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Audit the Fed Moves Forward! – Article by Ron Paul

Audit the Fed Moves Forward! – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
July 31, 2012
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Last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed my legislation calling for a full and effective audit of the Federal Reserve.  Well over 300 of my Congressional colleagues supported the bill, each casting a landmark vote that marks the culmination of decades of work.  We have taken a big step toward bringing transparency to the most destructive financial institution in the world.

But in many ways our work is only beginning.  Despite the Senate Majority Leader’s past support for similar legislation, no vote has been scheduled on my bill this year in the Senate.  And only 29 Senators have cosponsored Senator Rand Paul’s version of my bill in the other body.  If your Senator is not listed at the link above, please contact them and ask for their support.  We need to push Senate leadership to hold a vote this year.

Understand that last week’s historic vote never would have taken place without the efforts of millions of Americans like you, ordinary citizens concerned about liberty and the integrity of our currency.  Political elites respond to political pressure, pure and simple.  They follow rather than lead.  If all 100 Senators feel enough grassroots pressure, they will respond and force Senate leadership to hold what will be a very popular vote.

In fact, “Audit the Fed” is so popular that 75% of all Americans support it according to this Rasmussen poll.  We are making progress.

Of course Fed apologists– including Mr. Bernanke– frequently insist that the Fed already is audited.  But this is true only in the sense that it produces annual financial statements.  It provides the public with its balance sheet as a fait accompli: we see only the net results of its financial transactions from the previous fiscal year in broad categories, and only after the fact.

We’re also told that the Dodd-Frank bill passed in 2010 mandates an audit.  But it provides for only a limited audit of certain Fed credit facilities surrounding the crisis period of 2008.  It is backward looking, which frankly is of limited benefit.

The Fed also claims it wants to be “independent” from Congress so that politics don’t interfere with monetary policy.  This is absurd for two reasons.

First, the Fed already is inherently and unavoidably political.  It made a political decision when it chose not to rescue Lehman Brothers in 2008, just as it made a political decision to provide liquidity for AIG in the same time period. These are just two obvious examples.  Also Fed member banks and the Treasury Department are full of former– and future– Goldman Sachs officials.  Are we really to believe that the interests of Goldman Sachs have absolutely no effect on Fed decisions? Clearly it’s naïve to think the Fed somehow is above political or financial influence.

Second, it’s important to remember that Congress created the Fed by statute.  Congress therefore has the full, inherent authority to regulate the Fed in any way– up to and including abolishing it altogether.

My bill provides for an ongoing, thorough audit of what the Fed really does in secret, which is make decisions about the money supply, interest rates, and bailouts of favored banks, financial firms, and companies.  In other words, I want the Government Accountability Office to examine the Fed’s actual monetary policy operations and make them public.

It is precisely this information that must be made public because it so profoundly affects everyone who holds, saves, or uses US dollars.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

Inflation is a Monetary Phenomenon – Article by Ron Paul

Inflation is a Monetary Phenomenon – Article by Ron Paul

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Ron Paul
July 18, 2012
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Later this month Congress will have an unprecedented opportunity to force the Federal Reserve to provide meaningful transparency to lawmakers and taxpayers. HR 459, my bill known as “Audit the Fed,” is scheduled for a vote before the full Congress in July. More than 270 of my colleagues cosponsored the bill, and it has the support of congressional leadership. But its passage in the House of Representatives is only the beginning of the battle, as many Senators and the President still don’t see the critical need to have a national discussion about monetary policy.

The American public now senses that the Fed’s actions, especially since 2008, are enormously inflationary and will cause great harm to the American economy in the long run. They are beginning to understand what so many economists still don’t understand, which is that inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and rising prices are merely a symptom of that phenomenon.  Prices eventually rise when the supply of US dollars (paper or electronic) grows faster than the available goods and services being chased by those dollars.

This fundamental truth has been thoroughly explained by Milton Friedman and many others, so today’s Keynesian economists have no excuse for their claims that “inflation is under control.”  Ordinary Americans don’t need a PhD simply to look at the Fed’s balance sheet and understand the staggering amount of money creation that has occurred in recent years. They know it will have harmful consequences for all of us eventually.

I’ve spoken at length about inflation, and how Fed money creation is effectively a tax. Every dollar created out of thin air dilutes the value of the dollars in your pocket and your savings in the bank. But the truth is that we are only beginning to see the results of the Fed’s dramatic increase in the money supply. As former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan himself explained last week to Larry Kudlow, most of the dollar deposits created by the Fed via successive rounds of “quantitative easing” remain on the balance sheet of Fed member banks. Because of very rational economic fears, banks are not lending, businesses are not expanding, and individuals are shedding debt. So, the trillions of dollars created by the Fed since 2008 remained largely undeployed. When those dollars eventually make their way into the world economy, prices across all sectors of the economy are likely to rise dramatically.

