Centennial Review - July 2013
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Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute Volume 5, Number 7 • July 2013
Publisher, William L. Armstrong Editor, John Andrews
4
DEBASED CURRENCY, DEBASED CULTURE: WHY AMERICA NEEDS SOUND MONEY
By Paul Prentice
One can scarcely pick up a newspaper without reading of some new financial scandal. From the Wall Street banking bailouts to stories of greed and corruption in oncevenerable investment companies, there is a developing sense that our money is neither safe nor sound.
would have to find someone who simultaneously had extra berries and wanted some meat. The voluntary exchange would then create additional wealth, by allowing the goods to flow to those who valued them more. But the entire process was held back by the necessity of a coincidence of wants. Furthermore, the meat or berries would deteriorate over time. Economic advancement was extremely slow and difficult. Then, the concept of money was developed when societies agreed that some commodity, be it stones or shells or precious metals, would be commonly accepted as a medium of exchange. Market Signals
The problem of coincidence of wants was solved. People could now trade their goods and services for money, and Nor is it. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, then trade the money for other goods and services that $1.00 in today’s 2013 currency is worth about the same as they valued more. This function as a medium of exchange $0.04 was worth in 1913. This is an astonishing debasement naturally evolved into a system of prices—the ratio at of the currency over the past century. which one good traded for another. Hence Given that 1913 is the year that the Federal In 1913, 4¢ bought the second function of money as a unit of Reserve System was established for the account, which provides the market signals express purpose of stabilizing the U.S. what $1 buys today. allowing scarce resources to be transformed monetary system, one is justified in asking into goods and services that maximize Murray Rothbard’s insightful question (in a book by that human wants and needs. title): “What has government done to our money?” This Perhaps society determined that one gallon of milk was essay will attempt an answer. worth two stones, and that one pound of meat was worth In addition, as Thomas Woods points out, economic cycles four stones. Now you had signals about relative value. have actually been worse —more frequent, deeper, and Then perhaps one hour of human labor was determined longer-lasting—after the creation of the Fed than they to be worth 10 stones, and societies now began to have a were before.1 So this essay will also make the case for sound way of determining what to do with their scarcest of all money—money that fulfills its natural economic role as (1) resources—time. Economies advanced faster. a medium of exchange; (2) a unit of account; and (3) a Finally, the concept of money allowed a person to keep the store of value. value of any excess production. If you earned 100 stones My contention will be that money can only fulfill that role and only traded 90 of them, you would have 10 extra stones when it is free from arbitrary and capricious governmental that you could then trade for goods and services another controls on its price and quantity. Before There was Money It is an economic maxim that income and wealth are created when people are at liberty to specialize, produce, and trade. In order to facilitate that process, thousands of years ago people invented what is now called “money.” Imagine a world before money. Trade had to be done by barter. If you had extra meat and wanted some berries, you
Paul Prentice (Ph.D., University of Connecticut) was an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and later a visiting scholar at the U.S. Department of The Treasury. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and serves as a Centennial Institute fellow. This is his second essay for Centennial Review. Centennial Institute sponsors research, events, and publications to enhance public understanding of the most important issues facing our state and nation. By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith, family, and freedom, teach citizenship, and renew the spirit of 1776.
day. This final function of money as a store of value now allowed people to save for the future. It brought the critical concept of time into the human action of specialization, production, and trade. People then began to trade money through time: “If you lend me 10 stones today, I will pay you 11 stones a year from now.” The concept of interest was born, reflecting what economists call the “social rate of time preference.” Economic participants were able to delay gratification today in return for even greater gratification tomorrow. Interest Isn’t Always Usury Jay Richards, in his book Money, Greed, and God, demystifies the biblical injunction against usury. Some have taken it to mean interest in general, but there is a difference. Usury refers to a ruinous price of borrowing charged exploitively to a poor fellow-believer. Such exploitation would violate God’s intention for us to behave charitably.
Significantly, the congressional power to “coin money” implies a precious-metals based currency. Notice that the Founders did not say “print money.” Over the millennia of human experience, two metals—gold and silver—have stood the test of time as socially acceptable forms of money fufilling all three functions. Article I, Section 10, is therefore quite clear: “No State shall make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” After the disastrous experience with creating “continental dollars” out of thin air to help pay for the Revolutionary War, which resulted in massive inflation as the currency became worthless, the Founders recognized that establishing a sound national currency must be a critical function of the new federal government. Only a sound currency could effectively pay off the war debt, allow merchants to engage in international trade, and facilitate trade among the states.
