Under a Hard-Money Regime, the Money-Supply Process Is Totally Privatized; Mining, Minting, Certification and Warehousing of Money Are Undertaken by Private Firms for Profit

The defining characteristic of such a monetary system has been incisively identified by Milton Friedman. In his words, “A real, honest-to-God gold standard … would be one in which gold was literally money, and money literally gold, under which transactions would literally be made in terms either of the yellow metal itself, or of pieces of paper that were 100 per cent warehouse certificates for gold.”

Thus, under a genuine gold standard, the monetary unit is, in fact as well as in law, a unit of weight of gold. This is the case whether the monetary unit bears the name of a standard unit of weight, such as a “gram” or “ounce,” or whether it bears a special name, like “dollar” or “franc,” that designates specifically a standard weight of the commodity used as money.

While it is true that certain types of government intervention in the monetary system are consistent with the basic criterion of a genuine gold standard, it is equally true that no particular government policy is essential to the operation of this monetary standard. Indeed, as Friedman notes, “If a domestic money consists of a commodity, a pure gold standard or cowrie bead standard, the principles of monetary policy are very simple. There aren’t any. The commodity money takes care of itself.”

Under the quintessential hard-money regime, therefore, the money-supply process is totally privatized. The mining, minting, certification, and warehousing of the commodity money are undertaken by private firms competing for profits in an entirely unrestricted and unregulated market. The money supply consists of gold in various shapes and weight denominations and claims to gold, in the form of paper notes or checkable demand deposits, that are accepted in monetary transactions as a substitute for the physical commodity money. These money substitutes are literally warehouse receipts that are redeemable for gold on demand at the issuing institutions, which hold a specifically earmarked reserve of gold exactly equal in amount to their demand liabilities. Barring fraud or counterfeiting, the total supply of money in the economy is therefore always equal to the total weight of gold held in the money balances of the nonbank public and in the reserves of the banks.

—Joseph T. Salerno, “Gold Standards: True and False,” in Money: Sound and Unsound (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), 356-357.

The Tragedy of the Euro Is the Incentive to Incur Higher Deficits and Make the Whole Euro Group Burden the Costs of Irresponsible Policies

The tragedy of the Euro is the incentive to incur higher deficits, issue government bonds, and make the whole Euro group burden the costs of irresponsible policies—in the form of the lower purchasing power of the Euro. With such incentives, politicians tend to run high deficits. Why pay for higher expenditures by raising unpopular taxes? Why not just issue bonds that will be purchased by the creation of new money, even if it ultimately increases prices in the whole of the EMU [European Monetary Union]? Why not externalize the costs of government spending?

The resulting moral hazard is asymmetrical. Governments of larger states would produce considerable inflationary pressure running high deficits and might be too big to be bailed out. On the contrary, governments of smaller states would not produce much inflationary pressures even if they would run high deficits because the impact of the money creation would not be important for the Eurozone as a whole. Moreover, small countries could expect to be bailed out by larger countries. It is unsurprising that the sovereign debt crisis has been worse in small countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The tragedy of the Euro is aggravated by the typical shortsightedness of rulers in democracies: politicians tend to focus on the next election rather than the long-term effects of their policies. They use public spending and extend favors to voting factions in order to win the next election. Increasing deficits delays problems into the future and also into the other countries of the Eurozone. EMU leaders know how to externalize the costs of government spending in two dimensions: geographically and temporarily. Geographically, some of the costs are borne in the form of higher prices by the whole Eurozone. Temporarily, the problems resulting from higher deficits are possibly borne by other politicians and only in the remote future. The sovereign debt problems caused by the deficits may require spending cuts imposed by the EMU.

—Philipp Bagus, The Tragedy of the Euro, 2nd ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 107-108.

There Is Really No Essential Difference Between the Unlimited Power of the Democratic State and the Unlimited Power of the Autocrat

And he also stressed that democracy must not be conceived as the unlimited rule of the general will:

There is really no essential difference between the unlimited power of the democratic state and the unlimited power of the autocrat. The idea that carries away our demagogues and their supporters, the idea that the state can do whatever it wishes, and that nothing should resist the will of the sovereign people, has done more evil perhaps than the caesar-mania of degenerate princelings.

Mises concluded that “only within the framework of Liberalism does democracy fulfill a social function. Democracy without Liberalism is a hollow form.” The great danger inherent in democracy is to turn the libertarian postulate of equality before the law into the postulate of economic equality.

Here is a fertile field for the demagogue. Whoever stirs up the resentment of the poor against the rich can count on securing a big audience. Democracy creates the most favourable preliminary conditions for the development of this spirit, which is always and everywhere present, though concealed. So far all democratic states have foundered on this point. The democracy of our own time is hastening towards the same end.

—Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2007), 412-413.

Society Is Purely and Solely a Continual Series of Exchanges; the Two Contracting Parties Always Both Gain; Society Is an Uninterrupted Succession of Advantages

Liberal class conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the defeat and final exile of Napoleon. From 1817 to 1819, two young liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal Le Censeur Européen; beginning with the second volume (issue), another young liberal, Augustin Thierry, collaborated closely with them. The Censeur Européen  developed and disseminated a radical version of liberalism, one that continued to influence liberal thought up to the time of Herbert Spencer and beyond. It can be viewed as a core-constituent—and thus one of the historically defining elements—of authentic liberalism (see “Liberalism, True and False,” in the present work). In this sense, a consideration of the world-view of the Censeur group  is of great importance in helping to give shape and content to the protean concept of liberalism. Moreover, through Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers and other channels, it had an impact on socialist thought as well. Comte and Dunoyer called their doctrine Industrialisme, Industrialism.