The true evil of inflation is that newly created money benefits politically favored financial interests, especially banks, on the front end. Over time, however, the net result of monetary inflation is always the devaluation of savings and purchasing power. This devaluation discourages saving, which is the key to capital accumulation and investment in a healthy economy. Inflation also tends to hurt seniors and those living on fixed incomes the most.

For decades the Fed has operated without any meaningful oversight whatsoever, resulting in the loss of savings, loss of purchasing power, and loss of quality of life for all Americans. It causes individuals and businesses to make bad decisions, misallocating their capital because market signals have been distorted. It causes financial ruin by engineering the inevitable boom and bust cycles that so many erroneously blame on capitalism. And it does all this in secrecy, to the benefit of the financial and political classes. It is time to Audit the Fed, as a first step toward ending its unchecked power over our money and economic fortunes.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

Casino Banking – Article by Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.

Casino Banking – Article by Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.

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Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr.
July 15, 2012
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JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the nation’s leading banks, revealed in May that a London trader racked up losses reportedly amounting to $2.3 billion over a 15-day period. The losses averaged over $150 million per day, sometimes hitting $200 million daily. The bank originally stated the trades were done to hedge possible losses on assets that might suffer due to Europe’s economic woes. There is now doubt whether it was a hedge or just a risky financial bet.

A hedge is a financial transaction designed to offset possible losses in an asset or good already owned. The classic hedge occurs when a farmer sells his crop in a futures market for delivery at a specified date after harvesting. He sells today what he will only produce tomorrow, and locks in the price. If the price at harvest time is lower than today’s price, he makes money on the forward contract, while losing a corresponding amount of money on the crops in the ground. In a perfect hedge the gains and losses should exactly offset each other.

How did JPMorgan suffer such large losses on its hedges, and what are the lessons?

It appears the London trader entered into financial transactions on the basis of observed relationships among various bond indices. The market relationships broke down. The indices moved differently from what historical patterns or financial models predicted. Such a breakdown has been at the heart of a number of spectacular financial collapses, notably that of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998 and a number of others during the financial meltdown of 2007–08.

LTCM invested the money of rich clients in financial bets based on the expected relationships among the prices of various assets. According to Nicole Gelinas in After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington, at the time of its collapse LTCM had $2.3 billion of client money. By borrowing, it leveraged that investment 53 to 1. Further, it employed derivatives to further magnify its bets so that its total obligations were a fantastic $1.25 trillion.

A derivative is any security whose price movements depend on (are derived from) movements in an underlying asset. “Puts” and “calls” on equity shares are relatively simple derivatives familiar to many. Asset prices, like various bonds, move in predictable ways with respect to each other, and values of derivatives linked to the assets similarly move in a predictable fashion with respect to the prices of the underlying assets—in normal times.

But the summer of 1998 was not a normal time. There was turmoil in Asian financial markets, then Russia threatened to default on its domestic debt. Global credit and liquidity dried up, and LTCM could not fund itself. It collapsed spectacularly.

A decade later there was turmoil in housing finance. The housing bubble was bursting. Mortgage lenders were under pressure, and some were failing. Many mortgages had been packed together in mortgage-backed securities, which were sold to or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie, allegedly private entities but in reality guaranteed by the government, were failing. Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, was heavily involved in housing finance; it borrowed short-term, even overnight, to finance long-term holdings; it employed heavy leverage; and it made liberal use of derivatives contracts. It declared bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.

The specifics varied between 1998 and 2008, and between LTCM and Lehman. But the reliance on certain asset prices moving in predictable fashion was one shared element. So, too, was the heavy use of borrowed money (leverage) and the reliance on derivatives contracts. The volatility of complex derivatives contracts led legendary investor Warren Buffett to characterize them as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

The Usual Suspects

In short there is nothing new in what happened to JPMorgan. It claimed it was not trying to make risky financial bets, but hedge risks already booked on its balance sheet. While details of the trades that led to losses are sketchy at this writing, they apparently employed both leverage and derivatives. As documented here, these are elements present in major financial blowups and collapses going back decades (and further). LTCM, Lehman, and Fannie and Freddie all thought they had at least some of their risks hedged. But hedges have a tendency to unravel just when needed most: in times of financial turmoil. Even so, financial institutions permit their traders to make the same kinds of dangerous bets over and over again. We used to have financial crises every decade or so. Now the cycle seems to be halved.

In the past I have dubbed today’s banking practice of placing dangerous financial bets “casino banking.” It differs little from the activities conducted at gaming tables in Las Vegas and has little or no reference to the fundamentally healthy activity of matching viable businesses with capital and credit.

In a Cato Policy Analysis, “Capital Inadequacies: The Dismal Failure of the Basel Regime of Bank Capital Regulation,” Kevin Dowd and three coauthors examined some of the technical problems with standard risk models used by large banks. It is an exhaustive analysis, and I commend it to those interested. The authors delve into many issues, but concentrate on the many flaws of the complex mathematical models used by banks to control risks.

