"And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy..."---Plato, "The Republic," c.350 B.C.
The following are just some thoughts related to a question---is democracy (the word comes from Greek words meaning "rule by the people") the best political order that can exist?
The democratic idea of the government as representative of the people fosters the attitude in the public mind that the government and the country are essentially one---and it is this idea that dulls resistance to war, for if you don't support the war it is taken to mean you therefore seemingly don't support your country! Speaking of war, horrible wars have been fought in modern times specifically (we are told) to further the cause of democracy in this world.
The democratic idea lends an aura of legitimacy to any action of government once it is sold as "the will of the people." So if a clear majority wanted to have the wealth of a minority confiscated, this violation of rights would be considered legitimate with those under the spell of democracy! Democracy seems inherently to steer people's minds away from prioritizing individual rights. If "the people" have spoken or a "common good" rationale is given by those supposedly representing the public, then any power the government is capable of possessing seems warranted. Conceivably, "enemies of the people" might even be executed.
The holy sacrament of the democratic religion is the vote. Most citizens in the democracy feel they have done their duty in participating by simply voting for either candidate A or B, or this or that measure. If they wanted candidate B, but got A, or a measure passed they did not want, they are relatively resigned about it. They did, after all, confer legitimacy to candidate A (for example) ---even though they wanted candidate B--- simply by the act of voting. Little thought is given as to why no candidate C was presented as a viable option.
Any candidate or party seeking a plurality of votes is naturally going to have a tendency to appeal to the lowest common denominator of public intelligence and/or those who are most susceptible of what amounts to bribery in the form of receiving redistributed wealth via government. Exceptionally intelligent people or especially productive people are minorities generally speaking, therefore, they tend to make up a smaller overrall vote count. Consider the ramifications on policy of this.
The ancient Sumerian cuneiform symbol "ama-gi" is sometimes held to be the first written reference to the concept of liberty.
Friday, March 30, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Imperialism, Corruption, and What "They" Didn't Want You To Read?
Professor Carroll Quigley, a Professor of History at the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University who formerly taught at Princeton and Harvard and was an influence on future president Bill Clinton, was the author of "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time"(1966)---a book of history focusing on economics. A huge tome totaling about 1,300 pages with chapter titles such as "Finance, Commercial Policy, and Business Activity, 1897-1947," it was doubtless considered a dry read from the standpoint of the average Joe---yet incredible revelations are to be found here and there, nestled within.
Tragedy and Hope was in fact withdrawn by its original New York publisher after attention was drawn to it by the likes of the John Birch Society, according to G. Edward Griffin in The Creature From Jekyll Island, but by then there was an edition put out by a California publisher and the "cat was out of the bag" so to speak. Now the book may be purchased through amazon.com, where I got my copy.
ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS---COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
If you add many of the biggest revelations with which we are here concerned together, the following is what you get "in a nutshell" so to speak:
A secret society with the aim of maintaining and expanding the British Empire was founded in England at the end of the 19th century by Cecil Rhodes---one of the wealthiest men in the world. This secret society extended branches into all countries of the British Commonwealth and the United States. These national branches, or "Round Table groups," themselves had "front groups" called Royal Institutes of International Affairs---but in America called the Council on Foreign Relations (which became quite powerful). In short, the existence of a sort of transnational imperial system is implied.
To assure us he's qualified to write on this, Dr. Quigley states:
"I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." (p. 950)
So we see that the author of "Tragedy and Hope" regards himself as an "insider"---he considers himself to be on the side of the "network" he writes about---but he breaks with them on the issue of secrecy.
In Quigley's words:
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. (p. 950)
The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups organized... on behalf of Lord Milner, the dominant Trustee of the Rhodes Trust.... The original purpose of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes...and William T. Stead...and the money for the organizational work came originally from the Rhodes trust. By 1915 Round Table Groups existed in seven countries, including England...(and) in the United States....Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals, and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially... organizations associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell, and Company. (950-951)
At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended.... Lionel Curtis... established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group... This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan 'experts'... who had gone to the Paris Peace Conference and there became close friends with the similar group of English 'experts' which had been recruited by the Milner group. In fact, the original plans for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations were drawn up at Paris. The Council of the RIIA ... and the board of the Council on Foreign Relations have carried ever since the marks of their origin. (951-952)
INTERNATIONAL BANKERS, THE FEDERAL RESERVE
The reference in the middle quote above to the "international banking fraternity" and the close relationship that it developed with the Round Table Groups is particularly interesting. There is discussion in Tragedy and Hope concerning the international bankers, from which I will now quote.
The following is quoted from his discussion of Britain's ability to dominate much of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries being partly due to the ability of its government to essentially draw on money created from nothing:
Credit had been known to the Italians and Netherlanders long before it became one of the instruments of English world supremacy. Nevertheless, the founding of the Bank of England by William Paterson and his friends in 1694 is one of the great dates in world history. For generations, men had sought to avoid the one drawback of gold, its heaviness, by using pieces of paper to represent specific pieces of gold. Today, we call such pieces of paper gold certificates which entitles its bearer to exchange it for its piece of gold on demand, but in view of the convenience of paper, only a small fraction of certificate holders ever did make such demands. It early became clear that gold need be held on hand only to the amount needed to cover the fraction of certificates likely to be presented for payment; accordingly, the rest of the gold could be used for business purposes, or, what amounts to the same thing, a volume of certificates could be issued greater than the volume of gold reserved for payment of demands against them. Such an excess volume of paper claims against reserves we now call bank notes.
