Markets and Economic Calculation

submitted by jwithrow.
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Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Markets and Economic Calculation

June 7, 2016
Hot Springs, VA

Monetary calculation is not the calculation, and certainly not the measurement, of value. Its basis is the comparison of the more important and the less important. It is an ordering according to rank, an act of grading (Cuhel), and not an act of measuring.” – Ludwig von Mises

The S&P closed out Monday at $2,109. Gold closed at $1,247 per ounce. Crude Oil closed at $49.71 per barrel, and the 10-year Treasury rate closed at 1.72%. Bitcoin is trading around $585 per BTC today.

Dear Journal,

Wife Rachel and I will commemorate our third wedding anniversary tomorrow! When she asked me what I would like to do to celebrate, I naturally suggested that we could do anything in the world she wanted. Her response:

I would kind of like to do something fun, but I would settle for a major house cleaning day…

Does that mean we are officially marriage pro’s?

Moving on… I think this is a fascinating time to be alive. Based on what I know about recorded human history, I doubt there has ever been a more interesting point in time to be a keen observer of civilization. How lucky we are!

As I have reckoned on before, human civilization is currently transitioning from the Industrial Age and into the Information Age. Pre-Internet society was drastically different from post-Internet society, and indeed all of modern civilization has been made dependent upon a functioning Internet. This dynamic will only deepen as all of the Big Data and Internet-of-Things trends continue to play out. Continue reading “Markets and Economic Calculation”

How the Fed Grows Government

by Hunter Hastings – Mises Daily
Article originally published in the January 2015 issue of BankNotesEccles Building

We are told that elections are important, but the most powerful state institution, the central bank, is totally out of reach of the voter.

Ludwig von Mises viewed democracy as a utilitarian concept. It was the form of political organization that allowed the majority to change the government without violent revolution. In Socialism, Mises writes “This it achieves by making the organs of the state legally dependent on the will of the majority of the moment.” He identified this form of political process as an essential enabler of capitalism and market exchange.

Mises extended this concept of utilitarian democracy to citizens’ control of the budget of the state, which they achieve by voting for the level of taxation that they deem to be appropriate. Otherwise, “if it is unnecessary to adjust the amount of expenditure to the means available, there is no limit to the spending of the great god State.” (Planning for Freedom, p. 90).

Today, this utilitarian function of democracy, and the concept of citizens’ limitations on government mission and government spending, has been taken away by the state via the creation and subsequent actions of central banks. The state carefully created a central bank that is independent of the voters and unaffected by the choices citizens express via the institutions of democracy. In the case of the US Federal Reserve, for example, the Board of Governors state that the Federal Reserve System “is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.”

Independent from Voters, But Not from Politicians

Importantly, the central bank is independent of the citizens in this way, but, in practice, not independent of politicians. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is quoted as asserting, “I never said the central bank is independent,” alluding to similar statements in two books he has written, and pointing to one-sided political pressure significantly limiting the FOMC’s range of discretion.

This institutionally independent, but politically directed central bank spearheads a process that enables largely unlimited government spending. It expands credit and enables fiat money, which is produced without practical limitation. Fiat money enables government to issue debt, which, at least so far, also has been pursued without restraint. The unlimited government debt enables unrestrained growth in government spending. The citizenry has no power to change this through any voting mechanism.

Thus, the state is set free from having to collect tax revenue before it can spend, and as Mises explained, in such a case, there is no limitation on government at all:

The government has but one source of revenue — taxes. No taxation is legal without parliamentary consent. But if the government has other sources of income it can free itself from this control.

In other words, when faced with the possibility of voter reprisals, members of Congress are reluctant to raise taxes. But if government spending no longer necessitates taxes, government becomes much more free to spend.

Without restraints on government spending, there are no restraints on government’s mission, or on the growth in the bureaucracy that administers the spending. The result is a continuous increase in regulations, and a continuous expansion of state power.

Has The Central Bank Limited Itself?

In the one hundred years since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, US federal government spending has grown from $15.9 billion to a budgeted $3,778 billion in 2014 (a number we now refer to as $3.8 trillion to make the numerator seem less egregious). Spending as a percentage of GDP has advanced from 7.5 percent to 41.6 percent over the same period. A comparison of regulation growth is more difficult, but over 80,000 pages are published in the Federal Register annually today, versus less than 5,000 annually in 1936.