In August 2007 Goldman Sachs Chief Financial Officer David Viniar puzzled over a series of “25-standard deviation moves” in financial markets affecting Goldman. (Returns deviated from their expected values by 25 standard deviations, a measure of volatility.) Such moves should occur once every 10-to-the-137th-power years if the assumptions of the risk model were correct (a Gaussian, or “normal,” distribution of returns). As Dowd and his coauthors put it, “Such an event is about as likely as Hell freezing over. The occurrence of even a single such event is therefore conclusive proof that financial returns are not Gaussian—or even remotely so.” And yet there were several in a matter of days. In Dowd & Co.’s telling, the models lie, the banks swear to it, and the regulators pretend to believe them. All of this goes to answer how the losses at Morgan might have happened. Traders rely on flawed models to execute their trades.

Now to the Lessons

Major financial institutions continue to take on large risks. Why? Assume the trades made by Morgan really were to hedge the bank’s exposure to events in Europe. That implies, of course, that risky investments had already been put in place (since they then needed to be hedged). Additionally, the risks were so complex that even a highly skilled staff (which Morgan certainly employs) could not successfully execute hedges on them.

Reports indicate that senior management and the board of directors were aware of the trades and exercising oversight. The fact that the losses were incurred anyway confirms what many of us have been arguing. Major financial institutions are at once very large and very complex. They are too large and too complex to manage. That is in part what beset Citigroup in the 2000s and now Morgan, which has until now been recognized as a well-managed institution.

If ordinary market forces were at work, these institutions would shrink to manageable sizes and levels of complexity. Ordinary market forces are not at work, however. Public policy rewards size (and the complexity that accompanies it). Major financial institutions know from experience that they will be bailed out when they incur losses that threaten their survival. Morgan’s losses do not appear to fall into that category, but they illustrate how bad incentives lead to bad outcomes.

Minding Our Business

Some commentators have argued that politicians and the public have no business in Morgan’s losses. Only Morgan’s stockholders, who saw its share price drop over 9 percent in one day, and senior management and traders who lost their jobs should have an interest. But in fact losses incurred at major financial institutions are the business of taxpayers because government policy has made them their business.

Large financial institutions will continue taking on excessive risks so long as they know they can offload the losses onto taxpayers if needed. That is the policy summarized as “too big to fail.” Let us not forget the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), signed into law by President George W. Bush in October 2008. It was a $700 billion boondoggle to transfer taxpayer money to stockholders and creditors of major banks—and to their senior management; don’t forget the bonuses paid out of the funds.

Banks may be too big and complex to close immediately, but no institution is too big to fail. Failure means the stockholders and possibly the bondholders are wiped out. Until that discipline is reintroduced (having once existed), there will be more big financial bets going bad at these banks.

Changing the bailout policy will not be easy because of what is known as the time-inconsistency problem. Having bailed out so many companies so many times, the federal government cannot credibly commit in advance not to do so in the future. It can say no to future bailouts today, but people know that when financial collapse hits tomorrow, government will say yes once again. The promises made today will not match the government’s future actions. There is inconsistency between words and deeds across time.

What to do in the meantime? The Volcker Rule was a modest attempt to rein in risk-taking. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker wanted to stop banks from making risky trades on their own books (as opposed to executing trades for customers). Industry lobbying has hopelessly complicated the rule and delayed its issuance.

Morgan’s chief executive officer, James Dimon, asserted the London trades would not have violated the rule. If true, it suggests that an even stronger rule needs to be in place. Various suggestions have been made to address excessive risk-taking by financial firms backed by the taxpayers. It is time to take them more seriously.

Gerald O’Driscoll is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. With Mario J. Rizzo, he coauthored The Economics of Time and Ignorance.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Not Enough Inflation? – Article by Tyler Watts

Not Enough Inflation? – Article by Tyler Watts

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Tyler Watts
July 15, 2012
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Two wrongs may not make a right, but a second dose of poison might just cure the first dose. That’s at least what Paul Krugman, America’s most prominent left-wing economic pundit, is saying about an untapped remedy for our economic woes. In his April 5 New York Times column, “Not Enough Inflation,” Krugman repeated his claim that “a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”

If you’re wondering how progressively higher prices for everyday goods could help any household get ahead economically, let alone contribute to overall economic recovery, you’re in good company. As all econ-principles students know, inflation is caused by an increase in the supply of money relative to money demand. The increase in consumer goods prices—that’s how the layman defines and experiences inflation—is really just a symptom of the reduced purchasing power of money caused by the increase in its quantity. The higher prices for all goods in turn mean lower real incomes for consumers—which is all of us—not to mention that inflation is also typically symptomatic of the boom-bust business cycle and can cause significant widespread economic damage. In its most severe forms, inflation can wipe out people’s monetary wealth and bring commerce to a halt.

