Counter-Economics: From the Back Alleys to the Stars by Samuel Edward Konkin III

Author:Samuel Edward Konkin III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: libertarianism, economics, soviet union, drug dealers, free market, hyperinflation, underground economy, agorism, black markets, countereconomics
Publisher: KoPubCo Publishing Division of the Triplanetary Corporation

Chapter Five:

Inflation Counter-Economics

Inflation: The Great Counter-Economizer

Inflation connects and interacts with all of Counter-Economics from taxes to drugs (as we have just seen and will see more of presently) and beyond. Its effects, and the recent attempts to comprehend its nature and workings, have been a great radicalizer of North Americans. Europeans of East and West and Third Worlders have been as much if not more affected by inflation, and taken counter-economic measures against it (most spectacularly in Poland and the most inflationary Latin American countries) but consciousness-raising there has not matched that of North America, where an entire genre of non-fiction books emerged in the early nineteen-seventies predicting further, more catastrophic inflation, advising measures to be taken against economic ruin (mostly practical measures for individuals and families) and, most spectacularly, anticipating correctly the surge in gold price.

Inflation touches — or contaminates — so much of economics (and counter–economics) because money is involved in most transactions in a developed economy. The exceptions are easily listed: “psychic” profit of emotional gain and barter. But even many things — if not most — done for love involve costs in goods and services, and “above-ground” bartering is far more expensive than the equivalent market transaction with some form of money. (Counter-economic bartering is another concept entirely, as will soon be shown.)1

The shock of sudden awareness of an inflation victim who discovers what money is and how his or her government manipulates it compares closely to that of a comfortable patriot facing a draft notice and discovering that this war is meaningless. Or the shock of a conservative businessman finding out that the taxes which will destroy him not only were justified by his beloved Constitution but that the Federalist government first organized under the Constitution promptly crushed the Pennsylvania Whisky Tax rebels.

Yet war and taxes are often lightly felt by some victims and harshly by others. Inflation is the great counter-economizer: it plunders all without favor — though, it should be stressed, that plunder goes somewhere to someone. Widows, orphans, the handicapped, and the devout religious retreatists are exempt from war and taxes — but not inflation.

The very study of Counter-Economics and its development by this author began with the great Gold Bug Wave of 1972-73. Harry Browne in particular, along with Harry Schultz, and later Douglas Casey and John Pugsley and many others, took a long step from the old free-enterprise economic movement largely identified with the political Right. Where these anti-inflation activists departed from conservatives was by advocating and demonstrating where individuals could take concrete actions to opt out of the general economy and protect themselves. Conservative free-enterprisers continued to urge support of a different government which would roll back the State through any of the political parties: Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians; even the leftist Peace and Freedom Party was considered as the vehicle for a time (1974).

Harry Browne took yet another step beyond the How You Can Prosper From The Coming Collapse genre with his How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World.

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