Dear Lord, in this world of palpable evil, give all people of goodwill the wisdom, the courage, and the means to resist and overcome it.
Read the rest, by Ira Katz, here.
Dear Lord, in this world of palpable evil, give all people of goodwill the wisdom, the courage, and the means to resist and overcome it.
Read the rest, by Ira Katz, here.
Gary North gives his answer here, in an essay from 2013.
Excerpts:
The power elite’s members do not sit in the cigar smoke-filled rooms of the history textbooks. Most of them do not smoke these days. Indeed, their non-smoking status is one mark of their superior status. But, just like the old political bosses, they depend on politics for their position. That is their Achilles heel. By becoming dependent on politics to protect themselves from free market competition, they will eventually overplay their hand. They will bet the farm — and ours — on a busted flush. Imploding debt will remove them from the scene.
Why do I believe this?
To answer this, I begin with North’s three laws of bureaucracy.
1. Some bureaucrat will inevitably enforce an official rule to the point of imbecility.
2. To fix the mess which this causes, the bureaucracy will write at least two new rules.
3. Law #1 applies to each of the new rules.
This is a convenient way to express the principle set forth by Ludwig von Mises in his essay, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism.” Each attempt to fix the problems caused by a previous government intervention creates new problems.
Mises also argued that socialism is inherently irrational, because it destroys the market for capital goods. It destroys market pricing. He wrote that in 1920.
Conclusion: all socialist systems must collapse.
Semi-socialist systems move in the direction of bureaucracy. They fall under North’s three laws.
Conclusion: The power elite will blow it. Give them time.
Their great temptation is private debt. Their salvation is the federal government. But the government depends on three things: low-interest debt, central banking, and bureaucracy. None of the three is trustworthy. The free market will displace them all. I call this event the Great Default.
[. . .]
The idea that conspirators in the American banking world engineered the crisis of 2008, which took down one of their largest organizations, is ludicrous. It assumes that the Keynesians who are in control understand Austrian School economics. Nobody else was predicting a crisis in 2007 except the Austrians. The Austrians were predicting it because they had an analytical system that enabled them to make the forecast. I was one of them.
Austrians are a fringe group. Nobody paid any attention to them in 2008. We are pariahs in the academic community, and we are equally pariahs in the banking community. So, why does anyone believe that the people who were running the system, who were dedicated to the economics of Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Paul Krugman, were able to figure out that they could precisely manipulate the world economy, taking it to the brink of failure, and then escape at the very end, coming out far wealthier? The suggestion is ludicrous. Yet it is widely believed among conspiracy theorists.
[. . .]
Then how should we explain what happened? By first abandoning that form on conspiracy theory that declares that nice guys finish last. I hold to the anti-Durocher view of long-term social causation: nice guys finish first. Eventually.
[. . .]
Widespread education is never free of charge, and widespread education is controlled in every country by the government. If the conspiracies control all of the governments, then how can widespread education ever roll back the conspirators?
So, there are two views, sometimes held by the same people: (1) the power elite is collectively God walking on earth; (2) mass education can unseat the power elite, and then never let other evil insiders replace them. We are either to believe in the immovable object of conspiracy or the irresistible force of democracy.
I’m not buying it. I never have.
[. . .]
The main idea behind most conspiracy theories is this: the bad guys behind the scenes are fooling the masses, thwarting the good hearts of the masses.
This is an intensely anti-biblical view of social cause and effect. The biblical view is that people get what they deserve politically. Moses warned that evil hearts in the masses would bring corrupt rulers (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). This was the message of the prophets. In short, ethics has consequences.
So, what are we to make of the power of the conspirators? This: the conspirators share most of the beliefs of the masses. If this were not true, a conspiracy could never be successful.
[. . .]
Conspirators invoke the language and the beliefs of the masses. They tell the masses what the masses want to hear. For instance, they say that the government will protect the people from an economic collapse. The government has the power to eliminate economic crises, we are told, if the politicians will pass new laws. The government will continue to fulfill its promises regarding Social Security and Medicare.
Do the conspirators believe this? Yes. Of the 6,600 richest or most influential people on earth, insider David Rothkopf writes in Superclass, something like 30% attended one of 20 universities (p. 290). The ideology of salvation through legislation is basic to the social science departments of all of those universities. The faculties are overwhelmingly Keynesian in outlook.
[. . .]
