A Note on the Machiavellian Origins of Central Banking in AmericaThomas J. DiLorenzo
ABSTRACT: In The Mystery of Banking, Murray Rothbard explained how the origins of central banking in the U.S. were rooted in a lobbying effort by Robert Morris and other “nationalists” to create a bank modeled after the Bank of England that would subsidize their businesses with cheap credit and other forms of corporate welfare. This paper argues that there was more to it than that, namely, that the chief proponent of a central bank, Alexander Hamilton, wanted the bank to be a more comprehensive engine of political corruption because of his belief that, without such corruption, government would be too small and ineffective. Members of Congress had to be “bought off” if they were to support the nationalists’ economic agenda, Hamilton believed, and a central bank was necessary to achieve that goal.
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Either Ben Bernanke has no understanding of how markets work and is equally ignorant of the massive regulatory influence the government has on housing and financial markets, or he is lying through his teeth when he says that under-regulated markets have run amok. The former is a possibility since Bernanke is a "macroeconomist." So-called macroeconomics has never been real economics but rather an endless series of engineering-type models purporting to guide politicians in centrally planning an economy...
During the Q&A session after Bernanke’s Council on Foreign Relations speech he took on an extraordinarily smug and arrogant tone as he explained that, during his academic career at Princeton, he was aware of "a few" people in the economics profession who believed that markets did a better job than central planners like himself, but that he hoped "there are no longer any people like that around." "We’re all socialist central planners now" is essentially what he was saying, some two decades after it was proven beyond all doubt that attempts to centrally plan an economy invariably lead to nothing but economic and human catastrophe...
Either Ben Bernanke is completely ignorant of the vast literature on the causes of the failures of socialist central planning, the economics of bureaucracy, the economics of public choice, the economics of regulation, the field of law and economics, and of markets, risk taking and entrepreneurship, or he is simply another evil, opportunistic, egomaniacal, empire-building bureaucrat who lives in a world of delusions surrounded by equally delusional sycophants...
To paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, author of Parliament of Whores, a book about Congress, giving Ben Bernanke – or any Fed chairman – money-printing ability and regulatory power is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
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My thoughts: Yep. Could Bernanke be the worst decision of the Bush Administration? Will Obama re-nominate Bernanke? Does Obama like to use teleprompters?
