The Federal Reserve has presided over a steady erosion of the dollar’s purchasing power—by design. See for yourself using the government’s inflation calculator that begins in 1913, the year President Wilson signed the Fed into law. Its definition of “price stability” as a perpetual two percent rise in prices would have struck earlier generations as an admission of failure rather than a policy goal. Since the American economy didn’t begin in 1913, I urge you to look at CPI values prior to 1913, before the Fed existed and before gold was outlawed. Over time, the dollar bought more because it was