But smart guys like Professor Krugman aren’t mere monetary cranks. They know that high inflation is economically dangerous. What they’re asking for is just a small, temporary dose of fresh money to inject some new life into the economy. There is a kernel of truth to this inflationary prescription. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume explained in his 1752 essay Of Money, prices for different kinds of goods react differently to new money entering the economy. Generally speaking, commodities or consumer goods prices will rise faster than wages. So for a manufacturing entrepreneur, for instance, who employs many workers, inflation will cause output prices (revenue) to increase relative to wages (costs), bringing an increase in profits that will induce an increase in output. Therefore, in Hume’s terms, an increase of money “must first quicken the diligence of every [entrepreneur], before it increase the price of labor.”

This “sticky wages” effect is what economists like Hume, John Maynard Keynes, and Krugman have in mind when advocating inflationary stimulus. Krugman also notes that “parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years,” and that “modest inflation . . . by eroding the real value of that debt . . . [would] help promote the private-sector recovery.” So higher inflation not only increases the demand for labor, but can also help clean up companies’ and individuals’ balance sheets, giving them the ability to ramp up their hiring and spending. What’s not to love about this miracle elixir?

There are two big problems with inflationary stimulus. The first involves the process dynamics of the market economy. The inflationists tend to omit the rest of the story, which involves the long-run effects of new money. New money will eventually increase all prices—even wages—meaning the stimulus effect can only be temporary. For if entrepreneurs read the price increases not as mere inflation, but higher demand for their products (as the inflationists hope), they are liable to make investments to expand their production capacity. Once the inflation effect peters out, once rising wages eventually push profits back down, they find that extra production is no longer profitable. The expansion can’t be sustained without more inflationary stimulus.

In a rising inflation environment, moreover, people will eventually come to anticipate further price increases. Workers demand upward wage adjustments in advance, and entrepreneurs anticipate rising costs and thus scale back their expansion plans. Once people catch on to inflationary stimulus in this fashion, larger and larger money injections (that is, higher inflation rates) are needed to merely maintain output levels. At some point, the high, rising, and volatile inflation rate itself becomes a drag on the economy. Miscalculation of next year’s, or even next month’s, inflation rate could spell disaster for entrepreneur and worker alike. As inflation heats up, it can actually drag investment down, as people seek to shelter their wealth in “sterile” assets like gold. Inflation, instead of a stimulus factor, becomes a source of economic confusion and frustration. Iconic images of people hauling wheelbarrow loads of money to buy a loaf of bread in post-World War I Germany remind us of the potential economic turmoil of unchecked inflation. This of course is not what Krugman has in mind, but we should not forget that the mightiest river begins as a trickle.

The second big problem with inflation is a moral one. Along with causing economic confusion, inflation redistributes wealth. The key fact here, again, is that not all prices rise immediately when new money enters circulation. People who are first to receive the new money get to spend it before prices go up. Those last in line see prices go up before their own incomes do. Inflation also redistributes wealth from lenders to borrowers, as Krugman indicated, by reducing the real value of debt. But Krugman conveniently ignores the corresponding fact that, whenever a borrower’s real debt burden is eased, a lender’s asset value is eroded. Thus to use inflation as a partial bailout for borrowers is to harm lenders and investors. This is happening already—even at “mild” inflation rates that are too low for Krugman’s tastes, real returns on investments like bank CDs are driven into negative territory.

Through these redistributions of purchasing power, inflation acts like a tax: a tax on savers, on investors, on those at the very end of the monetary policy food chain. Ironically for Progressives like Krugman, this inflation tax arguably hits the poor and uneducated hardest. Educated, economically sophisticated people know the warning signs of inflation and know how to shelter their assets—as attested by the flurry of gold bullion dealers’ ads on cable news and AM radio. The poor are much more likely to be wage earners whose incomes tend to lag inflation, or pensioners who, even with annual cost-of-living adjustments, can still see consistent reductions in their purchasing power.

Nonetheless, Krugman and the inflation party don’t understand the free-market camp’s arguments against inflation. He accuses us of “obsessing” over inflation, while he thinks the Fed should focus on curing unemployment. Even conceding that inflation can provide a temporary, halting employment stimulus, the objection remains strong. It comes down to the fact that inflation is a big lie—or, should we say, a million little lies, because inflation distorts all prices and thereby hinders their crucial function of giving entrepreneurs and workers the correct information and incentives on which to make the best economic decisions. Inflation’s promises of faster growth and greater wealth are illusory. Like alcohol or drug abuse, every high begets a crash that demands larger and larger doses to maintain the effect. Inflation is a dangerous medicine that stands to do the patient more harm than good.

