Following up on his column yesterday on James A. Garfield, today Larry Reed writes about William Bourke Cockran, whose learned speech helped convince the House of Representatives to repeal the inflationary silver purchase law that had set the nation up for the monetary crisis known as the Panic of 1893.
Incidentally, opponents of capitalism and sound money often point to our various panics and crises and say, “See — that proves that your system is unstable.” What we learn in Reed’s essay is that it was interference with sound money that led to the Panic of 1893. In fact, as Murray Rothbard showed, all of our various monetary crises have been rooted in government tampering with money and credit for short-term political gain.
