ludwig von mises Archives

How Free Markets Enhance Freedom of Choice

Ludwig von Mises was careful to establish the individual actor as the basis for all economic analysis. An individual acts to improve his circumstances. To do so, he chooses among various available means in order to achieve his ends. Those ends are based on his individual values, which are subjectively established. Methodological individualism and dynamic subjectivism are distinctive features of Misesian Austrian economics.

The Importance of Economics Based on the Individual

Interventionists and Keynesians, on the other hand, use economic aggregates such as GDP and aggregate demand as their basis for analysis. By reducing economic activity to a matter of measuring aggregates, interventionists seek to justify the manipulation of those aggregates in order to establish policy goals, and to design interventionist policies that purportedly are intended to achieve those goals.

In order to manipulate such immense aggregates, Keynesians turn to powerful government institutions that, the Keynesian rationale goes, are necessary to manage such a huge economy. These institutions include not only government agencies and regulations, but also their favored partners including big banks (protected financial franchises benefiting from central bank policies and bailouts), big pharma (government-protected pharmaceutical monopolies), and big food (government-protected purveyors of government-approved diets).

This regulation and manipulation is supposedly done for the good of “the economy,” but in the face of so much government favoritism and management for the benefit of certain special interests, it is easy for individual economic actors to feel disempowered. And it’s not just a feeling. The more government intervenes to control markets, the less sovereignty the consumers have.

How Governments Destroy Competition

An example is the increasing domination of the major Wall Street banks in the US. Consumers and small businesses report in surveys that two-thirds of respondents consistently report dissatisfaction with big banks, and three-quarters say it is important to bank locally. Yet, the number of community banks has declined by 24 percent over 2000–2013, while big banks grew their share of deposits — the five biggest banks now hold 47 percent of deposits, and in some counties, as much as 75 percent of deposits. Their low consumer satisfaction scores are a result, at least in part, of higher prices. For example, Consumer Reports found that the ten largest banks charged a monthly fee of $10.27 for a non-interest checking account, compared to $7.45 at small banks and $6.00 at the ten biggest credit unions.

Professor Amat R. Admati of Stanford University stated in testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in July 2014 that Too-Big-To-Fail legislation provides an explicit subsidy to large banks in the form of a lower cost of capital, and bemoaned the “extreme opacity of large banking institutions” that grow “to inefficiently large sizes.”

Yet customers do not switch. Some of this can be explained by the convenience found in banking with a very large enterprise, but consumers also find it costly to switch to smaller banks in the face of market dominance facilitated by government protection.

Things would be different if big banks had to truly compete. In Liberty and Property Mises explained that the real power in the market lies with individual consumers who are making the choices that ultimately determine output and prices; he termed it “consumer sovereignty.” Murray Rothbard in Man, Economy, and State elevated the idea of individual economic power, emphasizing not only the right to choose, but also (and perhaps more tellingly) the right to refuse: “Economic power, then, is simply the right under freedom to refuse to make an exchange. Every man has this power. Every man has the same right to refuse to make a proffered exchange.”

To choose and refuse to make an exchange, i.e., to do business with any other economic entity, is the essence of individual economic power.

True Diversity in the Marketplace

True freedom in the marketplace can greatly shape a consumer’s entire lifestyle.

In their financial lives — if true market competition is allowed — individual economic actors can refuse to do business even with big Wall Street or global banks, and choose, instead, community banks or credit unions.

In their home lives, consumers can install solar panels or a home generator and disconnect from the regulated energy utility. This releases them from guaranteed price increases, often caused by the need for the utilities to support their excessive pension commitments, and the charges imposed by the forced redistribution of energy subsidies to low-income households.

Consumers can refuse to buy from the food companies that hide behind government food regulations and agricultural subsidies, and instead choose smaller, more local and healthier options. They can choose online education in the form of free MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses offered by top professors at many universities) or pay per course from online providers like Udemy, and refuse the offerings of pro-government biased content and tenured Keynesian professors. They can choose Uber and refuse the highly regulated local taxi monopoly, which is often typified by old, uncomfortable, and poorly maintained vehicles caused by the high cost of taxi regulations and lack of competition.

