Reflecting on “An Evening With Tom Woods”
I recently had the honor of meeting Tom Woods and seeing him speak at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. Having only in recent months been exposed to Austrian economics and the names of his predecessors such as Ludwig von Mises, I expected to learn a lot. I am sure that I will learn much more from reading the works of these men, however I find it important to note that most of what Dr. Woods spoke about seemed like what should be common sense to most people.
When I went to work the next day, I was told a story by one of our regular customers while discussing what I had realized was “not so common” sense in today’s world about economics, a subject I am not well-read in to say the least. This elderly man, who is one of my favorite regular customers, told me a story from when he had been in Germany during World War II. Stationed on the Rhine River, my friend met an elderly man who had shown him the stacks of German marks in the empty homes in the town they were in. This elderly man warned my friend that inflation of this sort would come to the U.S., so now my now-elderly friend thinks of the man he met in Germany often as we are now facing inflation of the same sort.
While our money here is not yet worth little more than heating fuel to burn in the fireplace, the story reminded me of something one of the attendees of the meetup at which we met Tom Woods said, “You can’t have a free market and a central bank.” Yet, for some reason, the “common” sense that I think that this statement has, is not really common at all because of the state of complacency running so rampant in the American society and the world in which we live.