They feared that allowing each state to create its own Interest, on the other hand, is simply the just return for money would lead to competing currencies that would putting one’s money at risk over time. As the negligent cause confusion and inhibit commerce and economic servant is told in Jesus’ parable of the talents: development. And Thomas Jefferson, “You ought to have deposited my money to Constitution foreshadowing a controversy that persists to the bankers, and I would have received back this day, warned that establishing a national my own with interest” (Matt. 25:27). Here doesn’t say central bank with power to discount notes and Christ teaches the importance of productivity, bills for other than sound coin money, would profit, and return on capital. The inference is ‘print money.’ create an institution of “deadly hostility to the that a society which values the future will save principles of the Constitution.” and invest more than a society that only lives for today. Thou Shalt not Steal Monetarily Thus as people learned to establish the time value of Not surprisingly, the Bible contains numerous passages money, expressed as interest, they could now delay instant and lessons rich in economic content. Since economics gratification and plan for the future by saving and investing. is so deeply intertwined with human nature, how could The process of capital accumulation began. Economic it be otherwise? In particular, there are multiple biblical growth accelerated. references to the necessity of sound money. Gary North’s Founders’ Foresight book, Honest Money, chronicles many of these. America’s Founders well understood the imperative for For example, even before the appearance of gold and sound money in a free society. In the U.S. Constitution, silver coins as money (dating from about 600 BC), these they granted Congress the authority to coin money and pure metals were recognized as having exchange value regulate its value—placing this in the same section with as ornaments and jewelry. In Genesis 24:53, Abraham’s setting the standards for weights and measures (Article servant gives Rebekah gifts of gold and silver jewelry to I, Section 8). They recognized that just as a carpenter lure her into marriage. could not build a sound house if a linear foot was not In contrast, the consequences of unsound money are standardized at 12 inches, a nation could not build a sound stated in Genesis 47:15: “So when the money failed in the economy if its unit of currency was of fluctuating value. land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians
CENTENNIAL REVIEW is published monthly by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. The authors’ views are not necessarily those of CCU. Designer, Bethany Applegate. Illustrator, Benjamin Hummel. Subscriptions free upon request. Write to: Centennial Institute, 8787 W. Alameda Ave., Lakewood, CO 80226. Call 800.44.FAITH. Or visit us online at www.CentennialCCU.org. Please join the Centennial Institute today. As a Centennial donor, you can help us restore America’s moral core and prepare tomorrow’s leaders. Your gift is tax-deductible. Please use the envelope provided. Thank you for your support. - John Andrews, Director
Scan this code with your smartphone to read this and previous issues online. Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 2
unsound money. Both are inherently immoral. They can be either a symptom of a corrupt civilization, or a cause of it. The Bible teaches us that civilizations fall when they become morally corrupt. This corruption is frequently manifested in a debased currency, a violating of God’s law for honest weights and measures. Consider what happens when a government is unconstrained from having sound money. Once it can print money at will, out of thin air, and still force citizens to honor it through legal tender laws, politicians no longer need to tax in order to spend. Now government can just print and spend. This “fiat money”—money created from nothing by decree—is still used as a legal medium of exchange. But it is no longer useful as a unit of account that allows relative prices to guide resource allocation. Nor is it useful as a store of value, since it depreciates over time as more and more is printed.
came to Joseph and said, ‘Give us bread, for why should we die in your presence? For the money has failed.’”
