Sunday, December 6, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The Coconut Island
Once upon a time there was a corporation owned by many wealthy shareholders. This corporation owned one property, a very large tropical island covered with coconut trees. They employed a number of workers who climbed the coconut trees and collected the coconuts ready for sale, and they would transport the coconuts to the dock for shipment oversees.
The corporation enjoyed a steady income, year in and year out. Then the shareholders started to get impatient. They had seen in other industries much greater returns and profit, and they were wondering if there might be some way of increasing their wealth faster.
So they met and decided on a course of action. They found and hired a young MBA graduate from Harvard Business school, as they had heard this was one of the best institutions. This hotshot came and told them he'd analyze their company for a fee ($750 / hour) and he'd report on his findings.
They accepted his offer. So the Harvard MBA flew to the island for a month, charging for 12 hours a day (weekends included), and then returned. In his report he was sketchy on details, but he said for a lump sum he could manage the reorganization of their operations and he could cut their operating expenses by 2/3.
The shareholders were overjoyed! They didn't ask him many questions, and wrote him the check and gave him the go ahead. Within a month their increased returns started coming in, and they were all congratulating each other on their wise business decision.
The Harvard MBA accepted his payment and left, with the shareholder's heartfelt thanks. The situation continued for a year, when finally their profits vanished one month, and in fact they discovered a huge operating loss.
The shareholders met and discussed the situation. Finally they decided to send one of their own members to the island to investigate. When he arrived at the island, he found it was completely bare of living coconut trees, and instead all the trees were down on the ground, having been cut down.
The shareholder found the workers living in their shacks, doing nothing but eating the company food. The shareholder asked the foreman for an explanation, and the foreman told him what had happened.
The Harvard MBA had invested in the purchase of a single chainsaw. He then fired 2/3 of the laborers, and told the remaining ones how they'd harvest coconuts. Since it took a lot of time for a worker to climb a tree to harvest the coconuts, the MBA told them to simply cut the trees down and harvest the coconuts while the tree was on the ground.
This way it was a lot easier to get the ready coconuts, and so only 1/3 as many workers were needed.
The situation had gone on well for a whole year before every tree on the island had been cut down.
The shareholder thanked the foreman for the explanation, then left. He reported his findings to the other shareholders.
Later they accepted a miserly offer from the Harvard MBA to buy the desert island. He set up an operation growing wild pigs on the island, for a modest revenue stream.
The corporation enjoyed a steady income, year in and year out. Then the shareholders started to get impatient. They had seen in other industries much greater returns and profit, and they were wondering if there might be some way of increasing their wealth faster.
So they met and decided on a course of action. They found and hired a young MBA graduate from Harvard Business school, as they had heard this was one of the best institutions. This hotshot came and told them he'd analyze their company for a fee ($750 / hour) and he'd report on his findings.
They accepted his offer. So the Harvard MBA flew to the island for a month, charging for 12 hours a day (weekends included), and then returned. In his report he was sketchy on details, but he said for a lump sum he could manage the reorganization of their operations and he could cut their operating expenses by 2/3.
The shareholders were overjoyed! They didn't ask him many questions, and wrote him the check and gave him the go ahead. Within a month their increased returns started coming in, and they were all congratulating each other on their wise business decision.
The Harvard MBA accepted his payment and left, with the shareholder's heartfelt thanks. The situation continued for a year, when finally their profits vanished one month, and in fact they discovered a huge operating loss.
The shareholders met and discussed the situation. Finally they decided to send one of their own members to the island to investigate. When he arrived at the island, he found it was completely bare of living coconut trees, and instead all the trees were down on the ground, having been cut down.
The shareholder found the workers living in their shacks, doing nothing but eating the company food. The shareholder asked the foreman for an explanation, and the foreman told him what had happened.
The Harvard MBA had invested in the purchase of a single chainsaw. He then fired 2/3 of the laborers, and told the remaining ones how they'd harvest coconuts. Since it took a lot of time for a worker to climb a tree to harvest the coconuts, the MBA told them to simply cut the trees down and harvest the coconuts while the tree was on the ground.
This way it was a lot easier to get the ready coconuts, and so only 1/3 as many workers were needed.
The situation had gone on well for a whole year before every tree on the island had been cut down.
The shareholder thanked the foreman for the explanation, then left. He reported his findings to the other shareholders.
Later they accepted a miserly offer from the Harvard MBA to buy the desert island. He set up an operation growing wild pigs on the island, for a modest revenue stream.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Viva La Restoration
Remarks of Robert K. Landis
finews.ch Gold Conference
Zurich, Switzerland, November 17, 2009
It is an honor and a pleasure to be here among so many good friends and great minds.
I feel a special affinity for Zurich. It was the home of my friend and inspiration Ferdi Lips. It is the home of other friends like Tony Deden.
It was also the ancestral home of the Landis family.
In fact, this ancestral tie makes me a little nervous at the prospect of a question and answer session. The last time a Landis preaching a dissident message was questioned in Zurich, it was while he was stretched out on the rack. His answers irritated his questioners. So they cut off his head.
