How Private Markets Can Provide Money

0:00What I want to do is make the general case for privatization and then apply it to money. And since gold has always been private enterprise money, it'll end up supporting the gold standard. So what is the general case for privatization? The way I see it, the general case for privatization is twofold. One, morality, and the other, economic efficiency. On morality, the benefit of privatization is when things are private, the interaction occurs in a voluntary way. Every aspect of the market is voluntary. All the market is, is the concatenation of all voluntary acts. So if I trade you this, your pen for my tie, I benefit because I like your pen more than my tie, So I gain to the difference between the two and you like my time more than your pen So you gain to the difference to you between how you evaluate my tie and your pen that you have to give up And that's pretty much what the market is it's just trading and all trades on the market are voluntary

1:12And this is highly moral as far as I can see because one of the basic premises of free enterprise or morality or ethics is voluntary In short contrast, the government, when you deal with the government it's not voluntary, you have to do what they say or not do what they say not to do, you have to pay them taxes and if you think taxes are voluntary, try not paying them and see what happens to you. Now, there are some people who will say, well, it's really a club. The government is a club. And just as if you join the golf club, you have to pay your dues, well, so do you have to pay your dues to the Canada club or to the U.S. club. But when something is voluntary, it's obvious that it's voluntary. People agree to it. They sign something.

2:04If you join the golf club, you have to sign up. You have to agree to join the golf club. Nobody has agreed to join the Canada Club or the U.S. Club, it's a very different sort of a thing. Now there's a quote from Schumpeter who says, The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or on the purchase of services, say of a doctor, only proves how far removed this part of the social science is from scientific habits of mind. And I think that's absolutely true. Now you might say that government is necessary, but my point is that it's evil. It's evil, so at best it's a necessary evil, but that doesn't make it good because it's coercive and things that are coercive like murder and rape are not cricket, not kosher, what have you.

2:53Suppose two people break into my house and they're about to take my TV away and they're a philosophical robber gang so they're willing to dialogue with me and I say, And they say, hey, tut-tut-tut, you know, this is robbery, what are you doing? He says, oh, not so fast, you know, we'll have a democratic election. And the leader of the gang says, well, how many think they should take Walter's TV? And the two of them raise their hand. And to be fair, they say, how many people think that they shouldn't take Walter's TV? And I raise my hand. And the guy says, well, see, democracy, you know, so it's legitimate. The point is that the group has no more right to do anything to the individual than any individual has to do to any other individual. And we as individuals have no right to do anything to anyone else without their consent. Forgetting about children. Children are a different sort of a thing.

3:40Paternalism, I think, with children is justified. Okay, so that's one argument for privatizing pretty much anything. And my motto is, if it moves, privatize it, and if it doesn't move, privatize it. And since everything either moves or doesn't move, privatize everything. The people who say it's a necessary evil because only government can do this, that or the other. I don't have time to go into that, but my view is that there's nothing that government does that the market can't do better. Okay, what about the second plank in this theory, economic efficiency? My claim here is that entrepreneurs are much more responsive to the wishes of consumers What do consumers then are politicians to the desires of the electorate?

4:28Why do I say this? Well, the dollar vote occurs every day, every hour. The political vote only occurs every four years. Suppose they're every four years in Canada, but they keep playing around with that, but roughly every four years. So we get to exercise our control much more often. Secondly, the control that we have in the market is very narrow. can vote for a red and blue striped tie, whereas in the political realm it's a package deal. In Canada you have to vote for the conservatives or the liberals or the NDP or what have you. In the U.S. it's the Democrats or the Republicans. Well, suppose you like Obama's policies 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9, and you like McCain's policies 2, 4, 6, and 8. You have no way of focusing and say, well, I love 8. No, it's a package deal. You have to take 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 2012 and you might not like those things. Whereas in the market you can focus it

5:22very narrowly so you have much more control. There was this wonderful case that occurred in Canada. Terry Fox, who is a Canadian hero, he ran marathons every day for I don't know several months all the way from Nova Scotia I think it was and he ended up in Manitoba when he had to stop on one leg a marathon every day on one leg and the Canadian people wanted a commemorative stamp in his honor and it took Canada Post, I don't know, two, three, four years to do that. At around the same time, Eaton's, a local department store here in Vancouver, had a display in their front door window and the local feminists decided that this display was sexist and they started writing letters and this is horrible. You know how long it took Eaton's to get rid of this offensive display?