In effect, this creation of paper claims greater than the reserves available means that bankers were creating money out of nothing. The same thing could be done in another way, not by note issuing banks but by deposit banks. Deposit bankers discovered that orders and checks drawn against deposits by depositors and given to third persons were often not cashed by the latter but were deposited to their own accounts. Thus there were no actual movements of funds,
and payments were made simply by bookkeeping transactions on the accounts. Accordingly, it was necessary for the banker to keep on hand in actual money (gold, certificates and notes) no more than the fraction of deposits likely to be drawn upon and cashed; the rest could be used for loans and if these loans were made by creating a deposit for the borrower, who in turn would draw checks upon it rather than withdraw it in money, such "created deposits" or loans could also be covered adequately by retaining reserves to only a fraction of their value. Such created deposits also were a creation of money out of nothing, although bankers usually refused to express their actions, either note issuing or deposit lending, in these terms. William Paterson, on obtaining the charter of the Bank of England, said "the Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys it creates out of nothing." This was repeated by Sir Edward Holden, founder of the Midland Bank, on December 18, 1907, and is, of course, generally admitted today. (p.48-49)
Moving into the 19th and 20th centuries, Quigley notes the formation of---
... a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that [financial institutions] were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) of Frankfort.... Rothschild's five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled. (p.51).
Much later in the book is this interesting quote:
... the powers of financial capitalism had (a) far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences....
Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. (p. 324)
The central bank of the United States, as mentioned in the quote, is called the Federal Reserve. Murray N. Rothbard, writing in Wall Street, Banks, And American Foreign Policy, notes the significance of how the founding of the Federal Reserve System came just a short time before America's involvement in a major military conflict, World War I:
"The massive U.S. loans to the Allies, and the subsequent American entry into the war, could not have been financed by the relatively hard-money, gold standard system that existed before 1914. Fortuitously, an institution was established at the end of 1913 that made the loans and war finance possible: the Federal Reserve System. By centralizing reserves, by providing a government-privileged lender of last resort to the banks, the Fed enabled the banking system to inflate money and credit, finance loans to the Allies, and float massive deficits once the U.S. entered the war. In addition, the seemingly odd Fed policy of creating an acceptance market out of thin air by standing ready to purchase acceptance at a subsidized rate, enabled the Fed to rediscount acceptance on munitions exports." (p.25 of 2011 edition)
POLITICAL MANIPULATION
I cannot leave this discussion of Tragedy and Hope without reference to Quigley's explanation concerning the function of our electoral process:
"The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy" (p.1247-1248, emphasis added).
According to Quigley, Wall Street long ago took to supporting both "right" and "left."
To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow and other partners were allied with the Republicans; Russell C. Lewffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left. (945)
The Lamont family was
sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations including the Communist Party itself. (945)
This notion of the control of our political system is echoed and connected to the above-mentioned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), albeit non-approvingly, by Senator Barry Goldwater in his book With No Apologies, pp. 277-78 where he asserts it as an actuality:
"When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945, three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four Democrats have held this most powerful post for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable change in foreign or domestic policy direction. When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller's protege, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller's protege."
This same sort of manipulation in the political sphere also seems to operate in the international field as well, according to the research of the late Antony C. Sutton, former fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sutton authored a three-volume study of the links of Wall Street to the twentieth-century rise of particular state socialistic regimes: Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution (1974), Wall Street and FDR (1975), and Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler (1976). Note that the Soviet Communists of Russia that came to power in the Bolshevik revolution and Hitler's Nazis are supposed to be ideological opposites.
This definitely does not address all the significant things that can be said about Quigley's book, but I think it may show why such a book may have faced the threat of suppression.
W. Cleon Skousen, in his 1970 review and commentary on Quigley's book, wrote:
"As I see it, the great contribution which Dr. Carroll Quigley unintentionally made by writing Tragedy And Hope was to help the ordinary American realize the utter contempt which the network leaders have for ordinary people. Human beings are treated en masse as helpless puppets on an international chess board where giants of economic and political power subject them to wars, revolution, civil strife, confiscation, subversion, indoctrination, manipulation and outright deception as it suits their fancy and their concocted schemes for world domination.
But, as we have previously mentioned, this MASS of world humanity is precisely the source of latent power which terrifies the Establishment. There is the constant fear that the masses might awaken and frustrate their gigantic schemes, particularly where they have acquired an education and accumulated a little property (which gives them a highly significant degree of independence).
That is what has happened to the mass of humanity in America. They now constitute the great and overwhelming majority of the people, called the middle class. And Dr. Quigley, as we have already seen, leaves no doubt as to the menace which middle-class Americans are believed to represent insofar as the Establishment is concerned.
It was once the great American dream to make as many people as possible a part of the great middle class because it was recognized to be the backbone of our society and the most important segment of the population in maintaining a progressive, self-governing, secure, and freedom-loving people. But, obviously, if you are trying to set up a virtual dictatorship, this group is an enemy. This group will resist a dictatorship. At least, it will do so if it knows what is happening.
So this is the fact of life which the super-rich collectivists of the Establishment face today. Everything they do must be accomplished in an atmosphere of propaganda and deception. Otherwise they keep running into a groundswell of resentment and resistance as they try to compel middle class Americans to give up their independence, their property, and their constitutional prerogatives." (W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist, 1970, pgs. 112, 113).
