20th century was the era of total war.
Limitations on the scope of war, first built up over many centuries, had already begun to break down in the 19th century.
They were altogether obliterated in the 20th.
And of course, the sheer amount of resources the centralized states could bring to bear in war,
and the terrible new technologies of killing that became available to them made the 20th century an era of almost unimaginable horror.
It isn't terribly often that people discuss the development of total war in tandem with the development of modern central banking,
which, although antecedents existed long before, also came into its own in the 20th century.
It's no surprise that Ron Paul, the man who in public life who has done more than anyone else, to break through the limits of what is permissible in polite society to say about both these things, has also been so insistent that the twin phenomena of war and central banking are linked.
Quoted, it is no coincidence, Dr. Paul said, that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.
He added, if every American taxpayer had to submit an extra five or ten thousand dollars to the IRS this April to pay for the war, I'm certain it would end very quickly.
The problem is that the government finances war, says Dr. Paul, by borrowing and printing money rather than presenting a bill directly in the form of higher taxes.
When the costs are obscured, the question of whether the war is worth it becomes distorted.
For the sake of my remarks today, I take it as a given that Murray Rothbard's analysis
of the true functions of central banking is correct.
Rothbard's books, The History of Money and Banking in the Colonial Era to World War II,
The Case Against the Fed, The Mystery of Banking, What Has Government Done to Our Money, provide
the logical case and the empirical evidence for his view.
And I refer to you those sources for additional details, and of course they're all available
For now, I also take it as uncontroversial that central banks perform three significant functions for the banking system and the government.
First, they serve as lenders of last resort, which in practice means bailouts for the big financial firms.
Second, they coordinate the inflation of the money supply by establishing a uniform rate at which the banks inflate, thereby making the fractional reserve banking system
Banking System, both less unstable and more consistently profitable than it would be without
a central bank, which by the way is the reason that banks have always clamored for central
banks.
Finally, they allow governments via inflation to finance their operations far more cheaply
and surreptitiously than they otherwise could.
As an enabler of inflation, the Fed is ipso facto an enabler of war.
Looking back on World War I, Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1919,
one can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism.
Without it, the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly.
War, weariness, would set in much earlier.
No government has ever said, because we want to go to war, we must abandon central banking.
Or, because we want to go to war, we must abandon inflation and the fiat money system.
Governments always say we must abandon the gold standard because we want to go to war.
That alone indicates that the restraint that hard money places on governments, precious
metals cannot be created out of thin air, which is why governments chafe at monetary
systems based on them.
Governments can raise revenue in three ways.
is the most visible means of doing so, and it is eventually, for that reason, meets with
popular resistance. They can borrow the money they need, but this borrowing is likewise
visible to the public in the form of higher interest rates. As the government competes
for a limited amount of available credit, credit becomes scarcer for other borrowers.
Creating money out of thin air, the third option, is preferable for governments, since
Since the process by which the political class siphons resources from society via inflation
is far less direct and obvious than in the case of taxation and borrowing.
In the old days, the king simply clipped the coins, kept the shavings, and then spent the
coins back into circulation at the same nominal value.
Once they have it, governments guard this power jealously.
Mises once said that if the bank in England had been available to King Charles I during
and English Civil War in the 1640s, he could have crushed the parliamentary forces arrayed
against him and English history would have been much different. Juan de Mariana, Spanish
Jesuit who in the 16th and early 17th centuries is best known in political philosophy for
having defended regicide in his 1599 work, Irregue. Casual students often assume that
it must have been for this provocative claim that the Spanish government jailed him for
for a time. But in fact, it was his treatise on the alteration of money, which condemned
monetary inflation as a moral evil that got him in trouble. Think about that. Saying the
king could be killed was one thing, but taking direct aim at inflation, the lifeblood of
the regime, that was taking things too far. In those days, if a war was to be funded partly
Covered by monetary debasement, the process was direct and not difficult to understand.
The sequence of events today is more complicated, but as I've said, not fundamentally different.
What happens today is not that the government needs to pay for a war, comes up short and
simply prints the money to make up the difference.
The process is not quite so crude, but when we examine it carefully, it turns out to be
essentially the same thing.
Central banks established by the world's governments allow these governments to spend more than
they receive in taxes.
Borrowing allows them to spend more than they receive in taxes, too, but government borrowing
led to higher interest rates, which in turn can provoke the public in undesirable ways.
