I love quotes.
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“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
– Winston Churchill
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In the province of financial journalism, bitcoin unmasks the Statists.
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“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
– Thomas A Edison
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life is lived forward, but only understood backwards
-Kierkegaard-
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Bitcoin needs millions, and then billions, of users who demand better money. The demand for Bitcoin must be strong enough that they will break the law if that’s what it takes to obtain it.
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“Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.”
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
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The job of an economist is to cloak theft in the mantle of science to reduce the cost of keeping the masses compliant
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Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized digital currency, provides a potent example of technology allowing us to transform into more highly-evolved self-leaders who refuse all external authorities, in contrast to the milennia-old sheep-like follow the herd mentality, now waning in its power and ubiquity.
Central bankers will meet their match. You can't bomb a bitcoin.
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Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
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Because nobody in a bank is paid for avoiding a crisis, and everyone is paid to generate a return even if it means making the systemic bubble even bigger.
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In reality, deflation is not the cause of Japan’s problems but a symptom. Trying to cure Japan’s malaise by generating inflation is like trying to cure a fever by putting ice on the thermometer.
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In reality, when the US government needs money, it doesn't sell debt! It "TRANSFERS" the obligation of its citizens to pay future real production ( taxes ) as a "backing" for its newly printed currency! As this process has been going on for decades, it has built up a debt of "real production payments" that its citizens can never pay.Further, as the world reserve, this currency is held thru proxy "by every single person on this planet" that uses paper to trade anything!
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You still wish government upon others. No different than wishing cancer upon them
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Voltaire: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
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“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
Ernest Hemingway
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The closest thing to a man's soul is his belief system
Threaten that and you threaten him!
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Passing a European Banking stress test these days is a little like farting - easy to do, mostly hot air, and yet it typically warns of something else coming down that isn't going to be pretty. And for those who see the writing on the wall, they know it stinks
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Banking is an agricultural derivative: sowing the debts and reaping the inevitable defaults that are mathmatically certain to accrue under a debt-based fiat regime in which the interest payments required to balance the books are simply never created....
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"Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die of euphoria." ~ John Templeton
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"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof."
——John Kenneth Galbraith
"If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows." - in relation to trickle-down economics
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
——John Kenneth Galbraith
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We do not need “monetary policy” any more than we need a paintbrush policy, a baseball bat policy, or an automobile policy. We do not need a monopoly institution to create money for us. Money, like any good, is better produced on the market within the nexus of economic calculation. Money creation by government or its privileged central bank yields us business cycles, monetary debasement, and an increase in the power of government. It is desirable from neither an economic nor a libertarian standpoint. If we are going to utter monetary truths, this one is the most central and subversive of all.
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"Government is a great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else" ~ Frederic Bastiat
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Money now is nothing more than a confiscation device used by the powers that be to rob their constituents of the fruits of their stored labor.
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“The only difference between a bank director and a counterfeiter is that the counterfeiter has given evidence of superior skill and modesty. It requires more talent to sign another man’s name than one’s own and the counterfeiter at least does his work in the dark, while the suspenders of [gold and silver] payments are brazen in the face of day, and laugh at the victims and dupes, who have put faith in their promises.”
President John Quincy Adams
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There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about the economic effects of deflation—unless one equates the welfare of the nation with the welfare of its false elites.
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"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius
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Note the important distinction: real wealth is actually not destroyed by the bust. The wealth destruction happens during the boom – that is when scarce capital is misallocated and consumed. When the bust begins one has arrived at the moment when perceptions change: illusory phantom wealth is no longer mistaken for the real thing. It suddenly becomes clear that economic calculation was falsified during the boom, and that what looked like profits was really an accounting chimera.
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"The problem with bubbles is that they force one to decide whether to look like an idiot before the peak, or an idiot after the peak. There's no calling the top"
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"Of all contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effective than that which deludes them with paper money.”
- Daniel Webster
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The single most important thing in the economy is money. If the government distorts the meaning and value of money, then rot inevitably sets in.
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It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.
