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By Toby Baxendale, on 8 March 10
The current debate about bankers’ bonuses is often seen as one of fairness pitted against the greed of those nasty capitalists,.
To me, bankers are lawfully working within the system – one that is rotten to the core. The banking system is the greatest of all examples of State corporate capitalism. We have a central bank that is State owned, we have a legal tender law that prevents competition in the provision of the production of money, and we have private sectors banks which are licensed by the State to be its agent when it wants to monetise its very own debts and create inflation at the expense of its citizens: people who have been prudent and thrifty as well as those on fixed income.
The State has one important central intention: to hide its prolific over spending. We have private sector banks that have legal privilege granted to them so they can use their depositors’ money to lend out many times over to entrepreneurs. They are the only type of business in the whole country permitted do this. All other commercial enterprises at all points in time need to keep their current creditors whole, otherwise they are insolvent. There is no requirement at all in this country for any bank to keep even one penny in reserves against their depositors’ funds. In fact, it has been a stated fact of law since 1811 in Carr V Carr that “his” deposited funds are not his, but are in fact the banks’.
This fractional reserve banking system we have can only work with a lender of last resort i.e. the State owned central bank with legal tender laws. This means that in partnership with the State, the State can monetise its debts (at the expense of you and me) and the banks can keep as little reserves as they can get away with to make a return on capital that you and I in the real capitalist private sector could never do. This encourages risk. Indeed with the banks now able to borrow at the taxpayers’ expense via the discount window (heavily subsidised short term central bank funding) and know there is a guarantee of a bail out should their gambles go wrong makes the state and the bankers two equal partners in a very unjust process.
The resulting situation is what I call ‘corporate capitalism’ (thoroughly amoral) as opposed to ‘capitalism’, which is totally moral. This needs some explaining, as I suspect worthy people are shooting arrows at the wrong target.
We know that the free market capitalist system is without doubt the most efficient creator and allocator of resources. Adam Smith taught us that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” in his Wealth of Nations. Self interest or the profit motive drives man to create and to provide all the multiplicity of goods and services we have enjoyed and will enjoy.
Mises in his famous book Socialism, http://mises.org/books/socialism.pdf showed us that if Society was run by planners, the price system which allows resources to flow to their most desired uses would not function. Indeed it would impoverish anyone nation that tried it. If, say. the planner could not correctly witness all the competing bids and resource allocations for metals that were capable of being used in the construction of railroad tracks (that involves many companies competing for scarce resources) he would never know which metal would be the most cost effective to build his railroad. No one planner would be able to economically calculate, or indeed, no army of planners would be able to calculate and allocate all the resources of Society in the socialist economy better than the many millions of participants in the economy allocating resources via the price mechanism. The experiment in the Soviet bloc with socialism impoverished at least three generations and lead to wide scale death and a general shortage of life, and misery.
Hayek, in his very famous essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html added to the critique of Mises by pointing out that absenting the price system would mean that the central planning officials would need to absorb the entire knowledge of all the people in society to effectively plan their needs. This was absurd and impossible.
All State planned schemes, from the provision of money to the provision of health and education – even in our cosy mixed economy – could be done better by an unhampered market. We are thus weary of all bloated government departments and officials who say they can do something better for us – they can’t.
The efficiency case for an unhampered market, or free market capitalism is clear and unchallengeable. The subjective actions of freely consenting adults in a capitalist system produce the most amount of goods in the most efficient way. But is there an objectively moral case for the capitalist system? I attempt to answer it in the remaining part of this Insight article.
First Principles: Secular Argument
I Argue
One thing that distinguishes human beings from all other life forms is our ability to communicate with each other via talking. Only human beings can make a proposition. The question of what is just or unjust only arises because I can debate or argue this point with another person. To be able to argue my position I must be in control of my physical and mental self. I must own myself in order to be to be a human being. I have the total right to use all my physical and mental faculties to participate in life, otherwise I cannot even exist as a human being expressing an opinion. I do not know many people who would argue with this. If I did not own my own faculties I could not participate in life except under the command of who owned me. This also implies that just so much as I own myself, I do not own anyone else. It also follows that if I do something that violates another human being without their consent I violate their right to express their very humanness.
Thus, I deduce that by my very being , I own myself , I own my own property as me, I have a right not to be interfered with so long as I do not interfere with anyone else. It clearly follows that if I were to interfere with someone else’s property, they would not own it. This would deprive them of their own humanity, I suggest. This is a deduction from the axiom that to exist I need to argue. I come to this conclusion via the Haberrmasian axiom of interpersonal argument that has been so cleverly adapted by Hans Herman Hoppe in his book The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: full text, http://mises.org/books/economicsethics.pdf .
