Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Draw your ine, Watch this video, and think. How far will you be pushed??
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Understanding the Crisis
Understanding the Crisis
What caused this? It is a simple question, and yet answers are all over the map, as you might expect. Here's mine in two words: fiat money. The word fiat means: out of nothing. Money out of nothing is money that is eventually worth nothing. The possibility of precisely that happening emerged on August 15, 1971. Since Nixon severed the last tie of the dollar to gold, the world's monetary system has not been restrained by anything physical. We've depended on the discretion of central bankers. We can't trust that, and this crisis shows precisely why.
Of course there are subsidiary factors. The lifting of restrictions on Freddie and Fannie. Subsidized lending. The Fed's artificially low interest rates. The Community Reinvestment Act. Financial "deregulation." The war. Bush profligacy. Debt. There is much more besides. But fighting each of these forces individually is like battling down flies at the garbage dump. The core issue is that there is nothing to restrain money creation.
The first time that people hear this, they find their minds rather boggled, and they want to know more. My whole experience in this area is that once people start digging around the area of monetary theory, they find that 1) it is not as difficult a subject as it seems, 2) it is endlessly fascinating, and 3) it explains far more than they realized before.
It was F.A. Hayek who bore this burden most directly for those in the English-speaking world. His books on the source of the business cycle and what to do about it appeared in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. These works were cited by the Nobel Prize Committee in 1974 as his most important contribution to economic thought. His ideas are directly applicable to our current plight.
It has been a real tragedy that these works have been out of print. But this year, the Mises Institute made a hard push to get this book out in time for the current financial calamity. We set other projects aside and worked all hours to bring out the definitive collection. Here it is: Prices and Production and Other Works on Money, the Business Cycle and the Gold Standard, by F.A. Hayek.
The book is priceless in its content and presentation. Specifically, Hayek explains the mechanism by which loose credit generates false signals to investors, leading them to chase fads all over the market, and ending in sector-wide failures. He was writing at a time when the gold standard provided partial restraint on the government and the central bank. No more. So Hayek’s analysis of all of this is more penetrating than ever. The book also contains the complete text of his many battles with Keynes.
At this link, you can buy what we are calling the Crisis Book Kit at a deep discount. Just click the books you want and the discount happens.
At the same time he was writing, his mentor Ludwig von Mises was battling it out in Austria and the German-speaking world. He became the great opponent of not only inflationary finance but also the Continent's version of the New Deal. The remarkable thing is that these essays were not translated until the 1980s and even then remained obscure. This book is really their first major debut, and it appeared only last year: The Causes of the Economic Crisis. You will see his expository virtuosity at work and also his amazing courage and passion.
It has been a major task of the Austrian school since 1912 to explain to people what money is, how it works, and how its corruption and distortion by the state is the source of both inflation and business cycles. The core book here is Mises's own 1912 classic called The Theory of Money and Credit, written at the dawn of the central banking age. The prose is still crystal clear, and it continues to be the best textbook on money ever written.
In the American context of the Great Depression, one book captures the whole onset and response. It is Murray Rothbard's America's Great Depression. He shows that it wasn't the 1929 crash that was the problem; it was the response to the crash that created the Depression. Bailouts. Price controls. Wage controls. Government programs. Trade restrictions. Crackdowns on the capital markets. And who did all this? It originated not with FDR but with Herbert Hoover – clear echoes of today. There is no understanding the present crisis without this book.
Finally we need to realize the problem of loose money and its effects are not new and not necessarily 20th century. The whole history of the American economy is littered with banking panics, bailouts, business cycles, and chaos, each with the same root. When the money goes bad, everything goes bad. Rothbard chronicles the long history in his marvelous book: History of Money and Banking in the United States.
The Mises Institute has sponsored research on this topic since it was created in 1982. Our first conference was on the gold standard. We've suffered for this choice. The best way to fall out of favor with the regime – or its pseudo-libertarian and neocon supporters – is to question its central bankers. We've done that. But now, the work is done. It is available. The truth is out there. You only need to grab it, comprehend it, and spread it.
