Money and Our Future

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:29:01 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

Lew Rockwell at lewrockwell.com - Fixing the economy, like fixing health care, is very simple. Get the government away from it. Separation of money and state. Separation of health care and state. Separation of school and state. Separation of life and state.

Consider what it means to live through our times in the light of economic understanding. Even in the face of calamity, there is no mystery and hence fear is reduced. You look at department stores going belly-up, and you know why. You see parking lots empty, and you know the reason. You have friends losing their jobs, and there is clarity concerning the cause. You see depositors in failing banks lose their money, and you are not surprised. Prices behave in ways that shock and surprise everyone else, but you know what's what.

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In an essay written at the end of his career, and recently brought back to life by the Mises Institute, F.A. Hayek discusses the only serious means of reform that is open to us. We must completely abolish the central bank. Money itself must be wholly untied from the state. It must be restored as a private good, privately produced for private markets. Government must have no role at all in monetary affairs. Money should be produced by private enterprise alone. Banks must exist only as free enterprise institutions, with no privileges from the state. This plan has also been advanced by Ron Paul.

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And consider: We are not asking Congress to intervene with a plan. No one is demanding that the Fed adopt this policy as versus that policy. All we are asking is that it not intervene in the attempts by the market to fix the problems that have been created by the central bank and the executive department.

Just imagine what would happen if legal tender laws were repealed and the government stopped intervention in the market for money. Virtually overnight, we would see the appearance of hundreds if not thousands of new payment systems and alternative monies online. Merchants would be free to accept any means of payment. There would be intense competition among them. Some would be foreign currencies like the Euro. Some would be new currencies based on existing commodities such as gold and silver. I'm certain that we would see a period of wild experimentation take place before the market settled back down again into a standard system that was famed for its reliability and stability and honesty.

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