On the other hand, every government subsidy, every regulation, and every tax-code change that favors one group of businesses over another reduces consumer sovereignty. This interference results in monopolies and oligopolies which are typically the product of government intervention in markets.

Nevertheless, short of a total monopoly — such as those often enjoyed by the government itself in law and other areas — the individual economic actor does have freedom to refuse to do business with these government-favored industries.

A Partnership of Entrepreneurs and Consumers

Freedom of choice is best secured by allowing true freedom for both entrepreneurs and consumers.

Entrepreneurs “are at the helm and steer the ship,” Mises noted in Human Action. “But they are not free to shape its course. They are not supreme, they are steersmen only, bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer.”

Not only is the exercise of individual economic power a choice, it is a powerful tool for directing change, one that we can wield with purpose. As Frank Fetter wrote in The Principles of Economics: “Every individual may organize a consumer’s league, leaguing himself with the powers of righteousness. Every purchase has far-reaching consequences. You may spend your monthly allowance as an agent of iniquity or of truth.”

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

Government Regulation is a Hidden Tax

by Brady Nelson – Mises Daily:

Perhaps due to it not being as readily quantifiable as government taxation, debt, welfare, and money creation; regulation has too often been superficially dealt with. In many ways, the largely “hidden tax” of regulation is a bigger threat to liberty, economy, and morality than other weapons of forceful government intervention.

What Is the Problem?

The total number of restrictions in federal regulations has grown from about 835,000 in 1997 to over one million by 2010, and the number of pages published annually in the Code of Federal Regulations, never substantially declined, and in fact has consistently grown. It has been estimated that regulatory compliance and economic impacts cost $1.863 trillion annually. This amounts to US households paying $14,974 annually in regulatory hidden taxes, with households thereby spending more on embedded regulation than on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel and services, and savings.

However, this is just the proverbial tip of the regulatory-burden iceberg. The tangible burdens above are a quite manageable list of the more immediate impacts such as extra money spent by business to comply and government to enforce regulation. However, the intangible burdens are an almost infinite list of the less immediate impacts, such as lower performance throughout the economy in terms of entrepreneurship, innovation, growth, customer service, and jobs. The intangible burdens do not readily lend themselves to quantification like the tangible burdens do, and thus it is harder to understand the magnitude and even the exact nature of the almost infinite potential problems caused-and-effected. This is made harder due to the fact that value is always subjective (and ordinal) to each individual at any one point in time and, thus, there are no objective (or cardinal) opportunity costs and benefits of regulations as a whole that can simply be observed, calculated, and compared using cost benefit analysis (CBA).

Why Is There a Problem?

The most important of these intangible burdens of regulation are the unintended negative consequences on decentralized and dispersed knowledge and incentives. As Frédéric Bastiat pointed out: “In the economy … a law gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen.”

Thus, in terms of regulation and other policies: “[I]t almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse.” The unintended consequences of regulation are usually even worse than this, as they usually — unlike in free markets — promote a relatively small group of private interests at the expense of a relatively large group of individuals.

From a Public Choice school perspective, the regulation problem is essentially one of government failure andrent seeking, noting that: “(1) individuals in government (politicians, regulators, voters, etc.) are driven by self-interest, just as individuals in other circumstances are, and (2) they are not omniscient.”

Worse still: “[S]pecial interests are disinclined to seek direct wealth transfers because their machinations would be too obvious. Instead, regulatory approaches that purport to provide public benefits confuse the public and reduce voter opposition to transfers of wealth to special interests.”