To argue against this you explicitly acknowledge control of your faculties, at the very least. Following Kant’s Golden Rule that a norm should be universal in its applicability should it be objectively valid, this proposition surely fulfils this requirement to be a totally objective axiomatic principle.
All ethical propositions, such as socialism, that say that you owe a duty to the State to provide for others, are violations of the very distinguishing thing that makes you a human being and not a rock or a colony of ants. To advocate any form or socialism, be it of the democratic variety, the communist variety, or indeed the mixed economy is to violate your very essence of being a human.
John Locke in his “Two Treatises of Government” spells out that property or, if you like all resources exist prior to any government. Man mixes his labour with what he finds and it is by right his. Government cannot ‘dispose of the estates of the subjects arbitrarily’. Locke left us with a conundrum called “Locke’s proviso.” This is where if a man mixes his labour to own something that was not owned before; he must always leave a “sufficient” amount for other human beings.
Jesus Huerta de Soto, one of the greatest living polymath Austrian School teachers in his essay “The Ethics of Capitalism” http://www.acton.org/files/mm-v2n2-desoto.pdf , shows us how possibly the other living giant of the Austrian School, Israel Kirzner in “Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice” has solved this proviso of Locke. And allows us to build the objective moral ethic of capitalism.
Socialist, social democrats and a large body of modern day liberals and conservatives have a distributive conception of justice that is about a top down approach of redistribution of scarce resources from those who do have to those who that have less, or nothing , or whose lobby groups has succeeded in extracting something from those that have. Kirzner shows us how as all human being are creative actor: they are always engaging in entrepreneurial activity to generate new goods and services. All human beings are alert to opportunity, some to a greater degree than others. The fruits of this alertness arises via their actions. This is universally so. To not act would not create these things. So he proposes an axiom that all human beings have a natural right to the fruits of their own entrepreneurial creativity. As these things are created out of nothing, it implies that the acting person has an undoubted right to the quiet and peaceful enjoyment of the fruits of his or her labour. If it did not exist before, it cannot be a negative to anyone else. So Locke’s proviso is overcome by the understanding of society as dynamic and spontaneous constantly evolving process with alert actors constantly creating new goods and services that they must have an unquestionable right to own.
De Soto coins the term ‘Dynamic Efficiency’ to describe this process. He also points out that the free market capitalist system – that we know is the most efficient system – is also the most just and in fact, these two concepts are indeed two sides of the same one coin. Any form of intervention is immoral as it impedes the creative capacity of individuals to express their creativity and create all the wide range of goods and services we have. It should be pointed out that top down provision of health, education, transport, industry etc is inefficient and hence unjust as it suppresses the creative activity of human beings. Absent the profit motive and you will get sub optimal results.
Do Soto points out that the last Pope, Pope John Paul II in his Centesimus Annus http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html , which built on the earlier work of the Rerum Novarum http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html of Pope Leo XIII, established the universal moral capitalist ethic by acknowledging the natural right (God given) to express your very creativity unhindered so long and you hinder no one else.
First Principle: Theological – God Endowed Rights
I Exist
Writing about the morality of capitalism in glowing positive terms as I have done above and setting it in the backdrop of universally applicable objective axioms is not as unfashionable as talking to any thinking person about God, but only just! Such is the secular society we live in; you are considered to be an ill informed mystic should you engage in “god bothering.” The See of Peter would naturally see this differently and I am very grateful for De Soto to direct me to the pro capitalist teachings of the Catholic Church.
Are the above self evident axioms that are universally applicable in all times and in all places to everybody there because we are human or are they there because they are God endowed?
I can ague both, but I favour self evident God endowed over self evident secular, although the latter can stand on its own legs. Why?
I wrote this article about the proof God three years ago: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/baxendale2.html . In short, I take the Aristotelian inspired position that as I exist I know that other physical things exist. I know that each and every one of these physical things must have been caused by another physical thing. I know that nothing is infinite. If it was, I would not exist as for it to be infinite, it would occupy all time and space and I would not exist. As I exist, I know this cannot be the case. I know there is a beginning to the universe and that there are physical boundaries to the universe, therefore I know there cannot be an infinite series of physical causes and effects as there would be no boundary and no beginning. Therefore what caused the first physical thing must indeed be immaterial if it cannot be a physical cause. This immaterial thing is what I label as ‘God’. So I conclude God does exist and the only act I can attribute to God by a priori reasoning is that God created everything. As I like to exist I am very grateful for this and can only conclude that God has good intentions. If I do not like to exist, I can choose not to and commit suicide. God is therefore good for me and objectively good for all human beings. As God has created everything, he has endowed us with the ability to reason and engage in the formation of reasoned propositions, the latter which is undoubtedly a unique attribute to mankind the former quite possible unique to mankind, sets the foundation for the derivation of the rights of man and the very ethics of capitalism.