6:12It took them one day, because if they didn't, they'd lose profits. Whereas if the post office didn't do what its consumers wanted, is the post office going to lose profits? Well, yeah, but they don't care. They can't go broke. See, one of the benefits of the market, the reason that the market is usually more efficient than the government, almost always, is because if they're not efficient, they go broke and they bother us no more. I teach in New Orleans. We had Katrina there. Katrina, I was going to say Katrina killed 1,500 people. Katrina didn't kill 1,500 people. The Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA killed 1,500 people. Now, I don't mind that that much. Don't think I'm cold-hearted. I'm against killing. But what really ticks me off is that FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are still in business.

6:59Can you imagine if FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers were private and 1,500 people were killed? They'd be out of business in the next day. So this weeding out, this profit and loss system is one reason why the market is more efficient than government. Okay, that's the overall view as to why we should prefer private to public. Now to get to my talk about money. This view that the market is preferable on moral and efficiency grounds is true of nothing more than money. If it's true for the average good or service, then it's true in spades for money. Money is the lifeblood of the economy.

7:44Money is to the body economic as blood is to the physical body. If the bloodstream is messed up, the body is messed up. If money is messed up, the economy is messed up. One half of every transaction in the market has got money, with the exception of border. And sometimes money is traded against money when a lira trades against the franc, or money today trades against money receivable tomorrow. But in most cases, money is half of every transaction. So if you're going to mess with money, you're messing with the entire economy. Now, some people say that if it's really important, government's got to do it. We can't leave the important things to the market. I say the very opposite. I say that if we have to have government, inept and immoral as it is, then let's assign it to unimportant things like paperclips, rubber bands, turnips.

8:36I don't know why I picked that list, but, you know, things that seem roughly unimportant. And if the government messes up here, it's not so bad. Anyone want to assign the Internet to the post office? I mean, the whole idea is ludicrous. Where's the bubblegum crisis? Where is the pencil problem? There isn't any, because the market is pretty much in charge of those things. Now in Canada right now there's this Listeriosis crisis, Maple Leaf meatpacking is in trouble. And everyone says it's Maple Leaf's problem. This seems to be a counter example of what I said. Here Maple Leaf, a private company, is in trouble for causing, I think, 11 deaths or something, 15 deaths, something like that. But this makes it sound as if laissez-faire capitalism is operating in this corner of the economy.

9:22Nothing could be further from the truth. The Canadian government is heavily involved in inspection of meat and other such products. And yet no one seems to be blaming the government for this because our media is not really in tune with free enterprise economics. Lenin said that the best way to overturn the capitalist system is to debauch its currency. Keynes, I don't usually quote these guys, but what the heck, you can quote the devil. Keynes said, and this was in the Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919, Lennon was right, two lefty buddies, and me, I guess I'm a lefty here too. There is no subtle and no sure means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

10:07The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner that not one man in a million is able to diagnose. There are our friends on the left who say money is the root of all evil. I say the very opposite. Okay, so why do we have money? How did it start? Why is it so important? How did the government take it over? And what are the problems with the government takeover of money? Those are the issues that I'll be addressing. And I'll be basing my remarks mainly on two of my gurus, So I'm going to ask you to imagine a scenario where there is no money. And not only where there is no money, but where there's no trade. And let's suppose that there are, I don't know, 10,000 people in the local area. This is years ago before the advent of money.

10:58And each of them has a square mile, so there's enough stuff to create life. They can all be farmers and eat, but they're all self-sufficient. Life, they can all be farmers and eat, but they're all self-sufficient. That means they have to make their own food, their own clothing, their own shelter, their own entertainment, their own repair services, their own shoes, their own health care, their own makeup. I guess they can get feathers or something. Everything they do is just by themselves. They're all on their own. It's in effect they have a tariff wall, an infinite tariff wall around each of them so that none of them can trade. So this is sort of the economic nationalist's great idea of self-sufficiency, you know, we have to be self-sufficient in oil, we can't buy oil from someone, we can't buy shoes from someone.