– Charles Darwin
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Using the after effects of a massive credit bubble to argue that deflation is harmful is as rational as using the existence of hangovers to argue that one should never stop drinking.
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“Governments never tell their citizens what they know. They tell their citizens what they want them to believe.” Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961)
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“If people are not free to control their own money, they cannot be free in any other sense.” -Ernest Berwin
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A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of the truth.
Albert Einstein
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Jonathan Swift (uit Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting): When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
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"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks." ~ John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
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Celine’s 1st Law:
The quest for national security ends up creating national insecurity. (Quis custodiet ispsos custodes? or “Who watches the watchers?”)
Celine’s 2nd Law:
Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation. (“True communication occurs only between equals.”)
Celine’s 3rd Law:
An honest politician is a national calamity. (“Fear those who promise great change.”)
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"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones." - John Maynard Keynes
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Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
– Oscar Wilde (“De Profundis”)
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“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand
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“Elephant: A mouse built to government specifications.”
—Lazarus Long
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“It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” --Ron Paul
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“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the Nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world-no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men.”
-Woodrow Wilson 1916, 3 years after signing the Federal Reserve Act –cited in, National Economy And the Banking System of the United States - Senate Doc. 23, 76th Congress, 1st Session.
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“All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in the constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin and circulation.” - John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson.
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“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'” - Ayn Rand
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“In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.” - Ezra Pound
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‘You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.’ ~ Ayn Rand
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"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H.L. Mencken
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"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley
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"Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."
- Thomas Edison
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There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Thomas Mann
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“In truth, in the case of individuals their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent. . . . On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money renders service, and foregoes the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments.
He sees, too, that other men practice this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he uses the ballot, he may become a master, if he does not use it, he must become a slave.
L. Spooner
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What sane moral rational exists for charging interest on money that was whipped up out of thin air? If we were borrowing someone else's *savings*, then it might make sense. But how can anyone justify the need to pay interest to the magician Fed and their miracle computer that spews money into existence?
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They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.
- Gerald Massey -
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If all the bank loans were paid, no one could have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of coin or currency in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial Banks. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the Banks create ample synthetic money we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp of the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible, but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it becomes widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.
- Robert H. Hemphill -
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That is what our money system is. If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.
- Mariner S. Eccles -
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“Do private banks issue money today? Yes. Although banks no longer have the right to issue bank notes, they can create money in the form of bank deposits when they lend money to businesses, or buy securities. . . . The important thing to remember is that when banks lend money they don’t necessarily take it from anyone else to lend. Thus they ‘create’ it.”
- Congressman Wright Patman -
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“[W]hen a bank makes a loan, it simply adds to the borrower’s deposit account in the bank by the amount of the loan. The money is not taken from anyone else’s deposit; it was not previously paid in to the bank by anyone. It’s new money, created by the bank for the use of the borrower.“
- Robert B. Anderson -
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Based on how monetary policy has been conducted for several decades, banks have always had the ability to expand credit whenever they like. They don’t need a pile of “dry tinder” in the form of excess reserves to do so. That is because the Federal Reserve has committed itself to supply sufficient reserves to keep the fed funds rate at its target. If banks want to expand credit and that drives up the demand for reserves, the Fed automatically meets that demand in its conduct of monetary policy. In terms of the ability to expand credit rapidly, it makes no difference.
- William C. Dudley-
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As long as 4 decades ago, the actual situation was put very simply by the then Senior Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Alan Holmes. Holmes explained why the then faddish Monetarist policy of controlling inflation by controlling the growth of Base Money had failed, saying that it suffered from “a naive assumption” that:
The banking system only expands loans after the [Federal Reserve] System (or market factors) have put reserves in the banking system. In the real world, banks extend credit, creating deposits in the process, and look for the reserves later. The question then becomes one of whether and how the Federal Reserve will accommodate the demand for reserves. In the very short run, the Federal Reserve has little or no choice about accommodating that demand; over time, its influence can obviously be felt. (Alan R. Holmes, 1969, p. 73; emphasis added)
- Steve Keen-
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[Banks] do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes in exchange for credits to the borrowers’ transaction accounts.