The evidence, therefore, is that voting makes no difference to this lava flow of spending and regulation. Whatever the will of the majority of the moment, government spending and government power will continue to expand, with consequent reduction in the economic growth that is the primary goal of the society that is being governed.

John Locke opined that, when governments “act contrary to the end for which they were constituted,” they are at a “state of war” with the citizens, and resistance is lawful. (Two Treatises of Government, p. 74). The theory and practice of unhampered markets and individual liberty are particularly relevant at election time.

Hunter Hastings is a member of the Mises Institute, a business consultant, and an adjunct faculty member at Hult International Business School

Please see the January 2015 issue of BankNotes for this article and others like it.

The First American Socialists

submitted by jwithrow.Pilgrims

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The First American Socialists

November 25, 2014
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P is hanging around $2,070 today. Gold is checking in at $1,196. Oil is floating around $76 per barrel in anticipation of OPEC’s big meeting on Thursday. Bitcoin is still at $380 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate is 2.30% today.

All remains quiet in the financial markets as we turn our attention to the wonderful holiday season upcoming. Thanksgiving is a day of family, food, and fellowship in honor of the legendary first American Thanksgiving celebrated back in the 17th century.

Most Americans are familiar with this story of the Pilgrims and the Indians sitting down together for the first Thanksgiving, but did you know the Pilgrims were the first American socialists? The Pilgrims’ original financing contract stated that all colonists would get their food, clothing, and provisions from the colony’s “common stock and goods” and any profits would go into the “common stock” for the first seven years. The agreement required each person to submit his production to the common stock and the governor was to distribute provisions out to each family according to need. There was to be no private property for at least seven years.

The Pilgrims landed in America on December 21, 1620 and the first winter wiped out half of the population. The following harvests of 1621 and 1622 were miniscule. Governor William Bradford documented the problems stating that the hardest working men found it unjust that they received no more food than the weakest workers, the young men resented working without compensation, and the wives resented doing household chores for other men who were not their husband. How dare them!

The Pilgrims wised up in 1623 and abandoned the socialist model. Governor Bradford documented the transition stating that families became very industrious once they were required to grow their own food with women and children taking on significantly more responsibilities for the family unit. Three times the amount of corn was planted once socialism was abandoned and the colonists actually exported a substantial surplus in 1624. The Pilgrims thereafter purchased back all of the colony’s stock and completed the transition to private property and free markets.

How fortunate we are that the Pilgrim’s experiment with socialism was largely forgotten over time!

What if Woodrow Wilson understood the Pilgrim’s story? There would be no Federal Reserve System, no
income tax, and no centrally planned war-time economy!

Imagine if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been familiar with the story. Why, Americans would have gotten no New Deal! There would be no Public Works Administration, Resettlement Administration, Rural Electrification Administration, National Youth Administration, Forest Service and Civilian Conservation Corps, Tennessee Valley Authority, Agriculture Adjustment Administration, Federal Crop Insurance Corporation, Farm Security Administration, Federal Housing Administration, Homeowners Loan Corporation, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or Works Progress Administration. There would be no food stamps, no Social Security, and probably no labor unions. Americans would have to settle for the old deal where they had to work hard, make their own decisions, provide for their own financial security, and save with gold coins instead of paper bills. Who wants to do that?

Of course there is a big difference in scale between the first American socialists and the newer variety. The Pilgrims’ experiment was limited to a small colony so when the model failed the damage was limited to the tiny colonial economy. The ill-effects of the newer forays into socialism modeled after Wilson and FDR’s examples are not contained within a tiny economy – they run rampant through a massive modern economy consisting of hundreds of millions of people.

We never seem to learn the lesson today, either. The Pilgrims abandoned the socialist model when the results clearly indicated failure. Today we implement a new public policy when the results indicate failure. We are always just one public policy fix away.

As we discussed last week in our journal entry examining macroeconomic trends, the sustainability of Pax Americana based on socialist programs is likely coming to an end. Will a transition back to free markets and private property be the solution?

More to come,
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Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and regaining individual sovereignty please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.