The cost of educating the masses to believe in even the rudiments of a conspiracy theory are vastly more than any private individual or group possesses. The vast majority of the American academic establishment in the social sciences and humanities are officially opposed to conspiracy theories, which is why they have become the pawns of the conspirators. It is a nice arrangement.
Then what can ever change the system? Simple: a change of heart among the masses. There has to be a rethinking of the fundamental presuppositions of the social order, especially the moral presuppositions. In other words, there has to be some kind of religious transformation. Under such conditions, people will re-think what they regard as morally legitimate. In that time of transition, it will be possible to undermine the existing institutional arrangements, because these institutional arrangements are built on the prevailing system of religion, ethics, and presuppositions. The economic doctrine of this religion is Keynesianism.
As long as things are muddling through, nothing fundamental is going to change. Why not? The economist will tell you: because it costs too much to change people’s opinions about the present social order when the present social order seems to be delivering the goods. It is only in a time of widespread crisis, when the present social order fails to deliver the goods, that there is an outside possibility of changing the opinions of the public.
[. . .]
Conclusion: don’t spend much time exposing conspiracies. Spend time showing why the prevailing outlook favoring the savior state is wrong. The solution is not one more revelation about this or that conspiracy. The solution is to prepare an educational program for a breakdown in the establishment’s cherished worldview. We must be able to show why this worldview priduced [sic] the disaster.
First things first.
The secret of success of any conspiracy is its ability to leverage the fundamental beliefs of the decision-makers in a society. They extend the influence of a worldview that is already operational. The conspiracy has power only because it is in fundamental agreement with the moral order that presently exists. When that moral order changes, in response to a monumental economic crisis, a different group of decision-makers will come into power, and there will be completely new terms of success for any conspiracy to gain control within this limited group of decision-makers.
[. . .]
The centralized levers of federal government power over the economy offer tremendous opportunities for insiders to get very rich. They can extend their private power through government privilege. They can and do leverage the existing political and regulatory system, which is a centralized economic system, and in doing so, they maintain their positions.
But what if Keynesianism is theoretically inaccurate? Then the power elite has created an economic system which is like a kind of bomb with a lit fuse. If the Keynesian system is analytically accurate, the rigged game of wealth-redistribution to the largest banks can go on indefinitely. But the Keynesian system is inaccurate. There is going to be a day of reckoning. On that day of reckoning, the entire system of leverage that the conspirators have used to benefit themselves will be shaken to the core. I mean leverage in all senses: financial, intellectual, political, and institutional. It will be like the state dinner of the Babylonian rulers to which Daniel was invited. They will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.
[. . .]
The people who are in control today defend the fiat money position of how prosperity is possible. Those of us who are on the side of the gold standard, especially the gold coin standard, argue that the fiat money position leads to booms and busts. The position of the fiat money people is that they can use fiat money to defer the day of reckoning. They believe that they can achieve something like a full-time economic boom by way of monetary expansion. The Austrian school opposes this.
[. . .]
The conspirators are not God. They do not predestinate the world. They are temporary possessors of influence, power, and money because they have adopted a particular view of economic intervention which the general public also believes. They believe the state is the Savior in history. The state is the healer. They believe that the state is the closest thing there is to God walking on earth.
So do most of the voters. The voters also believe that the state can intervene to protect them. They are beginning to lose this faith, for good reason, but this is what they still believe. This is what they have been taught in public schools for over 100 years. Why should we expect and believe anything different?
[. . .]
CONCLUSION
Then what is to be done? Individuals must work to develop and master a comprehensive critique of the prevailing establishment’s worldview: salvation by legislation.
The correct goal is to shrink the state to where it won’t matter much who controls it.
Shrink the power of the power elite by shrinking the establishment’s lever: the state. Any other program is a waste of effort. Any program to expose a conspiracy without a program to de-fund it only adds to the prestige of the conspiracy. It makes the conspiracy look smarter than it is.
Never forget this: a conspiracy is no smarter than the tenured bureaucrats who administer the government’s legislation. In short, not all that smart.
Final note: If you remain skeptical, please read Numbers 14:1-25. There are always giants. They are always vulnerable.
Article by Kurt Zidulka.
Article by Amir Iraji.
For decades, the dominant narrative surrounding population growth has been one of alarm. Thinkers like Malthus warned that population growth would cause mass starvation and ecological collapse. Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb famously predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve in the 1970s due to overpopulation.
