Category Archives: Murray Rothbard

The Psychopathic Machine: How Modern Finance Learned To Live Without Conscience

Article by Mark Keenan.

Excerpts:

Debt-based money ensures that this pattern is permanent. Because all money is issued as interest-bearing credit, new debt must constantly be created to service the old. If credit creation slows, defaults rise and the political class panics. Hence the endless call for “growth,” however hollow, and the refusal to confront the costs it imposes on both nature and society. A system that must expand or die will behave like a shark—efficient, unreflective, and indifferent to collateral damage.

[. . .]

The late psychologist Hervey Cleckley defined the psychopath as a person who “knows the words but not the music.” Our financial order knows the language of prosperity but not its meaning. It can model markets to six decimal places yet cannot tell the truth about who benefits and who pays. The spreadsheets are perfect; the souls are missing.

As I examine in the book The Debt Machine, this isn’t about hating bankers or glorifying poverty—it’s about recognizing that the very architecture of money has been built to reward the traits of a machine: speed, aggression, and detachment. Unless we redesign that architecture to reward stewardship instead, we will keep mistaking the cunning of greed for intelligence or wisdom.

This is what it means to return from illusion to reality — to build an economy that serves life rather than consumes it.

Sound money, honest credit, and transparent risk are not nostalgic slogans; they are the minimum conditions for sanity in an economy. Until we recover them, we will remain ruled not by men of reason, but by a system that acts—coldly, efficiently, and predictably—like a psychopath.

Playing with Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve

Video by the Mises Institute.

The Fed has been the source of booms, busts, and the ongoing impoverishment of Americans since the Fed’s founding.

This is why a new, critical look at the Federal Reserve is needed, and why the Mises Institute is now happy to bring you this new documentary on the Fed.

Playing with Fire provides a look at how the Fed uses its expanding power to damage our economy, increase inequality, and to impoverish ordinary Americans. The film also looks at how much the Fed has expanded its own power since the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Featuring interviews with Ron Paul, Tom DiLorenzo, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Jim Grant, Alex Pollock, and Jonathan Newman, Playing with Fire explains what the Fed is, where it came from, and why it is so dangerous. Perhaps most importantly of all, Playing with Fire shows why we need to end the Fed altogether.