Tragedy and Hope was in fact withdrawn by its original New York publisher after attention was drawn to it by the likes of the John Birch Society, according to G. Edward Griffin in The Creature From Jekyll Island, but by then there was an edition put out by a California publisher and the "cat was out of the bag" so to speak. Now the book may be purchased through amazon.com, where I got my copy.
ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS---COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
If you add many of the biggest revelations with which we are here concerned together, the following is what you get "in a nutshell" so to speak:
A secret society with the aim of maintaining and expanding the British Empire was founded in England at the end of the 19th century by Cecil Rhodes---one of the wealthiest men in the world. This secret society extended branches into all countries of the British Commonwealth and the United States. These national branches, or "Round Table groups," themselves had "front groups" called Royal Institutes of International Affairs---but in America called the Council on Foreign Relations (which became quite powerful). In short, the existence of a sort of transnational imperial system is implied.
To assure us he's qualified to write on this, Dr. Quigley states:
"I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known." (p. 950)
So we see that the author of "Tragedy and Hope" regards himself as an "insider"---he considers himself to be on the side of the "network" he writes about---but he breaks with them on the issue of secrecy.
In Quigley's words:
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. (p. 950)
The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups organized... on behalf of Lord Milner, the dominant Trustee of the Rhodes Trust.... The original purpose of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes...and William T. Stead...and the money for the organizational work came originally from the Rhodes trust. By 1915 Round Table Groups existed in seven countries, including England...(and) in the United States....Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals, and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially... organizations associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell, and Company. (950-951)
At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended.... Lionel Curtis... established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group... This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group. In New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J.P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan 'experts'... who had gone to the Paris Peace Conference and there became close friends with the similar group of English 'experts' which had been recruited by the Milner group. In fact, the original plans for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Council on Foreign Relations were drawn up at Paris. The Council of the RIIA ... and the board of the Council on Foreign Relations have carried ever since the marks of their origin. (951-952)
INTERNATIONAL BANKERS, THE FEDERAL RESERVE
The reference in the middle quote above to the "international banking fraternity" and the close relationship that it developed with the Round Table Groups is particularly interesting. There is discussion in Tragedy and Hope concerning the international bankers, from which I will now quote.
The following is quoted from his discussion of Britain's ability to dominate much of the world in the 18th and 19th centuries being partly due to the ability of its government to essentially draw on money created from nothing:
Credit had been known to the Italians and Netherlanders long before it became one of the instruments of English world supremacy. Nevertheless, the founding of the Bank of England by William Paterson and his friends in 1694 is one of the great dates in world history. For generations, men had sought to avoid the one drawback of gold, its heaviness, by using pieces of paper to represent specific pieces of gold. Today, we call such pieces of paper gold certificates which entitles its bearer to exchange it for its piece of gold on demand, but in view of the convenience of paper, only a small fraction of certificate holders ever did make such demands. It early became clear that gold need be held on hand only to the amount needed to cover the fraction of certificates likely to be presented for payment; accordingly, the rest of the gold could be used for business purposes, or, what amounts to the same thing, a volume of certificates could be issued greater than the volume of gold reserved for payment of demands against them. Such an excess volume of paper claims against reserves we now call bank notes.
In effect, this creation of paper claims greater than the reserves available means that bankers were creating money out of nothing. The same thing could be done in another way, not by note issuing banks but by deposit banks. Deposit bankers discovered that orders and checks drawn against deposits by depositors and given to third persons were often not cashed by the latter but were deposited to their own accounts. Thus there were no actual movements of funds,
and payments were made simply by bookkeeping transactions on the accounts. Accordingly, it was necessary for the banker to keep on hand in actual money (gold, certificates and notes) no more than the fraction of deposits likely to be drawn upon and cashed; the rest could be used for loans and if these loans were made by creating a deposit for the borrower, who in turn would draw checks upon it rather than withdraw it in money, such "created deposits" or loans could also be covered adequately by retaining reserves to only a fraction of their value. Such created deposits also were a creation of money out of nothing, although bankers usually refused to express their actions, either note issuing or deposit lending, in these terms. William Paterson, on obtaining the charter of the Bank of England, said "the Bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys it creates out of nothing." This was repeated by Sir Edward Holden, founder of the Midland Bank, on December 18, 1907, and is, of course, generally admitted today. (p.48-49)
Moving into the 19th and 20th centuries, Quigley notes the formation of---
... a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that [financial institutions] were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) of Frankfort.... Rothschild's five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled. (p.51).
Much later in the book is this interesting quote:
... the powers of financial capitalism had (a) far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences....
Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world. (p. 324)
The central bank of the United States, as mentioned in the quote, is called the Federal Reserve. Murray N. Rothbard, writing in Wall Street, Banks, And American Foreign Policy, notes the significance of how the founding of the Federal Reserve System came just a short time before America's involvement in a major military conflict, World War I:
"The massive U.S. loans to the Allies, and the subsequent American entry into the war, could not have been financed by the relatively hard-money, gold standard system that existed before 1914. Fortuitously, an institution was established at the end of 1913 that made the loans and war finance possible: the Federal Reserve System. By centralizing reserves, by providing a government-privileged lender of last resort to the banks, the Fed enabled the banking system to inflate money and credit, finance loans to the Allies, and float massive deficits once the U.S. entered the war. In addition, the seemingly odd Fed policy of creating an acceptance market out of thin air by standing ready to purchase acceptance at a subsidized rate, enabled the Fed to rediscount acceptance on munitions exports." (p.25 of 2011 edition)
POLITICAL MANIPULATION
I cannot leave this discussion of Tragedy and Hope without reference to Quigley's explanation concerning the function of our electoral process:
"The chief problem of American political life for a long time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international. The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy" (p.1247-1248, emphasis added).
