Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Liberty Papers--A Primer on Money

"The dangers of government control of the money supply:

There are two properties that make governments especially destructive:

1) Governments are able to seize resources by force and to compel people to do buainess with them allowing them to continue economically unprofitable activities for far longer than free market enterprises.

2) Governments, being controlled by people who have little incentive to take a long term view, and a great deal of incentive to use their offices for short-term personal gain

When governments seize control of the money supply, the result is usually disaster. They overproduce money, usually by debasing coinage. They force people to use the state approved currency to the exclusion of all else. In extreme cases they wreck the economy so badly that saving because impossible, and the economy reverts to a barter economy.

Today, the United States government has engaged in massive amounts of spending. They are not getting this money through taxation. Rather they are borrowing it, and a good porioin of what is being borrowed is money created by the Federal Reserve. The production costs of U.S. dollars being almost nonexistent, the Federal Reserve can continue to create money profitably through a Zimbabwe like hyperinflation. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were founded upon the ruins of nations whose economies had been strangled by government mismanagement of money. Will the United States similarly succumb to tyranny? Time will tell."

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