federal reserve

Who are the worst Americans?

by on August 16, 2010 @ 12:26 am · 10 comments

in Anti-Statism, The Left, The Right

From Stephen Bainbridge via Tyler Cowen comes a list of the worst Americans:

John Hawkins asked a bunch of right of center bloggers to list the “20 Worst Americans of all time,” from which he compiled the following list. The comments are mine. Personally, I find the collated list pretty much of a joke. It reflects the partisan passions of the moment, not anything resembling a serious verdict of history.

It goes on to list the usual suspects from the modern political right’s perspective: the Clintons, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, various spies and assassins, FDR, Ted Kennedy and so on.  I agree with Bainbridge that several selections are historically dubious; leftist loudmouths such as Moore and Al Sharpton seem inconsequential next to true monsters like FDR and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I doubt Bainbridge would agree with a libertarian’s list, however, although some overlap would exist.  But we libertarians enjoy the benefit of an anti-state, pro-liberty perspective, which neither the right nor left will entertain.  Thus while Bainbridge puts John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of “our greatest President”, at # 3 of his own list, Booth’s target would top mine.  Yes, Abraham Lincoln: the worst American ever.

And certainly no other assassin or spy or anyone else who has undermined the state would go on my list of worst Americans.  The worst Americans are the ones who have used the state to murder, rob and terrorize innocent people.  Lincoln prosecuted a war to prevent secession and caused the deaths of 600,000 Americans and virtually unmeasurable economic destruction.  Timothy McVeigh isn’t our worst domestic terrorist: the United States government is.

FDR, who ushered in the modern welfare state and deliberately goaded the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, thus providing an excuse to push the U. S. into WWII, surely is in the top five.  As is his successor, Harry Truman, for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with atomic weapons.

Then there’s Alexander Hamilton, a strong centralist whose ideas of protectionism and fiat currency plague American economic policy to this day.

Here are some of my choices, not in a meaningful order after the top five or so:

  1. Abraham Lincoln
  2. Woodrow Wilson (World War I tyrant, established the Fed and the first progressive income tax, allowed segregationist government policies)
  3. FDR
  4. Harry Truman
  5. Alexander Hamilton
  6. LBJ (expanded involvement in Vietnam, biggest spender on social programs since FDR)
  7. George W. Bush (two wars, unprecedented expansion of Federal government)
  8. Ted Kennedy (worst recent example of our ruling political class)
  9. Alan Greenspan (architect of the Fed’s disastrous monetary expansion)
  10. Paul Krugman (apologist for neo-Keynesian economic policy)
  11. John Marshall (4th Chief Justice of SCOTUS who greatly expanded Federal power)
  12. Janet Reno (murderess of 76 Branch Davidians in Waco)
  13. J. Edgar Hoover (the FBI’s first and still most evil dictator director)

I’m sure readers can think of many others, but this is a good start.

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The long, slow flight from the US Dollar

by on July 10, 2010 @ 12:43 am · 3 comments

in (Austrian) Economics

Fortune magazine has an interesting piece summing up some recent trends in the dollar. While there has not been a radical or frantic dumping of the dollar, central banks and private investors continue to distance themselves from the US Dollar. The piece notes that other dollars, namely the Australian and Canadian ones, are gaining in prestige:

A new report from Morgan Stanley analyst Emma Lawson confirms what many had suspected: the dollar is firmly on its way to losing its status as the reserve currency of the world. We already knew that central banks have preferred gold to dollars, and that they’re even selling their gold for cash; now, according to Lawson’s data, it seems that those central banks prefer almost anything to dollars.

The new competition over reserve currency is interesting for more than its economics since it is an important political issue. The nation that can build up its own currency as a reserve currency will expand its ability to inflate and incur debt with less fear of inflation.

The US has benefited from this situation for decades. As the Fed inflates to finance deficit spending and to “stimulate” consumer spending, dollars are eventually absorbed by foreign central banks, put in reserves and out of circulation. The United States has managed to stave off the effects of reckless money printing for decades thanks to the willingness of foreign investors and central banks to sit on dollars as a store of value.

Now the demand for the dollar is fading away slowly. This won’t mean sudden hyperinflation, however, since the economy is still in terrible shape, and even if a boatload of dollars were to return to our shores right now, the lack of lending and spending, as a consequence of deflating portfolios across the land, will keep prices relatively contained, at least in the short- and possibly medium-term.

The good news is that the fall of the dollar will mean that the United States will slowly have to come to the realization that it won’t be able to engage in endless deficit spending and monetization of debt without feeling the consequences of runaway inflation. The empire has been financed by a dollar that was the world’s reserve currency. Those days are coming to an end.

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