mph....Gee that's the first time I ever heard anyone call rape "social architecture"! If I ever need a good lawyer in California i will definitely hire you.<G> Below are a few snippets for your enjoyment, er.....whatever.
fame.org
"But the process of cure was misdiagnosed as the disease: if shortage of bank reserves was causing a
business decline- argued economic interventionists-why not find a way of supplying increased
reserves to the banks so they never need be short! If banks can continue to loan money indefinitely--it
was claimed--there need never be any slumps in business. And so the Federal Reserve System was
organized in 1913."
When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created
more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous,
however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us
because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was
politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal
Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States
would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss
and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.
The "Fed" succeeded: it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in
the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock
market-triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop
up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the
speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching
and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed.
Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she
abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of
confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the
Great Depression of the 1930's.
But the opposition to the gold standard in any form-from a growing number of welfare-state
advocates-was prompted by a much subtler insight: the realization that the gold standard is
incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic
jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the
wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A
substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to
recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they
had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing
government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale."
What paranoid jerk could write such drivel you ask? .....Alan Greenspan folks.... |