Hans Landis was a radical Protestant who denied the authority of the Pope and preached strict fundamentalism. In the passions of the early 1600’s, that was like being a gold bug who denies the legitimacy of the central bank and preaches sound money.
And so, as I stand before you this evening, I sincerely hope that over the course of the last four hundred years, Zurich has mellowed out.
Tonight I’m going to approach the subject of gold from a somewhat oblique angle. Please bear with me as I circle in on it.
Just over a year ago, the United States underwent a seemingly radical change, seemingly overnight. Its financial system had been revealed as insolvent under the weight of huge liabilities and worthless assets. The government refused to allow all the bankrupt institutions to fail, and thus permit the market to do its job of purging the rot from the system.
Instead, the authorities saved their favorites, effectively merging bank with state. They did so under cover of a witches’ brew of subsidies, guarantees and quasi-nationalizations bearing bizarre acronyms like TARP; PDCF; TAF; TSLF; and my personal favorite, the ABCPMMFLF, otherwise known as the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Fund Liquidity Facility.
And those were just the visible programs. The Fed, our central bank, dropped interest rates to zero and monetized additional trillions of dollars worth of problem assets, away from prying eyes. The nature and source of these assets remain matters of speculation, because the Fed to this day refuses to tell us what it bought and from whom.
When the smoke cleared, we Americans found ourselves the subjects of a gangster state, in thrall to a clutch of greedy, corrupt and incompetent banks which only days before had failed. We were now the guarantors of trillions of dollars in worthless assets that had generated billions in profits for those same banks in recent years. Their gains remained their gains; but their losses were now our losses. Our money, the reserve currency of the world, was now backed by toxic waste.
The events of last fall were, to all appearances, a bloodless coup, taking us from freedom to fascism virtually overnight. And all without a shot fired, or even, with few exceptions, an authoritative voice raised in protest.
How was such a thing possible in the United States, the supposed bastion of free market capitalism? The nation that had led the free world in the defeat of fascism some sixty years earlier, and in the defeat of Marxism-Leninism less than 20 years earlier?
And more importantly, how do we get out of this mess?
To understand how we got here, we must first understand that what seemed like major change, was actually just the illumination of existing reality. Bank and state had been a unitary phenomenon for many years. And what seemed abrupt, was actually the outcome of a gradual, accretive process.
Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. What happened last fall can be seen as the aftermath of a war of ideas fought long ago, in which the wrong side won, decisively.
The vanquished were the heirs of a noble intellectual tradition, the English empiricist philosophers who developed in the modern era the concepts of private property and voluntary exchange. This tradition, which informed, among other things, the United States Constitution, was reinvigorated in the late nineteenth century by a remarkable succession of economists originally based in Vienna, hence the term “Austrian School” of economics. The Austrians, whose greatest exponent was Ludwig von Mises, and whose American voice was Murray Rothbard, developed a theory of economics based entirely on individual choice.
The victors were the heirs of a far less noble tradition, a long line of intellectual quacks and panderers to power. The line began with a Scotsman, John Law, reached a vigorous maturity in an Englishman, John Maynard Keynes, and entered a final, flamboyant decrepitude in the policies, if not the public posturing, of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. In this tradition, the relevant analytic units are aggregates, broad abstractions. The individual scarcely warrants mention. Public power, not private property, is the heart of this tradition.
Keynesian economics is just a modern mutation of inflationism, a stealth tax levied by powerful insiders on ordinary people who can’t see it happening until it is too late. It is music to the ears of interventionist governments, because it ratifies what, if unchecked, they will do anyway, and it preys on the greed and gullibility of its victims, who are more than willing to believe you can get something for nothing.
Now I must concede, as a matter of historical fact, I’ve overdrawn the point. It wasn’t much of a fight, much less a war. The quacks had the field to themselves. They told powerful people what they wanted to hear, validating the intervention and deficit spending that was already occurring. They also had a head start of some 20 years, since it was not until relatively late in the day when the Austrians’ theories were even translated into English.
Nevertheless, I believe the events of last fall, and the road ahead, can best be understood in terms of the interplay between these two schools of economic thought.
Now, a detailed comparison of the two schools is just a bit beyond us this evening. But there are two contrasting theories that I’d like to mention briefly.
The first such contrast is the theory of depressions. In Austrian teaching, so-called business cycles are caused by official interference with money and credit creation. This interference – for example, setting interest rates below market – fools individual actors into overproducing, creating supply that exceeds actual demand. A depression is merely the process of clearing the resulting imbalance. It is inevitable, and it is necessary. Left to itself, the market will clear the excess of supply over demand through price adjustments. Government at this point has no role to play; it has done quite enough already.
In Keynesian teaching, by contrast, government is blameless in the business cycle, which just occurs naturally. In a depression, markets can’t be trusted to clear themselves through price adjustment. The government must step in and stimulate additional demand by means of deficit spending, more money creation, and more credit expansion.