From an Austrian school perspective, the regulation problem is essentially one of economic calculation and bureaucracy. Ludwig von Mises explains: “Without market prices for the means of production, government planners cannot engage in economic calculation, and so literally have no idea if they are using society’s resources efficiently. Consequently, socialism [and regulatory interventionism] suffers not only from a problem of incentives, but also from a problem of knowledge.” Mises said regarding the latter that: “A bureau is not a profit-seeking enterprise; it cannot make use of any economic calculation.” And this inevitably leads to regulatory failure as: “… [t]he lack of [profit-and-loss, price and customer-oriented] standards [which] kills ambition, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required.” All of this is, of course, the antithesis of consumer-driven entrepreneurialism.

At perhaps a still deeper level, Murray Rothbard reasoned:

When people are free to act, they will always act in a way that they believe will maximize their utility. … Any exchange that takes place on the free market occurs because of the expected benefit to each party concerned. If we allow ourselves to use the term “society” to depict the pattern of all individual exchanges, then we may say that the free market ‘maximizes’ social utility, since everyone gains in utility.

On the other hand:

Coercive intervention … signifies per se that the individual or individuals coerced would not have done what they are now doing were it not for the intervention. … The coerced individual loses in utility as a result of the intervention, for his action has been changed by its impact. … [I]n intervention, at least one, and sometimes both, of the pair of would-be exchangers lose in utility.

What Is the Solution?

The solution is of course deregulation — as much as possible, as fast as possible. However, both special interests (as emphasized by the Public Choice school) and bad economics (as emphasized by the Austrian school) will need to be overcome.

This combination was colorfully dubbed the “Bootleggers and Baptists” phenomenon. It has been observed that:

[U]nvarnished special interest groups cannot expect politicians to push through [regulation] that simply raises prices on a few products so that the protected group can get rich at the expense of consumers. Like the bootleggers in the early-20th-century South, who benefited from laws that banned the sale of liquor on Sundays, special interests need to justify their efforts to obtain special favors with public interest stories. In the case of Sunday liquor sales, the Baptists, who supported the Sunday ban on moral grounds, provided that public interest support. While the Baptists vocally endorsed the ban on Sunday sales, the bootleggers worked behind the scenes and quietly rewarded the politicians with a portion of their Sunday liquor sale profits.

More dauntingly, Murray Rothbard reminds us that, in many ways, the history of humanity can be seen as a race between bigger government versus freer markets:

Always man — led by the producers — has tried to advance the conquest of his natural environment. And always men — other men — have tried to extend political power in order to seize the fruits of this conquest over nature. … In the more abundant periods, e.g., after the Industrial Revolution, [freer markets took] a large spurt ahead of political power [including over regulation], which ha[d] not yet had a chance to catch up. The stagnant periods are those in which [such] power has at last come to extend its control over the newer areas of [freer markets].

It will not be easy to slow, stop, and reverse the century-plus growth of the regulatory state in the US and around the world. The crucial job of pursuing deregulation cannot just be left to politicians from the top down. It will need to come more from as many voters and seceders as possible from the bottom up and every direction in between.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

There’s No Political Freedom Without Economic Freedom

by Patrick Barron – Mises Daily:

Can we have political liberty without first having economic freedom? Is the form of government predetermined by the form of economic organization? At first blush the opposite would seem to be self-evident, i.e., that our form of government determines all else, including our economic structure. But Mises advises otherwise. In Human Action (page 283 of the Mises Institute’s scholars’ edition), Mises explains (my emphasis):

“Freedom, as people enjoyed it in the democratic countries of Western civilization in the years of the old liberalism’s triumph, was not a product of constitutions, bills of rights, laws, and statutes. Those documents aimed only at safeguarding liberty and freedom, firmly established by the operation of the market economy, against encroachments on the part of officeholders.”

Likewise, in The Law by Frédéric Bastiat (page 49 of the Mises Institute edition),
Frédéric Bastiat has this to say (my emphasis again):

“Political economy precedes politics: the former has to discover whether human interests are harmonious or antagonistic, a fact which must be settled before the latter can determine the prerogatives of Government.”

