Why Bernanke should read FAUST

Goethe’s FAUST elaborates on the dubious virtues of paper money. Bernanke is not the first monetary authority to believe that the printing presses can solve all the US problems. A well-known US critic elaborates on the backgrounds of the French Revolution: "It records the most gigantic attempt ever made in the history of the world by a government to create an inconvertible paper currency, and to maintain its circulation at various levels of value. It also records what is perhaps the greatest of all governmental efforts--with the possible exception of Diocletian's--to enact and enforce a legal limit of commodity prices… It failed. They left behind them a legacy of moral and material desolation and woe, from which one of the most intellectual and spirited races of Europe has suffered for a century and a quarter, and will continue to suffer until the end of time. There are limitations to the powers of governments and of peoples that inhere in the constitution of things, and that neither despotisms nor democracies can overcome." Author & poet Johann Wolfgang v. Goethe puts the monetary story right at the center of the Faust action, and compellingly shows how it leads to a national catastrophe. Inflation brought commerce and manufactures, the mercantile interest to flourish, the agricultural interest, to ruin. It brought on these the same destruction which would come to a Hollander opening the dykes of the sea to irrigate his garden in a dry summer. It ended in the complete financial, moral and political prostration of France-a prostration from which only a Napoleon could raise it." Does the US want another Napoleon ?