Tyler Watts is an assistant professor of economics at Ball State University and the winner of the 2012 Beth A. Hoffman Memorial Prize for Economic Writing.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Prohibition: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bandits – Article by Sanford Ikeda

Prohibition: Bootleggers, Baptists, and Bandits – Article by Sanford Ikeda

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Sanford Ikeda
July 7, 2012
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The political economist Bruce Yandle’s phrase “bootleggers and Baptists” captures the idea that special-interest groups with conflicting moral positions often find common cause in particular government interventions.  Many on the political left agree with crony capitalists that government should make taxpayers bailout some businesses that are “too big to fail”; some radical feminists agree with some Christian fundamentalists that government should ban pornography.  Their reasons are different but the policies they support are the same.

Bootleggers and Baptists

The inspiration for “bootleggers and Baptists” (pdf) comes directly from the diverse support that so-called “blue laws” have historically received.  According to Yandle,

Bootleggers . . . support Sunday closing laws that shut down all the local bars and liquor stores [because they increase the demand for illegal hooch].  Baptists support the same laws and lobby vigorously for them [because they believe drinking on Sunday is wrong].

Of course the story behind Prohibition era in the United States, marked by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1920-33), is this lesson writ large.  Banning the sale of liquor, whatever it did to deter drinking, did wonders for promoting organized crime, which had (and still has) a comparative advantage over law-abiding people in supplying and demanding illegal goods. By clamping down on a product in such high demand, local and national governments (including the fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation, which also prospered during Prohibition) spurred mob activity, intentionally or not, from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York.

Ken Burns: No Eighteenth Amendment without the Sixteenth

What I hadn’t realized until I saw Ken Burns’s excellent documentary “Prohibition” is that an important and, I think, less-known connection existed between the anti-liquor lobby–which included among others the Anti-Saloon League (ASL) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)–and passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.  That amendment gave Congress in 1913 the power

to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

(The Supreme Court had ruled an earlier income tax law unconstitutional in 1895.)

In an earlier FreemanOnline column, Don Boudreaux explained why Prohibition was repealed after only a dozen or so years.  In short the inability to tax liquor, now illegal, along with the onset of the Great Depression, had a devastating impact on government tax revenues.  My focus is on the alliance between anti-liquor forces on the right, pressing for prohibition, and Progressives on the left, pressing for an income tax.

Now, according to one source:

By 1868, the main source of Government revenue derived from liquor and tobacco taxes. . . . From 1868 to 1913, almost 90 percent of all revenue was collected from . . . excises.

That’s a significant source of taxes, without which the government could hardly operate, let alone grow to the size needed to implement the Progressives’ agenda: making government more efficient in order to run society along “rational” principles.  Government programs to improve schools, health care, and industry need a steady funding source, and without liquor taxes intervention could not go far enough.  So no matter how hard prohibitionists argued, marched, and lobbied, and no matter how sympathetic government officials may have been to their cause, they would never dream of sacrificing their cash cow on the alter of idealism–at least not without an equally reliable alternative.

And that of course led naturally to the social conservatives support of the progressive (in both senses of the word) income tax.  The Sixteenth Amendment passed in 1913, opening the way in 1919 for the Eighteenth Amendment.  The rest is history.

Baptists and Bandits

I’m not arguing that the alliance was primarily responsible for passage of the amendment, but rather that it’s clear the interests of social conservatives and the taxman were perfectly aligned.  “Baptists” on the one side, and on the other, those eager to expand the use of aggression to plunder wealth created by trade and to spend it to indulge their own preferences–that is, bandits.

Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College, SUNY, and the author of The Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

Is Serfdom an Executive Order Away? – Article by Sheldon Richman

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Sheldon Richman
July 7, 2012
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Sometimes a step back helps to provide perspective on a matter. President Obama provided such a step with his March 16 Executive Order, National Defense Resources Preparedness. In it we see in detail how completely the government may control our lives—euphemistically called the “industrial and technological base”—if the president were to declare a national emergency. It is instructive, if tedious, reading.

President Obama claims this authority under the Constitution and, vaguely, “the laws of the United States,” but he specifically names the Defense Production Act of 1950. As Freeman columnist and Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs observed, “Under this statute, the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.”

We shouldn’t assume this is merely an academic exercise or that a third world war would need to break out. In the last decade, under circumstances representing no “existential threat” to our society, the executive branch has exercised extraordinary powers.

Reading the Executive Order, I was reminded of a quotation of Leonard Read’s: “[A]nyone who even presumes an interest in economic affairs cannot let the subject of war, or the moral breakdown which underlies it, go untouched. To do so would be as absurd—indeed, as dishonest—as a cleric to avoid the Commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal’ simply because his parishioners had legalized and were practicing theft.”

The Executive Order begins by authorizing executive-branch officers to “assess on an ongoing basis the capability of the domestic industrial and technological base to satisfy requirements in peacetime [!] and times of national emergency, specifically evaluating the availability of the most critical resource and production sources, including subcontractors and suppliers, materials, skilled labor, and professional and technical personnel.”