Please help. History hangs in the balance.
P.S. for those who want a more extensive collection, see our complete Money and Banking Collection, at an even deeper discount.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Quit the NATO club
This was also from lewrockwell.com. Very good article!
Following WWII, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Treaty (NATO), was established in 1949 for the collective defense – Wait, hold on a minute. Isn’t collective a term the Communists use? More on that later. Anyway, NATO was established for the purpose, as NATO’s first secretary General Lord Ismay summed up, "to keep the Russians out, the American’s in, and the Germans down." That the USSR posed a serious threat to the security of Western Europe, there was no question – That Europe wanted America to become point man for their defense against the USSR was merely a continuation of Churchill’s political machinations to draw an isolationist US into WWII and European politics. Add two world wars with Germany, and Europe gets an additional bonus by having the US stationed in bases in Germany to disabuse them of any ideas of having another go at conquering the continent.
Through the 1950’s up to the late 1980’s, NATO and the USSR stood glaring at each other across the Iron Curtain. Dreams of an epic armor battle at the Fulda Gap between the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces that would make the tank battle at Kursk look like a piker filled the heads of armchair wargamers and inspired books like Red Storm Rising. Then, gosh darn it, Gorbachev’s Glasnost herald a new era of open politics in Soviet Union. Some electrician named Lech Walesa was giving the Communist party in Poland fits with organized strikes. Suddenly in 1989, East Germany takes down the Iron Curtain. The cold war thaws into a hopeful spring. What was NATO going to do with all those tanks, planes, and troops? Worse, what were the generals going to do to keep their jobs? No enemies to fight, and the politicians were promising a peace dividend to citizens by closing military bases. The common quip of the Berliners in the last days of WWII of "Enjoy the war. The peace will be terrible" now seemed a reality for poor NATO. Without a combat command, military career advancement would come to a standstill. Without the need to maintain ongoing weapon superiority, the military industry would lay off employees. There goes the economy. Desperate, NATO takes a cue from the movie of Canadian Bacon, and becomes involved in the ethnic strife in Yugoslavia between the Croats and the Serbs to look useful and from being disbanded. It becomes the strong arm of the UN, enforcing that august body’s no-fly zone mandate, as well as the UN’s arms and economic sanctions. NATO continued by initiating air strikes in Bosnia, and deploying a peacekeeping force on the ground. NATO finds a use for its leftover cold war ordinance collecting dust by mounting an 11-week bombing campaign. NATO cleverly names the bombing sorties with various titles such as Operation Deliberate Force, so as to assure people that the bombs were not dropped by accident, or Operation Allied Force, in case someone doesn’t already know that NATO is a collective (there’s that Communist word again!) of various nations working together to enforce the peace by killing people. What is strange about the working relationship of NATO and UN is that the former resists attempts to by the latter to have the final word regarding its military actions. The UN would say, "Don’t bomb, we have things under control," and NATO would reply. "Yes we will bomb, just to make sure." I guess when you have one organization whose mission is to preserve peace, and another whose job is to break things to protect democracy, you are bound to have some philosophical differences. As the Good Book says, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." How any nation can belong to both organizations, and yet come to cross-proposes deciding if and who should be bombed, is beyond me. Sounds like one of them is unnecessary and is getting in the way of the other. Better yet, to be on the safe side, it might be best to get rid of both. But that’s just my opinion.
But local European ethnic conflicts were not enough to justify the overhead cost of a coalition as large as NATO. Fortunately, 9/11 happened just in the nick of time. In 2003 NATO was reorganized so as to take over the duties International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. This would set the precedent for NATO to entertain missions outside its North Atlantic backyard. Plenty of opportunities to keep business as usual for NATO. But while NATO enjoys a good brush war like anyone else to keep the military industrial complex economy running, the real action is found in the defensive missiles gig. Never mind there is yet a practical missile made that can hit the broadside of the proverbial barn, much less a ICBM coming in from the stratosphere, this is were the big money is. Plus, it has the biggest boogieman fear component to inspire the civilians to work harder to pay taxes. Scaring citizens with images of mechanized armies invading your neighborhood is so passé – To really play on the sheeple’s paranoia, talk about the possibility of rogue missile attacks launched from middle-eastern countries such as Iran. Even hint darkly about a resurgent Russia, with Putin desiring to push the big red button. Never mind that Putin enjoys Russia’s prosperity with capitalism with Europe as customer. He wouldn’t dream of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by nuking western Europe into glass parking lot. Bad for business, you know.