- Modern Money Mechanics-
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"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." ~ Adrian Rogers
“some people make things happen, some watch things happen, while others wonder what has happened "
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Familiarity, the first myth of reality: What you know the best, you observe the least.
Devotion, the second myth of reality: The faithful are most hurt by the objects of their faith.
Conviction, the third myth of reality: Only those who seek the truth can be deceived.
Fellowship, the fourth myth of reality: As the tides of war shift, so do loyalties.
Trust, the fifth myth of reality: Every truth holds the seed of betrayal.
-Magic, The Gathering
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As Voltaire observed, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible." This is precisely how empires collapse.
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When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you … you may know that your society is doomed.
~ Ayn Rand
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I have to imagine that this entire euro system is probably going to go down as one of the worst ideas in the history of economics.
The central bank fiat system that pervades global finance is already ludicrous enough. We entrust the reins of an entire economy, the prices of goods and services, the printing press, total control of financial markets– to a tiny elite.
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“Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.” – John Mills, "On Credit Cycles and the Origin of Commercial Panics," 1867
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“They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” –George Carlin
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"You don't make money buying when you're optimistic. You have to actually run completely counter to your own emotional psychology."
Doug Casey
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Survivor bias
The basic idea here is that studying the aircraft that come back riddled with holes from bombing missions leads us astray when we try to analyze the damage: what would really help us is studying the planes that were shot down, but they are unavailable for study.
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It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
-Voltaire
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"When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe." –Frederic Bastiat
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a man will never admit that which he is paid to ignore
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“No warning can save people determined to grow suddenly rich.”
- Lord Overstone.
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As we have discussed previously, this is precisely how one could sum up the mercantilist fallacy underlying the so-called 'currency wars'. One does not become magically richer if the exchange value of one's currency declines. The opposite is the case; one needs to produce and export more goods than before to obtain an amount of goods from abroad that is equivalent to the previously imported amount. Whatever monetary gain the export industries can point to in domestic currency terms is but fleeting – it exists only for as long as it takes for domestic prices and wages to adjust to the new situation.
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"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."
- Thomas Sowell in 1993
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It's not your money in that bank account; it's their money. You don't issue it, you don't own it, you don't control it. You are simply allowed to use it under strict terms of those who issue it, own it, and control it.
Bitcoin, on the other hand...
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If any person is too big to prosecute then your justice system is a sham, a lie, a farce, a joke, a bastardization of all that America used to stand for. Ultimately, it becomes a tool to enforce the will of fascists.
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Reducing costs by managing the currency is, to put it less politely, all about robbing the workforce of the purchasing power of its wages.
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“Devaluing a currency is like peeing in bed,” a Federal Reserve official told The Journal. “It feels good at first, but pretty soon it becomes a real mess.”
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History rather unkindly finds that Central Planning elevation of markets and suppression of risk is impermanent: Intervention leads to crashes. Why is this so? Risk cannot be eliminated; it can only be transferred or suppressed. When it is suppressed, it eventually bursts out. The greater the suppression, the greater the eventual dislocation.
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We currently have the second-worst kind of monetary system, in which an irredeemable currency is borrowed into existence under the central planning of a central bank. The only system which would be worse is one in which politicians can outright create money at will.
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Hunter S. Thompson’s observation sprang to mind: “in a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”
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Always remember Gandhi's dying words of the 'roots of violence' - "wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles."
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Government officials and voters are not aware of the lessons of Frederic Bastiat. The attempt of all to live at the expense of all is doomed. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
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My definition of Neoliberal Capitalism differs significantly from the conventional view: markets are opened specifically to benefit the Central State and global corporations, and risk is masked by financialization and then ultimately passed onto the taxpayers. In this view, the essence of Neoliberal Capitalism is: profits are privatized but losses are socialized, i.e. passed on to the taxpayers via bailouts, sweetheart loans, State guarantees, the monetization of private losses as newly issued public debt, etc.