Further reading
By Dr Tim Evans, on 8 February 10
I like this proactive thinking from TCC’s Consultant Communications Manager, Antoine Clarke. He is promoting a Facebook page about a campaign to get outstanding Spanish economist Jesus Huerta De Soto nominated for a Nobel Prize in economics. This is a most deserved cause and one that my TCC colleagues and I fully support. If you are on Facebook, please join here.
By Toby Baxendale, on 4 February 10
Drawing on the work of Nobel Laureates in economics from three traditions, plus numerous other distinguished scholars, Cobden Centre Chairman, economist and successful entrepreneur Toby Baxendale presents an informal introduction to our proposal for honest money and the benefits consequent on the reform. See also our precis of Irving Fisher’s 100% Money.
Fact
- The average overhang of credit to money of all banks in the United Kingdom is 34 x to its reserves i.e. its actual money base.
- If more than one person in 34 walks into all banks simultaneously to withdraw their deposits, there will be a system wide bank run and a mass liquidity event with systematic default and insolvency.
- We saw the start of this with Northern Rock in the summer of 2007.
- We attempt to paper over the cracks and restore confidence in the banking system still today – with little success.
 Sterling Liquid Assets (BoE FSR, Jun 2009) A practical, politically-acceptable proposal
Our proposal is, as Irving Fisher wrote, “The opposite of radical”:
- Require 100% cash reserves to be held against all demand deposits; there can never be a crisis if a bank always holds 100% cash against all its demand deposits.
- Parliament can do this with one Act.
A similar Act took place in 1844. The Bank Charter Act or “Peel’s Act” established a 100% reserve requirement for bank notes that were issued claiming to be redeemable in gold. The reality was that there were 23 notes in issue for every one unit of gold at the time, creating instability, “panic” and general economic chaos. Not a too dissimilar situation from today where we have 34 claims on money to one unit of money. Politicians in the 19th century did not see the creation of unbacked credit through accounting entries as a problem, since it was only done on a very small scale. The problem then was rampant note issue (claims to real money) well over and above the monetary base, as this was the preferred method the bankers used at the time.
It is often forgotten but when you place £1m in a savings account (in cash) in say the Royal Bank of Scotland, which has no legal reserve requirement, they then lend £970k (in credit) , keeping on average 3% of cash back in reserves, to an entrepreneur in say HSBC, who then deposits that money in HSBC. We now have one claim to the original £1m and one claim to the £970k. The money supply has moved from £1m to £1.97m – just like magic! This is credit expansion.
The reality is that across all the banks in the United Kingdom licensed by the Bank of England, we have for every £1 of money (in cash), £34 in claims to money (credit)!
Peel’s problem was the over issue of notes to gold: our problem is the over issue of credit to money.
Continue reading “A day of reckoning: how to end the banking crisis now”
By Steven Baker, on 18 December 09
Via Edmund Conway at The Telegraph we learn that the debt today cannot be inflated away:
In fact, around four fifths of the state’s debt bill is inflation-proof. The only way ministers and mandarins could inflate their way out of the crisis would be to rip up all the contracts that tie these debts to inflation: possible in the case of the state pension (which is one reason why Gordon Brown’s pledge to link it to earnings is probably doomed), difficult for all the rest.
Thankfully, James Tyler has explained How to deal with the Banksters, a proposal in the tradition of Fisher, de Soto and others which just happens to deal with the debt too.
By Steven Baker, on 14 December 09
 This article gives a summary of the legal nature of banking contracts as presented by Jesús Huerta de Soto in Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles (PDF). A second article will discuss artificial credit expansion and its effects.
In his speech in the 2009 Banking Bill debate, the Earl of Caithness, one of the most experienced Conservative peers, said:
My Lords, the Banking Bill which we are currently discussing in the House is very complex and detailed, but it does nothing to resolve the current banking crisis, which lies at the heart of our economic problems. [...]
