How Inflation Helps Keep The Rich Up And The Poor Down

LudwigvonMisesInstitute  May 31 2014

Banking is fraudulent whenever bankers sell uncovered or only partially covered money substitutes that they present as fully covered titles for money.” ~ J. G. Hülsmann

The production of money in a free society is a matter of free association. Everybody from the miners to the owners of the mines, to the minters, and up to the customers who buy the minted coins — all benefit from the production of money. None of them violates the property rights of anybody else, because everybody is free to enter the mining and minting business, and nobody is obliged to buy the product.

cartoon_bernankeThings are completely different once we turn to money production in interventionist regimes, which have prevailed in the West for the better part of the past 150 years. Here we need to mention in particular two institutional forms of monetary interventionism: (fraudulent) fractional reserve banking and fiat money. The common characteristic of both these institutions is that they violate the principle of free association. They enable the producers of paper money and of money titles to expand their production through the violation of other people’s property rights.

Banking is fraudulent whenever bankers sell uncovered or only partially covered money substitutes that they present as fully covered titles for money. These bankers sell more money substitutes than they could have sold if they had taken care to keep a 100-percent reserve for each substitute they issued.

The producer of fiat money (in our days, typically, paper money) sells a product that cannot withstand the competition of free-market moneys such as gold and silver coins, and which the market participants only use because the use of all other moneys is severely restricted or even outlawed. The most eloquent illustration of this fact is that paper money in all countries has been protected through legal-tender laws. Paper money is inherently fiat money; it cannot thrive but when it is imposed by the state. Continue reading

The Case for Regulation. The Failure of Free Market Economics

by Paul Craig Roberts | Global Research
November 10 2011

The economic mess in which the United States and Europe find themselves and which has been exported to much of the rest of the world is the direct consequence of too much economic freedom. The excess freedom is the direct consequence of financial deregulation.

Brooksley BornThe definition of free markets is ambiguous. At times  it  means  a  market  without  any  regulation.  In other cases it means markets in which prices are free to reflect supply and demand. Sometimes it means competitive markets free of monopoly or concentration. “Free market” economists have made a mistake by elevating an economy that is free of regulation or government as the ideal. This ideological position overlooks that regulation can increase economic efficiency and that without regulation external costs can offset the value of production.

Before going further, let’s be clear about what is regulated. Economists reify markets: the market did this, the market did that. But markets don’t do anything. The market is not an actor; it is a social institution. People act, and it is the behavior of people that is regulated. When free market economists describe the ideal as the absence of any regulation of economic behavior, they are asserting that there are no dysfunctional consequences of unregulated economic behavior.

If this were in fact the case, why should this result be confined to economic behavior? Why shouldn’t all human behavior be unregulated? Why is it that economists recognize that robbery, rape, and murder are socially dysfunctional, but not unlimited debt leverage and misrepresentation of financial instruments? The claim, as expressed by Alan Greenspan along with others, that “markets are self-regulating” is an assertion that unrestrained individuals are self-regulating. How did anyone ever believe that?

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