Economic Freedom Is the Foundation of All Freedom

These insights counsel us that attempts to pass laws — or even constitutional amendments — to ensure our political liberty will be wasted as long as our economic freedom continues to be usurped by government. In other words, limited government will fade in the face of the modern regulatory state, and no laws can protect us from its deprivations. Economics not only trumps politics, it determines its very form.

The root cause of economic interventions is the mistaken belief that government can improve our lives by making economic decisions for us. As I explained in an earlier essay, by their very nature, economic interventions by government are coercive in nature. Voluntary cooperation in the marketplace, on the other hand, requires only access to an honest criminal justice system to enforce contracts and protect property rights.

Government mandates require government coercion for their enforcement, including, for example, the mandate that everyone contribute to the government’s Social Security and Medicare programs. Although the public requires no government mandate to buy any of the wide ranging retirement savings and health insurance products available on the free market, government must force us to participate in its Social Security and Medicare schemes.

Absent the mandates, few would participate, because many understand that these programs are fatally flawed transfer taxes — Ponzi schemes of sorts — posing as retirement savings and healthcare plans. There are no real profit-producing assets from which to pay the plans’ distributions, merely the promise by government that it will continue to force others to pay you in the future as it forces you to pay others in the present.

These programs must be maintained by the police power of the state, and what may appear to be widespread acceptance of the Social Security and Medicare mandates is really the vociferous support of those receiving benefits. Meanwhile, the taxpayers who understand the reality of the program continue to pay to stay out of jail.

Economic Regulation Requires Coercion

The more government meddles in the economic sphere — which should require no regulation at all, since it is completely voluntary — the more police power is necessary to force us to comply. All government agencies possess huge enforcement mechanisms that not only can confiscate our property but take away our freedom. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is little more than a government-supported extortion racket, finding nebulous health and safety violations in the workplace that apparently do not concern the actual workers themselves, who haven’t been chained to their machines for quite some time now.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shuts down businesses and threatens entire industries for violations of arbitrarily established environmental standards that are of little concern to the people affected. Smokestack emissions and the like are local environmental issues for which one would expect a wide variety of standards across the nation. Undoubtedly the people employed by the giant steel mills of Gary, Indiana tolerate smokestack emissions that Beverly Hills residents would find unacceptable. These arbitrary EPA standards are depriving Americans of the opportunity to work at higher paying jobs: their freedom to tolerate more pollution in order to enjoy a higher standard of living has been usurped by government.

Speaking of jobs, just try practicing some profession that requires a government issued license, even if the parties using your service do not care whether you have one or not. Better yet, employ someone who is willing to work at a wage rate below the proscribed minimum or who is willing to work without healthcare or family leave benefits. The police power of the state will descend upon you, even though there is no dispute between you and your employee. Want to reclaim discarded furniture, refurbish it, and sell it out of your house? Better not try to do that without a business license and a store front in an area that is properly zoned. Do you want to hire “an able bodied man” to do some heavy lifting at your place of business? Uh, oh! The discrimination police will put you in your place, which may be a jail cell if you cannot pay their fine.

No truly limited government can perform these police functions, so expecting a limited government in a world where such regulations are common falls into the category of a cognitive dissonance. In laymen’s terms, we are just kidding ourselves that we are a truly free people with a government that is subservient to our wishes and exists primarily to protect our life, liberty, and property. Keep this in mind the next time you hear that some new economic regulations have been proposed or implemented. Concomitant with these regulations comes an ever more powerful and coercive government.

Article originally posted at Mises.org.

How the Fed Grows Government

by Hunter Hastings – Mises Daily
Article originally published in the January 2015 issue of BankNotes

We are told that elections are important, but the most powerful state institution, the central bank, is totally out of reach of the voter.

