Oct 16, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Ludwig Von Mises on the relationship between free-market banking (“free banking”) and capitalism (“liberalism”):
Free banking is the only method available for the prevention of the dangers inherent in credit expansion. It would, it is true, not hinder a slow credit expansion, kept within very narrow limits, on the part of cautious banks which provide the public with all information required about their financial status. But under free banking it would have been impossible for credit expansion with all its inevitable consequences to have developed into a regular–one is tempted to say normal–feature of the economic system. Only free banking would have rendered the market economy secure against crises and depressions.
Looking backward upon the history of the last two centuries, one cannot help realizing that the blunders committed by liberalism in handling the problems of banking were a deadly blow to the market economy. There was no reason whatever to abandon the principle of free enterprise in the field of banking. The majority of liberal politicians simply surrendered to the popular hostility against money-lending and interest taking. They failed to realize that the rate of interest is a market phenomenon which cannot be manipulated ad libitum by the authorities or by any other agency. They adopted the superstition that lowering the rate of interest is beneficial and that credit expansion is the right means of attaining such cheap money. Nothing harmed the cause of liberalism more than the almost regular return of feverish booms and of the dramatic breakdown of bull markets followed by lingering slumps. Public opinion has become convinced that such happenings are inevitable in the unhampered market economy. People did not conceive that what they lamented was the necessary outcome of policies directed toward a lowering of the rate of interest by means of credit expansion. They stubbornly kept to these policies and tried in vain to fight their undesired consequences by more and more government interference. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action (1966) 444]
Oct 15, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
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From FOX News (using their front page headline): U.S. to Pour Up to $250 Billion Directly Into Banks
U.S. officials announced Tuesday morning a broad range of measures designed to shore up the struggling financial system, including the purchase of stakes in some of the country’s largest banks and guarantees for most new debt issued by insured banks. [Emphasis added]
You think Hugo Chavez is jealous?
Good to see that not all banks are wanting government intervention. From the Washington Post: Smaller Banks Resist Federal Cash Infusions.
Community banking executives around the country responded with anger yesterday to the Bush administration’s strategy of investing $250 billion in financial firms, saying they don’t need the money, resent the intrusion and feel it’s unfair to rescue companies from their own mistakes.
But regulators said some banks will be pressed to take the taxpayer dollars anyway. Others banks judged too sick to save will be allowed to fail. …
The opposition suggested that the government may have to continue to press banks to participate in the plan. The first $125 billion will be divided among nine of the largest U.S. banks, which were forced to accept the investment to help destigmatize the program in the eyes of other institutions. [Emphasis added]
Banks are being “pressed” and “forced” to accept money that was “pressed” and “forced” from taxpayers.
In defense of yet another socialist expansion, Bush gives us a classic A-is-non-A denial of reality: “These measures are not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it.”
Clearly the man doesn’t even know what the “free” in “free market” means. And unfortunately it neither do McCain and Obama.
Oct 15, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Don’t forget to read a seven part series detailing John Lewis and Paul Saunders objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American.
Cartoon by Cox and Forkum
The total of their objections may be accessed at: http://www.classicalideals.com/EPA_Ruination.htm
EPA Fascism versus America (1 of 7) (September 23, 2008)
On July 11, 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR). This document details how the EPA intends to claim unlimited power over the life of every American.
EPA Fascism versus America: The EPA Plans are Immoral (2 of 7) (September 24, 2008)
The major impetus behind the man-made global warming scare–and the resultant political proposals–is rooted in something other than the rational identification of a genuine problem. It is erroneous moral ideas that are leading us to political disaster.
EPA Fascism versus America: There is No Natural Evidence for Man-made Global Warming (3 of 7) (September 25, 2008)
The provisions in the ANPR are based on a specious, unproven, scientifically unsupported, a-historical claim that impending disaster is caused by our very prosperity. This claim is leading us into the clear and present danger of federal economic controls imposed on a scale previously intolerable in the United States.
EPA Fascism versus America: There Is No “Consensus” Among Scientists (4 of 7) (September 26, 2008)
We oppose these measures on scientific grounds, because the assertions of a man-made global warming crisis are opposed by some of the best scientific minds in the world. There is no “consensus” among scientists that man-made global warming is a crisis requiring government intervention.