Today, concerns are shifting. Many of the same governments that once feared overpopulation are now worried about declining birth rates. Countries like Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe struggle with economic stagnation and aging populations. Even China—after enforcing its coercive One-Child Policy—is now encouraging larger families. This shift raises an important question: where did the fear of overpopulation come from, and was it ever justified?
Continue reading here.
Bjorn Lomborg on how climate alarmism leads to economic crisis (interview with spiked.com)
16-minute excerpt of a conversation Eric Metaxas leads with James Lindsay.
Article by Sebastian Wang.
Article by Phil Butler.
“The European Union’s push for militarization is facing widespread public backlash, as citizens across social media platforms reject its aggressive defense policies and question its leadership.”
“Europe’s leadership has gone stark raving mad. We all watch in awe as the elusive Fourth Reich emerges from an otherwise peaceful confederation of states. Interestingly, few realize that the European Commission is advertising and spreading propaganda on social media to sell the most significant arms race in history.”
Interview with Doug Casey.
Excerpt:
Today, the media and the State have merged together as a practical matter. The people in power (the Deep State, if you will) know it’s critical that the public are all on the same page when it comes to major issues. The public can argue about whether chocolate or vanilla, or red or blue, is better. That makes them feel relevant. But big philosophical issues are off the table.
Article by Joanna Williams.
Excerpt:
Paddington is, we are told, a representative of diverse Britishness. But this is bizarre. Unable to name real historical heroes, including the many Brits of migrant backgrounds who have made their mark, the cultural elites resort to celebrating a fictional character. It’s as if these people are unable to make the case either for British values or mass migration and so hide behind poor old Paddington.
Perhaps the very attraction of Paddington as a national symbol over, say, Shakespeare or Churchill, rests on the fact that he is made up. Real people exist within a particular time period and tend to reflect that era’s values. Real people often have messy personal lives – few of us are unambiguously good or bad. But moral purity and all manner of values can be ascribed to fictional bears. They never disappoint.
Article by Ryan McMaken. (See also here.)
[Comment by PwG: For over half a millennium, we have allowed states to get away with stealing and lying their way into total control of our money. We have thus tolerated their breaking of some central Godly commandments. The results have been predictably calamitous, including totalitarianism and total war.]
Excerpts from above linked article:
Yet the monetary system was dominated by the private sector, and Van Creveld reminds us that a sizable amount of money in this period
was produced not by the slowly emerging state but by private institutions. Before 1700, attempts to develop credit systems succeeded only in this places where private banking and commerce were so strong as to virtually exclude royal authority; in other words where merchants were the government…. Common wisdom held that, whereas merchants could be trusted with money, kings could not. Concentrating both economic and coercive power in their own hands, all too often they used it either to debase the coinage or to seize their subjects’ treasure.
[. . .]
The lack of national monetary monopolies in most cases did not stop nascent European states from engaging in two centuries of state building. By the sixteenth century, France was already building an absolutist state even in the midst of ongoing currency competition. By the mid-seventeenth century, of course, the state had come into its own, with absolutism gaining ground in France, Spain, Sweden, and other parts of the Continent. In England—although the Stuarts failed to achieve their much-desired absolute monarchy—the state progressed far in the direction of a centralized, consolidated state during this period. Indeed, by the mid-seventeenth century, Europe’s Thirty Years’ War—what might be called Western Europe’s first era of “total war,” ended with the consolidation of the state system throughout Western Europe.
Indeed, war and state building—two things that were often one and the same—drove efforts to build government revenues through debasements of the coinage. It was war with Scotland that drove Henry VIII to begin a multiyear period of debasing the currency in 1542, which continued into the reign of Edward VI. War drove other monarchs to similar ends, and on the Continent Charles V devalued the gold taler in 1551. In the seventeenth century, European monarchs engaged in “progressive debasement … in anticipation of the Thirty Years’ War.” Ultimately, Kindleberger concludes, “Many princes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did a roaring business in currency depreciation.”
Spain, France, and other rising states of the period accomplished all this without establishing true monopolies over the money supply, and currency competition limited what states could get away with. Even if national states had been able to solidify de jure monopoly control of money within their own borders, the sovereign’s money still faced competition from currencies in neighboring states and principalities. Just as dozens of different types of coins circulated within France, it was always possible for merchants, financiers, and more mobile classes of individuals to move their wealth in such a way as to avoid using the more heavily devalued currencies.