The Banking Bill fails to address the fault which has led to every major banking and currency crisis during the past 200 years, including this one. It merely, lazily and weakly, papers over the cracks. Like Lilliputians, we are trying to tie down Gulliver with ever more strands of rope. It did not work then; it has not worked since 1811; and it will not work now.
He went on to explain that no Act of Parliament established the present banking system but that it emanates from a base of judicial decisions:
Prior to 1811, title to the money in depositors’ accounts belonged to the depositor. However, in that year, decisions in Carr v Carr and, in 1848, Foley v Hill gave legal status to the banking practice of removing depositors’ money from their accounts and lending it to others. Since then, title to depositors’ money has transferred from the depositor to the bank at the moment when the deposit is made.
Bankers have always seen it as their job to invest as much of their depositors’ money as they prudently can, in order to earn income for themselves while, at the same time, maintaining sufficient cash flow to be able to honour depositors’ cheques when presented and to meet withdrawals when demanded. If new deposits fail to materialise in sufficient strength or if borrowers fail to repay on time or at all, banks need to be rescued or they will fail. Historically, bank failures then led to a demand for central banks to act as lenders of last resort to save imprudent bankers who got caught short.
These judicial decisions meant that, from then until now, money deposited belonged to the bank and not the depositor, thereby allowing bankers to use customers’ deposits as they saw fit, always provided that they could manage cash flow so as to meet depositors’ requirements. In good times, that enabled them to take greater risks. Then, with the advent of central banks as lenders of last resort, the bankers soon learned they could take even greater risks with virtual impunity. When their lending became too aggressive and their reserves and deposit receipts were less than required to meet cash flow, they began to lend to each other. Banks with excess reserves would lend on the overnight market to those with a shortfall. With all these supposed safety mechanisms to protect them, bankers came to believe they could become even more aggressive in their lending, enabling them to make increased profits for themselves.
The provision of these safety mechanisms had, in some cases, merely encouraged them to take excessive risks. Further, these two judicial decisions overlooked or failed to consider the fact that when banks lend depositors’ funds, more than one receipt for the same deposit is issued. This was not done intentionally by individual banks or it would immediately have been seen as fraudulent. Rather, it was done by the system as a whole. This process continued to the present. It is as a result that our UK money supply has grown from £31 billion in 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window, to in excess of £1,700 billion today. Let us consider the implications of those last two figures. They mean that every year since 1971 the banking system has created, on average, for its own use, in excess of £44 billion. That is more per year than the entire money supply which had, until 1971, sustained our economy since recorded history and through two world wars. Is it any wonder that we have suffered such serious inflation over that period? It is clear that the normal, everyday onward lending of depositors’ funds by retail banks has been the principal producer of inflation.
Now, the 1844 Bank Charter Act ended the overissue of notes over specie but it did not deal with the overissue of demand deposits drawn by cheque. This omission, combined with the judicial decisions described by Caithness, left open the possibility of the same mechanism which was known to cause economic crises in the nineteenth century and which has caused the crisis we are in today: artificial expansion of credit.
This article deals with the legal principles under which banking should operate; a second article will explain artificial credit expansion and its consequences.
Continue reading “What is wrong with banking, part 1: the legal nature of banking contracts”
By Steven Baker, on 19 November 09
 Through tomorrow and Saturday, ESCP Europe and The Cobden Centre are hosting a Colloquium on Sound Money. The Colloquium is to be directed by Founding Fellow Dr Anthony J Evans and chaired by Corporate Affairs Director, Steve Baker.
A team of academics, banking professionals, entrepreneurs and politicians will meet to discuss:
- What is Money?
- The Interest Rate and Intertemporal Coordination
- The Gold Standard and the Great Depression
- Deflation and Prosperity
- Free Banking vs 100% Reserves
- Central Banking
- Proposals for Reform
The authors whose work will be under consideration are Carl Menger, Joseph Salerno, Frank Shostak, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A Hayek, Joan and Richard James Sweeney, Murray Rothbard, Lawrence Reed, Lawrence H White, George Selgin, Vera Smith, Tim Congdon, Richard Salsman and Jesús Huerta de Soto.
By Toby Baxendale, on 18 September 09
The Cobden Centre’s Chairman, Toby Baxendale, exposes the myths within the mechanistic Quantity Theory of Money from which the present policy of quantitative easing is derived.
The mainstream economists hold that the volume of money in circulation, times its velocity is equal to the prices of all goods and services added up. This is the famous Theory of Exchange, MV=PT, or the mechanistic Quantity Theory of Money, where:
- M is the stock of money,
- V is the velocity of circulation: the number of times the monetary unit changes hands in a certain time period,
- P is the general price level,
- and T is the “aggregate” of all quantities of goods and services exchanged in the period.
