Postage

I find my views growing ever narrower, thus it is great to benefit from everyone's fresh perspectives...

I would like to hear your takes on the following two paragraphs until I either disagree with them, or confidently agree. At the moment I'm afraid I'm just blind to something.

"...For this way, without actually breaking and entering the property of others, he can insidiously steal the fruits of their productive labor, and do so at the expense of all holders of money, and especially the later receivers of the new money. Counterfeiting, therefore, is inflationary, redistributive, distorts the economic system, and amounts to stealthy and insidious robbery and expropriation of all legitimate property-owners in society.

...Counterfeiters are generally reviled, and for good reason. But what happens when government sanctions, and in effect legalizes, counterfeiting, either by itself or by other institutions? Counterfeiting then becomes a grave economic and social problem indeed. For then there is no one to guard our guardians against their depredations of private property."

Prior to this book I hadn't given nearly enough thought to fractional-reserve banking, and I had no idea this book would discuss it so much. At the moment Rothbard seems to have gotten away from discussing the FED directly, but I'm guessing the underlying implication being that the FED, to a large extent, enables the continued existence of large scale fractional-reserve banking, primarily as lender of last resort (let's enable irrationality and extreme leveraging, yeah, that'll make for a stable economy, all while socializing the costs), but also as the number one regulator of the banking system. That is, it must be great when he who is called on to maintain a watchful eye on you, aides you in your unhealthy activities. Such an implication is not a bad case against the FED, with my current limited understanding.

I'm always hesitant to make any mention of Ayn Rand as I disagree with so much of her philosophy, yet one quote keeps coming to mind, "No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But Capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism." -Ayn Rand, Racism, 19th paragraph, or pg 151 of Virtues of Selfishness.

Capitalism, as true capitalists define it (as true capitalists define true capitalists, so on and so forth), in no way advocates a central bank.