The policy responses of last fall illustrate perfectly Keynesian doctrine in action. Our authorities refused to let the markets clear. Instead, they panicked, and attempted to prop up prices, reignite the credit expansion, and stimulate demand. All this is obvious to anyone who follows the news.
What is less obvious is how the crisis came about. Keynesians treat it like an act of God. Virtually no one in authority saw it coming. Applying Austrian theory, we see that the crisis was caused by Government intervention, decades of relentless credit expansion. It was entirely predictable. And, indeed, it was predicted. The nature and timing of the inevitable crash were endlessly debated for years all over the Internet by ordinary people unburdened by false doctrine.
A more important question, however, is why we tolerate unaccountable power in government. Why do we find it acceptable that government has the power to intervene so massively in the market that it can cause such a crisis in the first place? And why do we now tolerate more of the same, a putative cure that is doing even more damage?
This brings us to the other contrasting theory, the concept of money itself.
In Austrian teaching, money originates in the market: …all money has originated, and must originate, in a useful commodity chosen by the free market as a medium of exchange. The unit of money is basically just a unit of weight of the monetary commodity – usually a metal, such as gold or silver. Government has no role in the definition or selection of money, let alone its creation, price or quantity. That is the market’s function.
In Keynesian theory, by contrast, money originates in the state. Government has a total monopoly on money, starting with its very definition. It is not chosen in free exchange, it is imposed by force.
Keynes got his idea for state control of the means of exchange in the writings of a Prussian academic named Friedrich Knapp. Herr Knapp was the author of a book entitled the State Theory of Money, published in 1905.
According to Knapp’s theory, money is a creature of law, of state power. Money is whatever the state is willing to accept as payment for its taxes. It derives its value exclusively from the state.
Keynes was so delighted with the State Theory of Money that in 1924 he sponsored its first translation into English. In 1930, he adopted it explicitly in his Treatise on Money.
Now, it is a measure of the success of the Keynesian indoctrination to which we have all been subjected that this insidious theory strikes most people, even some who fancy themselves free market in orientation, as unobjectionable. They prefer to concentrate on other fallacies of Keynesian doctrine. Many of us are so used to hearing that the state properly has a monopoly on money that we have come to think it natural.
In fact, the State Theory was already defunct long before Keynes appropriated it. It had been demolished in theory as early as 1912 by Mises in his classic Theory of Money and Credit. It had been discredited in practice by its association with the German hyperinflation of the 1920’s. But inconvenient truth did not deter Lord Keynes. The State Theory was quietly incorporated into Keynesian dogma without further ado.
And there it sits, to this day, malignant and unexamined, a false theoretical postulate at the foundation of the entire corrupt edifice of inflationist theory and practice.
So why is this bit of intellectual history relevant?
Because bad ideas have bad consequences.
The State Theory of money, the obscure foundation of modern inflationism, left us intellectually defenseless against our government’s incremental shift to fiat money and away from any practical limitations on its power.
It left us defenseless against the depredations of our central bank, whose grotesque mispricing of money and credit over the years led in a straight line to the catastrophic serial bubbles in assets and credit whose threatened collapse triggered the open interventions of last fall.
And, unless we drag it out into the open and drive a stake through its heart, the State Theory will leave us defenseless still as we grope for a way out. If our assumptions are so flawed that we cannot properly articulate the conceptual problem, we will never understand, let alone fix, the institutional and behavioral problems.
Or, more to the point, defend ourselves against the next wave of monetary swindles by powerful insiders.
And so we come to the second question: how do we get out of this mess?
The short answer is, we don’t. There is no saving the dollar or the monetary system now based upon it.
Not that we should want to. Absolute power, Lord Acton famously observed, corrupts absolutely. The power to print a reserve currency out of thin air is the greatest power on Earth. Its very existence attracts and empowers people who wish to control other people. It corrupts all who enjoy it.
You have had direct exposure to the truth of this observation. Consider the relentless attacks on your gold by our authorities, and the relentless attacks on your bank secrecy laws by nearly everybody. The very same laws, ironically, that were developed in the 1930’s for the express purpose of protecting clients who were nationals of fascist states.
I believe it fair to say that as a society, we Americans have reached a dead end. We are bankrupt, and not just financially. Our leading institutions are corrupt and discredited. Our leadership class has betrayed its trust, openly and repeatedly.
Our financial and economic crisis will in due course lead to an intellectual and cultural crisis. We may yet avoid the fury and violence that have attended other paradigm shifts, other imperial collapses. But we will need to be very lucky indeed. That’s because on the one hand, this is about power which will not be voluntarily relinquished, and on the other, there is no reasoning with an angry mob.
So I believe it is a waste of time to talk about reform of the existing monetary system. There is no historical precedent for a fiat money surviving more than a brief span of years; and, in any event, the experience of the Soviet Union teaches that an economic system built upon a false dogma cannot survive.