11:44So here you have the anti-globalists, the people who riot in Seattle whenever they're trying to have more trade, you have their ideal. Well, is this good? Not really. Not very good. Because you can't trade with everyone. You have to be a jack of all trades. You have to make everything for yourself. And as you know, we can't have specialization, and it's very hard to be rich, let alone to live, if you have to make everything literally for yourself. You'd be like a Robinson Crusoe on your island, only there are other people around you, but you can't trade with them. Life would be nasty, British and short. This earth that can now support 6 billion people under such a regime might be able to support 6,000 people. The 6,000 people who are the most into, you know, survival in the woods or whatever it is that takes to live on your own.

12:34Namely, roughly 6 billion of us owe our very lives to the fact that we can trade with each other, that we can specialize, that we can learn more about the task that we're assigned to, that we can have a division of labor, we can perfect our skills. That's why we're rich or relatively rich compared to the situation that would ensue could we not trade. Look, if you want to be a good concert pianist, you have to practice six, eight, ten hours a day. How good a concert pianist can you be if you have to make all your food and your clothing and your shelter and everything else? It's just an abomination. Itivid be an economic abomination. So, the only way out of this is to specialize. But the problem with specializing is if you can't trade, if you specialize in, I don't know, shoes or frisbees, Frisbees, you can't eat shoes or frisbees, so you can't specialize.

13:27So if you want to specialize, you have to trade. So we are now going to relax our assumption of no trade. We're going to reduce the tariff barriers down to zero. And we're now going to allow trade into our model. So what happens? Well, different people specialize in different things and they have to trade. The problem with that is a thing called the double coincidence of wants. Suppose I'm a chicken-owning pickle-wonter. I have to find a pickle-owning chicken-wonter. Say that three times fast and you'll drive yourself crazy. Or you move into town, you are a computer expert, and you have to find a landlord who wants computers. I mean, it's hard enough to find an apartment in a new city, but to find a landlord who So, what it was found in history, sort of made up history or historical exegesis, is that instead of making the double coincidence of wants direct, that would be called direct trade, there was such a thing called indirect trade.

14:37Well, what's indirect trade? Indirect trade means I trade my chicken in for something, salt, sugar, whatever, fish hooks, something that I think everyone else will want. And then when I get the salt, I take the salt and I go out and buy a pickle. So I have to do two trades instead of one, but each of these two trades is easy to do on the assumption that everyone will accept salt or sugar or whatever it is that I'm using to intermediate trade. And then I can trade, and if I can trade, then I can specialize, and if I can specialize, then we can have life for humanity. These people, clergymen, lefties, hippies, whatever, who think that money is the root of all evil, all it is, is a facilitator of trade.

15:24And all trade is, is something that enables specialization and efficiency. And all that does is promote human life. So this is evil? Well, if this is evil, then human life is evil. Don't tell this to our friends, the environmentalists, because they believe that, but we won't go into that. Okay, notice various things have been used to intermediate trade. Salt, sugar, cigarettes, tobacco, fish hooks, cows, metals, brass, copper, silver, gold. But notice one thing that all of these trade intermediators have in common is that they're commodities. There's something you can grab or bite or chew or hold or something like that. You can't have a piece of paper be money.

16:12Look, suppose I write over on this piece of paper, I write 10 blockheads. And I go around the room and say, hey, Erin, will you give me your car and I'll give you 10 blockheads? You know, she's going to look at me as something a little weird. They don't call me Walter Weird Block for nothing. and that's part and parcel of it. The point is that if somebody just printed up a piece of paper, no one would accept it in term, except, you know, in some sort of weird way. Murray Rothbard used to do this and he would say, well, suppose I printed up 10 Rothbards and try to trade. And I would raise my hand and said, I'll accept it. I'll give you my bicycle for one. And he would say, shut up, Block, you know, I'm trying to make a point here. But the point is, you see, 10 Rothbards, if I really had 10 Rothbards, I could probably sell it for a lot of money.