America’s Founders likely gained their biblical perspective It is not hard to see how a degenerating fiat currency can lead on the importance of a fixed and honest set of weights and to a degenerating culture.3 As political pressure builds to print measures from Leviticus 19:35: “You shall do no injustice money to empower various interest groups, constitutional in judgment, in measurement of length, weight, or volume. constraints on a government of limited and You shall have just balances, just weights, enumerated powers erode. Dishonest money a just ephah, and a just hin: I am the Lord Endless Free Lunch your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” violates the Within a single generation after the creation We find this echoed in Proverbs 20:23: Golden Rule. of the Federal Reserve, and not by accident, “Diverse weights are an abomination to the the Great Depression ensued and the modern welfare state Lord, and a false balance is not good.” It naturally follows was institutionalized. Government was set free to engage that coined money must also have a fixed and honest in endless “free lunch” promises. In the generations since weight, in order to be traded for goods that have a fixed then, Americans’ ethos of personal responsibility has been and honest weight. increasingly crowded out by promises of government To tamper with the scales is a moral evil —theft through security.. 4 fraud. Similarly, to tamper with the fixed and honest value Our country has experienced the very degeneration of which of money is also theft through fraud. This is a clear violation Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom. Over time, as of the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” he foresaw, government welfare changes the moral character (Exodus 20:15). Even John Maynard Keynes understood of the people. Society demands more free lunches, which the societal consequences of inflation, as evidenced by his require ever more fiat currency. The state crowds out the many writings against debasement of the currency. self-reliance of the citizen. Purge the Dross What economists call “moral hazard” becomes endemic, The concept of currency debasement itself has biblical whereby individuals are allowed to enjoy the benefits of correlatives. Unscrupulous merchants and unscrupulous irresponsible behavior while sloughing off the costs onto rulers would alloy their pure gold and silver with base society at large. In other words, they internalize the benefits metals or “dross” such as iron, lead, or tin. So from Isaiah but externalize the costs. Thus young men and women 1:22, we have: “Your silver has become dross, your wine begin to have children without having the means to support mixed with water.” To which God voices his displeasure them. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocket, and the family several verses later: “I will turn my hand against you, and disintegrates. purely purge away your dross, and take away your alloy.” In the business world, fiat currency allows profit to be As I have written in these pages before, capitalism is a privatized while losses are socialized. David Stockman, moral system of win-win voluntary exchange.2 Without a formerly President Reagan’s budget director, makes this moral basis such as the Golden Rule, exchange can become connection with the Wall Street bailouts in his sobering new win-lose. One person gains at the other’s expense. This book, The Great Deformation. The social safety net grows is the case with either unsound weights and measures, or
Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 3
Centennial Review
June 2013
Centennial Institute
Colorado Christian University 8787 W. Alameda Ave. Lakewood, CO 80226
Return Service Requested
Debased Currency, Debased Culture
By Paul Prentice
Money can’t fulfill its role to facilitate human flourishing when government manipulates it. The Bible teaches this, as our Founders knew. A century of efforts to the contrary by the Fed have failed.
along with the government’s printing press. The state becomes both the parent and the spouse. Generation after generation becomes increasingly corrupted. Civilization itself falls into a death spiral. It was Ayn Rand’s character Francisco d’Anconia in When Atlas Shrugged who perhaps put it best:
“Paper [money] is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account that is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account Overdrawn.’”
in a hole, stop digging.
Footnotes
Any layman, moreover, can see that a century of debased currency has contributed to the debasement of our culture, and it must not continue. Monetarily the United States is in a deep hole. It’s time to stop digging.
1. See Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas B. Woods, Regnery Publishing, 2009. 2. See “Moral Foundations of Capitalism,” by Paul Prentice, Centennial Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, January-February 2010. 3. This point is elaborated in my audio lecture, “The Link Between Degenerating Currency and Degenerating Culture,” Austrian Scholars Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn AL, 2009. 4. See, for example, the analysis in Responsibility Reborn by John Andrews, MT6 Media, 2011.
When people democratically elect corrupt leaders, they are part of the corruption. What can be done to stop the cultural death spiral? Reestablishing a sound currency might not be sufficient, but it certainly is necessary. With a sound currency, society can begin restoring its moral behavior by reviving personal responsibility. Exemplars: Mises, Friedman, Reagan Does this mean we have to return to a hard gold standard? In my opinion, no. There is nothing magical about gold. But it’s one thing that government cannot create out of thin air. So for that very reason, as Ludwig von Mises noted in The Theory of Money and Credit, gold acts as a constraint on government: “Sound money was devised as an instrument of protection of civil liberties… [much like] constitutions and bills of rights.” Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, each in his own way an economic giant of our time (and both born before the Federal Reserve was), left us waymarks toward the restoration of sound money with or without a gold standard. Friedman (1912-2006) outlined a nonmetallic “fixed money” rule to make the dollar once again as good as gold. And Reagan (1911-2004) showed during his presidency how much benefit can accrue even from just slowing the government printing presses.