According to Quigley, Wall Street long ago took to supporting both "right" and "left."
To Morgan all political parties were simply organizations to be used, and the firm always was careful to keep a foot in all camps. Morgan himself, Dwight Morrow and other partners were allied with the Republicans; Russell C. Lewffingwell was allied with the Democrats; Grayson Murphy was allied with the extreme Right; and Thomas W. Lamont was allied with the Left. (945)
The Lamont family was
sponsors and financial angels to almost a score of extreme Left organizations including the Communist Party itself. (945)
This notion of the control of our political system is echoed and connected to the above-mentioned Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), albeit non-approvingly, by Senator Barry Goldwater in his book With No Apologies, pp. 277-78 where he asserts it as an actuality:
"When we change presidents, it is understood to mean that the voters are ordering a change in national policy. Since 1945, three different Republicans have occupied the White House for 16 years, and four Democrats have held this most powerful post for 17 years. With the exception of the first seven years of the Eisenhower administration, there has been no appreciable change in foreign or domestic policy direction. When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller's protege, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller's protege."
This same sort of manipulation in the political sphere also seems to operate in the international field as well, according to the research of the late Antony C. Sutton, former fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sutton authored a three-volume study of the links of Wall Street to the twentieth-century rise of particular state socialistic regimes: Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution (1974), Wall Street and FDR (1975), and Wall Street and The Rise of Hitler (1976). Note that the Soviet Communists of Russia that came to power in the Bolshevik revolution and Hitler's Nazis are supposed to be ideological opposites.
This definitely does not address all the significant things that can be said about Quigley's book, but I think it may show why such a book may have faced the threat of suppression.
W. Cleon Skousen, in his 1970 review and commentary on Quigley's book, wrote:
"As I see it, the great contribution which Dr. Carroll Quigley unintentionally made by writing Tragedy And Hope was to help the ordinary American realize the utter contempt which the network leaders have for ordinary people. Human beings are treated en masse as helpless puppets on an international chess board where giants of economic and political power subject them to wars, revolution, civil strife, confiscation, subversion, indoctrination, manipulation and outright deception as it suits their fancy and their concocted schemes for world domination.
But, as we have previously mentioned, this MASS of world humanity is precisely the source of latent power which terrifies the Establishment. There is the constant fear that the masses might awaken and frustrate their gigantic schemes, particularly where they have acquired an education and accumulated a little property (which gives them a highly significant degree of independence).
That is what has happened to the mass of humanity in America. They now constitute the great and overwhelming majority of the people, called the middle class. And Dr. Quigley, as we have already seen, leaves no doubt as to the menace which middle-class Americans are believed to represent insofar as the Establishment is concerned.
It was once the great American dream to make as many people as possible a part of the great middle class because it was recognized to be the backbone of our society and the most important segment of the population in maintaining a progressive, self-governing, secure, and freedom-loving people. But, obviously, if you are trying to set up a virtual dictatorship, this group is an enemy. This group will resist a dictatorship. At least, it will do so if it knows what is happening.
So this is the fact of life which the super-rich collectivists of the Establishment face today. Everything they do must be accomplished in an atmosphere of propaganda and deception. Otherwise they keep running into a groundswell of resentment and resistance as they try to compel middle class Americans to give up their independence, their property, and their constitutional prerogatives." (W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist, 1970, pgs. 112, 113).
How You're Getting Screwed, In Plain English
This piece is about the monetary system, how it benefits the ruling class and how it adversely affects YOU.
I am deeply indebted to various popular treatments of the subject matter at hand written from the perspective of what is called the Austrian school of economics, books by such writers as Murray Rothbard, Thomas E. Woods, Peter Schiff, Henry Hazlitt, and Ron Paul. Anyone wanting deeper insight is invited to read books by these authors, and I quote directly from two such books here, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas Woods, and the classic What Has Government Done To Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard.
MONEY
First off, what exactly is money? Money is a medium of exchange for transactions in an economy. Direct exchange is barter. The limits of barter aren’t too hard to imagine. Suppose you had eggs and wanted a set of clothes: you would have to find somebody who had a set of clothes to trade who also happened to want your eggs at the same time you wanted their clothes (if your expertise was a teacher of Spanish and you wanted some eggs…). What if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread but all you owned was a mansion? Clearly direct exchange, which is barter, has limits that make it impossible as a basis of a more complex economy.
So here we come to a money economy, an economy of indirect exchange. Someone could sell their eggs (or clothes, or Spanish lessons, etc.) for whatever is functioning as money and then exchange that money for the good or service that they desire. From the starting point in a primitive barter system, it was realized at some point in time that if someone dissatisfied with barter could trade their particular good for another that was more widely desired, they could then more likely exchange that second good for whatever others might offer to them. And the more that this more widely desired good was used for exchange, the more it was desired simply for the purpose of exchange. So we have the evolution of money. Everything from cattle to beads to tobacco has been used as money. In many societies, such as those of Europe, precious metals (gold, silver) evolved as the predominant forms of money.
