deflation is what America underwent in the 1930s. A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls to go out to stockholders, who ran to their banks that, besieged, collapsed, wiping out a third of our money. As Milton Friedman, who won a Nobel for his thesis that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression,...