We should instead focus on regeneration, the task of rebuilding out of the wreckage on the other side of that final monetary collapse. At that time, and not before, we will have the opportunity, however brief, to drive out these disastrous ideas along with those who used them to control and impoverish us. Only then will we have an opportunity, however long the odds, to restore our Constitutional republic.
In the meantime, what keeps the current system going?
You do.
You, meaning foreign investors, still lend us your savings. This just enables us to prolong the process, defer the resolution, and increase its ultimate cost.
When will it end?
Whenever you cut us off.
At some point, foreign holders will sell our debt in earnest, and buy gold with a conviction resembling panic.
And so, finally, I come to gold. This is, after all, a gold conference. Why then do I talk so much about politics?
Because I think it’s impossible to understand gold without understanding its political dimension. Gold is permanent, natural money, the antithesis of money made from nothing, money backed by force alone. It is a potent symbol of private property; of voluntary exchange taking place outside the control of the state; of limits on state power; and of resistance to the runaway state.
Left to its own devices, gold is the ultimate barometer of public confidence in government. It is also the ultimate means for ordinary citizens to opt-out of an oppressive, fraudulent system.
That is why gangsters who wield power in the name of the “people” always make ownership of gold a crime. So it was in France during the Revolution, in Germany during the Nazi era, in Russia during the Soviet era, in China during Mao’s rule, and in the United States from 1933 through 1974. It is why, even during periods when the ownership of gold is not outlawed, its price is ‘governed’, as one commentator puts it, or officially manipulated, as others of us put it.
It’s often hard for practical men of affairs to understand the vehemence of those of us who assert, seemingly ad nauseam, that gold is money. The truth is, our passion has more to do with the concept of liberty than with that of money. We know from history and experience that once the free market has lost control over the definition and creation of money, individuals have lost their liberty.
That’s why neither a central bank nor fiat money find support in the Constitution of the United States, and why our monetary system, which has these two elements as its very foundation, is unconstitutional on its face.
It’s also why, as we rebuild our institutions from the wreckage of the final monetary collapse, control over money must at all costs be kept away from government. It is not enough that gold return as money; government must keep its hands off.
Money must be real, tangible, circulating. As Mises wrote when considering the subject of monetary reform back in the 1950’s, “Everybody must see gold coins changing hands, must be used to having gold coins in his pockets, to receiving gold coins when he cashes his paycheck, and to spending gold coins when he buys in a store.” And I’m sure he would have added an approving reference to digital gold had the technology then existed.
Now, just to be clear, people must be free to choose whatever they want to use as money. We believe they will choose gold, given a chance, simply because people have already done so over thousands of years, and for very good reasons.
But creating the conditions within which an informed choice can be made, even – or perhaps especially - after the collapse of the system and the discrediting of its false ideology, will be extremely difficult.
We are beset by propaganda, falsehood and spin from all sides. Truth is of no consequence; the Fed has bought and paid for virtually the entire economics profession in the United States.
Our universities are riddled with apparatchiks who at the very least must toe the party line to advance in their careers, and in many cases are directly dependent on Fed largesse.
The financial press, now concentrated in ever fewer hands, is captive to the same false dogma, and is little more than an apologist for the current monetary regime.
We desperately need credible new sources of information on money if we are going to have any shot at a sustainable regeneration.
In this connection, I have reason to hope that from the talent assembled here this evening, we will see a new initiative in the very near future. Stay tuned.
Thank you.
finews.ch Gold Conference
Zurich, Switzerland, November 17, 2009
It is an honor and a pleasure to be here among so many good friends and great minds.
I feel a special affinity for Zurich. It was the home of my friend and inspiration Ferdi Lips. It is the home of other friends like Tony Deden.
It was also the ancestral home of the Landis family.
In fact, this ancestral tie makes me a little nervous at the prospect of a question and answer session. The last time a Landis preaching a dissident message was questioned in Zurich, it was while he was stretched out on the rack. His answers irritated his questioners. So they cut off his head.
Hans Landis was a radical Protestant who denied the authority of the Pope and preached strict fundamentalism. In the passions of the early 1600’s, that was like being a gold bug who denies the legitimacy of the central bank and preaches sound money.
And so, as I stand before you this evening, I sincerely hope that over the course of the last four hundred years, Zurich has mellowed out.
Tonight I’m going to approach the subject of gold from a somewhat oblique angle. Please bear with me as I circle in on it.
Just over a year ago, the United States underwent a seemingly radical change, seemingly overnight. Its financial system had been revealed as insolvent under the weight of huge liabilities and worthless assets. The government refused to allow all the bankrupt institutions to fail, and thus permit the market to do its job of purging the rot from the system.
Instead, the authorities saved their favorites, effectively merging bank with state. They did so under cover of a witches’ brew of subsidies, guarantees and quasi-nationalizations bearing bizarre acronyms like TARP; PDCF; TAF; TSLF; and my personal favorite, the ABCPMMFLF, otherwise known as the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Fund Liquidity Facility.