Ludwig von Mises viewed democracy as a utilitarian concept. It was the form of political organization that allowed the majority to change the government without violent revolution. In Socialism, Mises writes “This it achieves by making the organs of the state legally dependent on the will of the majority of the moment.” He identified this form of political process as an essential enabler of capitalism and market exchange.

Mises extended this concept of utilitarian democracy to citizens’ control of the budget of the state, which they achieve by voting for the level of taxation that they deem to be appropriate. Otherwise, “if it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.” (Planning for Freedom, p. 90).

Today, this utilitarian function of democracy, and the concept of citizens’ limitations on government mission and government spending, has been taken away by the state via the creation and subsequent actions of central banks. The state carefully created a central bank that is independent of the voters and unaffected by the choices citizens express via the institutions of democracy. In the case of the US Federal Reserve, for example, the Board of Governors state that the Federal Reserve System “is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.”

Independent from Voters, But Not from Politicians

Importantly, the central bank is independent of the citizens in this way, but, in practice, not independent of politicians. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is quoted as asserting, “I never said the central bank is independent,” alluding to similar statements in two books he has written, and pointing to one-sided political pressure significantly limiting the FOMC’s range of discretion.

This institutionally independent, but politically directed central bank spearheads a process that enables largely unlimited government spending. It expands credit and enables fiat money, which is produced without practical limitation. Fiat money enables government to issue debt, which, at least so far, also has been pursued without restraint. The unlimited government debt enables unrestrained growth in government spending. The citizenry has no power to change this through any voting mechanism.

Thus, the state is set free from having to collect tax revenue before it can spend, and as Mises explained, in such a case, there is no limitation on government at all:

The government has but one source of revenue — taxes. No taxation is legal without parliamentary consent. But if the government has other sources of income it can free itself from this control.

In other words, when faced with the possibility of voter reprisals, members of Congress are reluctant to raise taxes. But if government spending no longer necessitates taxes, government becomes much more free to spend.

Without restraints on government spending, there are no restraints on government’s mission, or on the growth in the bureaucracy that administers the spending. The result is a continuous increase in regulations, and a continuous expansion of state power.

Has The Central Bank Limited Itself?

In the one hundred years since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, US federal government spending has grown from $15.9 billion to a budgeted $3,778 billion in 2014 (a number we now refer to as $3.8 trillion to make the numerator seem less egregious). Spending as a percentage of GDP has advanced from 7.5 percent to 41.6 percent over the same period. A comparison of regulation growth is more difficult, but over 80,000 pages are published in the Federal Register annually today, versus less than 5,000 annually in 1936.

The evidence, therefore, is that voting makes no difference to this lava flow of spending and regulation. Whatever the will of the majority of the moment, government spending and government power will continue to expand, with consequent reduction in the economic growth that is the primary goal of the society that is being governed.

John Locke opined that, when governments “act contrary to the end for which they were constituted,” they are at a “state of war” with the citizens, and resistance is lawful. (Two Treatises of Government, p. 74). The theory and practice of unhampered markets and individual liberty are particularly relevant at election time.

Hunter Hastings is a member of the Mises Institute, a business consultant, and an adjunct faculty member at Hult International Business School

Please see the January 2015 issue of BankNotes for this article and others like it.

Capitalism and Creditism and Corporatism, Oh My!

submitted by jwithrow.

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Capitalism and Creditism and Corporatism, Oh My!

December 26, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $2,084 today. Gold is flat around $1,198 per ounce. Oil is still checking in at $56 per barrel. Bitcoin is at $326 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 2.24% today.

All is quiet in the markets this holiday season. We may look back on this time period in a few years and say that we were presented with a tremendous opportunity to buy beaten down energy and commodity stocks during the tax-loss selling season of 2014. We probably will say that we had a great opportunity to accumulate some gold throughout 2014 as well. Just be sure to follow your asset allocation model if you decide to capitalize on these opportunities.

Yesterday we examined our current economic circumstances and realized that we were employing capitalism but we had no capital! Today we must ask the question: How can you have capitalism without any capital?

