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Free Money Leaves Everyone Poorer

June 7, 2016

Free Money Leaves Everyone Poorer 

Destroying Lives

BALTIMORE – A dear reader reminded us of the comment, supposedly made by Groucho Marx: “A free lunch? You can’t afford a free lunch.”

Groucho-Marx_Groucho dispensing valuable advice     Photo via imdb.com

He was responding to last week’s Diary about the national referendum in Switzerland on Saturday. Voters will decide whether to give all Swiss residents a free lunch – a guaranteed annual income of about $30,000 a year [ed note: the initiative was overwhelmingly rejected with 78% voting against].

The problem with a guaranteed income (you get it no matter whether you have a job or not) is something we’ve been writing about for the last 15 years. It is the problem with all frauds… all cockamamie, jackass redistribution programs… and all something-for-nothing schemes.

And it is the same whether you are “stimulating” an economy with artificial, phony-baloney “money”, giving aid to foreign dictators, or handing out free lunches to voters at home.

The Deep State, in addition to being malignant and entertaining, is incompetent. It fights wars just to lose them. It solves problems and makes them worse. Led by the Yellen Fed, it “improves” the economy and leaves 9 out of 10 people poorer than they were before.

Today, we turn to a special war – the War on Poverty. Jesus dismissed it. “The poor you will always have with you,”he said. But that didn’t stop the feds from launching an attack.

 

1-BG-war-on-poverty-50-years-chart-2-825The “war on poverty” has been just as rousing a success as the “war on drugs”.  According to the NCPA is has actually cost $22 trillion so far (estimates of the total cost differ) – click to enlarge.

Fortunately, they are so clumsy, lame, and incompetent, they spare us a worse disaster. Had they been smarter and better organized, they would have done even more damage.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Interview With Dr. Emma Dawnay on the Swiss Referendum on Monetary Reform

February 1, 2016

INTERVIEW WITH DR EMMA DAWNAY ON THE SWISS REFERENDUM ON MONETARY REFORM

The following questions have been answered by Dr Emma Dawnay, on behalf of Monetäre Modernisierung, the organisation bringing the Swiss Sovereign Money Initiative (or Vollgeld-Initiative in German). The interviewer is The Cobden Centre Editor, Max Rangeley.

How does the current monetary system affect the economy? 

In several ways. The most drastic way is that the current system is inherently unstable – giving rise to gradual unsustainable build ups of debt which can turn into financial crises, as we have seen in 2007/2008. This happens because money comes into circulation almost entirely by banks making loans. In Switzerland 90% of the money supply M1 has been lent into existence by banks, and only 10% comes from the Swiss National Bank. Banks base their decision on whether to give a loan on one criterion only: do they expect it to make a profit for them? They do not have to check they have sufficient reserves, nor do they take the health of the economy in general into account. The result is that they tend to make too many loans in the economic good times, and they tend to stop lending in the bad times when boom turns to bust, which means either too many or too few projects get funded. The trouble with a financial crash is that it doesn’t just affect financial industries, but the whole economy and society.

Another way the current monetary system affects the economy comes from the fact that it is much easier for a bank to lend money into existence against collateral – either financial or real estate assets – than to lend against a business plan. This means that the way money enters the economy is more likely to inflate asset prices than to generate jobs, goods and services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“I am a hard working taxpayer who is getting pretty fed up. . .”

December 1, 2014

“I am a hard working taxpayer who is getting pretty fed up. . .”.

So the Swiss have decided not to force their central bank into underpinning its reserves with harder assets than increasingly worthless euros.

At least they had the chance to vote.

But in the bigger picture, the rejection of the “Save Our Swiss Gold” initiative flies in the face of a broader trend towards repatriation and consolidation of sovereign bullion holdings – following on the heels of similar attempts by the Bundesbank, the Dutch central bank, for example, recently announced that it had moved a fifth of its total gold reserves from New York to Amsterdam.

And the physical metal continues its inexorable exodus eastwards, into stronger hands that are unlikely to relinquish it any time soon.

The Swiss vote was preceded by some fairly extraordinary black propaganda, most notoriously by Willem Buiter of the banking organisation that now styles itself ‘Citi’.

Once again we were treated to the intriguing claim that gold is nothing more than “a six thousand year-old bubble”, and a “fiat commodity currency” (whatever that might mean) that has “insignificant intrinsic value”.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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