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"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men,
living together in society,
they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
Frederic Bastiat, (1801-1850)
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"The illusion of freedom [in America] will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." --Frank Zappa
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An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Laurence J. Peter
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"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion-when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing-when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors-when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you-when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice-you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot" ~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
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Stating that a free market co-exists in a country in which a Central Bank retains the monopolistic power to set interest rates is as impossible a relationship as the physics maxim that states two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.
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Confronted by a crisis like the Great Recession, each section of society uses its political influence to try to maintain its share of the national wealth, while forcing the cost of economic adjustment to others. The rich try to shift adjustment costs to the middle class, who in turn try to pay for their own subsidies and entitlements by cutting the programmes of the poor.
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If you collect the money, you disperse the people;
If you disperse the money, you collect the people.
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"Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency."
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"When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion"
Dale Carnegie
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The financial sector has politicized bank credit by pressing to privatize economic rent rather than collect it as the tax base. This financialization of rent-extracting opportunities does not reflect a natural or inevitable evolution of “the market.” It is a capture of market structures and fiscal policy. Bank lobbyists have campaigned to shift the economic arena to the political sphere of lawmaking and tax policy, with side battlegrounds in the mass media and universities to capture the hearts and minds of voters to believe that the quickest and most efficient way to build up wealth is by bank credit and debt leverage
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Proper defaults on government debt would also teach bond investors a lesson, namely that they should not engage in the socially destructive practice of channelling scarce savings through the government bond market into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats with the aim of obtaining a ‘safe’ income stream’ out of the state’s future tax receipts (i.e. stolen goods) but to instead invest savings in capitalist enterprise and thus fund the creation and maintenance of a productive, wealth-enhancing capital stock. Losing their money in allegedly ‘safe’ government bonds is, quite frankly, what they deserve
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(in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members ofsociety least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers
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Martenson also states, "When your central bank badly misprices money and then bids up everything related to bonds, nothing can be reasonably priced. Risk is mispriced; the few remaining investors (as distinct from speculators, which are now the majority) are forced to accept both poor yields and higher risk - so we know the price of everything, but the value of nothing."
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“In the first place God made idiots. He did this for practice. Then he made politicians. This was a mistake. Then he tried to correct His mistake by having the people elect the politicians of their own choosing. He then realized that he had made idiots twice and he pondered his miscalculation for seven days. Next he made dogs and finally being satisfied that he had done something correctly he went off on holiday. One day he may come back and finish the exercise.”
-The Wizard
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"Finally, we must question the morality of Fed programs that trick people (as if they were Pavlov's dogs) into behaviors that are adverse to their own long-term best interest. What kind of government entity cajoles savers to spend, when years of under-saving and over-spending have left the consumer in terrible shape? What kind of entity tricks its citizens into paying higher and higher prices to buy stocks? What kind of entity drives the return on retiree's savings to zero for seven years (2008-2015 and counting) in order to rescue poorly managed banks? Not the kind that should play this large a role in the economy."
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"There are good reasons to think that the nature of money is not yet rightly understood." John Law, 1720 (with the *****collapse of the Mississippi Bubble)
"Irredeemable paper money has almost invariably proved a curse to the country employing it." Irving Fisher, 1911
"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920
"Since the time when President Richard Nixon broke the final tenuous link between the dollar and gold in 1971, no major currency, for the first time in history, has any connection to a commodity. Every currency is now a fiat currency..." Milton Friedman, 1991
"We very much believe that, if you have a debased currency, that you will have a debased economy. The difficulty is in defining what part of our liquidity structure is truly money." Alan Greenspan, 2000
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“Inexact sciences like economics advance funeral by funeral,
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PROPAGANDA
"Most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker, but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all." - Michael Rivero
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play. The tune does not matter, so long it is the only one the public is allowed to hear. Eventually they will all dance." - Joseph Goebbels
"The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of it's powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the state." - Joseph Goebbles.
"Until they become conscious, they will never rebel and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious." - George Orwell
"Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened." – Winston Churchill
"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light." – Plato
"Its not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true." – Henry Kisinger
"It is difficult to free fools from their chains they revere." – Voltaire
"None are more hopelessly enslaved then those that believe they are free." - Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe
"Man will never be free until the last King is strangled with the entrails of the last Priest.” – Denis Diderot
"In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We will not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen – of whom we have ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things that their fathers and mothers are doing in an inperfect way.” – John D. Rockerfeller. General Education Board 1906.
