Why the Federal Reserve Exists

Here we go with the vocabulary thing again.  I promise to make this easier than your last root canal.  The Federal Reserve Bank is a central bank.  Central banks are created to control and manipulate the money supply.  The money supply is the aggregate total of all the money in circulation in an economy.  It is often referred to in the media and the industry as M.  Controlling the money supply frees governments from the responsibility of living within their means.  It makes it possible for them to counterfeit money.  All governments have laws making counterfeiting their currency illegal.  That is because all governments have a monopoly on counterfeiting and do not tolerate competition in the business.

Governments counterfeit money in the exact same way all counterfeiters do; they print it, and slip it into circulation into the economy.  They spend it.  They spend more money than the economy produces because they do not want to live within their means.  They do not want to live within their means because they use money to buy votes.  They give out goodies in return for favors; favors in the form of legislation that promotes the welfare of one group over another group; favors that line their individual pockets, reward their friends, punish their enemies, and above all, favors that get them re-elected.

Other reasons are given, of course, for the existence of the Fed.  But it is axiomatic that all governments seek continual expansion of their powers, and control of the public purse and the power to tax is the Holy Grail for power seekers.  The founding fathers of this country feared government more than anything, and the Constitution they framed was to protect us, not from foreigners, and not from each other, so much as from our elected government itself.  The debates about economic policies are a sideshow and a distraction; the main event is the relentless expansion of executive power and the quiet transfer, not only of wealth, but of personal liberties as well.  Without economic freedom based on individual rights, private property, and the right to keep and dispose of our earnings as we choose, there is no freedom at all. Read more..

Financial Literacy: Measuring the Mood of the Mob by the Price of Gold

At various times throughout history money, or currency, has been based on metals, usually silver or gold.  This created an objective value to the currency of the period.  A dollar, for example, was worth an ounce of gold, or 1/10 of an ounce of gold, or 1/20 of an ounce of gold.  Governments and rulers, who always want to spend more money than they take in, either for their own enrichment or in order to bribe voters, usually try to debase their currency.  Kings about once a generation used to re-mint their coins (paper currency wasn’t invented yet), using the need to have their own image on the coin as the excuse, and they would dilute the gold content by mixing other metals with the gold, or slightly downsize the coin itself, but calling it by the same name as its predecessor.  When governments became well established, they usually did a ‘bait and switch’ routine and substituted printed money for metal coin, and again called it by the same name attached to a unit of its metal predecessor.  So a gold dollar was now called a paper dollar, as if their value were the same!

Once governments discovered the delights of the printing press, they would print as much money as they felt they could slip past their gullible and unaware subjects.  Acceptance by the herd was essential, and when the debased currency was widely rejected, it was not uncommon for a ruler to create stiff penalties, including the death penalty, for not accepting the paper currency as legal tender.  The reason governments prefer to print money is first of all so they are not bound by the usual principles of fiscal discipline (Don’t spend more than you make) but also every time they print money, they are actually lowering the unit value of that currency, reducing its purchasing power.  They are actually picking the pockets of their citizens, especially the most conservative ones who save.  The money these citizens save will not buy as much when it is finally spent as it would have immediately upon their having received it.

When citizens get nervous about the stability of the banking system, their political system, or their own personal safety, they are inclined to buy gold.  Gold does not pay interest, and it is still only worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, but because there is a fixed quantity of it at any given point in time, its value tends to be very stable.  This is why nervous people buy gold as a hedge against inflation.  Gold is not without risk, however.  At times when the madding crowd is enamored of another of its periodic manias, interest in gold will wane as the herd stampedes in a new direction.  When demand falls off, the price of gold drops, like anything else.  Even in times of rising price of gold, there is always the possibility of the government confiscating it (that has been done by OUR government, as well as many others.)  Ultimately the government has the guns, and whatever we have is pretty much by permission.  A democracy, as I have written many times, is no guarantee of anything more than mob rule.  All people, in any period of history, need protected most from those they elect over themselves.  Inevitably their public servants become their masters.  Even here, the freest nation on earth, the Constitution guaranteeing both individual rights and the limitation of government’s powers, has been under steady attack for well over a hundred years by many activists who resent its restrictions.  They want to harness the coercive power of government to an endless list of programs to protect us from ourselves, and of course, with them at the levers of distribution and power.

For a short video on how the price of gold is a measure of the mood of the mob, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuDZQFPgXCw

Why We Believe: The Power of Utopia! Part I

About ten years ago I was asked to give a speech about the power of cults, largely because I had been raised almost from infancy as a Jehovah’s Witness, a religious organization often associated in the public’s mind with cultism.  Some of the hallmarks of cultism are a need for certainty, a conviction that you have absolute truth and are the final authority on that truth, and repression of dissent.  Some cults exercise a physical control of their members, but most of them exert a psychological control.  A true believer is someone who no longer needs coercion or physical restraint, but who now acts as if those restraints are still in place.  I can best compare it to training a guard dog; you use a choke collar with such consistency that eventually you remove the choke collar from the neck of the dog and he is so conditioned that he continues to act as if the choke collar is still there.  When, in my thirties I left this organization, I was eager to embrace a society of intellectually free people, and I was excited about the prospect of associating with others with open, inquiring minds.  I was astonished to find so much more of what I had just abandoned, only worse:  People who were born into freedom, and yet who both abused and despised it.  Read more..

Did Capitalism Fail?

The global economic crisis now in play is being universally touted as the failure and collapse of capitalism.  The cover of the February 16, 2009 edition of Newsweek ecstatically proclaimed “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW”.  The documented collapse of Wall St. institutions and international banking is being gleefully interpreted as the failure of capitalism itself.  In the furious debate that has ensued, the arguments for and against capitalism have focused entirely on the causes of various recent economic phenomena, such as Wall St. greed, the failure of regulators, the incompetence of one or another administration, and the complexity of derivatives that were both unheard of and technically impossible only twenty years ago.  All of them have totally missed the point.  Capitalism has not failed, because capitalism was not practiced to begin with.  Pure capitalism has never been practiced because it is philosophically unacceptable in our culture.  What is called capitalism today is a hybrid political philosophy so filled with contradictions, it is unable to defend itself.  To answer the question in the title of this article, we have to begin at the beginning. Read more..