UNFAVORABLE REVIEWS
The U.S. dollar eerily parallels the life of Ricky Nelson, although it has yet to crash and burn
BY DOUG FRENCH

Doug French, associate editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine is an executive vice president of a Nevada bank. He is the 2005 recipient of the Murray N. Rothbard Award from the Center for Libertarian Studies. Other stories by Doug French

From my barstool at Scores, strangely juxtaposed were the eight-foot black-and- white face of Ricky Nelson and the girl on stage. While the TV commercial was selling Ricky's greatest hits from a long ago America, the curvaceous one on stage was bearing her assets for tips in the here and now. 

The photo of Ricky was from 1956 when rock 'n' roll was sweeping the country. He starred on TV with Ozzie and Harriet, but Ricky resented their boring lifestyle and authority and instead immersed himself into rock 'n' roll, the antithesis of Ozzie's smooth big band sound. He grew sideburns, slicked his hair back, wore shirts with the collars turned up and played his music loud.

America was a much different place in the late 1950s. The dollar was sound. Gold in Fort Knox backed the paper money floating throughout, at least in theory. Nelson's fresh-faced look was considered radical. And some Republicans were fiscally conservative and isolationists. 

The U.S. government debt was $276 billion in 1956. A mere pittance compared with the $7.9 trillion as of Sept. 30 of this past year. The nation has gone into hock exponentially at a rate of nearly 28 times since Ricky sang Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin."

In February of 1956, a young Murray Rothbard confessed to former Nebraska Congressman Howard Buffett that he (Rothbard) was in fact "Aubrey Herbert." Buffett had become interested in the work of a right-wing journalist of that name two years prior. The two had actually met in the previous summer at Ludwig von Mises's Austrian economics seminar. Buffett and Rothbard would go on to correspond for years and became close friends. They commiserated with one another over the drift toward war, imperialism and centralization, which was aided and abetted by the then-current leadership of the American right wing.

Red-hot Ricky Nelson had orders for a million copies before even entering the studio to record "Be-Bop Baby" and "Have I Told You That I Love You." A week later, the songs were played on the TV show. The record roared up the charts in the fall of 1957, at the same time this writer as a newborn was living just down the railroad tracks from the Belle Springs Creamery in Abilene, Kansas, where just re-elected President Eisenhower had toiled as a young man. 

But, the money supply was anything but roaring in 1957. M-3 was roughly $260 billion. Consider now in the age of gangster rap, the money supply stacks up to $10.2 trillion. If you think popular music has been despoiled, money is much worse for wear at the hands of the Federal Reserve.

Ricky's career accelerated quickly. He received favorable reviews co-starring in John Wayne's Rio Bravo. His concerts were instant sellouts. He received 10,000 fan letters a week and appeared in a monthly comic book. He raced cars, dated starlets and was even friends with Elvis.

But fame is fleeting and as the '60s began, Nelson's career went into a slump from which he never recovered. Ricky then became Rick, but was booed at a rock revival concert in 1971. In reaction, a hurt and frustrated Nelson wrote and produced the album Garden Party in 1972. His critics were stunned when it became a million-seller, his first since 1961, but it would be his last major success.

By the early 1970s, the monetary printing presses were working overtime to pay for the Vietnam War and LBJ's Great Society social programs. The United States was running not just a balance of payments deficit but also, for the first time in the 20th century, a trade deficit. Foreign dollar holders increasingly began trading dollars for gold and by 1970 U.S. gold coverage had deteriorated from 55 percent to 22 percent. 

In the first six months of 1971, assets of $22 billion fled the United States. The same year Rick Nelson was booed off the stage, Richard Nixon closed the gold window severing the dollar's last link to gold on Aug. 15. 

Rick Nelson's struggle to regain fame ended when he died on New Year's Eve 1985 in a plane crash following a performance in Guntersville, Alabama. A year and half later, the dollar's fate was sealed when Ronald Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan was to create more money than any central banker in history, with M-3 increasing by $6.6 trillion in his 18 years on the job, an amount 25 times where M-3 stood in 1957 when Ricky Nelson was making hearts flutter.

The dollar has not yet crashed and burned, but its fall has surely quickened and government's size grows unabated with no end in sight. But thankfully, the female form remains timeless. LW