It is held by the overwhelming majority of all economists, that if the velocity of money falls, the price level will fall and thus it is the duty of government, the monopoly issuer of money, the chief Central Planner of the Money Supply, to create more money to keep the price level where it is and thus preserve the existing spending habits of the nation.
Error One — the stock of money
It is held that if you can count the monetary units in the economy and their velocity, you can say what the price level is. As people find it very difficult to count the money in an economy, they cannot see the statistical relationship showing up mechanistically in the price level as expected: the authorities do not have a measure of the money supply which correlates to economic activity.
Working from a sound theoretical basis, I and my colleague Anthony Evans can show you how to count money exactly and how that measure of the money stock correlates to economic activity:
Note that changes in the mainstream measures — M0 and M4 — are quite different to changes in our measure — MA. However, it is MA which shows the best correlation to economic activity and not the measures used by the Bank of England and HM Treasury:
The monetary authorities do not have an adequate measure of the money supply.
Error Two — the velocity of circulation
Velocity is defined as the average number of times during a period that a monetary unit (I will call this MU) is exchanged for a good or service. It is said that a 5% increase in money does not necessarily show itself up with a 5% increase in the price level. It is argued that this is because the velocity of money changes. The trick is to measure by how much the velocity has declined and then create new money — cross your fingers, pray to the Good Lord, do a rain dance around a fire, and hope that the new money will be spent — to fill in this gap left by the fall in velocity.
When you buy a house, we do not say it “circulates”: money is exchanged against real bricks and mortar. The printer who sold me books would have had to sell printed things (i.e. real goods) and saved (forgone consumption) for the future purchase (act of consumption) of the house. Imagine selling your house backwards and forwards between say you and your wife 10 times: the mainstream would argue that the velocity of circulation had risen!
Yes as daft as it sounds, this is the present state of economics.
Thus, if the velocity has gone up by a factor of 10, the price level has increased by the same factor. Here is the suggested rub: therefore, when the velocity of circulation falls, if you increase the money supply by the same factor that the velocity of circulation has fallen by, the price level will stay the same.
Note, as explained above and in detail here, the mainstream do not actually know what money is. Well, let us be clear: it is the final good for which (all) other goods exchange. All of us who are productive make things for sale or sell services, even if it is only our own labour. We sell goods and services which we produce or offer for other goods and services we need. The most marketable of all commodities, money, is accepted by you and other citizens and facilitates exchange of your goods and services for other goods and services. Note that, at all times, money facilitates the exchange of real goods for other real goods.
Party one and a counterparty exchanging or “selling” the house between one another 10 times causing an “increase in velocity” and thus an increase in the price level as an idea is utter garbage. If one party had sold real goods and saved in anticipation of buying the house — real bricks and mortar via the medium of money — this would facilitate a transaction of something (the party’s saved real goods) for something (the counterparty’s real house). Printing money to make sure the price level stays stable to facilitate the “circulating” house in the first example will facilitate a transfer of nothing (the paper) for something (the house). This is commonly called counterfeiting.
This may be another helpful example of why velocity is utterly meaningless. Consider a dinner party: Guest A has a £1. He lends it to Guest B at dinner, who lends it to Guest C who lends it to Guest D. If Guest D pays it back to Guest C, who pays it back to Guest B pays Guest A, the £1 is said to have done £4’s worth of work. The bookkeeping of this transaction shows that £1 was lent out 4 times and they all cancel each other out! Just to be clear, £1 has done £1’s work and not £4’s work. No real wealth or value is created.
The velocity of circulation makes no economic sense.
Error Three — the general price level
Since the monetary authorities have no means to sum the price and quantity of every individual transaction, they must work instead with the “general price level”, ignoring the vital role of changes in relative prices.
As early as 1912, Ludwig von Mises demonstrated that new money must change the structure of relative prices. As anyone who has lived through the past year could tell you, new money is not distributed equally to everyone in the economy. It is injected over time and in specific locations: new money redistributes income to those who receive it first. This redistribution of income not only alters people’s subjective perception of value, it also alters their weight in the marketplace. These factors can only lead to changes in the structure of relative prices.
Mainstream economists believe that “money is neutral in the long run”. They do not have a theory of the capital structure of production which can account for the effects of time and relative prices. They believe increases in the money supply affect all sectors uniformly and proportionately. This is manifestly untrue: look at changes in the Bank of England’s balance sheet and your bank statement.