When central banks create money and inject it into the banking system, they serve the
purposes of government by pushing those interest rates back down, thereby concealing the effects
of government borrowing.
But central banking does more than this. It essentially prints up the money and hands it
to the government, though not obviously so directly. First, the Federal Government is
able to sell its bonds at artificially high prices and correspondingly low interest rates
because the buyers of its debt know they can turn around and sell it to the Federal Reserve.
It's true that the Federal Government has to pay interest on the securities the Federal
Reserve owns, but at the end of the year, the Fed pays that money back to the Treasury
minus its trivial operating expenses.
Trivial in terms of the federal budget, anyway.
That takes care of the interest.
And in case you're thinking, well,
at least the federal government has to pay the principal,
it really doesn't.
The government can roll over its existing debt
when it comes due, issuing a new bond
to pay off the principal of the old one.
Through this process, a process that not coincidentally,
the general public is unlikely to know about or understand,
the federal government is in fact able
to do the equivalent of printing money and spending it.
While everyone else has to acquire resources
by spending money they earned in a productive enterprise,
in other words, they first have to produce something
for society and then they may consume,
governments may acquire resources
without first having produced anything.
Money creation via government monopoly,
this becomes another mechanism whereby
the exploitative relationship between government
and the public is perpetuated.
Now because the central bank allows the government to conceal the cost of everything it does,
it provides an incentive for government to engage in additional spending in all kinds
of areas, not just war.
But because war is enormously expensive, because the sacrifices that accompany it place such
a strain on the public, it is wartime expenditures for which the assistance of the central bank
is especially welcome.
The Federal Reserve System, which was established in late 1913 and opened its doors the following
year, was first put to the test during World War I. Unlike some countries, the U.S. did
not abandon the gold standard during the war, but it was not operating under a pure 100%
gold standard in any sense. The Fed could and did engage in credit expansion.
On Mises.org, we feature an article by John Paul Koning that takes the reader through
were the exact process by which the Fed carried out its monetary inflation in those early years.
In brief, the Fed essentially created money and used it to buy war bonds, to add war bonds to its balance sheet.
Benjamin Anderson, the austro-sympathetic economist that served at the time,
quote, the growth in virtually all of the items on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve system
since the United States entered the war has been very great indeed.
The Fed's accommodating role was not confined to the wartime itself. In America's Money Machine, Elgin Grossclose wrote,
Although the war was over in 1918 in a fighting sense, it was not over in a financial sense.
The Treasury still had enormous obligations to meet, which were eventually covered by a victory loan.
The main support in the market, again, was the Federal Reserve.
Monetary expansion was especially helpful to the US government during the Vietnam War.
and some more.
Lyndon Johnson could have both his great society programs and his overseas war, and the strain
on the public was kept, at first at least, within manageable limits.
So confident had the Keynesian economic planners become, that by 1970 Arthur Oaken, one of
the decade's key presidential advisors on the economy, was noting in a published retrospective
that wise economic management seemed to have done away with the business cycle.
But reality could not be evaded forever, and the apparently strong war economy of the 1960s
gave way to the stagnation of the 1970s.
There is a law of the universe, according to which every time the public is promised
that the boom-bust business cycle has been banished forever, a bust is right around the
corner.
The month after Oaken's rosy book was published, the recession began.
The stock market has paid a steep cost for the inflation of the 1960s.
The loss of life resulting from the war itself was the most gruesome and horrific of these
costs, but the economic devastation cannot be ignored.
As many of us well remember, years of unemployment and high inflation plagued the U.S. economy.
The stock market fared even worse.
Mark Thornton points out that, quote, in May 1970, a portfolio consisting of one share
of every stock listed on the big board was worth just about half of what it would have
been worth at the start of 1969.
The high flyers that had led the market of 1967 and 1968, conglomerates, computer leasers,
far-out electronics, franchisers, were precipitously down from their peaks.
Nor were they down 25 percent like the Dow, but 80, 90 or even 95 percent.
