What Government Is Doing to Our Money

0:00Since 1990, we've heard about what a low rate of inflation we've experienced. And in some ways, it might appear low compared with what we experienced in the late 1970s. The dollar of 1976 was worth only 63 cents by 1981, once the Nixon-Carter inflation had done its work. The cultural and economic consequences were devastating. A generation was punished for having saved and accumulated capital. Debtors were rewarded and of course the government being the biggest debtor of all. This period of our financial history was dubbed the age of inflation. But did it really come to an end? The problem is that we've continued to live through the late 1970s, just stretched out over a greater period of time.

0:48The dollar of 1990 is today worth 64 cents. Yet we call this a low inflation rate, while the same level of devaluation was accomplished. In some ways, it's perverse that we should ever be sanguine about inflation. It would be as if we screamed bloody murder if someone broke into our house one night and stole all our flatware, our electronics and our precious metals. But if the same burglar came in every day and took just a fork or an iPod or a Krugerrand, Perhaps we'd happily announce we're experiencing a low burglar rate. Now whether we think prices are rising or falling depends on what we've been buying lately because it's true that not all prices are rising, some are falling and for that we can only be grateful. Since 1996 wireless telephone services dropped by 40%, personal computers and software accessories by more than a 100%. Apparel in general, including women's clothing, fallen by 10%. Furniture and bedding, fallen by 5%.

1:53I keep in mind several points. These price declines are a reality. They haven't occurred despite the existence of the CPI. Indeed, these price declines are factored into the creation of the CPI. But the CPI has nothing but an index number that compares the change in one group of averages to the same group of averages at a later time. may or may not have anything to do with an individual consumer's experience. Murray Rothbard used to say that the main thing he bought with his money was scholarly books, one of the fastest rising goods. And so his personal inflation rate was far above the average. Of course, that was before the internet started doing strange things to book prices, driving the price of new books down and the price of used books up.

2:39In any case, the CPI is not a measure of price inflation. This is statistical fiction that serves only the function of helping us keep track of general price movements. There is nothing in nature called a consumer price index. There are only consumer prices. In the absence of government money management, prices rise and fall based on supply and demand. Even in the presence of government management, not all prices rise at the same rate and some prices fall. For years, Fed officials and others have warned about the grave dangers associated with deflation. Now, we praise this very thing taking place in clothing, technology and other goods that you can buy, especially at large discount stores. What's been the result? It's, of course, a wonderful blessing for consumers.

3:26Indeed, it's been our saving grace in times of soaring prices for education, energy, houses and medical care. If some prices had not fallen, the American economy would be even in worse shape. Does deflation make business more difficult? Yes, it can. Retailers can't hold on to inventory as long. The maintenance of profit profitability involves relentless innovation, keen-eyed cost watching, and cutting and constant attention to the competition. In a deflationary environment, consumers expect outstanding service and a big bang for their buck. are ready to defect to the competition over the slightest thing. All these are facts of life in a deflationary environment. My only question is, despite Mr. Bernanke, why should we regret this?

4:11If we seek an economy in which waste is held to a minimum, the people are served, the consumer is king, business operates with top efficiency and innovation, this is all to the good. Deflation never harmed anyone except those not willing to work hard for their profits. Now, it's true that these industries are constantly quenching about the supposed problem. But I don't see any evidence that entrepreneurs are thereby avoiding these industries. In fact, these industries have become increasingly competitive and robust job creators. Deflation, in fact, clarifies what kind of business people should be doing and just who should be doing it. Let me give you an example from the Mises Institute store. Last year, some of our staff considered offering specialized flash sticks of memory emblazoned with the Institute logo.

5:01They thought of having sticks that held up to one gig of data, pricing them out. They discovered that they were running at about $100 of retail and they could get them customized for about half that. Then we took notice of price trends for hard memory and saw nothing but falling prices. So we decided against it. Sure enough, six months later, you could get a gig stick for $50 less than we could have, about what we would have paid to have gotten them. Today, you can find them for as little as $20. What would have happened to our stock? Well, of course, we would have had to sell at a loss. What this taught us is that we should leave the business of computer hardware sales to the specialists. Downward price pressure helped us understand this. If you're in business, you understand this point as well.