Hayek wrote that his chief objection to this theory was that it paid attention only to the general price level and not to the structure of relative prices. He indicated that, in consequence, it disregarded the most harmful effects of increasing the money supply: the misdirection of resources and specifically unemployment. Furthermore, this wilful ignorance of relative prices explains the mainstream’s lack of an adequate theory of business cycles, something Hayek provided.
The general price level aggregates away a vital factor: the relative structure of prices.
Error Four — the aggregate quantities of goods and services sold
Since the sum of price times quantity for every individual transaction is not available, the authorities must use the “aggregate quantity of goods and services sold”. This is nonsense: the quantities to be added together are incompatible. It makes no sense to add a kilogram of potatoes to a kilogram of copper to a litre of petrol to a day’s software consultancy to a 30-second television advert.
The aggregate quantity of goods and services sold is an impossible sum.
Error Five — the equation is no more than a tautology
Consider this, if I buy 10 copies of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from a printing company for 7 monetary units (or MU), an exchange has been made: I gave up 7 MU’s to the printer, and the printer transferred 10 sets of printed works to me. The error that the mainstream make is that “10 sets of printed works have been regarded as equal to 7 MU, and this fact may be expressed thus: 7 MU = 10 printed works multiplied by 0.7 MU per set of printed works.” But equality is not self-evident.
There is never any equality of values on the part of the two participants in exchange. The assumption that an exchange presumes some sort of equality has been a delusion of economic theory for many centuries. We only exchange if each party thinks he is getting something of greater value from the other party than he has already. If there was equality in value, no exchange would happen! Value is subjective and utility is marginal: each party values the other’s goods or services more highly than their own.
Thus, while the mainstream believe that there is a causal link between the “money side” of the equation and the “value of goods and services side”, it is just a tautology from which no economic knowledge can be gained. All we are saying, if the Quantity Theory holds, is that “7 MU’s = 10 sets of printed works X 0.7 MU’s per set of printed works”: in other words, “7 MU = 7 MU”. Thus what is paid is what is received. This is like announcing to the world that you have discovered the fabulous fact that 2=2.
The mechanistic Quantity Theory of Money is not a causal relation but a tautology.
Conclusion
The mechanistic Quantity Theory only provides us with a tautology and every term of “MV = PT” is seriously flawed. Public policy should not rest on the foundation of this bad science.
If the money supply contracts as it has done so spectacularly since late 2008 (see the chart above), you will have less goods and services supporting less economic activity. This for sure is bad. We now have less money and less exchanging of real goods and services for other real goods and services.
The only way to get more goods and services offered for exchange is if entrepreneurs get hold of their factors of production — land, labour and capital — and reorganise them to meet the new demands of the consumers in a more efficient way than before. The only thing that the government can do is to make sure it provides as little regulatory burden as possible and the lightest tax regime that it can run in order to allow entrepreneurs to facilitate this correction.
Certainly in my business of the supply of fish and meat to the food service sector — www.directseafoods.co.uk — I have never witnessed such an abrupt change in consumption patterns as people have traded down from more expensive species and cuts to less expensive ones. Thus I have to reorganise my offer to my customers and potential customers. No amount of fiddling about with the level of newly minted money in the economy will help this reorganisation of my factors of production: they need to be retuned to the new needs and desires of my customers.
Quantitive easing, as I have said before, is firmly based on a belief in the so called “internal truths” held in the Quantity Theory of Money. I hope any reader can see that this belief is based on very faulty logic. Bad logic gives us bad policy. A policy of QE says that because the velocity of circulation has fallen, we can print newly minted money, out of thin air, at the touch of a computer key, and create more demand for the exchange of goods and services.
Money has been historically rooted in gold and silver because these cannot “vanish” overnight as we are seeing under our present state monopoly of money — fiat money, money by decree, i.e. bits of paper we are forced to use as legal tender. Remember, since 1971 when Nixon broke the gold link, money is just bits of paper, notwithstanding a promise to pay the bearer on demand. In the near future, this will no doubt remain the case. Indeed, anyone who dares to mention that the final good, for which all goods exchange, should be a real good that is scarce (hard to manipulate it, hard to destroy it) unlike paper and electronic journal entries (easy to manipulate, easy to destroy) is considered a lunatic!