WESTERN CONSERVATIVE SUMMIT Freedom’s New Day • July 26-28
Tickets Going Fast • Don’t Miss It
Mike Huckabee
Fox News
Allen West
Former Congressman
Scott Walker
Governor, WI
Jonah Goldberg, KT McFarland, Dick Morris, Kellyanne Conway, Guy Benson, Charles Murray, Bill Whittle, Michael Barone, Lee Strobel, & Mia Love Book at WesternConservativeSummit.com or 800.937.8728
Plus
Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 4
Principled Ideas from the Centennial Institute Volume 5, Number 7 • July 2013
Publisher, William L. Armstrong Editor, John Andrews
4
DEBASED CURRENCY, DEBASED CULTURE: WHY AMERICA NEEDS SOUND MONEY
By Paul Prentice
One can scarcely pick up a newspaper without reading of some new financial scandal. From the Wall Street banking bailouts to stories of greed and corruption in oncevenerable investment companies, there is a developing sense that our money is neither safe nor sound.
would have to find someone who simultaneously had extra berries and wanted some meat. The voluntary exchange would then create additional wealth, by allowing the goods to flow to those who valued them more. But the entire process was held back by the necessity of a coincidence of wants. Furthermore, the meat or berries would deteriorate over time. Economic advancement was extremely slow and difficult. Then, the concept of money was developed when societies agreed that some commodity, be it stones or shells or precious metals, would be commonly accepted as a medium of exchange. Market Signals
The problem of coincidence of wants was solved. People could now trade their goods and services for money, and Nor is it. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, then trade the money for other goods and services that $1.00 in today’s 2013 currency is worth about the same as they valued more. This function as a medium of exchange $0.04 was worth in 1913. This is an astonishing debasement naturally evolved into a system of prices—the ratio at of the currency over the past century. which one good traded for another. Hence Given that 1913 is the year that the Federal In 1913, 4¢ bought the second function of money as a unit of Reserve System was established for the account, which provides the market signals express purpose of stabilizing the U.S. what $1 buys today. allowing scarce resources to be transformed monetary system, one is justified in asking into goods and services that maximize Murray Rothbard’s insightful question (in a book by that human wants and needs. title): “What has government done to our money?” This Perhaps society determined that one gallon of milk was essay will attempt an answer. worth two stones, and that one pound of meat was worth In addition, as Thomas Woods points out, economic cycles four stones. Now you had signals about relative value. have actually been worse —more frequent, deeper, and Then perhaps one hour of human labor was determined longer-lasting—after the creation of the Fed than they to be worth 10 stones, and societies now began to have a were before.1 So this essay will also make the case for sound way of determining what to do with their scarcest of all money—money that fulfills its natural economic role as (1) resources—time. Economies advanced faster. a medium of exchange; (2) a unit of account; and (3) a Finally, the concept of money allowed a person to keep the store of value. value of any excess production. If you earned 100 stones My contention will be that money can only fulfill that role and only traded 90 of them, you would have 10 extra stones when it is free from arbitrary and capricious governmental that you could then trade for goods and services another controls on its price and quantity. Before There was Money It is an economic maxim that income and wealth are created when people are at liberty to specialize, produce, and trade. In order to facilitate that process, thousands of years ago people invented what is now called “money.” Imagine a world before money. Trade had to be done by barter. If you had extra meat and wanted some berries, you
Paul Prentice (Ph.D., University of Connecticut) was an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Presidents Carter and Reagan, and later a visiting scholar at the U.S. Department of The Treasury. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs and serves as a Centennial Institute fellow. This is his second essay for Centennial Review. Centennial Institute sponsors research, events, and publications to enhance public understanding of the most important issues facing our state and nation. By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith, family, and freedom, teach citizenship, and renew the spirit of 1776.
day. This final function of money as a store of value now allowed people to save for the future. It brought the critical concept of time into the human action of specialization, production, and trade. People then began to trade money through time: “If you lend me 10 stones today, I will pay you 11 stones a year from now.” The concept of interest was born, reflecting what economists call the “social rate of time preference.” Economic participants were able to delay gratification today in return for even greater gratification tomorrow. Interest Isn’t Always Usury Jay Richards, in his book Money, Greed, and God, demystifies the biblical injunction against usury. Some have taken it to mean interest in general, but there is a difference. Usury refers to a ruinous price of borrowing charged exploitively to a poor fellow-believer. Such exploitation would violate God’s intention for us to behave charitably.
Significantly, the congressional power to “coin money” implies a precious-metals based currency. Notice that the Founders did not say “print money.” Over the millennia of human experience, two metals—gold and silver—have stood the test of time as socially acceptable forms of money fufilling all three functions. Article I, Section 10, is therefore quite clear: “No State shall make any thing but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” After the disastrous experience with creating “continental dollars” out of thin air to help pay for the Revolutionary War, which resulted in massive inflation as the currency became worthless, the Founders recognized that establishing a sound national currency must be a critical function of the new federal government. Only a sound currency could effectively pay off the war debt, allow merchants to engage in international trade, and facilitate trade among the states.