And those were just the visible programs. The Fed, our central bank, dropped interest rates to zero and monetized additional trillions of dollars worth of problem assets, away from prying eyes. The nature and source of these assets remain matters of speculation, because the Fed to this day refuses to tell us what it bought and from whom.
When the smoke cleared, we Americans found ourselves the subjects of a gangster state, in thrall to a clutch of greedy, corrupt and incompetent banks which only days before had failed. We were now the guarantors of trillions of dollars in worthless assets that had generated billions in profits for those same banks in recent years. Their gains remained their gains; but their losses were now our losses. Our money, the reserve currency of the world, was now backed by toxic waste.
The events of last fall were, to all appearances, a bloodless coup, taking us from freedom to fascism virtually overnight. And all without a shot fired, or even, with few exceptions, an authoritative voice raised in protest.
How was such a thing possible in the United States, the supposed bastion of free market capitalism? The nation that had led the free world in the defeat of fascism some sixty years earlier, and in the defeat of Marxism-Leninism less than 20 years earlier?
And more importantly, how do we get out of this mess?
To understand how we got here, we must first understand that what seemed like major change, was actually just the illumination of existing reality. Bank and state had been a unitary phenomenon for many years. And what seemed abrupt, was actually the outcome of a gradual, accretive process.
Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. What happened last fall can be seen as the aftermath of a war of ideas fought long ago, in which the wrong side won, decisively.
The vanquished were the heirs of a noble intellectual tradition, the English empiricist philosophers who developed in the modern era the concepts of private property and voluntary exchange. This tradition, which informed, among other things, the United States Constitution, was reinvigorated in the late nineteenth century by a remarkable succession of economists originally based in Vienna, hence the term “Austrian School” of economics. The Austrians, whose greatest exponent was Ludwig von Mises, and whose American voice was Murray Rothbard, developed a theory of economics based entirely on individual choice.
The victors were the heirs of a far less noble tradition, a long line of intellectual quacks and panderers to power. The line began with a Scotsman, John Law, reached a vigorous maturity in an Englishman, John Maynard Keynes, and entered a final, flamboyant decrepitude in the policies, if not the public posturing, of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. In this tradition, the relevant analytic units are aggregates, broad abstractions. The individual scarcely warrants mention. Public power, not private property, is the heart of this tradition.
Keynesian economics is just a modern mutation of inflationism, a stealth tax levied by powerful insiders on ordinary people who can’t see it happening until it is too late. It is music to the ears of interventionist governments, because it ratifies what, if unchecked, they will do anyway, and it preys on the greed and gullibility of its victims, who are more than willing to believe you can get something for nothing.
Now I must concede, as a matter of historical fact, I’ve overdrawn the point. It wasn’t much of a fight, much less a war. The quacks had the field to themselves. They told powerful people what they wanted to hear, validating the intervention and deficit spending that was already occurring. They also had a head start of some 20 years, since it was not until relatively late in the day when the Austrians’ theories were even translated into English.
Nevertheless, I believe the events of last fall, and the road ahead, can best be understood in terms of the interplay between these two schools of economic thought.
Now, a detailed comparison of the two schools is just a bit beyond us this evening. But there are two contrasting theories that I’d like to mention briefly.
The first such contrast is the theory of depressions. In Austrian teaching, so-called business cycles are caused by official interference with money and credit creation. This interference – for example, setting interest rates below market – fools individual actors into overproducing, creating supply that exceeds actual demand. A depression is merely the process of clearing the resulting imbalance. It is inevitable, and it is necessary. Left to itself, the market will clear the excess of supply over demand through price adjustments. Government at this point has no role to play; it has done quite enough already.
In Keynesian teaching, by contrast, government is blameless in the business cycle, which just occurs naturally. In a depression, markets can’t be trusted to clear themselves through price adjustment. The government must step in and stimulate additional demand by means of deficit spending, more money creation, and more credit expansion.
The policy responses of last fall illustrate perfectly Keynesian doctrine in action. Our authorities refused to let the markets clear. Instead, they panicked, and attempted to prop up prices, reignite the credit expansion, and stimulate demand. All this is obvious to anyone who follows the news.
What is less obvious is how the crisis came about. Keynesians treat it like an act of God. Virtually no one in authority saw it coming. Applying Austrian theory, we see that the crisis was caused by Government intervention, decades of relentless credit expansion. It was entirely predictable. And, indeed, it was predicted. The nature and timing of the inevitable crash were endlessly debated for years all over the Internet by ordinary people unburdened by false doctrine.
A more important question, however, is why we tolerate unaccountable power in government. Why do we find it acceptable that government has the power to intervene so massively in the market that it can cause such a crisis in the first place? And why do we now tolerate more of the same, a putative cure that is doing even more damage?
This brings us to the other contrasting theory, the concept of money itself.
In Austrian teaching, money originates in the market: …all money has originated, and must originate, in a useful commodity chosen by the free market as a medium of exchange. The unit of money is basically just a unit of weight of the monetary commodity – usually a metal, such as gold or silver. Government has no role in the definition or selection of money, let alone its creation, price or quantity. That is the market’s function.
