Please take this as penance for my recent, and recently-deleted, post regarding the Fed. Out of that regrettable conversation came, I hope, one good thing: an opportunity to open a door for the genuinely curious who wonder what I’m so worked up about. Specifically, let me present a good launching point. It isn’t a massive scholarly tome, but it isn’t (or at least isn’t merely) opinionated handwaving.

What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar is Murray Rothbard’s famous manifesto on sound money. First published in 1963 in the style of a pamphlet designed for mass distribution, it is one of his most influential works.

Murray Rothbard needs no introduction in libertarian economic circles. For the rest, Rothbard might best be characterized as an economist analogue of David Horowitz. Raised by parents of the Left, he was intellectually unable to reconcile cant with reality, but sincere in his belief in freedom, both in the abstract as a moral good in itself, and in practice the best vehicle for improving the lot of the less fortunate.