But these officials are to do more than assess. They are to be prepared to “ensure the availability of adequate resources and production capability,” to “improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the domestic industrial base to support national defense requirements,” and to “foster cooperation between the defense and commercial sectors. . . .”

Further, the President’s order notes his authority to “require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense” (emphasis added).

That is, the executive branch is first in line for whatever it wants (except civilian labor—perhaps).

Under the section titled “EXPANSION OF PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY AND SUPPLY,” the heads of agencies engaged in procurement are authorized to “guarantee loans by private institutions,” “make loans,” and “make provision for purchases of, or commitments to purchase, an industrial resource or a critical technology item for Government use or resale, and to make provision for the development of production capabilities, and for the increased use of emerging technologies in security program applications, and to enable rapid transition of emerging technologies.”

Think of the potential for corporatist rent-seeking.

In the section on personnel we learn that the secretary of labor shall “collect and maintain data necessary to make a continuing appraisal of the Nation’s workforce needs for purposes of national defense and upon request by the Director of Selective Service, and in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, assist the Director of Selective Service in development of policies regulating the induction and deferment of persons for duty in the armed services.”

So along with the commandeering of private resources, there will be a draft, the commandeering of military (and other?) labor—that is, slavery by another name.

Advocates of the freedom philosophy have a dual concern: that the executive has virtually unchecked authority to declare an emergency and that in an emergency the private economy would be commandeered by government officers. The Executive Order is a breathtaking reminder that, as Higgs put it, “private control of economic life in the United States, to the extent that it survives, exists solely at the president’s pleasure and sufferance.”

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America’s Families.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

Are Immigration Laws Like Jim Crow? – Article by David Bier

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David Bier
July 7, 2012
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Alabama Governor Robert Bentley was forced to defend his state’s harsh immigration law recently against charges that it amounts to a return to segregation-era racially biased policies.  “What took place in the civil rights era was a series of unlawful actions against lawful residents,” Bentley said in response to the charges. “It was a shameful chapter in our state’s history. The immigration issue of today is entirely different.”

Parallels to segregation might be slightly overdone, but to call immigration policies “entirely different” is disingenuous. America’s restrictive immigration system was invented by the Eugenics Research Institute’s future president, Rep. Albert Johnson (R-Washington), who wanted to protect America’s racial purity from, in the words he quoted from a State Department official, “unassimilable . . . filthy . . . and often dangerous” foreigners. While such laws are no longer justified on racial grounds, their impacts today are just as ethnically disparate—more than 80 percent of immigrants labeled “illegal” are Hispanic, and 97 percent (pdf) of deportees are Hispanic.

Nor was segregation “unlawful”—it was a bizarre system of legal controls. Although it’s best known as a system of social control, it was just as much a system of economic regulation. Jim Crow began humbly—with segregated streetcars in Georgia in 1891—but quickly escalated, imposing on southern businesses ever more burdensome requirements: twice the number of bathrooms, waiting rooms, ticket counters, phone booths, even cocktail lounges. The president of Southeastern Greyhound told the Wall Street Journal in 1957, “It frequently costs fifty percent more to build a terminal with segregated facilities.”

Businessmen Conscripted

Since laws that intend to control personal behavior are so rarely enforceable, governments conscript business people to act as de facto State agents. In this way social controls quickly morph into economic regulations. It is often forgotten that the railroad in the infamous Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) actually helped fight  the “separate but equal” doctrine because it “saddled employers with the burden of becoming the state’s race policemen.” Immigration law, which began as a way to restrict the movement of foreigners into the United States, has followed exactly the same pattern. Today a vast portion of America’s immigration code targets businesses, not foreigners.

Jim Crow’s regulatory state only affected businesses that served both white and African American patrons. For most small businesses, the costs of the regime were simply too great. Similarly, for many businesses today, hiring migrant workers has just become too dangerous. “I always relate it to tax law,” labor law consultant Barlow Curran recently told the Tampa Tribune. “Federal tax law is so complicated that if the IRS audits you, regardless of how careful you’ve been, they’ll probably find something. The same thing is true of farm labor law.” No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement has imposed $100 million in fines in just the last three years alone—more than the Bush administration’s previous eight years.

Alabama has only added to these regulatory threats. The state’s HB 56—enacted a year ago—mandated that employers use E-Verify to check the work authorization for potential employees. Over 60,000 Alabama businesses missed the deadline. If employers are unable to comply, they face license suspensions and may even be given the “business death penalty,” permanent closing.

As Isabel Wilkerson documents in her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns, more than six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South and left many southern employers facing labor shortages. “Farmers . . . have [woken] up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on his place gone,” editorialized the Macon Telegraph in 1916 as the Great Migration began. “And while our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us, we go about our affairs as usual.”