The utility of money lies in its exchange value, or “purchasing power.” Even though if asked if they want more money many people will unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative, what they really want rather than more units of money is more effective units, to have their money buy more.
If there is an increase in the supply of a good other than money, the price of that good gets lower, and society as a whole benefits. An increase in the supply of money also lowers its “price” (purchasing power of the money-unit), but does not benefit society. If we assume no increase in the total goods and services of society, an increase in the supply of money just means you have more money-units chasing the same goods and services.
As can be understood from the above, government had nothing to do with the origin of money. For one thing, how would some government of the distant past have been able to determine the value of money in terms of all other goods? Yet nowadays many people might assume money came about through government decree. This is because in our present society, we have the situation where government has taken over money.
The incentives for government to be involved with the creation of money are not too difficult to see. After all, government does not gain money through selling services on the free market---it takes it from the people by threat of force, what we call taxation. With increased government spending tends to come increased government power, as well as benefits to those well-connected to government. However, there has generally been a limit on how far taxation can increase---revolutions have been precipitated when the burden is felt too heavily. The creation of money out of thin air by government therefore represents a natural development in the elite’s quest for power and wealth.
In a nutshell, our monetary system developed as follows. At some point in our history paper notes issued by banks that could be redeemed for a given weight of the commodity money (gold) began to circulate as a convenient substitute for carrying precious metal coins. In the modern era, government confiscated the commodity to which the paper notes entitled their holders, and thereby left the people with paper money that is redeemable into nothing (in America this occurred in 1933). This is called fiat money. The creation of fiat money does not have the physical limitations that would be involved in creating additional gold.
It is known that after national governments originally gained control of their nation’s commodity money currencies (for the public good, of course!), the rulers were then able to loot the population by clipping the coins and inserting some amount of non-precious metal into previously pure coins and pocketing the difference (known as debasing the currency). Economic historians can cite various examples of this happening in history.
INFLATION
Freed from the constraint of gold, our government was thus given the ability to substantially increase the money supply. Inflation is defined as an increase in the amount of money in circulation not backed by the monetary commodity, or in the case of a fiat standard as we have now, simply an increase in the amount of paper money in circulation. If done by anyone but government, this would be called counterfeiting.
But the banking system and government joined together long ago to reap the mutual benefits of inflation. The original function of a bank was simply as a warehouse for money, as it did not always seem safe or practical to carry precious metals on your person. In depositing their silver or gold, a customer would receive a warehouse receipt. If the warehouse keeper was trusted, this receipt (or bank note) could be treated as though it were itself money, making purchases more convenient. However, the warehouse keeper eventually realized that only a small fraction of the store of money in his safekeeping was ever redeemed, as people trusted his paper notes. Therefore, confident the scam will not be uncovered, he loaned out more and more of the contents of the vault as interest-earning loans. What ends up happening in such a scenario is you end up with more warehouse receipts than units of gold or silver in the vault, thus adding to the effective money supply. Banks in the U.S. have been required to keep a certain minimum ratio of reserves to their total deposit liabilities. This inflationary practice is called “fractional reserve banking” and has come to be protected by government.
If you look at the piece of paper we call a “dollar,” you will see it says at the top “Federal Reserve Note.” This means this money-unit is a note issued by our central bank, the Federal Reserve. Central banking was the latest big development in the creation of an inflationary system for the benefit of government.
America adopted its central bank---the Federal Reserve System (hereafter, called “the Fed“ for short)---in 1913. It has a governmentally-granted monopoly of the issuance of notes. Banks have to go to the Fed to get notes for their customers. A central bank like the Fed can stimulate inflation by pouring reserves into the banking system, and also by lowering the reserve ratio, thus permitting a nationwide bank credit-expansion.
Economic historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr. explains further in his book, Meltdown:
“The Federal Reserve controls the American money supply and can influence interest rates either upward or downward; it can also function as a ‘lender of last resort.’ Although people use the phrase ‘printing money’ as a kind of shorthand for what the Fed does, the Fed increases the money supply not by printing cash and putting it into circulation, but by what are called ‘open-market operations,’ which involve the purchase and sale of assets. Strictly speaking, the Fed can purchase any kind of asset it wants, but it normally purchases government bonds. If it wants to increase the money supply, it purchases, say, $1 billion in bonds from a bond dealer. It makes the purchase by writing a check on itself for $1 billion and handing it over to a firm like Goldman Sachs in exchange for the bonds. It creates this $1 billion out of thin air.
Goldman Sachs then deposits this $1 billion check from the Fed in its bank. That bank doesn’t put the $1 billion in a special vault with ‘Goldman’s Money’ on the door. Instead, the bank will lend out most of that $1 billion, since the law only requires it to keep a small percentage of its deposits on reserve. (Most of the bank’s reserves, incidentally, are kept in its own account at the Fed, with a small amount in cash in its vaults to satisfy normal day-to-day requests for cash by the bank’s depositors). When the bank, in turn, lends out the money, borrowers spend it, and it winds up in accounts in other banks, which use most of that money in still another round of expansion, and so on. With a reserve requirement of ten percent, the initial $1 billion will have supported $9 billion in additional lending by the time this process is complete. All of this $10 billion has been created out of nothing: the initial $1 billion check from the Fed, and the additional $9 billion in loans that fractional-reserve banking makes possible, were produced out of thin air. Should the Fed wish to contract credit, it follows this procedure in reverse: it sells bonds to the banks, and the money it receives for them---and the further increase in the money supply that the fractional reserve system then created on top of it---are withdrawn from the economy.” (pp.120-121)
As we explained early on, there is no social benefit resulting from an increase in the money supply. If we were to imagine inflation bringing more actual wealth to society we would be engaging in something like magical thinking. Money is not wealth, it is a medium of exchange. As we also described early on, an increase in the supply of money tends to raise prices (as measured in money-units), because the purchasing power of the money-unit lowers if we also assume no corresponding increase in the total goods and services of society.
