Richard Ebeling emails:
Dear Bob,
I have new article on the news and commentary website, “EpicTimes,” on, “Time to End Monetary Central Planning.”
If there is anything that can be said for certainty about practical Federal Reserve policy it that Janet Yellen and the other Board of Governors of America’s central bank, have no idea what to do or when, as reflected in their decisions on short-term interest rates over which they have some influence.
As I explain in my new book, Monetary Central Planning and the State, published by the Future of Freedom Foundation and available in a low-cost eBook format from Amazon, this is indicative of the irrationality of all forms of central planning of which monetary central planning by central banks is one example.
Central bank policy-making distorts interest rates, disrupts savings and investment decision-making, destabilizes the general value of money through manipulation of the money supply, and brings about imbalances in the structure of relative prices, wages and the allocation and use of resources, capital and labor throughout the economy.
The only way to eliminate the repeated pattern of booms and busts, inflations and recessions is to bring an end to central banking and its system of monetary central planning. And replace it with a market-based and market-generated system of monetary freedom and competitive, free banking.
http://www.epictimes.com/richardebeling/2015/10/time-to-end-monetary-central-planning/
Best,
Richard
Yes, There is an Imperialist Ruling Class by Paul Street
ReplyDeleteNowhere is the planning and influence of the ruling class of the world’s and history’s most powerful capitalist state, the United States, more evident than in the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).
historian Shoup shows in his indispensable new book Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council of Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014 (Monthly Review Press, 2015), no such group remotely approximates the CFR in scale, reach, and influence when it comes to articulating the national and global class interests of the U.S. capitalist elite and a growing transnational capitalist ruling class. With an individual membership of 5000 (boasting an average household worth of $1.4 million), a top Fortune 500 corporate membership of 170, a staff over 330, a budget of $60 million, and assets of $490 million, the Council is “the largest and most powerful of all U.S. private think tanks that presume to discuss and decide the future of humanity in largely secret meetings behind closed doors in the upper-class neighborhoods of New York and Washington. During the last four decades,” Shoup observes, “the CFR has not only successfully continued its central position as the most important private organization in the United States, one with no real peer in the country. It has succeeded in expanding its key role, and remains at the center of the small plutocracy that runs the United States and much of the world.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/06/yes-there-is-an-imperialist-ruling-class/