The Banking Oligarchs

By Nelson Hultberg

Can anyone stop the overweening lunacy of the banking oligarchs? No more than anyone can stop pythons from devouring rabbits at play. Our bankers are not honorable. They are not farsighted. And they have set in motion forces that no human effort can avert. Moreover they long ago formed a deathly co-op with history’s most deplorable criminal element – the state. This has given them a free pass to indulge in ugly asset corpulence and hideous irresponsibility. It has hidden the true state of their criminality from realization by good men and women. The banking oligarchs and the power they have over us today are the result of a long train of poisonous ideas descending upon the American republic over the past 120 years.

It began with the coming of socialism to Europe and its Fabian migration to America at the turn of the century. Capitalism, the Fabians preached, is the root of all evil with its insistence on gold as money. Its freedom is no longer possible in the modern world. It brings to mankind uncontrollable booms and busts and horrific poverty. There is no cure for capitalism. It must be burnt at the stake of its egregious altar – free banking. Free banking is responsible for wild cycles, and gold stifles productivity when needed. Only by centralizing the great network of free banks that capitalism creates and shifting from rigid gold money to flexible paper money can abundance and stability be brought to modern life. Thus was ushered in America’s reign of “easy money” with the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

The Lure of Easy Money

Prior to 1913 we had resisted the lure of easy money, a curse that goes back to early civilization. Governments of history have always partaken in monetary debasement to create the illusion of prosperity. Our Founders realized this and preached against any kind of paper money. But their wisdom lasted only 125 years.

Easy money is like promiscuous sex. The two lures promise sensual delight and prosperity, and they do deliver such for various periods of time to their partakers. But ultimately they erode self-worth (for the female) and degrade the store of value that money represents for society. Bleakness and disaster are their ultimate denouements.

The media of the day, however, were eager to endorse this glorious shangri-la of perpetual prosperity that was sold to them as the Federal Reserve. “All progressive thinkers now realize,” they hammered home to us, “that banking must be centralized and controlled in Washington. Only then can booms and busts be eliminated. Only then can true stable wealth be produced.”

The fact that just the opposite has taken place over the past 100 years of this maniacal experiment in giving to government the power to create money escapes the awareness of pundits on the political left because clarity and reason do not move pundits on the left. Getting more out of life than they are willing to put in moves them. Denying the existence of Natural Law moves them. These two obsessions blind them to the irrational mega-statism that they so ritualistically worship in face of every problem that life thrusts upon us. Their worldview belongs to Alice in Wonderland. Words mean what they want them to mean. Objective reality is optional in their mind.

Because the pundits of the left have been taught the misconceptions of socialism, they fell prey to John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s who believed that capitalism had reached its “mature stage” and would never again be able to “generate sufficient demand.” Thus it needed massive government intervention into banking and the creation of money by those in Washington.

But capitalism has no such thing as a “mature stage.” It is eternally renewable as long as it is left free to recharge itself. The flaw in Keynesianism is that it was not capitalism that brought us the Great Depression; it was government intervention into capitalism via the Federal Reserve and its irresponsible inflation of the money supply that created a massive boom throughout the 1920s that had to eventually crack up and collapse.

All Keynesianism does is to exacerbate the normal cycles of laissez-faire and turn them into dangerous monster cycles via massive injections of credit, i.e., DEBT. If left on a gold standard, this cannot happen. Only the normal cycles of laissez-faire will come about, which quickly self-correct if left alone. Keynesianism is the classic case of government intervention creating economic distortions that it then uses as an excuse for more interventions, which then create more distortions. Eventually the distortions reach epic proportions such as we have today.

The solution is to restore a free-market in banking. Take the control of money out of government hands and let the marketplace determine what is to be used. It will always pick gold and silver, which cannot be inflated and thus will not bring about massive booms and busts. Keynes was catastrophically wrong in thinking that gold and the free market caused the Great Depression. The cause was the paper inflation that came from the creation of the Fed in 1913. Numerous Austrian economists have demonstrated this quite brilliantly – Murray Rothbard in America’s Great Depression and Ludwig von Mises in Human Action, for example. It is this crucial mindset that our intelligentsia must grasp if we are to get back to a free society and avoid the New World Order being prepared for us by the banking oligarchs.