It is not hard to see how detrimental this may be for someone on a fixed income, as prices for what they buy go up as their income stays the same. But taking a wider view, we can see that inflation acts as a kind of tax on the people. It has been called our most unfair tax. Thomas Woods explains:
“Consider this question: in what order and in what way does the new money make its way through the economy? When the government inflates the money supply, the new money does not reach everyone simultaneously and proportionately. It enters the economy at discrete points. The earliest recipients of the new money include politically favored constituencies of one kind or another: banks, for example, or firms with government contracts---in other words, wherever government spends money. These privileged parties receive the new money before inflation has pushed prices upwards. In effect the economy doesn’t yet know how much the money supply has increased, and prices have not yet adjusted accordingly. By the time the new money makes its way through the whole economy, prices will have risen throughout practically all sectors. But while this process is taking place, the privileged firms that are lucky enough to get the new money early benefit from being able to make their purchases at the previously existing price level---thereby silently looting those from whom they buy. When the average person gets his hands on this new money---through higher wages, say, or lower borrowing costs---prices have already been rising for quite a while, and he’s been paying those prices all this time on his existing income. The value of his money was diluted by the new money before it ever reached him.
Here is another way to think about it: Money in your possession is compensation for some good or service you have provided. When you buy a dozen apples, you do so with the proceeds from a good or service that you yourself provided in the past. So you are able to buy those apples because in the past you provided someone else with something he needed.
Now imagine a situation in which business firms or banks connected to the government receive a new influx of money courtesy of Fed credit expansion. That money comes out of thin air, not from the sale of some previous good or service. Thus when these favored firms spend this money, they are in effect taking goods out of the economy without providing anything themselves. Here we see very clearly how they benefit at the expense of the rest of society: they take from the stock of goods without giving anything in return. The money they pay for their goods didn’t originate in a good or service that they themselves had previously provided; it came from nowhere. The analogous case under a system of barter would be one in which, instead of trading my bread for your orange juice, I just take your orange juice.” (Meltdown, pp 122-123)
Thus the people are robbed, but it takes place invisibly. So the political function of inflation is not hard for us to see. Since the Fed began operations in 1914 following the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913, the American dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its value.
THE BOOM-BUST CYCLE
In trying to determine the cause of the economic boom-bust cycle, which is a general movement in business---in which suddenly many businesses that were doing just fine simultaneously experience losses---it makes sense to look at the common denominator of economic exchanges. That common denominator is money.
Economist Murray N. Rothbard, in his short and readable book, What Has Government Done To Our Money? brings the focus back to our enemy, inflation:
“A final indictment of inflation is that whenever the newly issued money is first used as loans to business, inflation causes the dread ‘business cycle.’ This silent but deadly process, undetected for generations, works as follows: new money is issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government, and loaned to business. To businessmen, the new funds seem to be genuine investments, but these funds do not, like free-market investments, arise from voluntary savings. The new money is invested by businessmen in various projects, and paid out to workers and other factors as higher wages and prices. As the new money filters down to the whole economy, the people tend to re-establish their old voluntary consumption/saving proportions. In short, if people want to save and invest about 20 percent of their incomes and consume the rest, new bank money loaned to business at first makes the saving proportion look higher. When the new money seeps down to the public, it re-establishes its old 20-80 proportion, and many investments are now revealed to be wasteful. Liquidation of the wasteful investments of the inflationary boom constitutes the depression phase of the business cycle.” (pp.55-56).
Rothbard elaborates this explanation more fully in his classic about the 1929 depression, “America’s Great Depression.” In this book he shows how the Austrian cycle theory of Ludwig von Mises accounts for why there is a sudden general cluster of business errors (generated by the distortions caused by credit expansion), why capital-goods industries fluctuate in the cycle more widely than do the consumer-goods industries (the capital goods sector takes advantage of the artificially low interest rates brought about through credit expansion to fund major and long-term projects), and why with every boom there is an increase in the quantity of money in the economy (63 percent inflation of the money supply during the 1920's).
It can be plainly seen that the boom-bust cycle does not originate with the free market.
I am deeply indebted to various popular treatments of the subject matter at hand written from the perspective of what is called the Austrian school of economics, books by such writers as Murray Rothbard, Thomas E. Woods, Peter Schiff, Henry Hazlitt, and Ron Paul. Anyone wanting deeper insight is invited to read books by these authors, and I quote directly from two such books here, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas Woods, and the classic What Has Government Done To Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard.
MONEY
First off, what exactly is money? Money is a medium of exchange for transactions in an economy. Direct exchange is barter. The limits of barter aren’t too hard to imagine. Suppose you had eggs and wanted a set of clothes: you would have to find somebody who had a set of clothes to trade who also happened to want your eggs at the same time you wanted their clothes (if your expertise was a teacher of Spanish and you wanted some eggs…). What if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread but all you owned was a mansion? Clearly direct exchange, which is barter, has limits that make it impossible as a basis of a more complex economy.