Thus, monarchs were cognizant of the risks that devaluation brought. “Too much” debasement of the currency could cause merchants, and even residents, to flee to competing imported or black-market currencies. Practical limitations controlled how much a regime could debase its currency. Thus, when Henry VIII began his campaign of debasement, he combined it with a broader wartime policy of confiscating goods and church property, and compelling loans.
In the seventeenth century, the ability to escape debased national currencies was further facilitated by the advent of the Bank of Amsterdam. Established by the City of Amsterdam in 1609, the bank—technically a “government bank”—calculated the values of the “no fewer than 341 silver and 505 golden coins” circulating in the Dutch Republic. The bank helped merchants identify which coins were “good” and which were debased. The bank then provided credit based on coins’ “real value” regardless of the coins’ claimed nominal values. The bank issued coins known as bank guilders which became the “the world’s most used currency at the time,” or perhaps even a “reserve currency” of a similar status to the US dollar today. This was not due to any moral righteousness on the part of Dutch politicians. It is likely that the Dutch regime would have also preferred to manipulate its own currency for gain. But the smallness of the Dutch Republic and its reliance on foreign trade greatly limited the regime in this regard. Thus, the Dutch were essentially forced to be become a reliable, competitive financial center in order to compete with larger states.
[. . .]
Banks proved to be essential, providing access to money in many cases, since even as late as the eighteenth century in many places, coinage was in short supply. These shortages may have been especially acute where wage work had replaced subsistence farming and agricultural barter. The new breed of employers needed money of various types. Bank-created paper money thus served an important role in providing a medium of exchange when coins were either unreliable or unavailable.
This diminished the dependence on the sovereign’s coinage, and princes came to view these banks as troublesome competitors. Moreover, banks—unlike ordinary consumers—had the knowledge and the means to more carefully evaluate regime money and to accept devalued coins only at a discount.
Unhappy about the fact banks could often do an end run around the king’s coinage, states then sought to compel payments in metals, which the sovereign could more easily control.
[. . .]
The downside of crippling a polity’s banking sector is sizable, so eventually the state abandoned this strategy and learned to love paper money. But getting the public to accept government-issued paper money would be a long uphill battle.
[. . .]
It was not until 1694 with the Bank of England—that is, after more than three hundred years of modern state building—that the foundations were laid for a true note-issuing central bank. And even then, the Bank of England did not begin as an institution that creates money and did not have a monopoly on issuing banknotes until 1844. Rather, the Bank of England initially financed the government deficit by issuing shares. These shares, not surprisingly, were very popular given the fact the bank also enjoyed a monopoly on government deposits.
[. . .]
The rise of these central banks throughout much of Europe provided states with unprecedented powers in terms of issuing new debt and financing explosive government spending in times of emergency. The regulatory role of central banks further solidified the regime’s control of their financial systems overall.
Ironically, however, it was also in the nineteenth century that states faced mounting opposition to state monopoly powers in the form of the classical gold standard.
This was a result of the rise of laissez-faire liberalism in the nineteenth century, which was especially notable in Britain, France, and the US. Increasingly in Western Europe, the liberals and the commercial class insisted, according to Glasner, on an “obligation to maintain the convertibility of gold or silver at a fixed parity.”19 These formal definitions of a currency’s value in metals were important in that they made it easier to see the extent and effects of government manipulation of the currency. That’s all to the good, but it offered no challenge to the state’s growing monopoly over money. After all, the gold standard could be—and repeatedly was—suspended for reasons of war.
In other words, it would be a mistake to regard the era of the classical gold standard as a period of state weakness in financial and monetary matters. On the contrary, the classical gold standard was built on a firm foundation of state power limited only by legislation. The legitimacy of the state’s prerogative to ultimately oversee the monetary system was not in question. By the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, and in many other key polities, the days of privately issued banknotes and privately minted coins were over. (The US lagged this trend somewhat, but the outcome was eventually the same.) That is, there were no institutions left that could realistically challenge the state in terms of issuing and creating money.
[. . .]
Although many liberals apparently hoped that the classical gold standard would render national currencies irrelevant in a truly globalized world, this did not happen. Instead, the CGS appears to have in many ways set the stage for what came later: Bretton Woods and floating fiat currencies. These two developments, of course, finalized total state control over national currencies.
