Mises Institute

As virtual fantasy worlds go, Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo 3 is particularly foreboding. Within this fairly straightforward gaming framework, virtual “gold” is used as currency for purchasing weapons and repairing battle damage. Over time, virtual gold can be used to purchase ever-more resources for confronting ever-more dangerous foes. But in the last few months, various outposts in that world have borne more in common with real world places like Harare, Zimbabwe in 2007 or Berlin in 1923 than with Dante’s Inferno. A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation. Considering the level of planning that goes into designing and maintaining virtual gaming environments, if a small, straightforward economy generating detailed, timely economic data for its managers can careen so completely aslant in a matter of months, should anyone be surprised when the performance of central banks consistently breeds results which are either ineffective or destabilizing? The Austrian School has long warned of the arrogance and naïveté intrinsic to applying rigid, quantitative measures to the deductive study of human actions and the events of the last week provide a stark reminder of the power and inescapability of the laws of economics.

The crypto-currency Bitcoin is still merely a speck on the global monetary landscape. It is young, experimental, and for all we know, it may ultimately fail to break into the monetary mainstream. However, on a conceptual level some are willing to call it a work of genius and arguably the most exciting development in the field of money for more than 130 years. The outcome is probably binary: Either Bitcoin ultimately fails and the individual Bitcoins end up worthless. Or Bitcoin takes off and Bitcoins are worth hundreds of thousands of paper dollars, paper yen, paper euros, or paper pounds. Maybe more. Those who buy Bitcoin as a speculative investment should consider it an option on the future success of the crypto-currency. We still consider gold to be the essential self-defense asset in the ongoing paper money crisis. The brand-new crypto-currency Bitcoin has to first earn its stripes as a monetary asset by proving itself as a ‘common’ medium of exchange. That is why we view Bitcoin very differently from gold, although the attraction of both has its origin in the demise of entirely elastic, politicized state fiat money. In the meantime, the debasement of paper money continues.

Bitcoin has been all the rage lately. The stuff, or lack thereof, runs on peer-to-peer technology, is fully decentralized, has no patents, and is open source. Currently, there are almost 11 million bitcoin units in existence and the maximum amount of bitcoin units that will ever be created by the logic of its design are 21 million. While bitcoins are designed so that they cannot be hyperinflated in name, they certainly can be hyperinflated in substance. There is no doubt that bitcoin is a spontaneous answer to the monetary instability that we see all around us today. On one side of the pond people are worried about the glorified currency peg known as the Euro and on the other about the amount of damage that Bernanke is willing to inflict upon the world’s reserve currency. However, let us not become so enamored of an innovative stateless solution that we forget Austrian economics and hitch libertarianism’s wagon to something heading for a crash.

Bitcoins have been much in the news lately. Against the background of renewed concerns about the integrity of the euro zone and the imposition of capital controls in Cyprus, the price of a bitcoin has tripled over the last month and reached more than $141 for 1 BTC. Are we witnessing the spontaneous emergence of an alternative virtual medium of exchange, as some would put it? This article offers an answer to this question by considering three aspects of the economy of bitcoins: their production process, their demand factors, and their capacity to compete with physical media of exchange. Virtual monies, of which bitcoins seem to be the most perfected specimen up to date, do not allow acting individuals to manage the uncertainty of the future as well as material monies do. They could serve to intermediate exchanges among those who invest in the technology that creates them, stores them, and transfers them. Nevertheless, they could never achieve that degree of universality and flexibility that material monies carry with them by nature. Thus, on the free market, commodity monies, and presumably gold and silver, still have a great comparative advantage.

The breakdown of sound money has now finally generated a cruel endgame. The fiscal and central banking branches of the state have endlessly bludgeoned the free market, eviscerating its capacity to generate wealth and growth. This growing economic failure, in turn, generates political demands for state action to stimulate recovery and jobs. But the machinery of the state has been hijacked by the various Keynesian doctrines of demand stimulus, tax cutting, and money printing. These are all variations of buy now and pay later - a dangerous maneuver when the state has run out of balance sheet runway in both its fiscal and monetary branches. Nevertheless, these futile stimulus actions are demanded and promoted by the crony capitalist lobbies which slipstream on whatever dispensations as can be mustered. At the end of the day, the state labors mightily, yet only produces recovery for the 1 percent.

Everything the Fed does ultimately leads to less economic activity, less savings and more debt resulting in poverty for Americans, not prosperity.  Debt is not prosperity. Debt is poverty and economic slavery. As long as the money printing continues things will continue to get worse, not better. Americans are now economically worse off than they were in 2008. This leads us to one curious question: if the Fed knows reality is deteriorating and it’s monetary policies are causing this deterioration to accelerate, what is the endgame the government and the Fed have in store for Americans?

Do you ever get the feeling that no one in the Washington power elite is willing to seriously deal with the major economic threat to future prosperity facing the United States today: mounting government debt and the associated deficits? As a taxpayer, you did not borrow the funds, you did not spend the funds, and you have no moral obligation to repay the funds. Rothbard’s recommendation: “I propose, then, a seemingly drastic but actually far less destructive way of paying off the public debt at a single blow: outright debt repudiation.” Repudiation is not only a sound economic solution to our fiscal crisis, but it is also the morally correct solution.

According to dictionary.com, Deflation is “a fall in the general price level or a contraction of credit and available money.” Falling prices. That sounds good, especially if you have set some cash set aside and are thinking about a major purchase. But as some additional research with Google would seem to demonstrate, that would be a naïve and simple-minded conclusion. According to received wisdom, deflation is a serious economic disease - St.Louis Fed: "...discourages spending and investment because consumers, expecting prices to fall further, delay purchases, preferring instead to save and wait for even lower price..." The problem with deflation, then - we are told, is that it feeds on itself, destroying the economy along the way. Deflation is far worse than its counterpart, inflation, because the Fed can fight inflation by raising interest rates. Deflation is nearly impossible to stop once it has started because interest rates can only be cut to zero, no lower. In case you’re not already scared straight, the deflationary doomsday has already happened in America when (according to the New York Times) it caused the Great Depression. I hope that everyone is clear on this. Now that you understand the basics, I have some questions for the people who came up with this stuff.