In Keynesian theory, by contrast, money originates in the state. Government has a total monopoly on money, starting with its very definition. It is not chosen in free exchange, it is imposed by force.
Keynes got his idea for state control of the means of exchange in the writings of a Prussian academic named Friedrich Knapp. Herr Knapp was the author of a book entitled the State Theory of Money, published in 1905.
According to Knapp’s theory, money is a creature of law, of state power. Money is whatever the state is willing to accept as payment for its taxes. It derives its value exclusively from the state.
Keynes was so delighted with the State Theory of Money that in 1924 he sponsored its first translation into English. In 1930, he adopted it explicitly in his Treatise on Money.
Now, it is a measure of the success of the Keynesian indoctrination to which we have all been subjected that this insidious theory strikes most people, even some who fancy themselves free market in orientation, as unobjectionable. They prefer to concentrate on other fallacies of Keynesian doctrine. Many of us are so used to hearing that the state properly has a monopoly on money that we have come to think it natural.
In fact, the State Theory was already defunct long before Keynes appropriated it. It had been demolished in theory as early as 1912 by Mises in his classic Theory of Money and Credit. It had been discredited in practice by its association with the German hyperinflation of the 1920’s. But inconvenient truth did not deter Lord Keynes. The State Theory was quietly incorporated into Keynesian dogma without further ado.
And there it sits, to this day, malignant and unexamined, a false theoretical postulate at the foundation of the entire corrupt edifice of inflationist theory and practice.
So why is this bit of intellectual history relevant?
Because bad ideas have bad consequences.
The State Theory of money, the obscure foundation of modern inflationism, left us intellectually defenseless against our government’s incremental shift to fiat money and away from any practical limitations on its power.
It left us defenseless against the depredations of our central bank, whose grotesque mispricing of money and credit over the years led in a straight line to the catastrophic serial bubbles in assets and credit whose threatened collapse triggered the open interventions of last fall.
And, unless we drag it out into the open and drive a stake through its heart, the State Theory will leave us defenseless still as we grope for a way out. If our assumptions are so flawed that we cannot properly articulate the conceptual problem, we will never understand, let alone fix, the institutional and behavioral problems.
Or, more to the point, defend ourselves against the next wave of monetary swindles by powerful insiders.
And so we come to the second question: how do we get out of this mess?
The short answer is, we don’t. There is no saving the dollar or the monetary system now based upon it.
Not that we should want to. Absolute power, Lord Acton famously observed, corrupts absolutely. The power to print a reserve currency out of thin air is the greatest power on Earth. Its very existence attracts and empowers people who wish to control other people. It corrupts all who enjoy it.
You have had direct exposure to the truth of this observation. Consider the relentless attacks on your gold by our authorities, and the relentless attacks on your bank secrecy laws by nearly everybody. The very same laws, ironically, that were developed in the 1930’s for the express purpose of protecting clients who were nationals of fascist states.
I believe it fair to say that as a society, we Americans have reached a dead end. We are bankrupt, and not just financially. Our leading institutions are corrupt and discredited. Our leadership class has betrayed its trust, openly and repeatedly.
Our financial and economic crisis will in due course lead to an intellectual and cultural crisis. We may yet avoid the fury and violence that have attended other paradigm shifts, other imperial collapses. But we will need to be very lucky indeed. That’s because on the one hand, this is about power which will not be voluntarily relinquished, and on the other, there is no reasoning with an angry mob.
So I believe it is a waste of time to talk about reform of the existing monetary system. There is no historical precedent for a fiat money surviving more than a brief span of years; and, in any event, the experience of the Soviet Union teaches that an economic system built upon a false dogma cannot survive.
We should instead focus on regeneration, the task of rebuilding out of the wreckage on the other side of that final monetary collapse. At that time, and not before, we will have the opportunity, however brief, to drive out these disastrous ideas along with those who used them to control and impoverish us. Only then will we have an opportunity, however long the odds, to restore our Constitutional republic.
In the meantime, what keeps the current system going?
You do.
You, meaning foreign investors, still lend us your savings. This just enables us to prolong the process, defer the resolution, and increase its ultimate cost.
When will it end?
Whenever you cut us off.
At some point, foreign holders will sell our debt in earnest, and buy gold with a conviction resembling panic.
And so, finally, I come to gold. This is, after all, a gold conference. Why then do I talk so much about politics?
Because I think it’s impossible to understand gold without understanding its political dimension. Gold is permanent, natural money, the antithesis of money made from nothing, money backed by force alone. It is a potent symbol of private property; of voluntary exchange taking place outside the control of the state; of limits on state power; and of resistance to the runaway state.
Left to its own devices, gold is the ultimate barometer of public confidence in government. It is also the ultimate means for ordinary citizens to opt-out of an oppressive, fraudulent system.