Fleeing the State

Alabama is discovering that harsh immigration laws can just as easily “suck the solvency out beneath” them. “From a business point of view, it’s a terrible piece of legislation,” Henry Hagood, CEO of Alabama Associated General Contractors, told Reuters. “My counterparts around the country are saying, ‘thanks for sending workers our way.’” Tens of thousands of workers have already fled the state. University of Alabama professor Samuel Addy found that losing these workers reduced the state’s GDP by between $2.3 billion and $10.8 billion.

Conservatives who profess a commitment to the free market must extend that commitment to the labor market. They must realize that harsh immigration laws have the same dire effects on business as other burdensome regulations. They limit not only the free movement of foreign workers but also the rights of American businesses to hire, transport, and associate freely. They need to go the same way as Jim Crow—into the dustbin of history.

David Bier is the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.

Audit the Fed Headed for the House Floor! – Article by Ron Paul

Audit the Fed Headed for the House Floor! – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
July 4, 2012
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Last week supporters of Federal Reserve transparency had a major victory when the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform passed my Audit the Fed bill, HR 459 unanimously with all major audit provisions intact.  This clears the way for a House floor vote expected sometime in late July, and with a whopping 263 cosponsors, the chances of it passing have never looked better!  This is an unprecedented opportunity for transparency into how the currency of the United States is handled, and mishandled by the Federal Reserve.  It is more important than ever that my colleagues in the House and Senate understand what this legislation does and why it is so important.

The Federal Reserve is an enormously destructive and unaccountable force in both the U.S. economy and the greater global economy. Federal Reserve policies affect average Americans far more than fiscal, spending, and tax policies legislated by Congress; indeed the Fed “spends” more than Congress when it creates trillions of new dollars on its balance sheet to bail out favored financial institutions.

For several decades the Fed has relentlessly increased the supply of U.S. dollars (both real and electronic) and kept interest rates artificially low. These monetary policies punish thrift, erode the value of savings, and harm older Americans living on fixed incomes and the poor. The Fed’s expansion of the money supply, combined with artificially low interest rates, creates destructive cycles of malinvestment. This results in housing, stock market, and employment booms and busts that destroy lives.

While the Fed was created by Congress, current law prohibits Congress from fully auditing the Fed’s monetary policy – the Fed actions that impact Americans the most. The Fed’s financial statements are audited annually, but the Fed’s monetary policy operations are exempt from audit. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), currently is prohibited by law from examining discount window and open market operations; agreements with foreign governments and central banks; and Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) directives. It is precisely this information that should be made public.

The audit mandated in the Dodd-Frank Act focused solely on emergency credit programs, and only on procedural issues rather than focusing on the substantive details of the lending transactions. Most of the data on its other activities, such as open market operations and discount window lending, have only been published as a result of lawsuits—not because of Congressional action.  Dodd-Frank requires this information to be disclosed going forward, but with a two year time lag and with GAO restricted to auditing only the procedural components of any programs. H.R. 459 grants GAO and Congress access without special exemptions and ensures that ALL of the Fed’s lending actions will be subject to oversight.

Also, given the Fed’s establishment of dollar swap agreements with foreign central banks (which lent up to $600 billion at a time in 2008), and the increasing economic uncertainty surrounding Spain, Greece and the European Union, the Fed’s continued financial assistance to Europe should not be exempt from public accountability and Congressional oversight. H.R. 459 brings transparency to the Fed’s agreements with the European Central Bank and other foreign entities.

H.R. 459 does not limit the focus of the audit, making a full audit finally possible. An entity that controls the value and purchasing power of the dollar should not be permitted to operate in the dark without oversight by Congress and accountability to the people. The Fed needs transparency and H.R. 459 would provide it. We now have this opportunity to ensure solid passage of HR 459 on the House floor, then the Senate floor and have it promptly signed into law.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

Is Greater Productivity a Danger? – Article by David Gordon

Is Greater Productivity a Danger? – Article by David Gordon

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The New Renaissance Hat
David Gordon
July 4, 2012
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It is bad enough that opponents of the free market wrongly blame capitalism for environmental pollution, depressions, and wars. Whatever the failings of their causal theories, at least they are focused on undoubtedly bad things. We have really gone beyond the pale, though, when the market is blamed for something good.

Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey, does just that in his article. “Let’s Be Less Productive,” which appeared in the New York Times, May 26, 2012.

Jackson suggests that greater productivity may have reached its “natural limits.” By productivity, he means “the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy.” He acknowledges that as work has become more efficient, substantial benefits have resulted: “our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth.”

Despite these benefits, danger lies ahead:

Ever-increasing productivity means that if our economies don’t continue to expand, we risk putting people out of work. If more is possible each passing year with each working hour, then either output has to increase or else there is less work to go around. Like it or not, we find ourselves hooked on growth.

If financial crisis, high prices of resources like oil, or damage to the environment make continued growth unattainable, we risk unemployment. “Increasing productivity threatens full employment.”