5:48I was walking through an office max the other day and saw some gig sticks for sale for $80. Now, either the store manager is not paying attention to price changes or he's counting on very gullible consumers, but you can't make money for very long with either practice. Well, let us consider then some of the price increases that have skewed the CPI so as to cause the entire index to raise so dramatically over this period of time. Medical care has gone up 45 percent since 1996, education up 80 percent, housing up 33 percent, energy prices more than 100 percent. Now given these figures and excluding the deflationary sectors, it should be clear that the CPI ought to be rising much more than they say it is.

6:33But even by the standard measure, the increase of inflation in our times has led to a decline in real wages over the last three years in a period of sustained economic growth. This is an alarming fact. Thanks to inflation, we're not benefiting from economic growth the way that we ought to. And if the economy turns into recession, as it may be preparing to do, it's not going to be a pretty picture. Take notice of the sectors in which prices are rising and those in which it is falling. The markets that are relatively free from are innovative and internationally competitive. Consumers are benefited from pressures from imports in textiles, for example. The globalization of textiles has been a great boon to consumers.

7:18This is despite all the protectionist legislation designed to keep out as many goods as possible. These sectors are also the most innovative. Meanwhile, the sectors in which government is heavily involved, Through taxes, regulations, subsidies, protectionism, price supports and what have you, we find prices are going up. What's happening here? To some extent, the interventions themselves are keeping prices high. But they're also immunizing these sectors against pressures that would otherwise cause them to respond to inflationary prices by cutting costs. In other words, it's the inflationary pressure of bad monetary policy that has affected these sectors more than any other. The relatively free-market sectors are dealing with inflationary pressure by adjusting to serve consumers in the best possible way.

8:04When I say bad monetary policy, let me be clear what I mean. I mean all monetary policy. The very existence of monetary policy. The free-market position that Mises and his successors laid out regards money as a good, like any other, whose creation and management should be handled by the market economy. Most economists are happy to have the market for shoes, watches and computers managed by the market, but they draw the line on money. They believe that in this sector, we need socialist-style management. This is where the Austrians are different. Carl Menger broke new ground in 1871 by explaining the origins of money.

8:49was not created by the state or some sort of social compact and emerged from within the structure of the market economy. Barter is suitable for primitive levels of development, but once societies and economies grow more complex, traders find the need for a good that they can purchase and hold onto to trade for other goods and services at a later point in time. This good is the most highly valued good in society, also called money. Experience suggests that the best money commodity is one that is divisible, qualitatively uniform, has a high value per unit of weight, is portable, cannot be manufactured without end. Precious metals then have served this function quite well. One precious metal rose above the others in being the most suitable and that's gold. Now there's nothing magical or mystical about gold that made it money. It just happened to conform most closely to the features Money is also makes possible the calculation of profits and losses over time.

9:54And this is the essence of what we mean to economize. That's why the quality of money in society is so critical to a well-functioning economy. And how do we assure quality? It is the same with money and banking as it is with computers and cell phones. We need free entry and exit, rivalrous competition, consumer sovereignty and no special privileges. Our current monetary system has none of these features, and so we shouldn't be surprised to see the quality of our money slipping day by day. As we all know, the dollar was once as good as gold. We never had a perfect gold standard in this country, which I would define as one that provides for perfect and instant convertibility between paper money and gold coin, one without a central bank managing it, one in which there is no government coinage but only private coinage, and a banking system that enjoys no government privileges whatsoever.

10:51Now, the ideal system has never been a reality in full, but as a general rule, the more closely a money system reflects the ideal, the better it is. The more it is monopolized, cartelized, managed and papered over, the worse it is. This was the thesis advanced by Ludwig von Mises in his 1912 book entitled The Theory of Money and Credit. At the beginning of the age of central banking, he took us back to the beginning to show what money is, how it acquires its value, and where the attempt to monopolize it would lead. In the intervening years, he has been proven all too right. The dollar today is worth a little less than a nickel of what it was at the founding of the Federal Reserve. Now this is a remarkable fact given that prices have been on a general downward decline during the whole of the 19th century except for periods of war.