"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications who directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries." – David Rockerfeller, 6/5/91
"Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." – Hermann Goering
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bitcoin is backed by an honest protocol/clearing system that has no inflation, no bank holidays, never stops trading, and utter contempt for financial oppression
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nobody's life or property is safe while Congress is in session
H.L. Mencken
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There isn’t a shred of decency in how governments or central banks operate. Their functions run antithetical to the basic virtues of mankind. If we as a species are to use our reason and free will to better our live, the institutionalized violence the state embodies must be rejected.
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1) Gold is the money of kings
2) Silver is the money of the working class
3) Barter is the money of peasants, but
4) Debt is the money of slaves.
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Assets that require longer term loans to purchase where there is a forward looking expectation that the debts incurred in today's transactions will be able to be repaid from wages earned in future years will suffer deflation and falling prices and asset valuations.
Inflation can be expected in the price of real/hard assets and commodities that don't require long term credit, especially where basic necessities (BN) are concerned. Discretionary spending will obviously decrease, but BN purchases will be made first. With money printing increasing the funds available, more money will be competing for BN and for real assets where there is immediate value and need. And the Hubbert Curve implies that there will eventually be less supply of BN and real/hard assets, so supply and demand will tend to drive prices up in these areas and cause inflation in them.
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A critical point to understand is that monetary inflation carried out by the central bank is a problem for the same reason that private counterfeiting is a problem. It results in an exchange of nothing for something and is therefore a form of theft. Nobody would argue that a private counterfeiter was providing a valuable service to the economy if he printed-up money to buy the bonds of financially-stressed governments, so why do many people believe that the central bank can do some good when it buys bonds with money conjured out of nothing?
Even believing that under certain conditions the central bank does no harm (rather than does some good) when it creates new money requires disabling the part of the brain devoted to logic and common sense. Of course it does harm! Adding to the supply of money cannot possibly add to the total wealth in the economy, and yet some people get richer as a result of the monetary injection. If some people get richer while the total wealth is not increased, then other people must be made poorer and what we are dealing with is a forced transfer of wealth.
We now get to the essence of what central bank debt monetisation is: a means of transferring wealth from some people to other people. In the specific case of the ECB using new euros to buy-up the bonds of insolvent governments and banks, it would be a transfer of wealth to the investors in these bonds from everyone with euro-denominated savings. In effect, the costs of making a bad investment in bonds would be shifted from those who made the ill-conceived investment decision to those who had nothing to do with the decision. Furthermore, the shifting of costs would be done surreptitiously. If all euro savers were sent a bill for their share of the wealth transfer there would be an uprising, but when the transfer is done via monetary inflation not even one person in one hundred will be able to figure out why he/she has become poorer.
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The chief problem that Marxists face is their misidentification of the present economic system as free market capitalism. How can we meaningfully call a system where theprice of money is controlled by the state a free market? How can we meaningfully call a system where financial institutions are routinely bailed out a free market? How can we meaningfully call a system where upwards of 40% of GDP is spent by the state a free market? How can we call a system where the market trades the possibility of state intervention rather than underlying fundamentals a free market?
Today we do not have a market economy; we have a corporate economy
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Very simply, I believe that the present system is inherently undemocratic. Giving banks a monopoly over the initial allocation of credit and money enriches the banks at the expense of society. Banks and bankers — who produce nothing — allocate resources to their interests. The rest of society —including all the productive sectors — get crumbs from the table. The market mechanism is perverted, and bent in favour of the financial system. The financial system can subsidise incompetence and ineptitude through bailouts and helicopter drops.
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Amusement ultimately comes in recognizing politics for what it truly is: a circus inhabited by well dressed thieves. It puts on a show for an audience that is forced to attend and hand over a portion of their earnings to a collective pot called the “public treasury.” The candidates are clowns who have no principles other than to disparage their opponents to the point where voters put them in office on Election Day just to avoid the other guys. They come up with ad hoc responses to justify how to gain better access to your wallet or control your life.