The Dow index, continues Dr. Thornton, shows that stocks tended to trade in a wide channel
for much of the period between 1965 and 1984. However, if you adjust the value of the stocks
by price inflation as measured by the consumer price index, a clearer and more disturbing
picture emerges. The inflation adjusted, a real purchasing power of the Dow indicates
that it lost nearly 80% of its peak value. And for all the talk of the Fed's alleged
Independence, it is not even possible to imagine the Fed maintaining a tight money stance when
the regime demands stimulus or when the troops are in the field. It has been more than accommodating
during the so-called war on terror. Consider the amount of debt purchased every year by
the Fed and compare it to that year's war expenditures and you will get a sense of the
Fed's enabling role. Now, while it's true that a gold standard restrains government,
It is also true that governments have had little difficulty finding pretexts, or chief
among them, to abandon the gold standard.
For that reason, the gold standard in and of itself is not a sufficient restraint on
the government's ambitions at home and abroad.
As we look to the future, we must cast aside all timidity in our proposals for monetary
reform.
We do not seek a gold exchange standard as existed under Bretton Woods.
We do not seek to use the price of gold as a calibration device to assist the monetary
authority in its decisions on how much money to create.
We do not seek even the restoration of the classical gold standard, great though its
merits are.
In the 1830s, as Tom Woods pointed out, the hard-money Jacksonians coined the marvelous
phrase separation of bank and state.
That would be a start.
But what we need today is the separation of money and state.
There are some ways in which money is unique among goods.
For one thing, money is valued not for its own sake, but for its use in exchange.
For another, money is not consumed, but rather is handed on from person to person.
And all other goods in the economy have their prices expressed in terms of this good.
But there is nothing about money, or indeed anything else, that should make us think its
Its production must be carried out by the government or its designated monopoly grantee.
Money constitutes one half of every non-barter market transaction.
People who believe in the market economy and yet who are prepared to hand over to the state
the custodianship of this most crucial good ought to think again.
Interventionists sometimes claim that a particular good is just too important to be left to the
market.
The standard free market reply turns this argument around.
The more important a commodity is, the more essential it is for the government not to
produce it, and to leave its production instead to the market.
Nowhere is this more true than in the case of money.
As Ludwig von Mises once said, the history of money is the history of government efforts
to destroy money.
Government control of money has yielded monetary debasement, the impoverishment of society
Relative to the State, Devastating Business Cycles, Financial Bubbles, Capital Consumption
because of Falsified Profit and Loss Accounting, Moral Hazard, and most remain to this topic
today, the expropriation of the public in ways that they are unlikely to understand.
It is this silent expropriation that has made possible some of the state's greatest
enormities, including all its wars, and it is all these offenses combined that constitute
a Compelling Popular Brief Against the Current System and in Favor of a Market Substitute.
The war machine and the money machine, in short, are intimately linked. It is vain to
denounce the moral grotesqueries of the U.S. Empire without at the same time taking aim
at the indispensable support that makes it all possible. If we wish to oppose the state
and all its manifestations, its imperial adventures, its domestic subsidies, its unstoppable spending
and debt accumulation. We must point to their source, the central bank, the mechanism that
the state and its kept media and economists will defend to their dying days. The state
has persuaded the people that its own interests are identical with theirs. It seeks to promote
Without their welfare, its wars are their wars. It is the great benefactor, and the
people are to be content in their roles as its contented subjects.
Ours is a different view. The state's relationship with the people is not benign. It is not one
of magnanimous giver and grateful recipient. It is an exploitative relationship, whereby
an array of self-perpetuating fiefdoms that produce nothing live at the expense of the
The Toiling Majority
Its wars do not protect the public, they fleece it.
Its subsidies do not promote the common good, they undermine it.
Why should we expect the production of money to be an exception to this general pattern?
As F.A. Hayek said, it is not reasonable to think that the state has any interest in giving
us a quote, good money.
What the state wants is to produce the money or have a privileged position vis-a-vis the
is the source of the money so that it can dispose largesse on its favored constituencies.
We should not be anxious to accommodate this.
The state does not compromise and neither should we.
In the struggle of liberty against power, few enough will oppose the state in the conventional
wisdom it urges us to adopt.
Fewer still will reject the state and its programs, root and branch.
We must be those few, as we work towards a future in which we are the many.
This is our mission today, as it has been the mission of the Mises Institute for the
past 30 years.
With your support, we shall at this critical moment carry on publishing our books and periodicals,
encouraging research and promotion of the Austrian School both in the profession and
with the general public, and continue the training of tomorrow's champions of the economics
of freedom.