Were We Going to Get Rid of World War Two Debt?

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When we came out of world war to the government had a dollar and nine cents of debt outstanding for every got dollar of the national annual income. And over the next three decades, that came down. It bottomed out at 26 cents on the dollar in 19 76,. But remember that an important part of how it came down was inflation. So if we are to come out of this experience with a debt level compared to our national income that is of the order of what we had after world war two. We have to be very careful about saying, are we going to get rid of it the same way we got rid of world the world war two debt, namely by slowly inflating a lot

In episode 162 of The Michael Shermer Show, Michael speaks with one of the nation’s preeminent experts on economic policy, Benjamin Friedman, about his new book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking that explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force — religion.

Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets — among economists as well as many ordinary citizens — is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset.