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By Steven Baker MP, on 6 September 11
Over at ConservativeHome, I have promoted Douglas Carswell’s ten minute rule Bill on legal tender laws and currency choice:
People today have unprecedented choice. They can shop around online. They can tune into numerous television and radio channels. They can even decide between different hospitals for medical treatment.
But why are people not allowed to decide for themselves in which currency to transact their business and store their own wealth?
Today, Douglas Carswell introduces a Bill designed to make a range of different currencies legal tender in the UK. It would mean that, with the click of a mouse, people would be able to store wealth and pay taxes in a range of different currencies of their choice.
The BBC are covering it here. Read the full article.
By Steven Baker MP, on 27 August 11
Via Honesty is best policy | The Jewish Chronicle, I set out MA, the Austrian measure of the money supply developed by Dr Anthony J Evans and Toby Baxendale:
Ask economists how much money there is and you will get many answers. You know money is what you can exchange for real goods and services, but economists often include things like time deposits, which cannot be spent because they have fixed terms. Money is one half of every transaction, so its supply really matters. According to my colleague Dr Anthony J Evans of Kaleidic Economics, the Bank of England’s preferred measures, “Narrow Money” and “Broad Money”, are either too narrow or too broad. From the perspective of the Austrian School of Economics, Anthony, together with entrepreneur Toby Baxendale, chairman of The Cobden Centre, has established and now publishes a different measure which they call “MA”. A chart (see above) of the growth of MA shows a pattern that is not visible in the Bank of England’s measures.
Given a good measure of the money supply, we shouldn’t be surprised that our economic and financial troubles continue.
Please see the full article for more and Kaleidic Economics for the data and explanation.
By Steven Baker MP, on 15 August 11
A very old and well known story is told in Genesis 11. It is the story of the curse of Babel:
Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
I retell this tale not for the sake of the theology but for the sake of our present debates. In what follows, the names have been omitted in the hope that I may be excused any hint of misrepresentation…
When I first approached a prominent worldwide leader of the Austrian School, in frustration at the pitiful state of economic debate, to ask who were the UK’s best Austrians, with a view to starting a UK-based Austrian-School think tank, things seemed ever so easy. I had mostly read Mises and a touch of Rothbard. I understood the Austrian school and the monetary theory of the trade cycle but I was not broadly read into the scholarly debate over money.
And then I discovered the curse of Babel amongst the monetary scholars of the free-market.
One eminent free-market British academic believes that central banking, fiat money and fractional reserve deposit taking are institutions which have evolved naturally in society and which should be preserved. He believes the Bank of England should be privatised.
Most Monetarists seem to think central banking and fiat money are just fine, together with the Keynesians, some of whom at least think they are free market, but some advocate various forms of full-reserve banking.
Most, perhaps all, Austrians think the central banks are a plain instrument of statism which should be abolished, together with deposit insurance, legal tender laws and various other privileges. They reject fiat money outright, more often than not, as a creature of interventionism and a tool of the enemies of liberty.
But one faction believes that fractional reserve deposit taking is a breach of sound property rights — a thoroughly libertarian concept — and that it emerged out of fraud to be legitimised by the state.
The other faction pay little heed to the theory of property rights in demand deposits, emphasising freedom of contract. They believe fractional reserve deposit taking is a natural and honest phenomenon which enjoys the consent of depositors. They argue that full-reserve deposit taking is only ever a product of the state and deride the full-reservers willingness to restrict freedom.
Amongst all this, the protagonists accuse one another variously of economic or legal ignorance or a misinterpretation of history. All sides have their scholars and their literature. Both factions claim the term “free banking” as a rejection of central banking. Sometimes they claim the support of the same scholars…
It seems once we go beyond money as the means of exchange, universal agreement stops. Truly, when it comes to the institutional arrangements for money, we are under the curse of Babel.
It is a pity then that money is dying.
Right across the western world and perhaps shortly in China, we see state-supplied money running out of control, with all the distortions and maladjustments that implies, across sectors, regions and time. It seems the state’s response to every setback is more borrowing and more debasement. Unable to sensibly measure the money supply and unsure whether circumstances are inflationary or deflationary, the authorities wrestle to prop up a system damned by its own inadvertent design, a design which emerged out of the failure of Bretton Woods, itself a system condemned to a youthful death.
Five years ago, I would have wondered how the monetary authorities of the Weimar Republic could be so stupid…
At The Cobden Centre, we are agreed that honest money is a product of the market subject to the laws of property and contract, not the will of authority. With Richard Cobden, we agree that the very terms of regulating and managing the currency are an absurdity: the currency should regulate itself. Unfortunately and despite endless study, we seem to be able to agree neither what the proper institutions of such a system would be nor how to get there.
We have previously published an admittedly incomplete list of ten plans for reform. Since I agree with Sir Mervyn King (PDF) in that “of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”, I could happily accept most of them as a step forward. Perhaps Bagus’ “button-pushing” withdrawal of the state would have disruptive consequences beyond our imagination but it seems mere perseverance with our present system is little more predictable, except in as much as it shall fail.
The original curse of Babel was cast, it seems, to prevent a people speaking as one: for speaking as one, nothing they planned to do would be impossible for them. Perhaps we shall not aspire so high, but we must change if we are to rise above the level of The People’s Front of Judea and win a battle which, it seems, must be won in our lifetimes.
By Steven Baker MP, on 29 June 11
I had the great pleasure last night of speaking to the Economic Research Council on the subject of Political Economy and the Crisis. I argued that:
- Economics should become political economy, embracing the problem of knowledge in the social sciences, morality (think Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) and public choice theory, in particular.
- Classical liberalism is the most robust political economy.
- The Austrian School offers important insights, particularly into business cycles and capital theory.
- The Austrian School predicted and intellectually survived the crisis.
- That reality is, or should be, a challenge to the contemporary paradigm.
- The implications for financial reform are profound.
We had a lively Q&A covering subjects from the Chinese socio-economic model to the residual role of the state. We agreed that we must not seek a rational reconstruction of society and we left outstanding the key challenge: to determine how to reform the financial system to deliver a free-market monetary regime.
My slides are available as a PDF here. For related reading, please see our primer and this article on the need for a paradigm shift in economics.
By Steven Baker MP, on 1 June 11
From Deception of Government Intervention (1964) – an essay in Mises’ anthology Economic Freedom and Interventionism – we learn how governments adopted “the third way”:
Faced with the tremendous challenge of totalitarianism, the ruling parties of the West do not venture to preserve the system of free enterprise that gave to their nations the highest standard of living ever attained in history. They ignore the fact that conditions for all citizens of the United States and those other countries which have not put too many obstacles in the way of free enterprise are much more favorable than conditions for the inhabitants of the totalitarian countries. They think that it is necessary to abandon the market economy and to adopt a middle-of-the-road policy that is supposed to avoid the alleged deficiencies of the capitalistic economy. They aim at a system which, as they see it, is as far from socialism as it is from capitalism and which is better than either of those two. By direct intervention of the government, they want to remove what they consider unsatisfactory in the market economy.
Such a policy of government interference with the market phenomena was already recommended by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. But the authors of the Communist Manifesto considered the ten groups of interventionist measures they suggested as measures to bring about step-by-step full socialism. However, in our time the government spokesmen and the politicians of the left recommend the same measures as a method, even as the only method, to salvage capitalism.
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, we are now going down a road towards ‘judgement-based’ regulation of financial firms in an attempt to salvage capitalism.
It is proposed that firms will be supervised by what amount to shadow management teams of disinterested, public-spirited individuals more able to reach sound views than firms’ own management teams: they shall possess “the optimal experience and technical ability”.
Quite where these mythical philosopher kings are to be found, I do not know. Presumably, financial firms and regulators already hire the best people available. And the notion that the best people will work for the regulator despite inevitably higher rewards in the firms themselves is silly.
Financial firms will find their business subject to the day-to-day judgement of government officials. To think that those officials will be more capable than the institutions’ traders and managers is a fantasy. The outcome will be, as it has been, a surprise financial catastrophe as regulators fail to foresee the future and, since they are bound to converge on “best practice”, fail as one.
A free society is not one based on constant official interference with business. It is one based on cooperation, choice, competition, profit & loss, predictable rules fixed well in advance and exit from the market: that is, property, contract and the classical rule of law.
Rather than resort to fantastic ideas about the effectiveness of government interference with market phenomena, we would do better to reapply the principles of a free society. Financial institutions should be no exception, for government intervention caused the crisis [1,2].
Postscript: Marx and Engels’ ten measures are available here.
By Steven Baker MP, on 12 May 11
I do not doubt that the Government is sincere in its wish to make Britain “open for business” and to deliver greater life chances through reform of the welfare state. I gave some time to the Centre for Social Justice and now I see many of their ideas filtering through to public policy. I support those reforms from both a practical perspective and in view of their moral necessity.
The Prime Minister is correct to talk of the culture we have lost, particularly in respect of private shame. I am put in mind of C S Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man: there is, after all, such a thing as right and wrong. Lewis predicted humanity’s ultimate destiny on the path which embraces subjective morality: a dystopian society in which “we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ — to their irrational impulses.”
Some readers will recognise the problem and the dangers but reject the state’s role in finding a solution. However, we do not live in that world where the state is comprehensively rejected. There is a welfare state and it needs reform. The Government is getting on with it, and in the right direction too.
However, what the Government is not addressing is the de-civilising effects of inflation, that is, increasing the money supply.
What is commonly called “inflation” – a rise in the general price level – is an automatic consequence of debasing the currency. And currency debasement has been fierce in our lifetimes: the consequences have been and remain profound.
There is a presentation which, in one form or another, I have given many times. It shows, in a few charts:
- How the state has grown inexorably since 1900,
- How taxation reached an apparent limit at rather less than the scale of state spending, remaining there since 1971 or thereabouts.
- Where our debt projections are heading,
- How our money has been debased, particularly since 1971.
By the end of the presentation, I have explained our banking, fiscal and economic crisis. Given that what it shows is a monetary and fiscal catastrophe, people receive it surprisingly well. As far as I can tell, people can handle the truth and they want it.
One of the key slides is a price index from 1750-2003:
The grotesque debasement since 1971 – when Bretton Woods finally collapsed – hides the detail of the nineteenth century on a linear scale, so I include the same chart on a log scale. The log chart shows that, despite a number of crises and fluctuations, a pound in 1900 bought about the same basket of goods as a pound in 1800.
In contrast, money has lost almost all its value since the Second World War.
The Ethics of Money Production by Jörg Guido Hülsmann is particularly relevant at this point. Hülsmann writes:
To appreciate the disruptive nature of inflation in its full extent we must keep in mind that it springs from a violation of the fundamental rules of society. Inflation is what happens when people increase the money supply by fraud, imposition, and breach of contract. Invariably it produces three characteristic consequences: (1) it benefits the perpetrators at the expense of all other money users; (2) it allows the accumulation of debt beyond the level debts could reach on the free market; and (3) it reduces the [purchasing power of money] below the level it would have reached on the free market.
While these three consequences are bad enough, things get much worse once inflation is encouraged and promoted by the state. The government’s fiat makes inflation perennial, and as a result we observe the formation of inflation-specific institutions and habits. Thus fiat inflation leaves a characteristic cultural and spiritual stain on human society
He goes on to write of inflation’s tendency to centralise government, to extend the length of wars, to enable the arbitrary confiscation of property, to institutionalise moral hazard and irresponsibility, to produce a race to the bottom in monetary organisation, to encourage excess credit in corporations and to yoke the population to debt. He explains how “The consequence [of inflation] is despair and the eradication of moral and social standards.”
That all sounds familiar.
Hülsmann’s work is not scripture of course, but neither are his ideas isolated. Consider Ayn Rand:
Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence.
It is my firm view that inflation – the debasement of money – was the primary cause of the banking crisis. That inflation was a deliberate policy choice of welfare states. You may recall Eddie George’s remarks in 2007 and now Mervyn King has said, “Of all the many ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today.”
Moreover, if Hülsmann, Rand and other scholars including Mises and Hayek are to be believed, then inflation is also a major contributor to the moral and spiritual decline of our country. No amount of welfare reform alone will solve that.
All is not lost however. To return to that log-scale price index, money’s value was substantially more volatile in the first half of the nineteenth century than in the second. In 1844, the Bank Charter Act, Peel’s Act, took from the banks the privilege of extending bank notes in excess of specie (coins of inherent worth). It was recognized that this extension of candy-floss credit un-backed by prior production of real value was a systemic cause of economic and banking crises.
Unfortunately, that Act left the banks unmolested in their ability to create deposits. As our system of money and bank credit has evolved, that loophole, combined with central banking and the socialisation of risk, has delivered us into our present predicament.
It falls to our generation to solve this problem and that is why we established The Cobden Centre.
As Martin Wolf wrote in the Financial Times on 9th November 2010, “The essence of the contemporary monetary system is creation of money, out of nothing, by private banks’ often foolish lending.” And then we wonder why house prices have raced out of reach. We wonder why the basement garages in Canary Wharf are full of supercars while what was once our industrial heartland languishes in state dependency.
I admire the Prime Minister and the coming welfare reforms. I will back them gladly. But, until we end inflation as a way to fund the promises of the welfare state, we shall not have done the decent thing. We shall not have established objective morality in banking and in that lifeblood of society: money. Honest money is a prerequisite for social progress and it must be delivered if reform is to succeed.
By Steven Baker MP, on 18 April 11
 In October 2009, Toby and I attended the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit in Salamanca, the birthplace of economic theory:
One of the great discoveries of the 20th century concerns the origins of economic science in the late middle ages in Spain and Italy. Long before Adam Smith wrote, many scholastics from the 14th through the 17th centuries were writing systematic economic theory.
No spot on the planet was as fruitful as the School of Salamanca in Spain. Here was the world center of economic research. The writings by the intellectuals gathered here explained price, value, money and its function, saving, entrepreneurship, inflation, contract and exchange, and so much more – and they closely engaged the modern world that was being born at that time, providing at theory and a rationale for the rise of prosperity.
For me, it was a particularly memorable and moving trip. I took the call informing me that I had been shortlisted for the Wycombe Parliamentary selection procedure, against all expectations, while sitting in the departure lounge at Girona after a week’s skydiving in Empuriabrava. I arrived at the Summit, knowing it was suddenly possible I would be an elected politician within the year.
Moreover, it’s no secret that I am a Christian, so it was reaffirming to discover that classical liberalism can be traced to men of God who developed their theory on the basis of morality, jurisprudence, theology and reason. An early speaker at the Summit was a contemporary Spanish friar whose passion for the poor and whose commitment to liberalism transcended the barriers of language. He knew as I know that the proper formula for widespread prosperity and the improvement of mankind is the doctrine of liberty: peace, equality before the law, freedom from arbitrary government, property and the family. In Cobdenite language, we might call for honest money, free markets, free trade, peace and the classical rule of law.
And so as I write on this Palm Sunday, we come to the Telegraph’s report “Catholic church: Big Society is failing“:
The Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, criticised the Prime Minister’s flagship policy as lacking “teeth”. The archbishop has been one of the most prominent supporters of the Big Society, but he told The Sunday Telegraph that he feared communities hit by the economic downturn would suffer if they did not get support.
The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales said Catholics were afraid the Coalition was “washing its hands” of its responsibilities to communities and expecting volunteers to fill the gap.
“It is all very well to deliver speeches about the need for greater voluntary activity, but there needs to be some practical solutions,” he said.
The Archbishop asks,
“Has the Conservative part of the Coalition simply seized the economic crisis as an opportunity to push through the unfinished neoliberal agenda of the last Conservative administration? We should not forget the enormous social division that was entailed in this. It signalled the end of a humanist and humane consensus in British society.”
How far the Archbishop has come from the scholastics of Salamanca. Yet the Archbishop is on to something:
“The poorest are taking the biggest hit while at the same time you see huge bank bonuses and profits and this is not right,” he said.
Now we have a point of agreement. We know we have the worst of all possible banking systems – the Governor of the Bank of England has told us so – and one of its effects is to distort the economy into unsustainable patterns thereby unjustly widening wealth inequality, driving the business cycle and precipitating banking crises, such as the one from which we are apparently recovering and at enormous cost to society. It is a statist banking system characterised by government monopoly, central planning, legal privilege and the socialisation of risk.
That very statism is the origin of the injustice the banking system is meting out to the rest of us.