The Tragedy of Modernity

Thus the tragedy of modernity. Political collectivists have swept over our country like a plague of infected rats in the days of Black Death. And they are destined to bring the same degree of upheaval to us that came to Europeans in the 14th century because of the rodents infesting their societies. Pathogenicity is not limited solely to physical life. It also plays a very prominent role in ideological life and comprises the evil factor in forming the tidal waves of history that sweep the shores of human endeavor over the millennia. The other side of the equation is that of salubrity and heroism which drive humans toward truth and propriety. Herein lies the great clash of good and evil that we find to be the metaphysical base of all meaning for our lives.

Unfortunately the pundits of the left like Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, and talking heads like Chris Matthews and Rachael Maddow dominate the scene and are lost in the utter irrationality of their philosophical fundamentals learned long ago in the formative years of their Fabian youth. Together with the equally warped neoconservatives, they control ten times the air space that the American freedom movement controls. Thus the country drifts toward an apocalyptic collapse.

What is coming is the end of the world as we know it. There will be no recovery from the Marxian-Keynesian disease and its vast rodent spawn of minds like Krugman, Friedman, Matthews, Maddow, and their 20th century mentors. There will be only chaotic economic crashes mixed into a steady, drizzling dissolution of culture and hope, prosperity and faith, politics and freedom proceeding from now into an indeterminate future.

But out of every downfall comes the inevitable effort to right the requisites of existence. Humans are seekers of truth in the long run. They desire the good rather than the evil even though they get hypnotized by the latter for long stretches of time. So for those of us who grasp the overwhelming idiocy of the collectivist Weltanschauung, sanity drives us to seek out one of two avenues: 1) drop off the grid and find a safe haven to ride out the coming storm, or 2) attempt to forge a resistance movement to fight the purveyors of what surely will be a Tyrannical World Order foisted upon us by the banking oligarchs in the coming storm. Both avenues have their appeal. One’s particular persona will dictate which is the preferred.

Nelson Hultberg, Director
Americans for a Free Republic
P.O. Box 801213
Dallas, TX 75380
972-490-8533
nelshultberg@aol.com
www.afr.org 

The GOP Debate - Miserable Irrelevancy

Nelson Hultberg

 

Seventeen GOP candidates for president of the United States paraded in front of us in Cleveland on August 6th. The establishment media crowed enthusiastically to the viewers about the import of this gathering to our lives as Americans. Chris Wallace and his fellow questioners milked the affair for all the drama they could squeeze from it.

Unfortunately this two-tiered debate was just one more exercise in the miserable irrelevancy of the media's handling of "political affairs" in America today. With each passing year the nation drifts deeper into economic ineptitude, a macabre government intervenes further into all the nooks and crannies of our lives, and our culture sinks relentlessly into an abysmal preoccupation with gays, transsexuals, drug addicts, and other sundry oddities of life. Decadence and despotism loom all around us. There are scores of monumental issues that need to be discussed today openly and fervently by our media. But instead we got irrelevancy and default on the real problems that our country and culture face. Why were not the following paramount issues presented to the candidates in depth?

1) States' rights versus Washington power.

We as a nation were formed under the concept of "federalism," which means that all legislative power is to emanate first on the local level, then on the state level, and last on the national level. Yet over the past century, this fundamental principle of federalism has been destroyed. Washington dominates our lives like a one-eyed Cyclops, arrogantly and stupidly. The first duty of a president today should be to lead Congress in eliminating federal bureaucracies and returning power to the states and localities. This cannot be mere lip service for political appeal; it must be a vigorous, organized effort by the president to dismantle the stultifying ABC bureaucracies in Washington. The president must go in front of the American people repeatedly on TV like Ronald Reagan did to explain why massive bureaucracies such as education, energy, welfare, transportation, etc. must be turned back to the states and reduced drastically if we are to stave off bankruptcy as a nation, even phased out of existence if the people will it.

2) The Federal Reserve's role in inflationary booms and busts.

