Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy—and What We Can Do About It. by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames (McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing)

Steve Forbes's Money: The Gold Standard Is The World's Prosperity Engine

Ex Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren rightly calls Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames's new book, Money, “A gripping read….”

Steve Forbes, chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media, and Elizabeth Ames have written their best book yet. It is entitled Money: How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy—and What We Can Do About It. Money is, by far, the most important book on economic policy published this year. (Full disclosure, Forbes and Ames reference and acknowledge this writer’s work, including his collaboration with Forbes.comcontributor Charles Kadlec, in this work.)

The authors succeed in making money — as in monetary policy itself — fascinating and accessible. It has drawn glowing praise from many important thought leaders, including virtuoso retired banking titan (now Cato Institute president John Allison; Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren; Whole Foods co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey; former CNBC contributor Lawrence Kudlow; public intellectual Dr. Ben Carson; and Atlas Economic Research Foundation's Dr. Judy Shelton, among others.

Steve Forbes speaks at the Get Motivated Seminar at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Significantly, one of the prime architects of the prosperity-inducing Reaganomics, Dr. Arther B. Laffer, has this to say about Forbes and Ames’s book: “A compelling and well-informed argument for a 21st century gold standard and a sound dollar, which will be the foundation for a new era of global prosperity.” It is very good to have the brilliant Laffer again speaking up for gold.

Laffer did seminal work, with Kadlec, on the gold standard in 1981. The record is contained in the Laffer Center’s archives: “Restoration of dollar/gold convertibility is the final and necessary link in the President’s program for an American Renaissance.”


Steve Forbes was featured prominently at an October 2011 Heritage Foundation Conference on a Stable Dollar: Why We Need It and How to Achieve it, also featuring Lewis E. Lehrman, the undisputed leading advocate of the classical gold standard (with whose Lehrman Institute's web publication this writer has a professional association). Lehrman appropriately is given pride of place in Money’s acknowledgements.

At that Heritage Foundation Conference Forbes made a wry and witty observation, reprised in this book: “conversations about monetary policy … (are) a surefire way to discourage unwanted conversations on airplanes." Forbes and Ames have found a way to make the conversation wanted, and even compelling. Forbes and Ames bring an abundant level of sanity, lucidity, and interest to what too often is considered as an arcane subject.

Good money is crucial to creating a climate of equitable prosperity. Forbes and Ames’s putting the case in terms accessible to regular readers is invaluable. Steve Forbes is a supply side icon. Money — this magnum opus on the gold standard, one of Forbes's signature issues — deserves to become a classic.

Money, far from being the root of all evil, presents (when, as here, golden) as delightfully virtuous. Its preface probes into just how our elites went so wrong in the mismanagement of our fundamental economic unit of account. Their analysis was anticipated by that of Frederick Hayek in The Pretense of Knowledge, his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:


It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences - an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the "scientistic" attitude - an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, "is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed." I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

Great minds work alike.

In the spirit of Steve's late, great, father Malcolm S. Forbes, each chapter of this book is encapsulated by an aphoristic “Nugget.” If you have any doubts as to whether acquiring it is worthy of your (at discount) $20.72 (just a nickle more than an iconic gold standard definition of the dollar of $20.67/oz), consider them:

How We Got Here: “An unstable currency means an unstable economy and less prosperity.”

What Is Money: “Money measures wealth, but does not create it.”

Money and Trade: “The only real deficit is not enough trade.”

Money Versus Wealth: “To paraphrase Ron Paul: if printing money created wealth, there would be no poverty left on earth.”

Money and Morality: “When people stop trusting money, they stop trusting each other.”

The Gold Standard: “Gold remains the monetary Polaris: Every alternative has failed.”