The various doctrines of statism have failed. For those of us who wish to live in an ethical society which benefits all its members, it is time to rediscover that moral tradition of social thinking which began formally in Salamanca. It is time to refine and apply the doctrine of justice, peace, prosperity and fulfilment which is humble about the uses of coercive power and optimistic about the potential of individuals cooperating in society.
It may be true that those who wear the badges of ethical authority reach often for the coercive power of the state, but those of us with an intellectual, moral and practical basis for another way would do well to remember both the origins of our school of thought and the motto of one of our inspirations, Ludwig von Mises:
Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it.
By Steven Baker MP, on 14 April 11
Let us establish some principles first. Central banks do indeed pose a risk to economic stability but not because their monetary policy is constantly too tight but because is it systematically too loose. Inflexible commodity money – such as gold and silver – has everywhere been replaced with state-issued fully flexible paper money under the control of central banks for one reason and one reason only: so that the supply of money can be constantly expanded in accordance with politically defined goals (such as a certain growth rate, a certain inflation rate, a certain unemployment rate….and constantly expanding bank balance sheets). Today’s consensus believes the following: When inflation is low and thus not an imminent threat, the central bank should ‘support’ economic growth via low interest rates and a moderate expansion of the money supply.
Wrong.
This is precisely the dangerous fallacy that made the dramatic events of the past four years ultimately inevitable. Yet, nobody seems willing to learn the lesson.
Constant expansion of the money supply and the persistent lowering of interest rates below the levels that would be justified by available savings – the raison d’etre of paper money and central banking – lead to misallocations of capital. Always. This – and not higher consumer price inflation – is the most immediate negative effect of monetary expansion. Today’s consensus is, sadly, still obsessed with CPI inflation (CPI= consumer price index). As long as monetary expansion doesn’t lead instantly to a higher grocery bill, the mainstream considers it a welcome boost to growth and practically a free lunch. This is a gross misconception, and this misconception is in essence still behind most of the commentary on monetary policy today. And it was again on display in the debate about the ECB’s recent move.
You can read Detlev’s superb article in full here but beware: he believes “that a collapse of the paper money system is practically inevitable”…
By Steven Baker MP, on 9 March 11
Via Tom Clougherty at the Adam Smith Institute, Mervyn King and narrow banking:
Ultimately, the problem with modern banks is that they do not operate in a free market. They haven’t done for decades. Deposit insurance means depositors take no interest in the stability of the banks they give their money to. The inevitability of bailouts means bondholders and shareholders take no interest either. Expansionary monetary policy encourages banks to lend too much and reserve too little. Accounting regulations encourage all banks to invest in certain asset classes, ensuring that when problems emerge, they are likely to be systemic. All of these things are government interventions, and all of them make the financial sector more risky and less stable.
By Steven Baker MP, on 25 February 11
In November, I asked this Parliamentary question:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much debt interest has been paid on Government securities held by the Bank of England and its subsidiaries in the last 12 months.
Mark Hoban (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; Fareham, Conservative)
In the 12 months to end September 2010, the Bank of England and its subsidiaries have received the following interest on holdings of UK Government debt securities:
|
£ million |
| Banking Department |
187 |
| Issue Department |
282 |
| Bank of England Asset Purchase Facility Fund Ltd |
8,527 |
| Total |
8,996 |
That’s right – the Treasury paid the Bank of England about £9 billion in debt interest.
The time for a six-month update on the figures is soon approaching, so I wondered what TCC readers thought…
Is this just the left and right hands of the State passing money to and fro and should bonds held by the Bank of England be written off? Is it vital those bonds are held so that QE can be “reversed” or is that like, as Mises put it, reversing over the man you just ran down in your car?
Mises also refers to the fact that deflation can never repair the damage of a priori inflation. In his seminar, he often likened such a process to an auto driver who had run over a person and then tried to remedy the situation by backing over the victim in reverse. Inflation so scrambles the changes in wealth and income that it becomes impossible to undo the effects. Then too, deflationary manipulations of the quantity of money are just as destructive of market processes, guided by unhampered market prices, wage rates and interest rates, as are such inflationary manipulations of the quantity of money.
£9bn is about 6% of the annual income tax take.
See also Toby’s An easy £10 bn of deficit reduction and £200 bn off the National Debt. Over to you…
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