The Mises Institute monthly, free with membership Volume 12,
Number 7 Murray N. Rothbard Governments, especially including
the US. government, seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping
their mitts off any part of the economy. Government, aided and
abetted by its host of apologists among intellectuals and policy
wonks, likes to regard itself as a deus ex machina (a "god out
of the machine") that surveys its subjects with Olympian
benevolence and omniscience, and then repeatedly descends to
earth to fix up the numerous "market failures" that mere people,
in their ignorance, persist in committing. The fact that history
is a black record of continual gross failure by this "god," and
that economic theory explains why it must be so, makes no
impression on official political discourse. Every nation-state,
for example, is continually tempted to intervene to fix its
exchange rates, the rates of its fiat paper money in terms of
the scores of other moneys issued by all the other governments
in the world. Governments