Economies don’t fail. They do exactly what they want to do exactly when they want to do it.
Fed chiefs fail to improve them. Politicians fail to understand them. And everybody fails to appreciate them.
Bill Bonner on Market Failure.
Since banking is not a business that creates real wealth, it can only enrich its owners by taking money from other people. It does that by: (1) printing money (and buying the banks’ deadbeat assets); (2) fixing interest rates at artificially low levels (taking money that should rightfully belong to savers); and (3) generally encouraging inflation to rob everyone.
Bill Bonner explaining that the Fed is a vast cartel charged with making for its members and clients.
Nothing happens in the Kingdom of God until there is a declaration.
Bill Johnson
In the second of his Two Treatises on Government, the seventeenth-century English political theorist John Locke accepted the inevitability of inequality stemming from the invention of money and private property. But having done so, he also had to acknowledge the need for a state to police the inequities that the market produces. Any state that could do this effectively, however, would also be strong enough to threaten the property holders it was meant to protect. And so a tension was born in the heart of liberalism: you can’t live with the state, since it might rob you, but you also can’t live without it, since the mob might kill you.
War is harmful, not only to the conquered but to the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking. Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us; labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds; war destroys.
Ludwig von Mises
The fundamental assumption that both sides share is that those who have a vision of an ideal society have the right and duty to take the reins of power and history and make that vision reality through the use of political power.
An anonymous blog comment highlighting the problem with political power.
Throughout our history – any country’s history – the people who save their money and invest for their future are the ones that you build an economy, a society, and a nation on.
In America, many people saved their money, put it aside, and didn’t buy four or five houses with no job and no money down. They did what most people would consider the right thing, and what historically has been the right thing. But now, unfortunately, those people are being wiped out, because they are getting 0% return, or virtually no return, on their savings and their investments. We’re wiping them out at the expense of people who went deeply into debt, people who did what most people would consider the wrong thing at the expense of people who did the right thing. This, long-term, has terrible consequences for any nation, any society, any economy.
Jim Rogers on Punishing the Prudent in favor of Rescuing the Irresponsible.
Augustine thought that imperial ambition was self-destructive folly. If humans had been rational, they would have created, not empires, but an enormous number of small states—Augustine says regna, literally “kingdoms”, but he means any political arrangement whatever. A multitude of tiny, harmless polities could have lived at peace among themselves and therefore at peace internally, just as a city contains innumerable households, none of which seeks to dominate the others, and all of which maybe domestically at peace.
Alan Ryan in On Politics (p.175).
Scandal was common across the democratic world in the early 1960s… It wasn’t just the shadow of the war but the frustrations of the democratic peace that had made people restless by 1963. In many countries, the political class that produced the postwar settlement was still hanging on; old political soldiers were refusing to die. Governments that had been around too long were growing careless, and their publics were looking for something new. These are the circumstances in which scandal becomes a vehicle of democratic change.
The press had a field day, and so did political opponents. Power-starved politicians and embittered journalists used the scandal to advance their own careers. The outs got in; the ins were temporarily put out. Its result was for ‘one network of egotists, with an intricate history of mutual obligations, murky pacts and tacit promises being replaced by an opposing alliance, no more qualified or efficient, held together by similar bargains, ambition and vanity’. There is nothing distinctively English about this. It’s how democracy works… Political damage was done by press and opposition speculation about who had said what to whom. Rumour did the work of fact. Journalists took sides; so did judges. A frustrated younger generation of politicians used the scandal to leverage old men out of power.
The result is usually disappointing: change is never commensurate with the scale of the outrage a scandal provokes. But it is effective: scandals are a good way of telling entrenched political elites when their time is up.
Democracies (especially parliamentary democracies) run on cycles of tolerance and intolerance for indiscretion at the top. New governments get away with a lot, but they are also more alert to what they can get away with. Then, when they become old, they become less alert and they get away with less.
The ability of a scandal to destroy a government usually has very little to do with the merits of the case. It depends on timing. It is asking too much to expect democracies to acquire a sense of proportion about these things.
David Runciman on An English Affair
