It’s no secret that governments hate the free market. At its base, every single government tax, license, regulation and restriction is an implicit rebuke of the idea that humans should be able to interact freely with those around them.
This is old news to my long-term readers, but it bears repeating because many have been duped by the purveyors of socialist dogma to believe that free interactions between sovereign individuals is a scourge that must be eradicated. Because, you see, the fact that food, clothing, shelter, health care and the means of production don’t magically rain from the sky into the lap of every person on the planet means that any attempt to exchange your skills and services with another in return for compensation is slavery. (No, this is not an analogy, it’s LITERAL SLAVERY, guys!)
The words “free market” have become so tainted in modern economic discourse that their very mention tends to evoke a slew of supposedly related and equally hated terms. “Capitalism” and “big business” and “banker” are thrown together in a stew with “free market” so that anyone who talks positively about voluntary transactions between free people in a positive manner is obviously a poor-hating fat cat who lights his cigars with $100 bills and dines on the tears of beggars.
But here’s a puzzler for the socialists in the crowd: Why is it that the very banksters that they so rightfully rage against are in fact their biggest allies in the fight against the free market?
I know this perfectly straightforward observation will come as a shock to some of my readers, so let’s break it down.
As I’ve already stated, we know that the very raison d’être of government is to undermine, skew, and otherwise hamper free exchange among its citizens. Government, after all, is a claim of ownership over a geographical territory by a cartel of crooks. That claim (according to the cartel and its defenders) gives the mafia the right to set rules for and impose restrictions on the inhabitants of that region. To understand how the gang of crook wields this power over the free market, one merely has to examine the history of the creation of the FDA or the ugly truth about the minimum wage or the nitty gritty details of how the financial regulators really operate.
But it would be folly to conclude from the simple observation that government is put in place to fleece the public that the politicians are the ones who benefit from this extortion scheme. Quite the contrary. The politicians are the punching bags that are put out for the public to lay into, expendable fall guys who are put in place merely to allow an enraged populace to let off steam without ever threatening the real rulers of the system. As Quigley observed long ago:
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.
So if interventions in the free market aren’t merely about lining the pockets of the political puppets, then who does this system really benefit?
Well, the big business monopolists, of course. Not only do we have the examples cited above (the FDA, the minimum wage, etc.) of big businesses benefiting from governments regulating their competitors out of the marketplace, but my Big Oil documentary is a case study in how an entire industry can grow up in conjunction with governmental institutions whose function is to cement big businesses in place as ruling monopolists. Oh, how the Rockefellers fell when the Supreme Court split up Standard Oil, hey?
But more to the point, the foundation of our economy lies neither in the politicians nor in the big business monopolists whose back pocket they rest in. It’s in the bankster class that creates the money out of nothing and loans it out (at interest, of course) to those cronies they wish to succeed in the phony baloney economy. And it is for this very reason that the central bankers are always the ones arguing for greater “governmental” power over the economy. Because, in the end, the government is just the mask that they wear to conceal their true face from the public.