The Mint: Markets go up, Slovenia goes down, Dissing the State, Embracing Anarchy

9/20/2011 Portland, Oregon - Pop in your mints…

The Stock market is absolutely resilient in the face of news ranging from bad to UGLY. Presumably, the slow motion debt market collapse occurring in Europe is priced in, and it may be this very collapse that is driving money into US equities. In the insane “debt is money” system, the money can only go so many places, and there is currently so much money sloshing around that it is a wonder everything isn’t going up in price.

Oh, wait, it is! The CPI came in at 0.4% for August. Nothing to write home about but at this pace the annual CPI could hit 5%, well above the FED’s 2% target.

And we haven’t seen anything yet. Tomorrow, the Federal Reserve will meet and be expected to “do something.” Lately, “do something” has meant that the FED offers to throw perfectly good Federal Reserve notes at various forms of bad paper issued by companies and governments who never intend to make good on them.

At this stage in the game, it is now a given that if perfectly willing market participants won’t buy the paper, surely the FED must do it. “So what?” say you, “Let the FED waste its own money!” If only it were that simple, fellow taxpayer.

Unfortunately, the FED’s money, by decree, is everybody’s money. Every bad decision by the FED reduces the purchasing power of every dollar holder on the planet, making nearly all of us involuntary shareholders of this worthless enterprise, and management at the FED has been making some very bad decisions with very large sums for about four years now.

As a concerned involuntary shareholder of the FED we are compelled to offer the following unsolicited advice: Why not just wait until January, when the 0% FED funds “trickle” their way down to Main Street? Then things will really be interesting. That is when the US Dollar in its present form will go the way of every other paper currency in the history of mankind.

Fellow taxpayer, prudence demands that one make immediate plans to replace anything that depends upon the value of the US Dollar with something real. By the time the FED gets around to doing it for you, by introducing a New Dollar, current inaction will have caused anyone with faith in the dollar to suffer horrendously tremendous losses in relative purchasing power.

Back in the rotting old world, to quote Nabokov, the Euro debacle just became more complicated as the Slovenian government failed a confidence vote. The President is now left trying to cobble together a government and the rest of the Eurozone will presumably have to wait at least 30 days to get Slovenia’s approval for the next round of good money to be thrown at Greece.

It is useless to point out that the Eurozone governments, like their American counterparts, are simply throwing good money after bad. As we have observed here before, throwing money at failing enterprises is their only solution. Besides, they have banking interests to protect. Soon they will be spreading propaganda that ATMs won’t spit out Euros and the world will end if the Greeks are not supported.
That may be true, but these unpleasant outcomes will eventually come to pass no matter what the Euro FEDs do.

This is how the State, which by definition can do nothing but destroy wealth, operates. Western societies, and dare we say, the entire world are now beginning to suffocate under the weight of the current form of welfare/warfare state which exists to make promises on behalf of its productive citizens to its unproductive citizens.

Is Anarchy the Answer?

Then, after enslaving the productive citizens, the State then makes promises to support the banking and military interests in order to ensure that the productive citizens remain enslaved.

At some point, each citizen decides that they are either better off becoming an unproductive citizen, working for the State taskmaster as a banker or provider of “security”, or fleeing beyond the State’s ability to enslave them. Western society is quickly approaching the tipping point where a majority of its productive citizens will be forced to make this choice.

Faced with such facts, an intelligent fellow taxpayer such as yourself is surely asking (or should be asking, if we may prompt you), “Isn’t there a better way?”

In other words, is the State really necessary? Today we read a brilliant essay on this very subject by Stefan Molyneux. We encourage you to peruse it at your leisure. You can see it by clicking on the link below:

The Stateless Society – An Examination of Alternatives

If you are limited on time, it is enough to say that Molyneux lays out compelling, logical arguments about how the free market would more effectively take care of the tasks which are currently relegated to the State. Specifically, he examines three activities which pro-State apologists claim that the free market will not solve on its own, making the State’s existence a necessity: Dispute Resolution, Collective Services, and Pollution.

After reading Molyneux’s arguments, it seems that now more than ever that embracing Anarchy is the answer to what ails society.

Much more than simply the answer, it is clear that the true chaos in not created by the Stateless Anarchist model, rather the present chaos is a product of entrusting the State with too much power.

How else can one explain how every present effort the Government uses to ”improve” its citizen’s lives serves to collectively impoverish them?

Stay tuned and Trust Jesus.

Stay Fresh!

David Mint

Email: davidminteconomics@gmail.com

P.S. For more ideas and commentary please check out The Mint at http://www.davidmint.com/

Key Indicators for September 20, 2011

Copper Price per Lb: $3.76
Oil Price per Barrel: $86.43

Corn Price per Bushel: $6.90
10 Yr US Treasury Bond: 1.94%
FED Target Rate: 0.09% ON AUTOPILOT, THE FED IS DEAD!

Gold Price Per Ounce: $1,805 PERMANENT UNCERTAINTY