A major theme of Keith’s work—and raison d’etre of Monetary Metals—is fighting to prevent collapse. Civilization is under assault on all fronts.
The Battles for Civilization
There is the freedom of speech battle, with the forces of darkness advancing all over. For example, in Pakistan, there are killings of journalists. Saudi Arabia apparently had journalist Khashoggi killed. New Zealand now can force travellers to provide the password to their phones so the government can go through all your data, presumably including your gmail, Onedrive, Evernote, and WhatsApp. China is now developing a “social credit” system, to centrally plan the economy and control citizen behavior. Canada has made it a crime to call someone by the wrong gender pronoun. Even in the US, whose First Amendment has (mostly) stood as a bulwark against censorship now has a president who threatens antitrust action against Amazon, because its CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which prints things he does not like. On college campuses, professors are harassed if they say one thing that the professional sensitives are sensitive to. If a controversial speaker is invited, he risks an angry mob coming to disrupt his talk (or worse).
Then, there is the nearly-over war against patients’ rights to purchase health care services from the provider of their own choosing, and health care professionals’ right to sell services to patients at a price they prefer. In the US, insurance companies are still forced (as under Obamacare) to provide insurance to anyone who applies, even those who have pre-existing conditions. This would be like forcing home insurance companies to issue policies to people whose houses are currently on fire. It is not insurance, but an unfunded welfare program.
The use of practical energy sources is in the battle for its life. Germany and Japan are de-nuclearizing. Other countries flirt with taxes designed, not to raise revenue, but to reduce the use of fossil fuels. While many may go along with this, thinking it’s OK to pay another 50 cents a gallon for gasoline, this will not be nearly enough to force large numbers of people to do without. Gasoline for driving to work and oil for heating homes has a highly inelastic demand. The price would have to rise enough to force people to change their lifestyles, abandoning their spacious houses in the suburbs to crowd into tiny urban apartments. In Europe this month, Keith saw petrol around $8 a gallon. And they use so much fossil fuels that more taxes are demanded to reduce carbon dioxide much further.
Few Want a Free Market in Money
And don’t even get us started on money. Even otherwise-free-market economists, and even wealthy entrepreneurs and business leaders, are for a properly managed irredeemable currency. One prominent person who is all of the above recently declared that if the Fed adopted GDP targeting (it currently does its central planning based on inflation and unemployment) it would end the business cycle! He did not want to hear anything about GDP being an invalid measure, about eating the seed corn, declining marginal productivity of debt, etc. If you break a window, it does add to GDP. This is not a recommendation to break windows. It is a damning indictment of GDP as a measure.
Where tyranny, socialism, and central planning (we repeat ourselves) are on the rise, not only liberty and human happiness wither, but so does the ability of people to coordinate their productive activities. A major theme of Keith’s dissertation is that government intervention promises improved outcomes, but always reduces coordination.
Others, especially Ayn Rand, have noted that socialism sets man against man. They can no longer cooperate to enrich each other. So they are forced to squabble to loot each other through the apparatus of the state.
This is a formula for misery even in a primitive agricultural economy. Wherever it has been adopted, it has been lethal not just to those who think independently, but even to millions of loyal supporters of the regime. The death toll of the socialist regimes of the 20thcentury—both international and national, i.e. communist and fascist—was in the hundreds of millions.