11:44It is even more remarkable when you consider that one of the stated jobs of the Fed was to stabilize the value of our money. Looking at the long trend, we can say that not only has the Fed failed to do its job, but even worse, that it's produced the very opposite of the results that it promised. This is especially true in the area of business cycles, which the Fed was supposed to counter with careful management of the money supply. It was supposed to provide more money in times when business conditions supposedly required more liquidity. It was supposed to pull back on its money creation at other times when liquidity was not necessary. No surprise, it turns out the Fed has never met business conditions that it deemed not in need of more liquidity. In many ways, the Fed is a childish institution, and I mean that in a very precise sense.

12:35A key feature of childish behavior is that it is action taken without a thought given to how actions might affect the reactions of others. Children always assume that they live and act in a vacuum. They're forever shocked to see that others' lives are impacted by their choices. Part of the process of maturity involves the realization that one's actions cause reactions in others. But it takes many years to mature. Childish traits can continue even to the teenage and college years, when kids still imagine themselves to be autonomous actors and forget that their actions generate responses from others that might foil their plans. Think of the typical teenage driver, buzzing in and out of line, zipping around cars, speeding up and slowing down slowly, solely on his own whim.

13:23He doesn't give a thought to how his behavior impacts the responses of other drivers or whether it makes the roads less safe. He looks at traffic patterns as a given and assumes that everyone is neutral with regard to his own driving. So too does the Fed pursue its goal without a thought to how market actors are going to respond. It will lower the price of credit on the market for bank lending. This affects other interest rates by driving them down. All of it is paid for by money created out of thin air. In the same way that children and teens might consider their action neutral from the point of view of others since they're thinking only of themselves. So to the Fed considers its money to be neutral with respect to the market. The Fed figures it is only adding liquidity, but in fact it is gravely distorting in the decision-making process, particularly as it affects long-term investments.

14:17Because this assumption of neutral money is at the heart of the monetary model of the Fed, they can believe that their inflationary policies do not constitute an intervention in the market process. What they do not consider is that cheap credit sends signals to entrepreneurs to overextend themselves, planning products that take a very long time to complete and presume a much A much more robust capital stock than exists in reality. When the reality is revealed, usually after the rate of monetary expansion slows, the boom turns to bust. And here we have a short description of the business cycle and its barest outlines. The other day the London Financial Times published an article that drew attention to the Austrian theory of the business cycle. It's said that only Mises' and Hayek's theory can account for the constant emergence of bubbles in such sectors as housing.

15:09Having watched the press coverage of Austrians for years, I've noticed that we can almost track the business cycle based on the number of mentions of the Austrian cycle theory in the press. They never mention the Austrian theory in boom times. It's only once the bust hits and no one can really explain what is happening that the Austrians come in for a mention. If you've ever wondered why Austrians have a reputation as a school of gloom and doom, maybe this is why. But let us remember that the Austrian theory is not just a theory of the bust, it's a theory of the boom and the bust. It recognizes there is a distinction between the appearance of prosperity and its reality. If you really want to explain a bust, you can't just look at the factors that coincide it with the fall.

15:56You have to look back to the boom period and see what artificial factors led the market to an expand at an unsustainable rate. This was the primary focus of the Austrians in the interwar period. In a book that the Mises Institute is publishing right now, we find a series of wonderful essays by Mises. One is from 1928, which he warns that inflationary credit has blown up many sectors beyond a sustainable rate. He warns of a coming collapse, one that would affect banking in particular. After the bust hit, he wrote a series of essays that reviewed its causes and pointed the way forward. He urged a policy of laissez-faire that would let the downward adjustment take place so the economy could again stabilize. Of course, his advice was rejected.

