Liberty Asylum

"This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every Part of Europe. Hither have they fled, not from the tender embraces of the mother, but from the cruelty of the monster; and it is so far true of England, that the same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from home pursues their descendants still." -- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, January 10, 1776

Hamilton's Counterfeit Capitalism
December 16, 2008

When history confirms that hands-off is the only effective and humane approach to a bust, and to prosperity generally, while hands-on brings ruination, why do governments today consider every option but free markets? Look back to the founding and the baneful influence of Alexander Hamilton. His influence has been highly detrimental to the majority who live outside the rarefied reality of national politics.
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In my proposed game, a player could have the option of paying rent to the bank in return for future undisclosed favors. If a player subsequently finds himself threatened with bankruptcy by landing on a property with hotels, he could draw a card to see if his past rent payments have earned him the status of “too big to fail.” Also, if a player wanted to put 7,000,000 hotels on a piece of property in a fit of irrational exuberance, the bank should have the option of providing cheap credit to cover the investment. And if another player should be so unfortunate as to land on a property with 7,000,000 hotels, the bank should once again be available to intervene in the public interest by bailing out the player. Full Article

There may be as many different preferences for president as there are voters, but only one person will win. Voters who prefer someone else or non-voters who prefer no one at all must endure the election results -- for years. If the political methodology were imported to the market, everyone in the country would end up wearing one size, style, and brand of shoes, even if their choice was to go without them. Full Article

Government has tried countless ways to sustain its Fed-induced booms and avoid the painful but necessary corrections. Its track record has been an unmitigated disaster, unless inflating the economy out of a crisis for a bigger one later is regarded as success. Yet the idea persists that intervention works, that if a mountain of facts show otherwise it’s always possible the intervention was too little, too late.

From the Establishment’s perspective, the fatal flaw of Austrian economics is the job it accords government, which is none at all. But free markets are markets free from intervention, which means today’s government not only has a job, but a crucial one: It should bow out of our economic lives altogether. That’s the “something” government should do. Full Article

Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it. ~ Rep. Ron Paul, TX, before the U.S. House of Representatives, February 15, 2006

The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. ~ Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1953

The quotes from Paul and Mises are political heresy, yet they hint at why government crises have long dominated the headlines. Why doesn’t the public understand this? Libertarians often observe that government doesn’t work, but clearly, it does some things right or those statements would be conventional knowledge. Put another way, why is the idea of sound money so foreign to most people? Why do they trust the state’s inflatable notes and the inflationist in charge of them, then wonder why the economy blows up? Given its record, why do they trust the state at all?

Year in and year out, government schools produce students who either (a) could care less about monetary issues, or (b) have state-approved ideas of them. Government crop management weeds out potential trouble-makers. Full Article

Winston Churchill once said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. A conversation with just about any voter would work as well. Hans-Hermann Hoppe points out that democracy promotes “the ‘infantilization’ of society,” resulting in “continually increased taxes, paper money and paper money inflation, an unending flood of legislation, and a steadily growing ‘public’ debt.”
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Less than three months from now either Obama or McCain will be the president-elect. Should we be concerned? Not whatsoever. Here’s why: Full Article

From what I can gather, Hackworth and Paine had this much in common: They saw the world with their own eyes. They were surely wrong about some things, perhaps many things, but their loyalty to reality was seldom breached. Their gods were facts and logical argument, not authority. Full Article

Anyone who publicly calls for the abolition of the Fed gets my attention. Add to his resume the fact that he rode a motorcycle across China once, circled the planet on the ground twice (the second time with his beautiful bride), ran the New York City marathon three times, and is one of the world’s most successful investors as well as a best-selling author, and I’ll sit and take notes.

I did my note-taking while reading Jim Rogers’s book, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip...full article

After Lexington and Concord, Congress had a war on their hands and needed a way to finance it. The Americans were in large measure tax rebels, so taxation of their own would have to wait. After giving some thought to borrowing, Congress decided instead to call upon their old friend, the printing press.

The colonists had a long history with paper money. They had been inflating since the 1690s and had all but driven silver specie out of circulation.
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The gold standard, Ludwig von Mises wrote, “requires nothing else than that the government abstain from deliberately sabotaging it.” [p. 421] Much to the detriment of civilization, governments have undermined and debased the gold standard throughout much of history. With the aid of a state-sympathetic class of intellectuals, most educated people now regard monetary gold as a quaint contrivance of a bygone age--to the extent they give the issue any thought at all. Any suggestion that we adopt an authentic gold standard as a permanent solution to financial crises, dollar depreciation, and senseless wars is dismissed by the intelligentsia as hopelessly naive. Full Article

Thomas Paine made the case for freedom in 1776, and ten years later made the case for freedom’s money, gold and silver. [1] If we had followed his advice on the latter, we would still possess a good measure of the former. Full Article

Ron Paul not only believes in the power of freedom, he is the only candidate I’ve heard explicitly oppose the philosophy of statism. And if we can go by a man’s record, we have to believe he means it. To get us moving in the right direction, he offers a few recommendations...Full Review

No one has ever died from inflation directly, yet it constitutes a serious threat to our existence. By “inflation” I mean a policy of increasing the money supply, the root cause of the booms that inevitably go bust. Using this traditional idea of inflation--which, it should be mentioned, is regarded as contrived by most economists today--in what sense can it be considered so dangerous?

In testimony last week, Ben Bernanke told Ron Paul that the government created the Federal Reserve in 1913 to stop the “periodic financial crises” that erupted in the 19th Century and again in 1907. Bernanke, evidently, was counting on Paul holding the accepted view of the Fed’s origins, the one untainted by Wall Street-government conspiracy -- not the view meticulously presented in the works of Kolko, Rothbard, and Griffin, among others.
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“The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the

United States

, provides the nation with a safe, flexible, and stable monetary and financial system.” ~ Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Like an interminable soap opera, pundits continue to bring forth scenarios of impending economic disaster. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, for instance, discusses in detail Professor Nouriel Roubini’s Twelve Steps to Financial Disaster, of how we have reached unsustainable levels of debt, and that bankruptcies, defaults, a collapse of stock prices, and “a drying-up of liquidity” are heading straight at us. Full Article

Candidate Ron Paul understands inflation as the creation of money out of thin air. While this view depicts a disturbing state of affairs and has a distinguished history, it is not in the least popular. For one thing, it tends to incriminate the money creators.

If inflation is defined as price increases, by coincidence the guilt falls on those who raise prices. Full Article

Imagine for a moment the dark days of banking when banks had to redeem gold coin for the money substitutes they issued, which were either bank notes or deposit accounts. Folks were generally happy to keep their gold locked up in a safe place and found it more convenient to use the substitutes. Very importantly, most of them were also either stockholders of the bank or in debt to it {pdf, p. 82), so they had little incentive to confront the bank for redemption. But this very fact enticed banks to create substitutes well beyond the amount of gold they held in their vaults, a practice considered normal and not the least fraudulent. Full Article

Hamilton's Counterfeit Capitalism December 16, 2008

Hamilton's Counterfeit Capitalism
December 16, 2008