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Democracy
Definition: An excellent form of government where if you can cobble together 51% of the people, by promising them other people’s stuff, or scaring them that you’ll take away their stuff, you can rule as a dictator. It is decidedly not the form of government originally chosen by the United States of America, which is a constitutional republic with limited government. Thankfully we’ve mostly done away with that nonsense.
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Stimulus
Definition: Taking money from current and future Americans to undertake projects that didn’t make sense before, don’t make sense now, will net cost jobs as the stimulus must be paid for privately, but since the job losses will be hidden, and the direct hires put on the evening news, might let those in charge keep their cushy jobs a bit longer.
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When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind
as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe,
he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Thomas Paine
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(in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers. syn-socialism.
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Governments steal, then spend, other people’s money with reckless abandon. They conjure paper currency out of thin air, rob the future earnings of generations which have not even been born, and create mind-numbing barriers to real growth.
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"Usury once in control will wreck any nation...Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of Parliament and of Democracy is idle and futile." W.L.MacKenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada (1934)
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In 2010, when referring to today's leveraged reserve banking system, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, argued that: "of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today."
In the same year Lord Adair Turner hit out at this structural flaw in the banking system, suggesting that holding reserves (deposits or good collateral) of 33% might be more prudent. Such a system would be only three times leveraged and far less vulnerable to bank runs and crises of confidence. Such a system would be better placed to meet the tests of time.
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"The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country, than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger."
~Andrew Jackson
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There are two methods, or means, and only two, whereby man’s needs and desires can be satisfied: one is the production and exchange of wealth; this is the economic means. The other is uncompensated appropriation of wealth produced by others; this is the political means...
- Alfred J. Nock
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Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses - Mencken
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In the end, I am tired of being collateral for some bankers who end up extracting taxes from me because of some arbitrary national boundries that came as a result of someone else's fight.
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Deflation means that in order to get people to spend their money you must actually offer products and services that are compelling enough on their own merits to convince them to part with currency. Inflation pushes people towards unnecessary consumption because the are driven to spend their money more quickly as it loses value.
Naturally people who want a system that allows them to live comfortable lives by skimming value away from the productive prefer inflation and high velocity to deflation and capital formation.
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Towers was asked, “Will you tell me why a government with power to create money, should give that power away to a private monopoly, and then borrow that which parliament can create itself, back at interest, to the point of national bankruptcy?” He replied, “If Parliament wants to change the form of operating the banking system, then certainly that is within the power of Parliament.”
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the State claims and exercises the monopoly of crime. . . . It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale. It punishes private theft, but itself lays unscrupulous hands on anything it wants, whether the property of citizen or of alien.
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government is based on the principle of awarding a small handful of individuals a set of powers that no human being should wield– the power to kill. The power to steal. The power to wage war. The power to control what we put in our own bodies.
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Ultimately the only kind of tyranny that can last is a tyrannical public opinion.
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Men's voluntary support of the pretended "constitution" is doubtless, in most cases, wholly contingent upon the question whether, by means of the pretended "constitution," they can make themselves masters, or be made slaves. Such contingent consent as that is, in law and reason, no consent at all.
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"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable" H. L. Mencken
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We could let banks fail when they make bad investments, and restore a sound money system to ensure price stability and an end to “too big to fail”. Instead, we have outsourced our nation’s monetary policy to an international bank cartel that does not share our national interests, threatens inflation on working families, and actually endangers our future prosperity.
The question before us is not growth versus austerity. That is a false choice being promoted by the state-controlled media.
The real question is whether the West will submit to this established order — represented by the bank cartel and entrenched political parties — or reject it.
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Tell me that you aren't supporting the destruction of capital lent, so as to make the payment of debt easier for the borrower? Tell me that a 3 t0 4 % interest rate is not the destruction of capital. Tell me that an increase in the money supply isn't a destroyer of value of all previously printed chits. Tell me that you don't support the destruction of the value of savings through this insidious inflfationary process. Tell me that Treasury issued money is the same as borrowing it from the banks. Tell me if you thing that the destruction of pensions and savings is the right thing to do through the above process. Tell me that you have more to offer than a semantic argument.
