Free Prices Now! by Hunter Lewis

Author:Hunter Lewis [Lewis, Hunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9887267-1-0
Publisher: Axios Press
Published: 2013-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

24

Who Should Run the Economy?

In Chapter 22, Llewellyn Rockwell suggested that “we the people” should run the money system through our own consumer choices. Money is a product, like any other, and a government monopoly of it just produces corruption, debased money, and irreparable injury to the free price system.

The counter-argument, that government knows best, is thousands of years old. Ancient Chinese annals tell us that the Han Dynasty emperor Wu-di (155–87 bce) decided that government must control the economy, and castrated his advisor Sima Qian for daring to dispute his view. Although Wu-di said that he was setting up monopolies granted by the state in salt, iron, and other basic commodities in order to protect the common people from greedy merchants, his monopolies really just made a few merchants colossally rich, and ensured a steady stream of kickbacks from them to court officials and to the Emperor himself.

In similar fashion, the middle and later Roman emperors granted monopolies, instituted price controls punishable by death, debased the currency by stripping precious metals from coins, exacted ever harsher taxation, and reaped a whirlwind of corruption and economic collapse. As economist Jesus Huerta de Soto has written:

Roman civilization did not fall as a result of the barbarian invasions.

It undermined itself from within through its own economic policies, although serious plagues also played a part in decimating and demoralizing the population.142

Economist John Maynard Keynes updated Wu-di and the Roman emperors by suggesting that the 20th century state would decide economic issues based on

long views, . . . the . . . general social advantage[,] and . . . collective wisdom.143

He concluded that

state planning, . . . intelligence and deliberation at the center must supersede the . . . disorder [of the past].144

It is notable that Keynes was not entirely consistent about this advice. He insisted that the future was unknowable, but seemed to forget this when extolling the “long views” of state planners. He also acknowledged the “muddle” that poor state policy choices had on occasion produced,145 and even at one point referred to politicians as “utter boobies,” thereby anticipating humorist P. J. O’Rourke’s remark that

bringing the government in to run Wall Street is like saying, “Dad burned dinner, let’s get the dog to cook.”146

It is likely that Keynes did not exactly mean what he said. He was not espousing economic leadership by elected officials. He acknowledged that they were chosen by

the vast mass of more or less [economically] illiterate voters,147

and might be equally “illiterate.” What he really wanted was control by state appointed experts, especially one expert—himself.

Other experts might do in a pinch, but Keynes further admitted that

some of those representing themselves as such seem to me to talk much greater rubbish than an ordinary man could ever be capable of.148

Experts might talk “rubbish”; they might give way to emotion; they might even prove to be dishonest. Keynes acknowledged this. But it did not prevent him from wanting to put the control of all money under a single world organization, run by

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