NATO’s reinventing itself is so successful that many of the former Soviet Bloc countries are applying for membership. Little Georgia has little to offer to NATO, other than to instigate hostilities with neighboring Ossetia. No doubt NATO was upset that Georgia did not wait after it was initiated into its club, so NATO could get into the act and justify its military budget by using mean old Russia as an excuse. Besides, how dare the Russians come to the aid of Ossetia when it was attacked by Georgia! That’s NATO job! If its one thing an organization hates, it’s someone else cutting in on the action.
In a recent interview by ABC’s Charles Gibson, Sarah Palin condemned Russia’s invasion of Georgia as quote-unquote, "unprovoked." Which of course, is a lie. Palin favors the inclusion of both Georgia and the Ukraine into NATO because they had demonstrated actions as being "democratic" When Gibson asked: "and under the NATO treaty, wouldn’t we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?" She replied "Perhaps." Which is another way of saying all options are on the table. Her fervor revealed later in the interview to come to the aid of "smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power" would have sounded noble if we were not already a larger power that had invaded a smaller country that had done nothing against us. But the difference of course, is Iraq is not a "democratic" one, so the US is excused where Russia is not. Palin stresses the importance of not reverting back to a cold war status, yet advocates economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure against Russia that are the equivalent of creating one. NATO could not have asked for a better lobbyist that Palin to cheerlead for its continued existence
Palin and others ongoing support to a collectivist (there its that word again!) defense organization as NATO reminds me of new inmates who are obliged to join a gang in order to survive in prison – Doesn’t matter what crimes you or they have committed, the thing is the colors you wear define who are your friends, and who are your enemies. So much for the rugged individualism that once was the hallmark of America’s legacy.
I find it ironic that the people who are opposed with our association in the UN are just as tenacious in insisting that we must stay in NATO. That we must honor our commitments and treaties by continuing to belong to a collective defense organization. All for the sake of defending democracy, which is a method of government, not a moral definition of who is the good guy, and who is the villian. Many still think that poor Europe is too weak to defend itself should Russia aspire to conquer Western Europe. Never mind that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia does not have near the manpower and hardware it formerly had with the Warsaw Pact.
Everyone is still thinking with a 1980’s cold war mindset. Worse, these people cannot see that NATO is little different than the UN – except it does not use white-painted armored vehicles and blue helmets, and is more likely to shoot first and then ask questions later. America needs to get out of the NATO club and stop being a club for NATO. NATO’s original purpose has been made obsolete by the fall of the USSR. It is a holdover of the same treaties, the "scrap of paper" signed by old men in Europe who offered their young people and treasure as collateral for the "honor" to defend each other’s decadent empires. By contractual reflex France, Britain, and Russia were led into disastrous world war with Germany in 1914, over the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a radical Serb. After three years of callously spending the lives and limbs an entire generation of their best young men by sending them in frontal attacks against machine guns with bayonets, they looked to America for fresh cannon fodder to rescue them for their folly – and Wilson provided it in the name of "making democracy safe for the world." That any reprobate country can gain political legitimacy by declaring being a "democracy" and be admitted into the NATO club is akin to putting lipstick on a pig, if I may use a cliché that is presently in vogue. Spilling the blood of our soldiers and depleting our treasure in the defense such countries that wear such false garb is a sucker’s game. America should follow the example of Groucho Marx, treating any club that would invite them as a member suspect, and not worth belonging to.
September 16, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Secession and slavery.