They feared that allowing each state to create its own Interest, on the other hand, is simply the just return for money would lead to competing currencies that would putting one’s money at risk over time. As the negligent cause confusion and inhibit commerce and economic servant is told in Jesus’ parable of the talents: development. And Thomas Jefferson, “You ought to have deposited my money to Constitution foreshadowing a controversy that persists to the bankers, and I would have received back this day, warned that establishing a national my own with interest” (Matt. 25:27). Here doesn’t say central bank with power to discount notes and Christ teaches the importance of productivity, bills for other than sound coin money, would profit, and return on capital. The inference is ‘print money.’ create an institution of “deadly hostility to the that a society which values the future will save principles of the Constitution.” and invest more than a society that only lives for today. Thou Shalt not Steal Monetarily Thus as people learned to establish the time value of Not surprisingly, the Bible contains numerous passages money, expressed as interest, they could now delay instant and lessons rich in economic content. Since economics gratification and plan for the future by saving and investing. is so deeply intertwined with human nature, how could The process of capital accumulation began. Economic it be otherwise? In particular, there are multiple biblical growth accelerated. references to the necessity of sound money. Gary North’s Founders’ Foresight book, Honest Money, chronicles many of these. America’s Founders well understood the imperative for For example, even before the appearance of gold and sound money in a free society. In the U.S. Constitution, silver coins as money (dating from about 600 BC), these they granted Congress the authority to coin money and pure metals were recognized as having exchange value regulate its value—placing this in the same section with as ornaments and jewelry. In Genesis 24:53, Abraham’s setting the standards for weights and measures (Article servant gives Rebekah gifts of gold and silver jewelry to I, Section 8). They recognized that just as a carpenter lure her into marriage. could not build a sound house if a linear foot was not In contrast, the consequences of unsound money are standardized at 12 inches, a nation could not build a sound stated in Genesis 47:15: “So when the money failed in the economy if its unit of currency was of fluctuating value. land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians
CENTENNIAL REVIEW is published monthly by the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University. The authors’ views are not necessarily those of CCU. Designer, Bethany Applegate. Illustrator, Benjamin Hummel. Subscriptions free upon request. Write to: Centennial Institute, 8787 W. Alameda Ave., Lakewood, CO 80226. Call 800.44.FAITH. Or visit us online at www.CentennialCCU.org. Please join the Centennial Institute today. As a Centennial donor, you can help us restore America’s moral core and prepare tomorrow’s leaders. Your gift is tax-deductible. Please use the envelope provided. Thank you for your support. - John Andrews, Director
Scan this code with your smartphone to read this and previous issues online. Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 2
unsound money. Both are inherently immoral. They can be either a symptom of a corrupt civilization, or a cause of it. The Bible teaches us that civilizations fall when they become morally corrupt. This corruption is frequently manifested in a debased currency, a violating of God’s law for honest weights and measures. Consider what happens when a government is unconstrained from having sound money. Once it can print money at will, out of thin air, and still force citizens to honor it through legal tender laws, politicians no longer need to tax in order to spend. Now government can just print and spend. This “fiat money”—money created from nothing by decree—is still used as a legal medium of exchange. But it is no longer useful as a unit of account that allows relative prices to guide resource allocation. Nor is it useful as a store of value, since it depreciates over time as more and more is printed.
came to Joseph and said, ‘Give us bread, for why should we die in your presence? For the money has failed.’”
