William E. Simon served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1974 to 1977, under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He arrived after the gold window had closed and the wage and price controls had failed, and he spent his term watching deficits, inflation and regulation grow anyway. A Time for Truth (1978) is his account of what he saw from inside the Treasury, and his indictment of it.
Simon argues that the United States had drifted from a free economy toward a managed one, and that easy money, deficit spending and an expanding regulatory state were not cures for the 1970s but causes of it. Unlike most Washington memoirs, this one does not defend its author's administration. It names the error and calls for a return to sound money, limited government and economic liberty.
The book carries a preface by Milton Friedman and a foreword by F. A. Hayek, and it became a bestseller that helped shape the free-market turn of the 1980s.
Read it beside The Creature from Jekyll Island: G. Edward Griffin explains how the Federal Reserve was made; Simon, a Treasury Secretary, explains from the inside how the system went wrong.
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