There were several major sources of Industrialism. One was Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the last and most famous of the Idéologue school of French liberals, whose friend, Thomas Jefferson, arranged for the translation and publication of his Treatise on Political Economy in the United States before it appeared in France. Destutt de Tracy’s definition of society was crucial:

Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.

Destutt de Tracy’s position was that “commerce is society itself. . . . It is an attribute of man. . . . It is the source of all human good . . .” Commerce was a “panacea,” in the words of a student of his thought, “the world’s civilizing, rationalizing, and pacifying force.”

—Ralph Raico, “The Conflict of Classes: Liberal vs. Marxist Theories,” in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 189-190.

The Acid Rain Scare Was the Dress Rehearsal for the Global Warming Scare; Both Scares Originated in Sweden; Bert Bolin, Future First Chair of the IPCC, Wrote the Report

This book tells the story of two countries and three environmental scares. Two originated in Sweden (acid rain and global warming) and one (the nuclear winter) was transmitted from Moscow via Stockholm. . . .

Acid rain (Scare #1) was the dress rehearsal for global warming. The politicized science of acid rain swept all before it, the bar set low in the first government report on acid rain, which happened to be written by Bert Bolin, a friend of Palme [prime minister of Sweden] and future first chair of the IPCC. It spread to Germany, where hysteria about “forest death” destroyed any hope of rationality and objectivity. It was taken up by Canada, which waged a relentless campaign to get the United States to cut its power station emissions. The Reagan Administration held firm against virtually unanimous scientific opinion. Elected as the environmental president, George H. W. Bush gave the Canadians what they wanted. However, the science was not as solid as the consensus asserted, and a ten-year federal study revealed it for what it was. Scandalously, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suppressed its findings until the main provisions of the acid rain legislation had been agreed in Congress.

—Rupert Darwall, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), Kobo e-book.

No Wonder Goebbels Declared Eighty Years Later that National Socialism Was “anti-Semitic” because It Was Socialistic

But the real Marx came to life in his letters, especially when he vented  his hatred on former friends, collaborators, or sympathizers. Marx actually vied with Engels in heaping anti-Jewish invectives upon the head of  Lassalle, insults of a descriptive physical nature reminiscent of the smutty Nazi weekly Der Stürmer, edited by Julius Streicher. Marx saw in Lassalle a “niggerlike Jew,” and Engels' invectives were no more moderate.  In a way these attitudes are not surprising because socialism and the Jewish  outlook, the Jewish mind, the Jewish character do not easily mix. Belonging to a religious minority within Christendom (with which they  remain mysteriously connected), the Jews are apt to have the critical bent of  small religious bodies everywhere. These minorities question much of the intellectual-spiritual foundations upon which the majority live, and they are often emphatic in their criticisms. Thus they easily become unpopular,  because the Philistine hates the critic. Let such minorities rise financially and opposition to them will increase—envy will be added to discomfort and suspicion. . . .

Yet even in Eastern Europe a break between the socialist and communist  forces and the Jews had to come. (For a while this was obscured by the fact  that the Nazis literally drove these Jews into the arms of organized leftism.)  A latent, sometimes even an open, anti-Jewish sentiment existed in the ranks of Europe's socialist parties—and it was prominent in Red Russia  as well. By the time World War II broke out, Stalin had killed many  more Jews than Hitler. Needless to say, Jewish haute finance was never  really procommunist. If Jewish bankers did business with the Soviet  Union, gentile manufacturers and financiers are even more guilty in this  respect.

Antonio Machado, the great Spanish poet who died in exile, predicted  the inevitable turn to anti Judaism that Marxism would take. Marx  himself started it, of course: “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” he  asked. “Practical needs, egoism. What is the secular cult of the Jew?  Huckstery. What is his secular God? Money.” No wonder Goebbels declared eighty years later that National Socialism was “anti-Semitic” because it was socialistic.

Marxism does not harmonize with the Jewish mind, which is individualistic and commercially oriented; nor has it in any way a “proletarian” character. Marx ended his revolting pamphlet against the Jews, in his Die Frühschriften, with the remark that the true emancipation of the Jews  consisted in “the emancipation of society from Jewry” (his emphasis). This is precisely what the National Socialists attempted with the Endlösung [the Final Solution]. 

--Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1990), 119-121.

The Cancer Chapter in Rachel Carson's “Silent Spring” Incorporated the Nazi Belief that Industrialization Was Causing a Cancer Epidemic

America invented Earth Day in 1970 and gave birth to postwar environmentalism with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). Yet even these seemingly all-American products drew on ideas from across the Atlantic and from across the chasm of the Second World War; the cancer chapter in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, for instance, incorporated the Nazi belief that industrialization was causing a cancer epidemic.

If there was a purely American strand of environmentalism, the demands it made on America were fairly limited. The costs of banning DDT—the principal policy consequence of Silent Spring—were mainly inflicted on Africans exposed to the risk of malaria. Thanks to the availability of cheap substitutes, phasing out CFCs a decade and a half later to preserve the ozone layer hardly required Americans to change their lifestyles. Preserving habitats and wildernesses did not necessitate transforming American society and culture.

—Rupert Darwall, Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex (New York: Encounter Books, 2019), Kobo e-book.