16:55But it wouldn't really be money. It would be more like an art or something like that. It would be a unique kind of a thing. But forget about that sort of a thing. In any real case, if someone says, here's ten Rothbards, give me your house. Well, ten blocks. Ten Rothbards, I don't know what you can do with if it was a real ten Rothbard. But you get the point. The reason that these commodities had serviceability as money is because they were valuable in their capacity as a commodity. So you have to start with a commodity. Okay, so then there was a debate, a competition to see what would be the money. A competitive struggle over which commodity. Would it be bananas? Would it be cement? Would it be diamonds? Would it be gold?

17:44You had a sort of a competition between these various commodities to see which of them would be the trade facilitator or money, which is a synonym. Well, the way economists look at this, the criteria for success are durability, which means bananas aren't going to really cut it as money because they rot too soon, divisibility, diamonds would make lousy money because when you try to make change in diamond and break a diamond in two, the two smaller diamonds I think are worth one-eighth of what the bigger diamond would be worth if you could cut them cleanly. So that couldn't make money. Recognizability, if you can't recognize the thing, you know, the, say, the gold from the copper, then it wouldn't work out too well. Portability, cement wouldn't make a good money because it's too heavy to carry around.

18:33Scarcity, you couldn't have one of those trace elements of chemistry, you know, there's that chemical thing where they have 150 different elements. The rare ones wouldn't make good money because there's not enough of it around. It has to be in circulation. It has to be visible, and gold is a soft money. You can cut it more easily than you can cut other monies. What is it that mercury wouldn't be a good money because it's too sloppy, you know, pours out all over the place? So there are various technical reasons why certain commodities were money. and other commodities just didn't make it as money. Well, that's why I say that gold is the free enterprise money, because whenever people were free to choose, they chose money.

19:25They chose gold, sometimes silver, sometimes copper for smaller change. So it's not as if the critics of gold... The way the critics of gold see gold advocates is it was sort of like Scrooge McDuck. Remember good old Scrooge? He'd get into his money bin and he'd sort of throw it up on himself And he would sort of roll down and go, ah, you know, sort of a pervert or something. I might be a pervert, but gold isn't one of my perversions, you know, so, and nor is it for most gold standard advocates. It's just because that was the best money, the best intermediator of trade. If tomorrow we had a free market and money and people were free to choose, which is the name of Milton Friedman's film series and I think a book, and I think a book, and I'll be criticizing Milton Friedman on this in my afternoon session.

20:15If people were free to choose and they chose, instead of gold this time, they chose silver, that would be fine, or if they chose platinum or whatever it is that they chose. So the key is not on gold, the key is on whatever people are free to choose. The idea, again, is back to this morality point, whatever is voluntary. And if they choose gold on a voluntary basis, then we're gold standard advocates. Why does government not like gold?

21:03There are only three ways that government can get money. The first way is taxes. The problem with taxes from the government's point of view is that it's very clear as to who's doing the taxing. It's government. The second way that government can raise money is by borrowing. And again, it's very clear that the government is crowding out private borrowing. The third way that they can raise money is by inflating. And as my man Kane said, it's one man in a million who really understands what's going on in this case. Rather, government is able to blame greedy consumers, or greedy businessmen, or greedy, greedy people, or unions, and I stand second to no one in my condemnation of unions, but I don't think that unions are responsible for inflation.

21:49It's rather government printing more money, chasing a certain amount of goods. Certain people blame inflation on oil sheiks or somebody like that. But the point is that if the prices of oil go up and the money supply stays at around the same price, then the same quantity, then the prices of other things have to go down. If we're spending more money on oil than we have to, and we only have the same amount of money, we have to spend less on everything else. So you don't get an overall increase in prices with anything like that. Now, it's hard to see why an increase in money would raise prices. And the reason it's hard to see is that there's no one-to-one direct correlation.

22:35And expectations are crucial here. For example, suppose we're all used to prices are flat. Prices have been flat ever since whenever. And all of a sudden government raises the money supply. And now there's demands for all goods go up in money terms. And there's an incipient tendency for prices to rise. And prices start to rise a little bit, but everyone thinks that prices will come back down to where they were. So if you think that prices are going to fall down tomorrow, are you going to buy more or less today? Obviously less. So what happens is that expectations dampen down the incipient effect of money to raise prices because people expect lower prices, so they buy less in the hope that they can buy more tomorrow when prices are falling.