The obvious answer is you can’t. It’s like making potato soup without potatoes – try as you might it just won’t work.

So if we don’t have capitalism then what do we have? My answer is that we have some weird blend of creditism and corporatism. Governments have colluded with large corporate interests, especially in the commercial banking sector, to rig the economy in their favor.

Though we could go back further, let’s start our story (from the American perspective) at the end of World War II. Prior to the war governments didn’t think they could do everything they wanted due to financial constraints. That didn’t stop them from doing half of what they wanted to do but it forced them to make a choice. Did they want guns (warfare) or butter (welfare)?

The U.S. came out of WWII looking like gold… literally. The U.S. economy was the least damaged by the war which ravaged Europe and it came out holding the world’s largest stash of gold reserves. This relative economic strength gave U.S. politicians the wrong idea: they started to think they might not need to make any choices. Then President Lyndon Johnson came along and he wasn’t shy about it – guns and butter it will be!

So we got the Vietnam War and the Great Society together! And gold steadily flowed out of the U.S. Treasury until President Nixon pulled the switch-a-roo in 1971 and closed the gold window. All of a sudden the international monetary system became elastic. With no more gold restraint, dollars and yen and pounds started to pile up as central banks and commercial banks discovered they could conjure money into existence largely at will. But this was a different kind of money than the gold-backed variety – it was credit-based.

This credit-based money was extremely popular and the money supply grew 50-fold between World War II and 2008. Everyone got used to a constantly expanding money supply and now both the economy and asset prices are dependent upon it. It is the expansion of credit, not real capital, that supports all of the federal spending programs, all of the wars in the Middle East, the mass imports from China and Vietnam, the new housing developments and shopping malls in Middle America, the massive car lots across the country, most of the skyscrapers dotting the city skies, and current real estate and stock market valuations.

Here’s a fun example: do you know how much debt is still owed on the tax-funded Meadowlands Sports Complex in New Jersey? I’ll tell you: more than $100 million is still owed on the facility. Oh, and I am talking about the old Meadowlands Stadium that was closed and demolished in 2009 to make way for a new $1.6 billion facility now known as MetLife Stadium. New Jersey taxpayers are still on the hook for $100 million on a sports complex that no longer exists! New Jersey built the stadium, used the stadium, and demolished the stadium but never bothered to pay for it.

Such nonsense can only occur in a world of ever-expanding credit-based funny money.

This applies to the massive bank bailouts and banker bonuses that one side of the fictitious aisle rails against just as it applies to the massive welfare programs that the other side of the false political-divide takes issue with. None of it exists without perpetual credit expansion; none of it exists without creditism and corporatism.

Capitalism would have nothing to do with any of it.

It is important to understand that we have only seen one side of the credit cycle within the current monetary system. Credit has been expanding constantly for more than forty years now. But if we look around our world we can clearly see that nothing expands forever. Waves rise then fall. Trees grow then mature. Balloons inflate then pop.

One day credit will have to contract; it is inevitable. What happens when that day comes? Ludwig von Mises, the late Austrian School economist, offered some insight:

“There is no means of avoiding a final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

Was he right? Time will tell.

More to come,

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and the fiat monetary system please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

IBC – What’s it all about?

by R. Nelson Nash
Author of Becoming Your Own Banker
Article originally published in the October issue of BankNotes

It should be evident to most people that the last 100 years have been very violent in the financial world. Why? What happened to cause all this turbulence?

During this period we have witnessed the bloodiest century of all time. Two World Wars. Endless smaller wars all over the earth. An influenza epidemic after WWI. Nations formed and then self-destructed. New diseases coming into existence. Endless turmoil in the Mid-East. Empires coming apart. Financial euphoria followed by inevitable busts. Unbelievably powerful weapons and weapon systems. Propaganda perpetrated on an unsuspecting public such as man-made global warming. The list could take several pages to itemize them.