EPA Fascism versus America: The Failed Predictions of the Environmentalists (5 of 7) (September 27, 2008)
Claims to man-made global warming are merely the latest in a century-long series of failed predictions of climate catastrophe, built on emotion and not on reason. These dire predictions have alternated between cooling and warming–cycles that have run parallel to the Earth’s natural climate variations.
EPA Fascism versus America: There Are No Practical Alternative Fuels in the Short-Term (6 of 7) (September 28, 2008)
There is no basis to conclude that practical development of so-called ‘alternative’ technologies can be achieved while destroying our industrial base in fossil fuels. Further, there is no basis for thinking that such technologies will be welcomed by environmental advocates, should they be made practical and available.
EPA Fascism versus America: The Descent into Dictatorship (7 of 7) (September 29, 2008)
The provisions of this ANPR grant virtually unlimited power to the Administrator of the EPA. This is a monstrous subversion of the very foundations of the independent American Republic, and the universal values it upholds: life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), dated July 11, 2008.
Oct 10, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
The ARC site has three essays by Ayn Rand that every defender of capitalism in the 21st century should read and study:
“Man’s Rights” by Ayn Rand
This essay explains the fundamental nature of rights, the facts of reality that give rise to them, and what in essence they mean (and don’t mean) in practice.
“Collectivized ‘Rights’” by Ayn Rand
This essay shows why rights apply only to individuals, not to groups or collectives of people, and why acceptance of the notion of group “rights” necessarily leads to the violation of individual rights.
“The Nature of Government” by Ayn Rand
What a government is, why government is necessary to a civilized society, and why a proper government must be constitutionally limited to the function of protecting, not violating, the rights of the individual.
If you have never read them before — enjoy!
Oct 10, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Washington, D.C. –The Treasury Department, as part of its ongoing assumption of control over the financial industry, is preparing to inject cash into U.S. banks in exchange for preferred shares of bank stock.
“Are we all socialists now?” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “Have we learned nothing from the devastation that socialist policies wrought worldwide in the twentieth century? Government intervention distorts markets and causes economic dislocations, no matter whether Uncle Sam controls private companies by regulation or assumes public ownership outright.
“A crisis doesn’t transform poison into medicine. Over decades, government manipulation of money, credit, and mortgages poisoned this economy and left it dangerously weak. Now Hank Paulson and his comrades are hooking up IV tubes filled with more of the same poison–bailouts, loan guarantees, cheap money, and more burdensome regulations–and hoping we will lie still and trust in their cure.
“But the real cure is capitalism, not more doses of socialism. We should act quickly to put government in its place, by rolling back the interventionist measures that caused the present emergency. Government’s proper role is to punish fraud and enforce contracts, not to own and manage the economy. We cannot achieve financial health unless we are willing to free the markets.”
Oct 10, 2008 | Dollars & Crosses
Capitalism has an undisputed record of wealth generation, yet it has always functioned under a cloud of moral suspicion. In a culture that venerates Mother Teresa as a paragon of virtue, businessmen sit in stoic silence while their pursuit of profits is denounced as selfish greed. Society tells businessmen to sacrifice, to serve others, to “give back”–counting on their acceptance of self-interest as a moral crime, with chronic guilt its penance. Is it any wonder that productive giants from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates have behaved as if profit-making leaves a moral stain that only tireless philanthropy can launder but never fully remove?
It is time America heard the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism.
Two centuries ago the Founding Fathers established a nation based on the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property–and the selfish pursuit of his own happiness. But neither the Founders nor their successors could properly defend self-interest and the profit motive in the face of moral denunciation. The result has been a slow destruction of freedom in America, leading us to today’s economic mess.
In this inaugural lecture celebrating the launch of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC), in Washington, D.C., executive director Yaron Brook will demonstrate how Ayn Rand’s revolutionary ethics of rational self-interest supplies the moral foundation that previous proponents of capitalism lacked. Dr. Brook will explain why individual rights are crucial for capitalism’s survival–why productivity and profit, the “selfish greed” that conservatives abhor, are not vices but cardinal virtues, and he will explain why Americans must reject McCain/Obama-style “national service” and instead proudly embrace the radical individualism their lives and happiness require.
Who: Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights
What: A talk defending the profit motive and presenting the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism. A Q&A will follow.
Where: National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C.
When: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, at 6:30 PM
The public and media are invited. Admission is FREE.