That is why gangsters who wield power in the name of the “people” always make ownership of gold a crime. So it was in France during the Revolution, in Germany during the Nazi era, in Russia during the Soviet era, in China during Mao’s rule, and in the United States from 1933 through 1974. It is why, even during periods when the ownership of gold is not outlawed, its price is ‘governed’, as one commentator puts it, or officially manipulated, as others of us put it.
It’s often hard for practical men of affairs to understand the vehemence of those of us who assert, seemingly ad nauseam, that gold is money. The truth is, our passion has more to do with the concept of liberty than with that of money. We know from history and experience that once the free market has lost control over the definition and creation of money, individuals have lost their liberty.
That’s why neither a central bank nor fiat money find support in the Constitution of the United States, and why our monetary system, which has these two elements as its very foundation, is unconstitutional on its face.
It’s also why, as we rebuild our institutions from the wreckage of the final monetary collapse, control over money must at all costs be kept away from government. It is not enough that gold return as money; government must keep its hands off.
Money must be real, tangible, circulating. As Mises wrote when considering the subject of monetary reform back in the 1950’s, “Everybody must see gold coins changing hands, must be used to having gold coins in his pockets, to receiving gold coins when he cashes his paycheck, and to spending gold coins when he buys in a store.” And I’m sure he would have added an approving reference to digital gold had the technology then existed.
Now, just to be clear, people must be free to choose whatever they want to use as money. We believe they will choose gold, given a chance, simply because people have already done so over thousands of years, and for very good reasons.
But creating the conditions within which an informed choice can be made, even – or perhaps especially - after the collapse of the system and the discrediting of its false ideology, will be extremely difficult.
We are beset by propaganda, falsehood and spin from all sides. Truth is of no consequence; the Fed has bought and paid for virtually the entire economics profession in the United States.
Our universities are riddled with apparatchiks who at the very least must toe the party line to advance in their careers, and in many cases are directly dependent on Fed largesse.
The financial press, now concentrated in ever fewer hands, is captive to the same false dogma, and is little more than an apologist for the current monetary regime.
We desperately need credible new sources of information on money if we are going to have any shot at a sustainable regeneration.
In this connection, I have reason to hope that from the talent assembled here this evening, we will see a new initiative in the very near future. Stay tuned.
Thank you.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Mark Twain Quote - The Patriot
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. -- Mark Twain
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Ron Paul: The Shining Beacon Of False Hope
For many months I regularly look at the Daily Paul website, here.
The lead articles, right at the top of the page, are always the update on the HR 1207 bill and the companion S 604 bill. HR1207 is Ron Paul's Audit The Fed bill in Congress, and the S 604 bill is the equivalent in the Senate.
As time goes by, the tally of co-sponsors for both bills has been rising steadily, especially in the House. At the time of writing HR1207 now has 309 cosponsors and S604 has 30.
Over a month ago, in September, Barney Frank was questioned about HR1207. He said they were working on it and expected a vote on it in October. The Ron Paul community jumped on that and was very enthusiastic. "Did you hear that? Barney Frank says it's coming for a vote in October. Oh my god, it's finally going to happen! Yay!"
October came and went, no vote. Instead, the Daily Paul reported that Mel Watt in the Financial Services Committee gutted the HR1207 bill so it has no teeth at all, supposedly removing any accountability for the Fed. The Ron Paul community was outraged! Now they're calling for support. Call your congressman! Protest! Fight Fight Fight!!!
Ron Paul recorded a video response. You can see his video on YouTube here.
Now, in that video, Ron Paul expresses confidence, says this is not unexpected, he's confident his rapport with Barney Frank will carry the bill through. He'll get a chance to restore the bill to its original form. Then he says this process is going to take a long time. Even if it passes the House, it's got to pass the Senate. Even if it passes the Senate, the president has to sign it. Even if he does, the Fed can challenge it in the courts. He ends by saying this will all take one or two years to come to fruition.
His caviliar attitude about how long this will take -- am I the only one outraged by this? The US dollar and the US empire will not exist as it does today in one or two years, not with all the other countries in the world moving away from the dollar as quickly as they possibly can.
What is going on here?
Whatever Ron Paul's personal beliefs are, there is an undeniable effect of his actions. The effect is to pacify an element of unhappy citizens. They can look at the steady progress of cosponsors for HR1207 and think, "Ah. The system is working. Progress is being made. Ron Paul will save us. We need not concern outselves with ongoing events, everything is moving along smoothly."
Ron Paul. Realistically, he is completely ineffective as a political figure. He was crucified in the 2008 election campaign. He became the butt of jokes by the mainstream media. He was unable to play the political game and even stay in the arena. He was marginalized almost from day one.
Ron Paul. Has he ever authored a single bill that passed? That made any substantive change?
Ron Paul. Always saying the right things. Always talking about how we need sound money. A return to a gold standard. How central banking is flawed. How the Fed's actions are wreaking havoc on the economy.