So, what’s going on? All of these actions are preceded by thoughts of the people involved at any time and place. Or, maybe it could be best described as lack of thought! It appears to me that people have forgotten how to live. It could be that they never learned how to live in the first place. Maybe it could be because of the way people feel. We seem to have a generation of “touchy-feely” folks that are in places of leadership and they influence the actions of every-day people.

Wars make absolutely no sense, but it is evident that this behavior is a common denominator throughout this time frame. Nothing good came from them. Yet, wars are glorified in the minds of many people. Things like Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation. In reality it was a disaster — because of what it did to the minds of the people. They heard lies and came to believe them. Our country had already adopted Socialist ideas a number of years earlier, but this head-long plunge gained tremendous momentum during this period. I was there to witness it as a teenager and have seen it unfold to become the monster that we have today.

The historian, Dr. Clarence B. Carson wrote a masterful book entitled, The World In The Grip Of An Idea back in the 1970’s. He did a great job of explaining how we got into this abominable situation. The book needs to be re-published and Dr. Paul Cleveland and Dr. L. Dwayne Barney are in the process of re-writing it at this time. The world needs this book very much and so I encourage you to get a copy when it becomes available.

From my own perspective, money is the real common denominator in human action. The great Austrian Economist, Ludwig von Mises points out that the business cycle is caused by central banks. They inflate the money supply dramatically and people can’t tell the difference between “real money” and the “counterfeit money” (fiat money has no real basis). They feel that it is real wealth and so they do things that are totally irrational. This creates booms in the economy. In due course of time, reality rears its ugly head, and the bust follows.

This pattern has a long history, but it seems that every generation during the boom years feels that “Yes, those things happened in the past – but, this time it’s different!” This is nothing but hubris in its purest form. It is the “Arrival Syndrome” that I describe in my book, BECOMING YOUR OWN BANKER. It is the worst thing that can happen to the human mind!

Government debt all over the world is huge. But, consumer debt in these nations is approximately equal in volume. Bankers have created a mind-set in people that “you don’t have to save money– just spend, spend, spend! We are going to take care of your financial needs.” A local Credit Union advertises “Get a Legacy Lifestyle Loan from us.” Translated: “If you don’t like your present lifestyle, then get a loan from us so you can live the way you want to today! Don’t worry about having to repay the loan.”
We are bombarded with such stuff every day. If you listen to financial advertising very long then it becomes “hourly!”

Your local, commercial banks are the primary source of inflation. They lend money that doesn’t exist. If anyone else did that they would be put in jail! But, this chicanery has been going on so long that most everyone considers it normal.

In the video, Banking With Life, Dr. Paul Cleveland points out that people confuse money with wealth. Wealth is your productivity, and things that you own. Money is just the medium of exchange that we use to acquire wealth. Creating a pool of money from which to buy wealth is a necessary function in an economy. This pool of money is known as banking! We could not live the way we do today without the concept of banking! It is sovereign! Some party in your life is going to be the banker whether you recognize it or not!

That party should be you! John Donne (1572-1631) gave us the thought, “No man is an island.” Therefore, this Infinite Banking Concept must involve other people in the form of a contractual relationship. The perfect financial instrument to accomplish this has been in existence for over 200 years. It is known as Dividend-paying Whole Life Insurance (Preferably with a Mutual Company – one that is owned by the policy owners). Your medium of exchange must be warehoused somewhere! There are no exceptions!

This is a place that cannot inflate the money supply. This Infinite Banking Concept has been taught through my book, Becoming Your Own Banker and the follow-up book, Building Your Warehouse of Wealth. Further explanation is provided by How Privatized Banking Really Works by Carlos Lara and Robert P. Murphy, PhD.

Through these books and seminars that are taught all over the USA and Canada, there are now thousands of people who will never have to make loans from an institution that inflates the money supply and creates “booms and busts.” You, too, can become your own banker!

Please see the October issue of BankNotes for the original article and others like it.