On a point of history, it is worthwhile remembering that, as we have mentioned here, the 1844 Peel Act did remove the banks’ practice of issuing promissory notes (paper money) over and above their reserves of gold (the most marketable commodity i.e. money) as this was causing bank runs, “panic”, boom and bust. They did not resolve the issues of demand deposits to be drawn by cheque. Both features allow banks to issue new money — i.e. certificates that have no prior production of useful economic activity such as our printer printing books or my selling of meat and fish — while retaining real money — claims to the printing of books and selling of my meat and fish — only to a percentage of the deposited money, i.e. the Reserve Requirement of the bank. In the UK, there is no Reserve Requirement anymore as far as I am aware, hence banks going for massive levels of leverage. It is no surprise that the house of cards has fallen down.
Our proposal for a 100% reserve requirement is offered for discussion as the only sure-fire way of delivering lasting stability. Listening to economists talking about the “velocity of circulation” falling and thus suggesting that we should conduct large scale Quantitive Easing to hold the price level is not economics, but the policy of the Witch Doctor and the Mystic.
It is staggering that so much garbage, posing as sound knowledge, hinges on these grave errors.
Further reading
By Steven Baker, on 11 September 09
Revised and updated: reconciling our conflicting views of the market through consistent principle and morality. This post originally appeared on www.stevebaker.info.
 Leviathan, 1st Edition, 1st Print, from Toby Baxendale's original A Christian friend is an avowed socialist and another associate is determinedly left wing. I asked them recently what socialism meant to them. The answer was essentially “people being good to one another”: kindness, compassion, fairness and justice, even liberty. Who would oppose that?
But can force make it so?
Though I write with great affection for my friends, when I hear or read “socialism”, I understand a quite different thing: misery. Everywhere Marxist theory was determinedly put into practice, the result was tremendous suffering, not utopia, and yet Marxist ideas persist in our thinking.
Socialism, though formally hopeful, causes misery because a socialist society must force individuals to take particular courses of action for the good of all. For example, Lenin’s acclaimed Marxist philosopher Bukharin wrote:
For a long time yet, the working class will have to fight against all its enemies, and in especial against the relics of the past, such as sloth, slackness, criminality, pride. All these will have to be stamped out. Two or three generations of persons will have to grow up under the new conditions before the need will pass for laws and punishments and for the use of repressive measures by the workers’ State.
And so socialist societies have justified sustained repression.
When the Soviet Union fell, it seemed we all accepted that public ownership of the means of production was a dead end. New Labour and the “Third Way” came to prominence, despite the third way being nothing new, merely the idea that government can successfully intervene in a market economy to bring about positive outcomes. The problem is, it does not work.
Today, we have a financial crisis, a credit crunch, but few reflect that for a long time we have laboured under the most pervasive price control of all: deliberate manipulation of the rate of interest. Around the world, millions have waited with trepidation for committees of wise men to announce the interest rate. We have had a combination of historically low levels of saving combined with historically high levels of borrowing. Where did this mismatch come from? The rate of interest has been deliberately suppressed, misleading people into saving less and borrowing more than would have been sustainable.
The phenomenon is rather like a gym in which the treadmills may be remote controlled. If just a few people slow down, the central controller does nothing. But imagine the controller sees “too many” people slowing down at once for a break. “This will not do!” he cries, “We must have higher levels of activity!” He turns up all the treadmills at once, and keeps turning them up as exhaustion builds. Eventually large numbers collapse at once. Do we take a break and rebuild ourselves? No! We must inject adrenalin, take sports drinks, anything to get back to peak activity immediately. Eventually, this must end in catastrophe for the participants, but with artificially-low interest rates and quantitative easing, this is what we do to individuals and corporations in the economy.
The consequence is social disaster: high levels of government debt, unemployment and the direct creation of new money, a phenomenon which can only widen wealth inequality because new money is given to the wealthy. Yet this is the consequence of just one intervention in the free market.
When people set out to intervene in the economy by force of authority, they usually fail to realise a simple point: you cannot control the economy without controlling people. The economy comprises the actions of thinking, purposeful human beings with their own ends and means. Socialism requires intervention in that striving, intervention that at best has unintended consequences because the information necessary to intervene successfully is simply not available. Jamie Whyte’s The kindness of geniuses explains charmingly.
Those of us of good faith all want the same thing: prosperity, kindness, compassion, fairness, justice, liberty. People being good to one another. The twentieth century teaches us that state planning of the economy does not deliver these things, so how should society be organised?
Views of the free market
I asked my friends how they reacted to the term free market. They understand this term to mean exploitation. I understand it to mean freely-chosen cooperation for mutual benefit.