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The creation of fiat money and money substitutes from thin air may appear to be "beneficial" from the few consequences that can be seen, but when the unseen consequences are taken into effect, the totality of its moral corruption must be apparent.
This is because creation of money does not cause creation of economic assets. It only gives the appearance of prosperity, at least for those who see the money being disbursed at the printing plant and being used to buy things and pay wages. However, the wealth represented by each pallet of currency only comes by diluting the value of every other currency unit already in circulation. It is embezzlement by dilution, just as when the bartender waters down the drinks.
When done on a small scale relative to the amount of currency already in circulation, the crime is invisible simply because the dilutution is immeasurable. But it is still embezzelment. In private business, we wouldn't excuse the payables clerk who padded her own bank account because she only took $500 over two years from a company with $1 million in annual sales. But the central banker's concern is embezzeling so much that the theft becomes tangible. That is the "getting out of hand" they worry about. But like the payables clerk who gets used to having a few extra dollars in her hands each week, the governments of these central bankers gets addicted to being able to spend 30 or 50 percent more dollars than they actually receive in tax revenues.
The extra social spending becomes triggers the cancer of a growing dependency in the private sector. People arrange their lives around their "benefits", and soon lose the ability to earn an income by working. They can only become desparate when it becomes clear that they have allowed themselves to be screwed. They focus their energies on political means rather than economic means. That is, they spend their time protesting and lobbying rather than learning new job skills or trying to find ways to earn a living.
So, while the central banker is trying to find new ways to "sterilize" money printing so he can create money without it "getting out of hand", he is destroying the very fabric of society's ability to create the wealth that is the very basis for the money he prints.
The meta-Ponzi scheme is now past the point of self recovery. This will not end well.
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It is actually downright comical that we have a central economic planning agency that is allegedly trying to 'mimic' the natural interest rate when we could obtain it very easily by simply abolishing the planners and rigorously enforcing property rights.
As Mises protégé Murray Rothbard explained, monetary inflation is akin to counterfeiting, which necessitates that some benefit and others don't. After all, if everyone counterfeited in proportion to their wealth, there would be no real economic benefit to anyone. Similarly, the expansion of credit is uneven in the economy, which results in wealth redistribution. To borrow a visual from another Mises student, Friedrich von Hayek, the Fed's money creation does not flow evenly like water into a tank, but rather oozes like honey into a saucer, dolloping one area first and only then very slowly dribbling to the rest.
The Fed doesn't expand the money supply by uniformly dropping cash from helicopters over the hapless masses. Rather, it directs capital transfers to the largest banks (whether by overpaying them for their financial assets or by lending to them on the cheap), minimizes their borrowing costs, and lowers their reserve requirements. All of these actions result in immediate handouts to the financial elite first, with the hope that they will subsequently unleash this fresh capital onto the unsuspecting markets, raising demand and prices wherever they do.”
You can line up 100 professional war historians and political scientists to talk about the 20th century, and not one is likely to mention the role of the Fed in funding US militarism. And yet it is true: the Fed is the institution that has created the money to fund the wars. In this role, it has solved a major problem that the state has confronted for all of human history. A state without money or a state that must tax its citizens to raise money for its wars is necessarily limited in its imperial ambitions. Keep in mind that this is only a problem for the state. It is not a problem for the people. The inability of the state to fund its unlimited ambitions is worth more for the people than every kind of legal check and balance. It is more valuable than all the constitutions every devised.
Central banking is an anti-capitalist, artificial system of coercive regulation and intervention in monetary affairs used to control the cost of money (interest rates) and sustain monetary inflations that destroy savings, wealth and capital; which punish the wealth creators, reward the looters, and create the great depressions that those who control this evil edifice go to great lengths blaming on the free market.
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H.L. Mencken
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wow... very much your quotes,
thanks for ur quotes.
Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.
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