Ron Paul. Saying the right things. Accomplishing absolutely nothing whatsoever other than to keep the growing number of disgruntled citizens pacified and believing the system works.
The system doesn't work. The system is fundamentally broken. It cannot be fixed. It is too corrupt, too far gone. It can never be fixed. The US debts are unpayable. The unfunded US committments can never be paid. National bankruptcy is the only way out. Or default. There is no magical way anyone can make it all better. Even if Ron Paul were president with dictatorial powers to do whatever he wanted, the problems are so systemic they can never be solved.
40 years of crippling taxation might pay off the US debt. Is this really going to happen? No way.
Ron Paul's true effect on the US arena is to provide false hope.
Ron Paul. The Shining Beacon Of False Hope.
If you really care about helping change, don't waste your time trying to work within the system. Voting is irrelevant. Playing guess the winner in presidential elections serves no purpose. Waiting for Congress to enact bills is pointless. If you really want to make a difference, all you need to do is buy some silver and gold, the real, physical kind you can hold in your hands. That represents a vote of no confidence in the US dollar and in the US empire and in the Federal Reserve and Central Banking Cartel.
It's really that simple. Pretend as if your dollars are going to be worthless, and transfer your wealth into things of real value. The easiest and most liquid and least risky are silver and gold.
The lead articles, right at the top of the page, are always the update on the HR 1207 bill and the companion S 604 bill. HR1207 is Ron Paul's Audit The Fed bill in Congress, and the S 604 bill is the equivalent in the Senate.
As time goes by, the tally of co-sponsors for both bills has been rising steadily, especially in the House. At the time of writing HR1207 now has 309 cosponsors and S604 has 30.
Over a month ago, in September, Barney Frank was questioned about HR1207. He said they were working on it and expected a vote on it in October. The Ron Paul community jumped on that and was very enthusiastic. "Did you hear that? Barney Frank says it's coming for a vote in October. Oh my god, it's finally going to happen! Yay!"
October came and went, no vote. Instead, the Daily Paul reported that Mel Watt in the Financial Services Committee gutted the HR1207 bill so it has no teeth at all, supposedly removing any accountability for the Fed. The Ron Paul community was outraged! Now they're calling for support. Call your congressman! Protest! Fight Fight Fight!!!
Ron Paul recorded a video response. You can see his video on YouTube here.
Now, in that video, Ron Paul expresses confidence, says this is not unexpected, he's confident his rapport with Barney Frank will carry the bill through. He'll get a chance to restore the bill to its original form. Then he says this process is going to take a long time. Even if it passes the House, it's got to pass the Senate. Even if it passes the Senate, the president has to sign it. Even if he does, the Fed can challenge it in the courts. He ends by saying this will all take one or two years to come to fruition.
His caviliar attitude about how long this will take -- am I the only one outraged by this? The US dollar and the US empire will not exist as it does today in one or two years, not with all the other countries in the world moving away from the dollar as quickly as they possibly can.
What is going on here?
Whatever Ron Paul's personal beliefs are, there is an undeniable effect of his actions. The effect is to pacify an element of unhappy citizens. They can look at the steady progress of cosponsors for HR1207 and think, "Ah. The system is working. Progress is being made. Ron Paul will save us. We need not concern outselves with ongoing events, everything is moving along smoothly."
Ron Paul. Realistically, he is completely ineffective as a political figure. He was crucified in the 2008 election campaign. He became the butt of jokes by the mainstream media. He was unable to play the political game and even stay in the arena. He was marginalized almost from day one.
Ron Paul. Has he ever authored a single bill that passed? That made any substantive change?
Ron Paul. Always saying the right things. Always talking about how we need sound money. A return to a gold standard. How central banking is flawed. How the Fed's actions are wreaking havoc on the economy.
Ron Paul. Saying the right things. Accomplishing absolutely nothing whatsoever other than to keep the growing number of disgruntled citizens pacified and believing the system works.
The system doesn't work. The system is fundamentally broken. It cannot be fixed. It is too corrupt, too far gone. It can never be fixed. The US debts are unpayable. The unfunded US committments can never be paid. National bankruptcy is the only way out. Or default. There is no magical way anyone can make it all better. Even if Ron Paul were president with dictatorial powers to do whatever he wanted, the problems are so systemic they can never be solved.
40 years of crippling taxation might pay off the US debt. Is this really going to happen? No way.
Ron Paul's true effect on the US arena is to provide false hope.
Ron Paul. The Shining Beacon Of False Hope.
If you really care about helping change, don't waste your time trying to work within the system. Voting is irrelevant. Playing guess the winner in presidential elections serves no purpose. Waiting for Congress to enact bills is pointless. If you really want to make a difference, all you need to do is buy some silver and gold, the real, physical kind you can hold in your hands. That represents a vote of no confidence in the US dollar and in the US empire and in the Federal Reserve and Central Banking Cartel.
It's really that simple. Pretend as if your dollars are going to be worthless, and transfer your wealth into things of real value. The easiest and most liquid and least risky are silver and gold.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
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