America’s Founders likely gained their biblical perspective It is not hard to see how a degenerating fiat currency can lead on the importance of a fixed and honest set of weights and to a degenerating culture.3 As political pressure builds to print measures from Leviticus 19:35: “You shall do no injustice money to empower various interest groups, constitutional in judgment, in measurement of length, weight, or volume. constraints on a government of limited and You shall have just balances, just weights, enumerated powers erode. Dishonest money a just ephah, and a just hin: I am the Lord Endless Free Lunch your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” violates the Within a single generation after the creation We find this echoed in Proverbs 20:23: Golden Rule. of the Federal Reserve, and not by accident, “Diverse weights are an abomination to the the Great Depression ensued and the modern welfare state Lord, and a false balance is not good.” It naturally follows was institutionalized. Government was set free to engage that coined money must also have a fixed and honest in endless “free lunch” promises. In the generations since weight, in order to be traded for goods that have a fixed then, Americans’ ethos of personal responsibility has been and honest weight. increasingly crowded out by promises of government To tamper with the scales is a moral evil —theft through security.. 4 fraud. Similarly, to tamper with the fixed and honest value Our country has experienced the very degeneration of which of money is also theft through fraud. This is a clear violation Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom. Over time, as of the eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” he foresaw, government welfare changes the moral character (Exodus 20:15). Even John Maynard Keynes understood of the people. Society demands more free lunches, which the societal consequences of inflation, as evidenced by his require ever more fiat currency. The state crowds out the many writings against debasement of the currency. self-reliance of the citizen. Purge the Dross What economists call “moral hazard” becomes endemic, The concept of currency debasement itself has biblical whereby individuals are allowed to enjoy the benefits of correlatives. Unscrupulous merchants and unscrupulous irresponsible behavior while sloughing off the costs onto rulers would alloy their pure gold and silver with base society at large. In other words, they internalize the benefits metals or “dross” such as iron, lead, or tin. So from Isaiah but externalize the costs. Thus young men and women 1:22, we have: “Your silver has become dross, your wine begin to have children without having the means to support mixed with water.” To which God voices his displeasure them. Out-of-wedlock births skyrocket, and the family several verses later: “I will turn my hand against you, and disintegrates. purely purge away your dross, and take away your alloy.” In the business world, fiat currency allows profit to be As I have written in these pages before, capitalism is a privatized while losses are socialized. David Stockman, moral system of win-win voluntary exchange.2 Without a formerly President Reagan’s budget director, makes this moral basis such as the Golden Rule, exchange can become connection with the Wall Street bailouts in his sobering new win-lose. One person gains at the other’s expense. This book, The Great Deformation. The social safety net grows is the case with either unsound weights and measures, or
Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 3
Centennial Review
June 2013
Centennial Institute
Colorado Christian University 8787 W. Alameda Ave. Lakewood, CO 80226
Return Service Requested
Debased Currency, Debased Culture
By Paul Prentice
Money can’t fulfill its role to facilitate human flourishing when government manipulates it. The Bible teaches this, as our Founders knew. A century of efforts to the contrary by the Fed have failed.
along with the government’s printing press. The state becomes both the parent and the spouse. Generation after generation becomes increasingly corrupted. Civilization itself falls into a death spiral. It was Ayn Rand’s character Francisco d’Anconia in When Atlas Shrugged who perhaps put it best:
“Paper [money] is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account that is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account Overdrawn.’”
in a hole, stop digging.
Footnotes
Any layman, moreover, can see that a century of debased currency has contributed to the debasement of our culture, and it must not continue. Monetarily the United States is in a deep hole. It’s time to stop digging.
1. See Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, by Thomas B. Woods, Regnery Publishing, 2009. 2. See “Moral Foundations of Capitalism,” by Paul Prentice, Centennial Review, Vol. 2, No. 1, January-February 2010. 3. This point is elaborated in my audio lecture, “The Link Between Degenerating Currency and Degenerating Culture,” Austrian Scholars Conference, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn AL, 2009. 4. See, for example, the analysis in Responsibility Reborn by John Andrews, MT6 Media, 2011.
When people democratically elect corrupt leaders, they are part of the corruption. What can be done to stop the cultural death spiral? Reestablishing a sound currency might not be sufficient, but it certainly is necessary. With a sound currency, society can begin restoring its moral behavior by reviving personal responsibility. Exemplars: Mises, Friedman, Reagan Does this mean we have to return to a hard gold standard? In my opinion, no. There is nothing magical about gold. But it’s one thing that government cannot create out of thin air. So for that very reason, as Ludwig von Mises noted in The Theory of Money and Credit, gold acts as a constraint on government: “Sound money was devised as an instrument of protection of civil liberties… [much like] constitutions and bills of rights.” Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan, each in his own way an economic giant of our time (and both born before the Federal Reserve was), left us waymarks toward the restoration of sound money with or without a gold standard. Friedman (1912-2006) outlined a nonmetallic “fixed money” rule to make the dollar once again as good as gold. And Reagan (1911-2004) showed during his presidency how much benefit can accrue even from just slowing the government printing presses.
WESTERN CONSERVATIVE SUMMIT Freedom’s New Day • July 26-28
Tickets Going Fast • Don’t Miss It
Mike Huckabee
Fox News
Allen West
Former Congressman
Scott Walker
Governor, WI
Jonah Goldberg, KT McFarland, Dick Morris, Kellyanne Conway, Guy Benson, Charles Murray, Bill Whittle, Michael Barone, Lee Strobel, & Mia Love Book at WesternConservativeSummit.com or 800.937.8728
Plus
Centennial Review, July 2013 ▪ 4