Secession and Slavery
An interesting commentary, “Lincoln, Secession, and Slavery” by Tibor Machan, published by the Cato Institute on June 1, 2002, was recently brought to my attention. I should say at the outset that I have long been a fan of Machan, and have the utmost respect for his positions. I just think he got it way wrong here.
Machan writes that the secession of the Southern states was ultimately an illegitimate act because “there is that undeniable evil of slavery.” Despite Lincoln’s own racist views, he was allegedly acting in the interests of the slaves, who were “unwilling third parties” to the secession, and therefore was “a good American” for destroying the Confederacy and slavery.
According to Machan,
[W]hen one considers that the citizens of the union who intended to go their own way were, in effect, kidnapping millions of people – most of whom would rather have stayed with the union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation – the idea of secession no longer seems so innocent. And regardless of Lincoln’s motives – however tyrannical his aspirations or ambitious – when slavery is factored in, it is doubtful that one can justify secession by the southern states.
So we can safely ignore Lincoln’s motives – “however tyrannical” [!] – because the motives of the “Southern rebels” were allegedly worse?
“[S]omething had to be done about [slavery],” writes Machan. “And to ask the slaves to wait until the rest of the people slowly undertook to change the Constitution seems obscene.” Machan acknowledges that the offending action was legal under the Constitution, but advocates and cheers an illegal and aggressive policy to rectify it because the normal, slow processes of constitutional change “seem obscene.”
Doesn’t that sound familiar?
In a habeas corpus proceeding in 1771, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, ordered the release of a slave named James Sommersett who had accompanied his master on a trip to England. Mansfield reasoned that while slavery was legal elsewhere, England had no law “so odious.” Nevertheless, it would be almost 40 more years before the slave trade was abolished in the rest of the British Empire, and slavery was not outlawed altogether until 1833.
Great Britain’s slaves were very much expected to “wait ... to change the Constitution.” Yet, slow as it came, change did come.
Following the wisdom of the Magna Carta reissued by King Henry III in 1225, which promised the benefits of legal custom to promote freedom, serfdom was eroded and eventually abolished completely over the course of 600 years by English courts.
On this foundation, Lord Mansfield took the same approach to slavery, stating that “Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say [slavery] is allowed or approved by the law of England; and, therefore, the black must be discharged.” With this ruling James Sommersett walked away a free man, as did other slaves held in bondage in England at that time. But, as stated above, this was only the beginning of the change. It would take sixty-two more years for England’s domains to be completely rid of the scourge.
The American colonies, and later the U.S. states, were following the same path. Throughout the 18th century, attempts were made by colonial legislatures to limit slavery and the slave trade. The obstruction of these laws by the King and Parliament were among the grievances of the colonists.
After the Revolution, the Northern states gradually began abolishing slavery. In the South, where slavery was much more entrenched, the process was moving more slowly. But it was moving. Major reforms to slavery were debated in the Virginia legislature in 1830. More important, throughout the first half of the 19th century Southern courts were chipping away at the evil institution – just as English courts and legislators had chipped away at villeinage and slavery. Moreover, by allowing the Southern states to secede, the United States could have accelerated the demise of slavery by providing a haven for runaway slaves.
However, this isn’t good enough for Machan. To ask slaves to wait would have been “obscene.” So the obscenity of hundreds of thousands of dead Americans – whites and blacks alike – as well as the total undermining of our constitutional Republic and the horrible destruction of war is somehow justified.
According to Machan, the Southern states could not legitimately secede because they were taking along “hostages” who would have preferred to stay in a “union that held out some hope for their eventual liberation.” Yet it is clear that “eventual liberation” was already on its way.
Machan has backed himself into a difficult corner here. If liberation was coming too slowly, then what about the those slaves who would have preferred the presumably quicker liberation that was coming under the British government but who were nonetheless swept away as hostages to the American Revolution? If, as Machan states, “secession cannot be justified if it is combined with the evil of imposing the act on unwilling third parties,” then wouldn’t Lord Mansfield’s ruling, coming 5 years before the Declaration of Independence, mean that American independence in 1776 could not be justified either?
September 13, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Federal Reserve and it's role in the New World Order
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