So here we come to a money economy, an economy of indirect exchange. Someone could sell their eggs (or clothes, or Spanish lessons, etc.) for whatever is functioning as money and then exchange that money for the good or service that they desire. From the starting point in a primitive barter system, it was realized at some point in time that if someone dissatisfied with barter could trade their particular good for another that was more widely desired, they could then more likely exchange that second good for whatever others might offer to them. And the more that this more widely desired good was used for exchange, the more it was desired simply for the purpose of exchange. So we have the evolution of money. Everything from cattle to beads to tobacco has been used as money. In many societies, such as those of Europe, precious metals (gold, silver) evolved as the predominant forms of money.
The utility of money lies in its exchange value, or “purchasing power.” Even though if asked if they want more money many people will unhesitatingly answer in the affirmative, what they really want rather than more units of money is more effective units, to have their money buy more.
If there is an increase in the supply of a good other than money, the price of that good gets lower, and society as a whole benefits. An increase in the supply of money also lowers its “price” (purchasing power of the money-unit), but does not benefit society. If we assume no increase in the total goods and services of society, an increase in the supply of money just means you have more money-units chasing the same goods and services.
As can be understood from the above, government had nothing to do with the origin of money. For one thing, how would some government of the distant past have been able to determine the value of money in terms of all other goods? Yet nowadays many people might assume money came about through government decree. This is because in our present society, we have the situation where government has taken over money.
The incentives for government to be involved with the creation of money are not too difficult to see. After all, government does not gain money through selling services on the free market---it takes it from the people by threat of force, what we call taxation. With increased government spending tends to come increased government power, as well as benefits to those well-connected to government. However, there has generally been a limit on how far taxation can increase---revolutions have been precipitated when the burden is felt too heavily. The creation of money out of thin air by government therefore represents a natural development in the elite’s quest for power and wealth.
In a nutshell, our monetary system developed as follows. At some point in our history paper notes issued by banks that could be redeemed for a given weight of the commodity money (gold) began to circulate as a convenient substitute for carrying precious metal coins. In the modern era, government confiscated the commodity to which the paper notes entitled their holders, and thereby left the people with paper money that is redeemable into nothing (in America this occurred in 1933). This is called fiat money. The creation of fiat money does not have the physical limitations that would be involved in creating additional gold.
It is known that after national governments originally gained control of their nation’s commodity money currencies (for the public good, of course!), the rulers were then able to loot the population by clipping the coins and inserting some amount of non-precious metal into previously pure coins and pocketing the difference (known as debasing the currency). Economic historians can cite various examples of this happening in history.
INFLATION
Freed from the constraint of gold, our government was thus given the ability to substantially increase the money supply. Inflation is defined as an increase in the amount of money in circulation not backed by the monetary commodity, or in the case of a fiat standard as we have now, simply an increase in the amount of paper money in circulation. If done by anyone but government, this would be called counterfeiting.
But the banking system and government joined together long ago to reap the mutual benefits of inflation. The original function of a bank was simply as a warehouse for money, as it did not always seem safe or practical to carry precious metals on your person. In depositing their silver or gold, a customer would receive a warehouse receipt. If the warehouse keeper was trusted, this receipt (or bank note) could be treated as though it were itself money, making purchases more convenient. However, the warehouse keeper eventually realized that only a small fraction of the store of money in his safekeeping was ever redeemed, as people trusted his paper notes. Therefore, confident the scam will not be uncovered, he loaned out more and more of the contents of the vault as interest-earning loans. What ends up happening in such a scenario is you end up with more warehouse receipts than units of gold or silver in the vault, thus adding to the effective money supply. Banks in the U.S. have been required to keep a certain minimum ratio of reserves to their total deposit liabilities. This inflationary practice is called “fractional reserve banking” and has come to be protected by government.
If you look at the piece of paper we call a “dollar,” you will see it says at the top “Federal Reserve Note.” This means this money-unit is a note issued by our central bank, the Federal Reserve. Central banking was the latest big development in the creation of an inflationary system for the benefit of government.
America adopted its central bank---the Federal Reserve System (hereafter, called “the Fed“ for short)---in 1913. It has a governmentally-granted monopoly of the issuance of notes. Banks have to go to the Fed to get notes for their customers. A central bank like the Fed can stimulate inflation by pouring reserves into the banking system, and also by lowering the reserve ratio, thus permitting a nationwide bank credit-expansion.
Economic historian Thomas E. Woods, Jr. explains further in his book, Meltdown:
“The Federal Reserve controls the American money supply and can influence interest rates either upward or downward; it can also function as a ‘lender of last resort.’ Although people use the phrase ‘printing money’ as a kind of shorthand for what the Fed does, the Fed increases the money supply not by printing cash and putting it into circulation, but by what are called ‘open-market operations,’ which involve the purchase and sale of assets. Strictly speaking, the Fed can purchase any kind of asset it wants, but it normally purchases government bonds. If it wants to increase the money supply, it purchases, say, $1 billion in bonds from a bond dealer. It makes the purchase by writing a check on itself for $1 billion and handing it over to a firm like Goldman Sachs in exchange for the bonds. It creates this $1 billion out of thin air.