16:43This was the age of central planning. Keynes was its profit in England and America, while FDR was its political arm. In the East, it was Stalin. In Europe, the future belonged to Mussolini and Hitler. The handful of laissez-faire radicals like Mises and Hayek, along with American thinkers like Nock, Flynn, Trotteroff and Benjamin Anderson, were an extreme minority. There is far more at stake with this debate than merely discovering the technical causes behind the business cycle, or even in securing the monetary unit against depreciation. What What is really at stake in the debate over money is the very idea of freedom itself, which always means freedom from the arbitrary and expansionist power of the state.

17:32After all, the real reason that government destroyed the gold standard and why our money has been completely untied from anything real and has been reduced to nothing more than computer entries backed by pressed cotton tickets with colored printing and idealized has little to do with theoretical error. Government found it in its interest to create all the money it would ever need for itself. The power to inflate is absolutely crucial to the agenda of everyone who believes in using government to manage the economy and society. As Mises said, they need the power to inflate in order to finance their policy of reckless spending, Banking, lavish subsidies, bribing voters. They also need it for financing their wars, bailouts, space shuttle trips, and for building their ever larger palaces to keep comfortable the millions of bureaucrats they employ to make our lives miserable.

18:30People talk of restraining government, but there will be no restraining government so long as the monetary system permits government to expand and spend without limit. So long So long as their debt is not traded with a default premium, so long as the government and all its connected institutions are considered to be too big to fail, we're going to have a problem with the expansion of power and the loss of freedom. Whenever the subject of monetary reform comes up, people ask many questions about the technicalities involved. How can we get by without a Fed, without deposit insurance, without a Bureau of Engraving and Printing? How can we determine the gold definition of the dollar? What will happen to all the dollars overseas? How can we really know how much money there is to be covered?

19:17There are answers to all these questions. You can gain them by reading two Rothbard books, What Has Government Done to Our Money? and The Case Against the Fed. I also highly recommend to you the most systematic study on the Austrian business cycle and its relationship to money ever published, Jesus Swerder de Soto's Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles. But I submit to you that none of these technical issues are what is standing in the way of monetary reform. What is really stopping a much needed change is public ideology. So long as the political system encourages the idea that government is the savior of mankind, the solver of all human problems, the machine that will bring freedom to the world through Through its bombs, we're going to have the problem of monetary instability.

20:08Sound money and freedom go together. So long as we do not want freedom, we can never achieve the goal of sound money. For what government is doing to our money is nothing but a microcosm of what government is doing to our freedom. To institute sound money is to put a lock on the door so the burglar of government cannot The answer is that owning and holding gold symbolizes independence and freedom. Governments can destroy it, they can take it away as they have in the past, if they can find it. and holding gold symbolizes independence and freedom. Governments can destroy it, they can take it away as they have in the past, if they can find it.

20:56But so long as we are free to buy it and keep it, we're able to hold a tangible good that remains universally recognized as a standard of value. It reminds us of what real money could be if we could ever let go of our attachments to the redistributionist state. Thus does the gold bug understand far more about the nature of things than others who blithely assume that wealth can be created from a printing press. The case for radical monetary reform need not be left to the gold bugs or the Austrians at the Mises Institute. We're perfectly happy for anyone of any perspective to join our cause. By understanding the connection between liberty and money, we gain some insight into why Mises, as a great classical liberal was also a passionate advocate of sound money.

21:45We can see why it is that his brilliant student Rothbard followed up on this cause. It's only libertarians who seem to fully understand the relationship between free markets and money and free markets in general. To champion one is to champion the other. This, I believe, is why we seem to be so alone in this battle. Those who have a stake in statism also have a stake in its means of finance. Those who might otherwise appreciate an economy without business cycles and inflation are unwilling to abide by the extreme limits that sound money places on state expansion. Consider a book like Jesus Swear to De Soto's On Money and Business Cycles. This is one of the great works on money that has ever been published.

22:31Why is it left to the Mises Institute to publish it? Because it takes a seriously radical institute to raise the fundamental questions of our age. Our publishing arm is not afraid to push forward the boundaries of economic science to the point where the conclusions bring into question the whole of the modern political process. And so we must, and so we will. We appreciate every bit of help that you can provide us in this great cause. Join us in this intellectual struggle so that we may once again embrace the freedom that is our heritage and our destiny. Thank you.