After far too long a gap in posting, here’s a round up of a few items I found interesting across the blogosphere recently.
Government Considers this Blog Post Illegal
Pausing to Note the Continued Upward Climb of Humanity
Fractional Reserve Banking is Not What Most People Think It Is
I hope to restore vaguely normal service soon!
There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
Ludwig von Mises
"Like every other tax, inflation acts to determine the individual and
business policies we are all forced to follow. It discourages all prudence
and thrift. It encourages squandering, gambling, reckless waste
of all kinds. It often makes it more profitable to speculate than to produce.
It tears apart the whole fabric of stable economic relationships.
Its inexcusable injustices drive men toward desperate remedies. It
plants the seeds of fascism and communism. It leads men to demand
totalitarian controls. It ends invariably in bitter disillusion and collapse."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
"But who can enforce honest weights and measures
regarding money if the enforcers—politicians and rulers—
are profiting from the cheating? That is the problem
that no society has ever been able to solve. Government
money eventually becomes corrupt money."
Gary North, Honest Money
"As a result I am more convinced than ever that if we ever again are going to have a decent money, it will not come from government: it will be issued by private enterprise, because providing the public with good money which it can trust and use can not only be an extremely profitable business; it imposes on the issuer a discipline to which the government has never been and cannot be subject. It is a business which competing enterprise can maintain only if it gives the public as good a money as anybody else."
FA Hayek, A Free-Market Monetary System
"By a continuous process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some."
John Maynard Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace
It is astonishing that Bank of England still has defenders. After all long gone are the days when the Governor of the Bank of England opposed Walter Bagehot (the third editor of the “Economist” magazine – and the man who turned this publication away from being a free market supporting publication) on his (Bagehot’s) support for, then very limited, Central Bank support for commerical banks that got into trouble. No, said the then Governor of the Bank of England, Bagehot’s position is a terrible one.
These days Bank of England people would not consider Bagehot to be an unaccaptable corporate welfare person, they (like the modern “Economist” magazine) would consider Bagehot’s position vastly too moderate. Central Banks should try and bail out the entire economy (not just a few politically connected banks) by unlimited increases in the money supply. No playing on the margins of the currency (as with Walter Bagehot) – but unlimited fiat money, to rape (I mean to “stimulate”) the entire capital structute of the economy.
And the European Central Bank (ECB) should do the same. It should offer “unlimited support ” (i.e. unlimited increases in the money supply) to prop banks and, indeed, national governments (by various complex and indirect scams of course – we would not want the people to know what is going on……).
The idea that unlimted increases in the money supply will “save the Euro” is, of course, absurd (as with the Dollar and the Pound such a policy would DESTROY the currency). But then the modern elite (unlike Walter Bagehot) even believe that increasing the money supply (either via the printing press or via book keeping tricks) will restore prosperity.
They are unable (or unwilling) to see that this “stimulation” is simply a boom/bust scam – that leaves the economy totally distorted (relative prices twisted – and so on).
It is a mistake to call this “money is real wealth” fallacy “Keynesian economics” (as the fallacy, print-more-money-and-we-will-be-better-off, existed long before Keynes).
It was refuted (centuries ago) by the Classical Economics, and even mocked by Karl Marx (see Hunter Lewis’ work “Where Keynes Went Wrong”).
For me, it is not so much astonishing that the BoE still has defenders, but rather than so many people don’t even question it’s role in the economy. Especially for those on the left, who love to claim they are radical and challenging the “capitalist system”, they just seem to ignore the role of central banks. It is not even the elephant in the room – then everybody knows the elephant is there but refuses to talk about it. With central banks, no-one even seems to realise that it’s there at all!
What I’m trying to do with this blog is to get people questioning central banks, and thinking about them perhaps for the first time. I’m relatively new to Austrian economics, and I’m still learning, but the conclusions regarding central banking and the business cycle have so much more “explanatory power” than the explanations of other schools of thought.
The problem is, the vested interest of the big banks and governments mean central banks are here to stay – unless we can educate people to see that they cause harm way beyond any supposed benefits they bring. Vested interests have been beaten before, hopefully we can do it again.