In recent years gold has become a sought-after currency in Vietnam. Why? The usual reason: its government has been printing too much money, causing prices to rise, and causing its currency, the Vietnamese dong, to plummet in value. But by holding gold instead of the domestic currency, Vietnamese citizens know their wealth’s value will be kept constant while the local currency declines. Recently, however, the government-run Vietnamese central bank disallowed loans in gold. Now, it is preventing banks from paying interest to customers on their gold. Instead, it is forcing banks to charge customer to store their gold. Offensive as this all is, it is not - yet - as offensive as steps the U.S. government took in 1933.

Nassim Taleb sits down for a quite extensive interview based around his new book Anti-Fragile. Whether the Black Swan best-seller is philosopher or trader is up to you but the discussion is worth the time as Taleb wonders rigorously from the basic tenets of capitalism - "being more about disincentives that incentives" as failure (he believes) is critical to its success (and is clearly not allowed in our current environment) - to his intellectual influences (and total disdain for the likes of Krugman, Stiglitz, and Friedman - who all espouse grandiose and verbose work with no accountability whatsoever). His fears of large centralized states (such as the US is becoming and Europe is become) being prone to fail along with his libertarianism make for good viewing. However, his fundamental premise that TBTF banks should be nationalized and the critical importance of 'skin in the game' for a functioning financial system are all so crucial for the current 'do no harm' regime in which we live. Grab a beer (or glass of wine, it is Taleb) and watch...

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the usual cadre of politicians, pundits and commentators are hitting the airwaves and condemning believers of the “guns don’t kill” rationale. This exercise in demonization is being followed with pleas to strip Americans of their guns and place a ban on vaguely-defined “assault” weapons. What’s been lacking in the flurry of proposals that inevitably followed a catastrophe like Sandy Hook has been a deeper look at the kind of environment impressionable minds are coming of age in. Far too often, politically-minded observers fall back on reactionary emotion for the solution to problems without actually engaging in critical thinking as to the root of what they are trying to solve. What must be considered is why some individuals are so drawn to violence, what effect has the increased prescription rate of antidepressants had, and why casualties in war have become so dehumanized. There is an uncomfortable but common denominator in all these factors. I would hope anti-gun zealots notice it before they ramp up their War on Firearms.

When one speaks of a concept it is important that it is properly qualified so as to be correctly understood. Failure to accomplish that makes impossible for either the problem to be identified or a desired solution to be found. Perhaps this is why politicians have a tendency to speak of ill-defined and oft muddled concepts, like “social justice,” “a living wage” or “fair share.” These concepts are impossible to define in a way consistent with how they are represented, since their proponents represent them as definite, rather than abstract matters. Politicians and demagogues alike may debate these issues for as long or as short as they may desire, but whatever level they agree on is sure to be arbitrary, save for the only objective conclusion that such concepts are impossible to quantify. It follows that the “fair share” doctrine is an indefinable political tool intended to be used as needed, when needed, by office seekers. It is not a policy to be sought in order to bring equality under the law or economic prosperity, as it is a concept that runs against the principle of private property.

The sure sign of a halfwit is someone who believes a politician’s promise. There are two types of promises that originate from a politician’s breath. The first is a starry-eyed pledge that is practically unworkable. The second is an assurance that would constitute a threat if given by a private individual. When announced, these promises are sold as a cure-all for all of society’s ills. They hardly ever come into fruition but are referred back to only if they aid in another reelection campaign. The masses have been fooled by years of unrelenting propaganda - they are assured by campaigners for public office of a life that requires minimal effort, little intellectual stimulation, and no prudence whatsoever. Under normal circumstances, breaking a promise is regarded as unbecoming for any man. Even worse is that such a criminal gang is still respected by the greater public. This terrible truth ends up reflecting worse upon the latter than the former.

To some, such as those few whose daily net worth is still a function of the policy vehicle formerly known as the 'market', it is a merry Christmas (at least until such time as the recoupling between central planning and reality once again inevitably occurs). To others, such as the 50 million (by now) Americans on food stamps, and billions of others around the world living in conditions of poverty, it is not so merry. But no matter one's current state of one's mind, there is always hope that the future will bring better days: after all that is what reflective holidays such as today are all about. We too hope that there is hope, if at the same time realizing that ever more of the promise of the future is packaged away in chunks of debt and securitized in order to fund an unsustainable present. We open up this open thread to readers to share their hopes and concerns about the present and the future.

In France, Minister for Energy and Environment Delphine Batho recently proposed a light curfew to pertain to “in and outside shops, offices, and public buildings” between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m. beginning next July. Some merchants are up in arms as the rule adds to existing bans such as the forced closing of stores on Sunday and night shopping in general. If enacted, the illumination ban will quickly disperse Paris’s reputation as the “City of Light.” France’s Commercial Council is criticizing the decision as being anti-business and economically damaging. However, the fact that these assumed defenders of free enterprise are surprised at such a proposal is the real puzzle. In a country run by a government that is happily bloodletting the productive capacity of the people through a hike on the income tax and a tax on financial transactions, this latest nanny-state resolve should be fully expected. It is not a power grab but a mere reassertion of the authority the central state has over the private affairs of society. The “lights out” edict is just another piece of evidence of a disturbing truth: the road to serfdom is not ahead of the West; we have already reached its end.