What then is to be done? Jackson has an ingenious remedy. We should concentrate on jobs in low-productivity areas. “Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention. The caring professions are a good example: medicine, social work, education. Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages.” A cynic might wonder whether it is altogether a coincidence that Jackson is himself employed in one of these professions.

Jackson has in mind other reforms besides greater emphasis on the “caring professions.” (One wonders, by the way, whether by this name Jackson intends to suggest that those engaged in high productivity occupations do not care about human beings. To say the least, that would be a rather bold suggestion.) We should also devote more resources to crafted goods that require substantial time to make and to the “cultural sector” as well.

Jackson’s program raises a question: how can these changes be achieved? He stands ready with an answer. Of course, a transition to a low-productivity economy won’t happen by wishful thinking. “It demands careful attention to incentive structures — lower taxes on labor and higher taxes on resource consumption and pollution, for example.”

Jackson is certainly right that if labor becomes more efficient, workers must find other uses for the time they now have available. But why is this a problem? Human beings have unlimited wants, and there are always new uses for human labor.

As Murray Rothbard notes,

Labor needs to be “saved” because it is the pre-eminently scarce good and because man’s wants for exchangeable goods are far from satisfied.… The more labor is “saved,” the better, for then labor is using more and better capital goods to satisfy more of its wants in a shorter amount of time.…

A technological improvement in an industry will tend to increase employment in that industry if the demand for that product is elastic downward, so that the greater supply of goods induces greater consumer spending. On the other hand, an innovation in an industry with inelastic demand downward will cause consumers to spend less on the more abundant products, contracting employment in that industry. In short, the process of technological innovation shifts work from the inelastic-demand to the elastic-demand industries. [1]

Financial crises may interrupt growth, but given the unlimited character of human wants, they cannot permanently supplant it. Jackson has offered us a cure, but he has failed to show that a disease exists that requires his remedy.

[1] Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, Scholar’s Edition, pp. 587–88, emphasis omitted.

David Gordon covers new books in economics, politics, philosophy, and law for The Mises Review, the quarterly review of literature in the social sciences, published since 1995 by the Mises Institute. He is author of The Essential Rothbard, available in the Mises Store. Send him mail. See David Gordon’s article archives.

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Copyright © 2012 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.

The CBO Sees the Economic Cliff Ahead – Article by Ron Paul

The CBO Sees the Economic Cliff Ahead – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
June 19, 2012
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In early June 2012 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) issued its annual long-term budget outlook report, and the 2012 numbers are not promising. In fact, the CBO estimates that federal debt will rise to 70% of GDP by the end of the year– the highest percentage since World War II. The report also paints a stark picture of entitlement spending, as retiring Baby Boomers will cause government spending on health care, Social Security, and Medicare to explode as a percentage of GDP in coming years.

While the mainstream media correctly characterized the CBO report as highly pessimistic, they also ignored longstanding errors of methodology in CBO estimates. And those errors tend to support arguments for higher taxes and government spending, when in fact America needs exactly the opposite.

As Paul Roderick Gregory explained in a recent Forbes column (http://tinyurl.com/cf746dl), CBO has always applied wrongheaded assumptions inherent in Keynesian economics when forecasting future deficits – no matter how many times both history and economic theory have proven such assumptions incorrect. In particular, CBO seems wedded to two enduring Keynesian myths: First, that higher taxes necessarily increase federal revenue and have no negative effect on the economy; and second, that lower government spending hurts the economy.  Neither is true, of course.

CBO also fails to factor in unexpected wars and expensive foreign entanglements, and we should not assign too much validity to predictive models based on peace. Judging from the actions and rhetoric coming from both parties in Washington, new military entanglements in Syria and Iran may well spike military spending in coming years.

Despite these sobering budget realities, the CBO report suggests that a solution is possible with merely a few minor adjustments in the way Congress handles economic issues. But what we need are not minor adjustments, but rather a fundamental shift in our philosophy of government.  If we could come to our senses about the proper role of government in America, and what level of government interference is appropriate in a free economy, we would quickly find that there is no reason for government to spend so much, borrow so much, and tax so much.

If we simply allowed markets to work free of governmental or Federal Reserve interference, bad debt would be liquidated relatively quickly and malinvestment would be curtailed. Scaled-back regulations would encourage businesses to expand. Lower taxes would jump start investment and spur job creation.

This is not rocket science, it is Economics 101. All it would take is for government to get out of the way. There would be some short term pain, of course, but only by allowing the bubble to burst and bad debt to liquidate can we ever hope to begin building a real economy again.

The CBO report was alarming to most simply because they know neither party will take the steps necessary to avoid eventual fiscal calamity. Instead, despite their rhetoric, both parties want to maintain the fantasy that “deficits don’t matter.” But the CBO report, combined with what is happening in Greece and the European Union, should finally make the undeniable case that economic realities apply even to industrialized first world economies. We must take concrete steps today to avoid having America become the next Greece.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, is a Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.