As we were sitting in a bar, I asked “Where was the exploitation when you bought that last round?” We wanted a drink, we had earned it in our own ways and the barman was happy to serve it to us. Perhaps the barman was there against his will, but how are we to know? Are we all to approach every transaction with a questionnaire? Should the barman have asked us if we had been exploited before serving us? Are we to invent possible exploitation somewhere up the supply chain for beer? Is it intrinsically exploitative for one man to serve beer to another?
Of course, this is absurd, but people suppose the free market inherently exploits without demonstrating how. This is not to deny the existence of isolated exploitation, but to question how free exchange is inherently exploitative, or corrupting, or the cause of whatever harm is perceived by the commentator. This is Marxist thinking and we know where it leads.
Before me, I have four books which begin to reconcile these difficulties:
Continue reading “Moral Markets and Honest Money”
By Steven Baker, on 10 September 09
Update: As the Footsie pushes above 5,000, we bring this post forwards and refer readers to Why is the FTSE going up?
Hopes for a flurry of company takeovers and growing belief in the strength of economic recovery on Wednesday propelled the FTSE 100 index through the 5,000 level for the first time in almost a year.
Follows on the heels of FTSE 100: stock market has best month in more than six years – Telegraph:
The stock market has enjoyed its best month in more than six years, boosting the savings of millions of investors and bringing hope that the worst of the recession may be over.
The FTSE 100 index of leading shares climbed 8.5 per cent in July, adding £134 billion to the value of the stock market, its best monthly performance since the fall of Baghdad during the second Gulf war in April, 2003.
The rise in share prices followed a series of strong profit figures from Britain’s biggest companies, with many proving to investors that they are coping well in the recession by cutting costs.
However, according to Austrian-School theorist Jesus Huerta de Soto:
[U]ninterrupted stock market growth never indicates favorable economic conditions. Quite the contrary: all such growth provides the most unmistakable sign of credit expansion unbacked by real savings, expansion which feeds an artificial boom that will invariably culminate in a severe stock market crisis.
In other words, and most unfortunately, the present stock market conditions are an illusion produced by quantitative easing that will not last. And:
The crash will take place as soon as economic agents begin to doubt the continuance of the expansionary process, observe a slowdown or halt in credit expansion and in short, become convinced that a crisis and recession will appear in the near future. At that point the fate of the stock market is sealed.
By Steven Baker, on 11 August 09
 Steven Baker presents a precis of de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles pp650-653, setting out an argument which was famously expounded by von Mises in Socialism. This article originally appeared on stevebaker.info.
To attempt to coordinate society through coercion is an intellectual error: it is impossible for an institution to obtain the information needed to establish social coordination by decree. There are four reasons:
- It is impossible to obtain, store and process the vast amount of practical information in the minds of different people.
- Most of the necessary information is subjective, practical, tacit and non-verbal: it cannot be transmitted.
- Information which people have not yet discovered or created and which arises from the market process cannot be transmitted.
- Coercion — that is, regulation — prevents the discovery or creation of the necessary information.
These are the arguments developed at length by von Mises in Socialism. Von Mises demonstrates the impossibility of socialism and of effective state intervention in the economy. His thesis explains theoretically why the socialist economies of the Eastern Bloc failed. It also explains the growth of the tensions, maladjustments and inefficiencies in western economies which have led to our present crisis.
Crisis is the inevitable outcome of the application of coercion and privilege by government, which systematically worsens social maladjustments, hinders the creativity of entrepreneurs, distorts economic information, encourages irresponsibility, corrupts individuals and encourages the underground economy.
These arguments are directly applicable to the financial and banking system which has now failed. The system is characterized by private banking with a fractional reserve, controlled by a central bank which determines monetary policy and which has a monopoly on the issue of legal tender. The system shares characteristics with a socialist economy in that:
- The whole system is planned by the central bank.
- Banks are commonly excluded from general bankruptcy proceedings.
- Bank failures are prevented by socializing the costs of their failure.
- The entire system rests on the government monopoly on currency.
- The system is based on the privilege granted to banks of creating loans out of nothing by holding only a fractional reserve on deposits.
- Legally, banks enjoy privileges otherwise only granted to governments.
- A vast and inordinately complex set of regulations applies to banks.
- There is little or no supervision of government intervention in bank crises and in many cases, intervention is determined ad hoc, disregarding principles of rationality, efficiency and effectiveness.
In banking and credit, the situation resembles that of the socialist countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Central planning is endemic in banking and finance and it is therefore not surprising that we are living through the same inefficiency and failure which has plagued command economies, ultimately causing their collapse.
Further Reading
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