There is hope

Silver here.  Claire has been very kind to lend me her soapbox.  It is a pleasure and privilege to address her audience of freedomistas and freedom outlaws.

I’ll contribute to this blog from time to time, but most of my efforts will be in the new forum.  I’ll cover money, free-market economics, business, taxation, commerce, a few other areas where I have some expertise.

There was some good, fun news recently, and a number of free-market/freedomista (they are related!) web sites picked it up. The Federal reserve created a Facebook page,***** (dire warning below) and the comments are overwhelmingly negative.   Zero Hedge has a good summary. Every fed post has received hundreds of negative comments.

I’m expecting the page and/or comments to be put down the memory hole, so I tried to save a sample of the torrent of criticism and abuse hurled at the fed in thousands of comments.  One post, beginning with the question What economic goals does the Federal Reserve seek to achieve through its monetary policy? ***** generated over 1,000 comments.  I scrolled through over 100 pages of them, and couldn’t find a single positive one.  Snark was common (Steven Kennedy: Quick question! Im a noob at this but, I’m trying to take over a country through monetary enslavement and currency destruction…. Any pointers?)  as was direct refutation (Megan Porter: No you don’t want to promote a strong U.S. economy, your organization is one of the single biggest causes of devaluing the U.S. Dollar. You shouldn’t exist. There is nothing “federal” about you, you are not a government organization. People are waking up and wising up to your lies.) along with plenty of insults, including some ASCII graphics that I hadn’t seen since the 1990s.

Why is there hope?  This overwhelming negative response to a feeble attempt at fed propaganda shows that people are becoming educated about the fed, about money, and what is being done to them.  Has been done to them, to all of us, for over 100 years.

These topics, the nature and creation of money, have never been very popular.  That has enabled the swindle to persist. The fed Facebook debacle shows that something has changed. Ron Paul’s books, essays, legislative efforts, presidential campaign, and especially his “audit the fed” bill introduced these concepts to millions.  Sites like Mises.org and LewRockwell.com are tireless promoters of free-market economics and relentless critics of the fed.  Whatever the cause, whatever the source, the fed no longer commands respect or even tolerance.

The blunt truth is that the federal reserve is a giant money pump.  The money pump transfers wealth from the productive class and the poor to the richest of the rich.  The money pump works extremely well, and has been in operation for a full century.  It is no accident that today the 1% control such an outsize and ever-increasing fraction of all wealth.  The system isn’t broken, it is working exactly as intended. Thank the fed.

The fed has only one real power: creating money from nothing.  The new money goes to politically favored parties: the government itself, banksters, the military-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex.  They get to spend it first, snapping up resources that they did not earn, which causes prices to be bid up.  That’s what money really is: the power to command actual resources.

The process of prices rising in response to the newly created money is delayed.  It is also uneven and happens to different degrees in different sectors of the economy.  In some cases housing gets bid up while gold and food stay largely untouched.  In other cases the price of tulips, gasoline, bonds, or stocks rise.  In the 21st century we’ve seen a tech stock bubble, a housing bubble, an oil price bubble, an enormous bond bubble, and presently a stock price bubble, college loan bubble, and auto loan bubble.  It is impossible to predict in advance where the money will go, but the money pump ensures that control of real resources flows relentlessly to the rich and powerful.

This can’t go on, and the insane zero interest rate policies of the fed will not end well.  When enough people learn and understand what the fed really is, what it does, change will come.  That’s why I see hope in the comments on the fed’s Facebook pages.

***** Warning! Danger! Facebook is to privacy what pins are to condoms. I’m armored up as best I know how and it still gives me the willies to go there.