23:20So that's the first stage of the Misesian inflationary story. The second stage is that there's a rough correlation. The money supply goes up by 5%, the prices go up by 5%. Remember, the first stage was the money is going up by 5%, prices weren't going up at all. Second stage is that there's a correlation. But the third stage is they keep pumping up money, and now people's expectations tip over in the other way, and they expect prices to be higher tomorrow. So they buy more now, and when they buy more now, then you have two causes of the higher price rise. One is the more money, and the other is the expectations, and then the last stage is they'll buy anything like in Zimbabwe or Germany in 1923.

24:05Whether they need it or not, they're going to buy it because the money is losing its value as you speak, so it's hard for people to see that there is this correlation because it's not a direct correlation because of this expectations intermediation and yet money is the increasing and money supply is the cause of prices increasing. Well, how did this get started? The way this got started was with the evils of fractional reserve banking. How did that start? Well, let's get back to our scenario before where there was a certain amount of gold and everyone was trading, intermediating, and now we could live lives and we can have specialization in division of labor and everything was cool. Well, where would you leave your gold?

24:52You don't want to leave it in your house because gold is valuable. So what you do is you leave it in the house of somebody who can protect gold. Well, who can protect gold? A goldsmith. He's got a big safe, he's got armed guards to protect the gold. So what you do is you deposit your gold with him and he gives you a little warehouse receipt, payable to the order of Walter Block, 10 ounces of gold and then every time I want to make a trade I go back to the goldsmith and I say hey give me my gold I want to go buy a horse and carriage and he gives me the gold and I go buy the horse and carriage and now the ex-horse and carriage owner deposits his gold with the goldsmith and he gets the same sort of receipt. That's the first stage. The second stage is people started saying why go to the goldsmith he's all the way over there. Everyone knows the goldsmith

25:42He's honest, here is his signature, it's a small town. We all know what his signature looks like. So instead of taking 10 ounces of actual physical gold, what I do is I go to the guy who has the horse and buggy and I say, here's my warehouse receipt, payable to the order of 10 ounces of gold. Will you accept this? And he looks at me and says, yeah, sure. So now we're trading little pieces of paper. But these little pieces of paper are backed 100% by gold in the Goldsmith's Warehouse or his safe. And then one day the gold skips the goldsmith's wife. It's always a woman who's in charge of the problems here. We sexists have to say such things. And the goldsmith's wife says, well, you know, the Jones is that he just got her a yacht and I don't have a yacht.

26:33And the goldsmith says to himself, you know, I have 10,000 gold ounces outstanding and I have, or rather have 10,000 gold ounces Right here in my safe, and I have 10,000 warehouse receipts worth of gold outstanding among the community. Maybe I'll print a few extra, a few extra warehouse receipts for which there is no gold. And the only time I can get in trouble is if all 10,000 ounces come together and demand their gold, which I'm obligated to do because these are demand deposits. But as long as they don't all come there, as long as no one knows about this, He can engage in fractional reserve banking and thus inflation was born. The gold standard didn't collapse, government abolished it to make it easy for it to inflate.

27:22How did it do this? Well, it had compulsory monopoly of the mint before the government got involved. Remember the reason the government wants to get involved is that this gives it a The third dimension of money raising. Look, if you had a printing press in the basement and you had the soldiers and the police and taxes were not enough and borrowing was not enough and you wanted to go fight a war in Iraq or somewhere and you didn't want to raise taxes, what you would do is start printing. Or in the age of banking, start increasing the money supply. So what the government did is it had a compulsory monopoly The Mint, it had legal tender laws. Here's a quote from U.S. Today of a year ago.

28:09Washington, the government today warned consumers and businesses that it is illegal to use alternative money known as Liberty Dollar Coins, which is based on gold, which organizers promote as a competing, a competitor to the dollar. So if you use anything else to intermediary trade, you can go to jail for that. So So you get this strange juxtaposition of the libertarians who favor legalization of pot and legalization of gold and legalization of pot is supposedly a left-wing thing and legalization of gold is a right-wing thing and libertarianism involves both of them. Other things that government did is it refused, it allowed fractional reserve banks to keep in business even though they couldn't meet all their debts, permitting banks to refuse payment even though they were bankrupt.