An analysis of these historical trends brings us to an important conclusion: it is not enough to wax nostalgic about the classical gold standard and seek a return to nothing more than gold-backed national currencies. Rather, the very idea of national currencies must be abandoned altogether, while embracing true currency competition and private commodity money.
[. . .]
So what is the ideal? Hayek concludes: “If we want free enterprise and a market economy to survive we have no choice but to replace the governmental currency monopoly and national currency systems by free competition between private banks of issue.”
[. . .]
He’s right. And what are these national currencies? They are the currencies we now refer to by their national names. The US dollar. The British Pound. The French Franc. This idea of a national money was central to the system of what we now call the classical gold standard. But, this idea of a national currency was essentially a trick foisted on ordinary people by governments themselves.
The rise of national currencies under the gold standard augmented state power in two ways. First, the CGS [classical gold standard] system helped accustom the public to using token money. Second, the consolidation of the national monetary systems under a single national currency solidified the power of central banks.
[. . .]
This, however, did not lead to runs on banks to convert banknotes into gold. Rather, ordinary people in domestic commerce learned to associate the regime’s paper money with gold, but without insisting on possessing the gold itself. More importantly, it was convenient to use paper money rather than to carry around heavy and bulky metal coins. As the public embraced this easy-to-use paper money, more and more of the gold supply flowed into bank vaults—including the all-important vaults of central banks.
[. . .]
This process of replacing gold and silver with things called shillings and kroner and dollars, by the way, was very important. Murray Rothbard saw this switch for what it was. In his book The Mystery of Banking Rothbard identifies how labeling precious metals as equivalent to some government currency denomination helped national governments pass off government currency as the same thing as gold.
[. . .]
On the Continent, regimes gradually abandoned silver and bimetallism due to a series of market events and government interventions. Thanks to the relatively new practice of governments imposing a fixed ratio for the prices of gold and silver—as opposed to embracing free-floating market prices—this meant that either gold or silver was undervalued in relation to the other. The undervalued metal would then be hoarded rather than used as a general medium of exchange. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a relatively high level of silver production, combined with a fixed ratio, meant gold was legally undervalued. Gold then disappeared into hoards and France, for instance, entered a de facto silver standard. But after the middle of the century, thanks in part to gold discoveries in Alaska and Australia, gold coins become both more numerous and relatively overvalued. This meant gold became the preferred medium of exchange and silver was hoarded or switched to nonmoney purposes. Many of the world’s regimes thus moved more rapidly toward a gold standard.
Embracing a gold standard was also useful in facilitating trade with Great Britain, the world’s economic powerhouse at the time. Residents of countries on a gold standard could more readily and easily trade with residents from other countries that were also on a gold standard.
[. . .]
But, this system was fundamentally a system that relied on states to regulate matters and make monetary standards uniform. While attempting to create an efficient monetary system for the market economy, the free-market liberals ended up calling on the state to ensure the system facilitated market exchange. As a result, Flandreau concludes: “[T]he emergence of the Gold Standard really paved the way for the nationalization of money. This may explain why the Gold Standard was, with respect to the history of western capitalism, such a brief experiment, bound soon to give way to managed currency.”
The ordinary consumer, of course, had no way of guessing where all this was headed: toward the end of gold convertibility in the face of the First World War. It was then that the gold-standard regimes realized they could cash in on all that trust they had gained during the period of the CGS. Once the war broke out, the façade of regime devotion to “sound money” immediately melted away. The gold standard had succeeded in growing state power over the issuance of banknotes, over coinage, and over physical control of specie. During the war, states became very interested in using that power to enrich themselves. Van Creveld concludes:
Within a matter of days [of the outbreak of war] all belligerents showed what they really thought of their own paper by taking it off gold, thus leaving their citizens essentially empty handed. Draconian laws were pushed through, requiring those who happened to own gold coins or bullion to surrender them. Next the printing presses were put to work and started turning out their product in previously unimaginable quantities.
[. . .]
The movement toward state controlled money over the past century is just part of a larger process of the state monopolization of money. For the past 500 years, states have become increasingly bold in asserting total control over the money supply and the financial system in general. The classical gold standard was part of this process, although one that was certainly less than optimal from the state’s perspective. In the century since the decline of the gold standard, however, states have managed to gain almost total control of money, and this is not a power states will give up easily.