Since 1972 there have been no limits on how much monetary expansion the Federal Reserve can bring about. Consequently the Fed has been expanding the money supply over the past 43 years at annual rates never before seen in the history of mankind. Thus the money supply has been growing far faster than the growth of goods and services, which is what creates inflationary booms and then the inevitable economic busts.

Congressman Ron Paul advocated ending the Fed as the answer to this problem. He is right, of course, but such a termination will take decades to bring about. The people have to be educated first as to correct banking and monetary policy. Thus in the meantime what do we do to stop the Fed from creating the booms and busts?

Fortunately there is a temporary practical solution to bridge the gap between today's Fed corruption and a future with no Fed. The late Milton Friedman advocated a 4% automatic expansion of the money supply every year. This would remove responsibility for monetary growth from the arbitrary decisions of the FOMC and make it a simple computerized function by law. Money would grow at 4% annually, which would match the average GDP growth in a free economy. This would result in zero percent price inflation, which would bring stability instead of booms and busts. The Friedman plan is not a perfect solution, but it would buy us time until we could educate the people as to why and how we are to terminate the Fed. To avoid a depression, it could be phased into slowly.

3) Magnets drawing the illegal immigrants to America.

There are five primary magnets that draw illegals into our country. They are jobs, education, welfare services, the anchor baby loophole, and the privilege of Spanish as a public language. No wall or fence will ever stop the migration of Mexico into America. Only by removing the five magnets can we stem this invasion. Talk of "securing the border" without removing the magnets is for deceivers and humbugs. No problem can be solved without going to the root causes of the problem. The roots of illegal immigration are the five magnets. To eliminate them we must do the following:

Enact E-verify and enforce the criminal laws on the books regarding the hiring of illegals.

Mandate English as the official language for America in her public schools. Eliminate schooling and welfare benefits to illegals. Begin the process to end the anchor baby loophole of the 14th Amendment.

4) Should marriage be decided in the courts or by the culture?

Gays and lesbians are humans with the same rights as heterosexuals, and they deserve to be treated with the same respect and civility that one conveys to all other human beings. But they do not have the right to mandate their acceptance through the courts. Whatever acceptance in society they are to gain must come voluntarily through reason and persuasion.

Obviously gays and lesbians have a right to equality under the law, but this means only that they have the same right as all other citizens in society to form a "contractual union" and have it upheld by the law. It does not mean they have the right to coerce their fellowman by judicial decree into accepting such a union as a "marriage." Marriage has, for thousands of years and for very sound reasons, been legally defined as between opposite sexes. Judges do not have the right to change this; only the people do. The determination of what constitutes marriage must be returned to the states and handled by a vote of the people.

5) Our police-the-world foreign policy.

In the Founding Fathers' eyes the role of foreign policy was not to solve other nation's problems, nor to dictate their forms of government. It was to defend our country's security and survival. Our actions and alliances abroad were to be centered only around self-defense.

Is today's aggressive foreign policy concerned only with self-defense? Or is it a policy driven by the egregious goals of corporate-government-banking combines? Is it America First? Or is it world hegemony dominated? Unfortunately it is the latter due to the neoconservatives rise to power over the past 30 years. It is their Wolfowitz Doctrine that guides Washington today. This doctrine maintains that America has an obligation to establish hegemony over all other nations via force in order to provide for a stable world because we are the only reigning superpower.

The question we must ask is: How can Washington justify the "spreading of democracy" through endless war and killer drones and think it is somehow pursuing justice? No nation has the right to dominate their neighbors because their technological superiority has made them the sole superpower. Such a foreign policy is imperialistic; it will bring America nothing but oppressive debt, international hatred, and quite possibly nuclear confrontation.

A Substantive Debate Needed

The above five issues are of vast importance. The survival of our country and our culture are at stake. Why were not clear cut questions asked of the candidates about federalism and states rights, about the role of the Fed in booms and busts, about immigration magnets, about the courts usurpation of the people's right to define marriage, about self-defense vs. world hegemony? Because today's media are not interested in substance and freedom, that's why. They're all about dog and pony shows and the further expansion of statism.   

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Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic www.afr.org. A graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, his articles have appeared in such publications as The American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman, The Social Critic, The Dallas Morning News, and the San Antonio Express-News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsonHultberg (at) afr.org