28:55engaged in central banking, which removed the checks on inflation, went off the gold standard in 1932, a little bit

29:25Friedman's favorite institution, private carnage, return of the government gold hoard to private hands, no government monopoly in the supply of money, complete separation of money in the state, somehow we talk about separation of religion, church in state, religion of school in state, well, also separation of money in state, because money is crucial, it's the lifeblood of the economy. Now, what have these people done? What have these people done with our money? Murray Rothbard wrote this magnificent book, What Has Government Done to Our Money? I don't know if it's for sale now, but it's available for free on the Mises Web. So just go to the Mises Web and look for what has government done to our money. It's one of the most — oh, wait, Will is waving it over there.

30:12So it is for sale, and I certainly would recommend anyone to buy it. It's just a little book, and it's beautifully written. One of the things about Austrian economics in general, and Murray Rothbard in particular, is the rights exquisitely, beautifully. What have they done with our money? They've messed it up. A hundred dollars that you could have, if you would have bought a market basket of goods for a hundred dollars in 1914, do you know what it would cost you now for that same market basket? Nineteen hundred and sixty-two dollars. So that's an eighteen hundred and sixty-two percentage increase. I don't know about you. I'm of a certain age. When I was a kid, you could buy a bagel for three cents. I don't know what it costs now, two bucks.

30:58You could buy an ice cream cone for ten cents. You could buy a hot dog and a Coke for 25 cents. Now these things are tenfold, fifteenfold, twentyfold in some cases. Now one problem with government inflation is that it allows them to do things, create wars that they couldn't finance otherwise. That's one problem. Another problem is it has a mal-redistribution of income, if you want to call it that way. Namely, who does inflation hurt? It hurts people who are on fixed incomes, like widows, pensioners, people like that, who are not protected at all or not protected fully by the cost of living adjustments. They get the The same amount of money, but by the time they get it, it's worth less.

31:48See, the people who benefit mostly from government law address are the people who get the money first. People in Wall Street, people of Boeing or Bechtel, they get the money first when the government creates money by buying stuff, by buying a bond or just by buying stuff, and they get the money before prices in general have risen. And then it goes to the second and the third guy, it's sort of like you throw a rock into water, there are waves. Well, the first wave of money has the money when prices are still low. The last person to get it, or not at all, is person on fixed income. So that's one problem with government involvement in money. They create inflation, they debauch the currency, and as our buddies Lenin and Keynes said, that's one way to ruin economy, and they are ruining the economy.

32:38Another point is that this exacerbates global tensions, in addition to government control of money enabling them to pursue foreign wars without permission from the populace. Remember voting every four years and you can't vote on specific things? It also exacerbates international crises because, look, if you water down your product, if you're selling, I don't know, bubble gum, Bubble gum, and instead of selling an ounce of bubble gum, you sell three-quarters of an ounce of bubble gum, people start resenting it. Well, that's what the government is doing with the money. They're watering down the dollar. I remember when I first came to this country in 78, the Canadian dollar was worth 66 cents. Now it came to par. Now it's about 93 cents. I lose track of it. I don't follow it every day.

33:27But this is because George Bush has been creating more money than the Canadian equivalent. So, if you water down your product, you get into difficulties, and if you water down your money, you get into difficulties as well. What is the view of most economists on gold? Here's a quote from Newsweek reporting on the American Economic Association meetings. Most quote, most economists have long since banned mention of gold from their discourse. Gold is not even discussed. If you favor gold, you're a cultist, you're a weirdo, you're a pervert or something like that. Milton Friedman, who is supposedly a free enterprise, and I'll have a lot more to say about him in my second session at 3 o'clock today.

34:18He calls us gold bugs. He's a monetary socialist. He's a socialist. and socialists of the money. Well, there are other forms of socialism as well. Well, my time is almost up, so let me just summarize. Gold is an intermediary of trade. It's not an evil. It's not the worst thing in the world, as our friends on the left sometimes think. It's just a way of facilitating trade. Trade is the lifeblood of the economy. If we can't trade, it's as if we have an infinite tariff around us. And that way lies death. Thanks for your attention. Thank you very much.