Goldman Sachs then deposits this $1 billion check from the Fed in its bank. That bank doesn’t put the $1 billion in a special vault with ‘Goldman’s Money’ on the door. Instead, the bank will lend out most of that $1 billion, since the law only requires it to keep a small percentage of its deposits on reserve. (Most of the bank’s reserves, incidentally, are kept in its own account at the Fed, with a small amount in cash in its vaults to satisfy normal day-to-day requests for cash by the bank’s depositors). When the bank, in turn, lends out the money, borrowers spend it, and it winds up in accounts in other banks, which use most of that money in still another round of expansion, and so on. With a reserve requirement of ten percent, the initial $1 billion will have supported $9 billion in additional lending by the time this process is complete. All of this $10 billion has been created out of nothing: the initial $1 billion check from the Fed, and the additional $9 billion in loans that fractional-reserve banking makes possible, were produced out of thin air. Should the Fed wish to contract credit, it follows this procedure in reverse: it sells bonds to the banks, and the money it receives for them---and the further increase in the money supply that the fractional reserve system then created on top of it---are withdrawn from the economy.” (pp.120-121)
As we explained early on, there is no social benefit resulting from an increase in the money supply. If we were to imagine inflation bringing more actual wealth to society we would be engaging in something like magical thinking. Money is not wealth, it is a medium of exchange. As we also described early on, an increase in the supply of money tends to raise prices (as measured in money-units), because the purchasing power of the money-unit lowers if we also assume no corresponding increase in the total goods and services of society.
It is not hard to see how detrimental this may be for someone on a fixed income, as prices for what they buy go up as their income stays the same. But taking a wider view, we can see that inflation acts as a kind of tax on the people. It has been called our most unfair tax. Thomas Woods explains:
“Consider this question: in what order and in what way does the new money make its way through the economy? When the government inflates the money supply, the new money does not reach everyone simultaneously and proportionately. It enters the economy at discrete points. The earliest recipients of the new money include politically favored constituencies of one kind or another: banks, for example, or firms with government contracts---in other words, wherever government spends money. These privileged parties receive the new money before inflation has pushed prices upwards. In effect the economy doesn’t yet know how much the money supply has increased, and prices have not yet adjusted accordingly. By the time the new money makes its way through the whole economy, prices will have risen throughout practically all sectors. But while this process is taking place, the privileged firms that are lucky enough to get the new money early benefit from being able to make their purchases at the previously existing price level---thereby silently looting those from whom they buy. When the average person gets his hands on this new money---through higher wages, say, or lower borrowing costs---prices have already been rising for quite a while, and he’s been paying those prices all this time on his existing income. The value of his money was diluted by the new money before it ever reached him.
Here is another way to think about it: Money in your possession is compensation for some good or service you have provided. When you buy a dozen apples, you do so with the proceeds from a good or service that you yourself provided in the past. So you are able to buy those apples because in the past you provided someone else with something he needed.
Now imagine a situation in which business firms or banks connected to the government receive a new influx of money courtesy of Fed credit expansion. That money comes out of thin air, not from the sale of some previous good or service. Thus when these favored firms spend this money, they are in effect taking goods out of the economy without providing anything themselves. Here we see very clearly how they benefit at the expense of the rest of society: they take from the stock of goods without giving anything in return. The money they pay for their goods didn’t originate in a good or service that they themselves had previously provided; it came from nowhere. The analogous case under a system of barter would be one in which, instead of trading my bread for your orange juice, I just take your orange juice.” (Meltdown, pp 122-123)
Thus the people are robbed, but it takes place invisibly. So the political function of inflation is not hard for us to see. Since the Fed began operations in 1914 following the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in December 1913, the American dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its value.
THE BOOM-BUST CYCLE
In trying to determine the cause of the economic boom-bust cycle, which is a general movement in business---in which suddenly many businesses that were doing just fine simultaneously experience losses---it makes sense to look at the common denominator of economic exchanges. That common denominator is money.
Economist Murray N. Rothbard, in his short and readable book, What Has Government Done To Our Money? brings the focus back to our enemy, inflation:
“A final indictment of inflation is that whenever the newly issued money is first used as loans to business, inflation causes the dread ‘business cycle.’ This silent but deadly process, undetected for generations, works as follows: new money is issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government, and loaned to business. To businessmen, the new funds seem to be genuine investments, but these funds do not, like free-market investments, arise from voluntary savings. The new money is invested by businessmen in various projects, and paid out to workers and other factors as higher wages and prices. As the new money filters down to the whole economy, the people tend to re-establish their old voluntary consumption/saving proportions. In short, if people want to save and invest about 20 percent of their incomes and consume the rest, new bank money loaned to business at first makes the saving proportion look higher. When the new money seeps down to the public, it re-establishes its old 20-80 proportion, and many investments are now revealed to be wasteful. Liquidation of the wasteful investments of the inflationary boom constitutes the depression phase of the business cycle.” (pp.55-56).
Rothbard elaborates this explanation more fully in his classic about the 1929 depression, “America’s Great Depression.” In this book he shows how the Austrian cycle theory of Ludwig von Mises accounts for why there is a sudden general cluster of business errors (generated by the distortions caused by credit expansion), why capital-goods industries fluctuate in the cycle more widely than do the consumer-goods industries (the capital goods sector takes advantage of the artificially low interest rates brought about through credit expansion to fund major and long-term projects), and why with every boom there is an increase in the quantity of money in the economy (63 percent inflation of the money supply during the 1920's).
It can be plainly seen that the boom-bust cycle does not originate with the free market.
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