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I highly recommend what is just an incredible article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Lewis Lehrman called “The Nixon Shock Heard ‘Round the World.” The article recounts President Richard Nixon’s machinations in 1971, where he decided to go the wholly statist route of separating the dollar from the gold tether set in place during the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, and at the same time impose wage and price controls on major portions of the U.S. economy — ostensibly to “battle inflation.”

As the article relates, by dint of his weaselly charm alone, Nixon somehow got his entire economic team– including Paul Volcker who later became Fed Chair under Carter and Reagan– to buy into this radical (and authoritarian) policy, which marked the true acceleration of the dollar’s decline to this day, as the graph included in the above-linked article illustrates:

 

It’s kind of incredible, but that was what passed for a “Republican” back in those days.   And as much crap as we give Jimmy Carter for continuing (and in some cases exacerbating) these policies in the following years, the progenitor was the “Republican” Nixon.  He destroyed the Bretton Wood’s Agreement, and our last tie to a stable currency, leading the U.S. into its first hard decline since the Great Depression.

So let’s give thanks to the true “progressives,” who worked within the Republican Party to return to the more classical liberal economic policies characterized by Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman,  policies which emphasized non-statist and individual influences as the prime actors in an efficient economy, rather than those of the top-down centralized planning influences of John Kenneth Galbraith and the big government types who’d dominated since Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt’s eras.

True, we’ve had a slip back in the last number of years, but it’s not like there has been no institutional learning.   Even though misguided and flawed bills like Obamacare are passed, no overt attempt to control mass wages and prices will likely every be attempted again by a President or Congress.

We must also, however, remain ever vigilant that such coarse moves are never bruited about — even in the worst of economic times.

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I sold nothing today, NOTHING.   Why?  Mostly because everything was up for the jump, and then I had meetings all day and just decided I’d wait for Tuesday morning to take my decision.   Besides, I’m hedged on most everything large from last week, so I’m not overtly concerned about “safety” at this point.

I will be in relatively early tomorrow and let you know what I’m doing.

Best to you all.

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