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가격 제도와 싸우는 영국 정부
2차대전 이후 영국은 노동당 정부가 집권해서 사회주의적 정책을 펼쳤다. 어쩌면 지금의 한국과 유사한 상황이다.
당시 정부는 자유 시장에 개입해 통제를 시작했는데, 해즐릿은 이를 비판하며, 자유롭게 가격이 형성되면, 정부의 우려와 달리 시장이 알아서 수천 가지의 상품과 서비스의 생산을 자동으로 배분하게 될 거라고 주장하고 있다.
England vs. the Price System
Henry Hazlitt
[This article was written from London and published in Newsweek, June 2, 1947.]
England's major economic troubles today seem not so much the result of its war losses, appalling as these were, as of its postwar policies. Temporary impoverishment was inevitable, but the postwar series of special crises in coal, food, and dollars was not.
The underlying assumption beneath the present strangling network of economic controls is that a free market and price system is at best a fair-weather system, a luxury a country can afford only when it is already well off. It is the precise function of free prices, however, to allocate production among thousands of different commodities and services and to relieve the most serious shortages most quickly by providing the greatest profit and wage incentives precisely where those shortages exist.
A free price system last fall would certainly have signaled the impending shortage of coal long before the Labour government was awake to its existence. It would have encouraged imports of coal from America then, instead of waiting until now. It would have enabled higher wages or bonuses to be paid for increased production. It would have attracted more men to mining. If the miners had been free to spend their money for things they really wanted, higher money wages would have meant higher real production incentives.
On May 7, Emanuel Shinwell, the minister of fuel and power, indiscreetly declared before a meeting of union delegates that "the organized workers of the country are our friends; as for the rest they don't matter a tinker's cuss."
This statement, which has since become a source of great embarrassment to the Labour Party, does supply a key to the real nature and animus of recent British planning. The essentially collectivist and egalitarian philosophy behind it begins to emerge more clearly. A ceiling has been put on imports and particularly on the purchase of so-called luxuries because "dollars are short" and "we cannot afford it." But who are "we"? Certainly not the individual who wishes to buy.
The real principle applied here is "If I can't afford to buy it, you shan't be allowed to buy it. If organized labor cannot have it nobody shall have it." This is most clearly illustrated in food. The overall food supply is not nearly as bad as is commonly supposed. Though it lacks interest and variety, the minister of food estimates in terms of calories it is only 6 percent below the prewar level. But analysis of its distribution is instructive. In April, wage rates in Britain were 68 percent above their 1939 level. Weekly wages were about 80 percent higher. The cost of living index, however, has gone up only 31 percent. Food considered separately had risen only 22 percent. This means that the average British worker is considerably better off in terms of goods than he was before the war.
One can say that this is a very good thing, but one cannot argue at the same time that production is low because nutrition is low (the coal miner in particular gets a much higher than average allotment) and one cannot call it austerity. Austerity is not being imposed on the British nation as a whole; it is being imposed through heavy taxes on the British middle and upper classes to subsidize the British working class.
Food prices are being subsidized to the extent of $1,572,000,000 a year in spite of the fact that the British worker is spending a much smaller percentage of his income for the same amount of food than he did before the war. It is the middle and upper classes who have now been reduced to something approaching the workingman's diet.
Insofar as austerity has been imposed on the whole British people, it consists in refusing to permit either consumers or producers freedom of choice. The consumer is not free to spend his money on things he himself wants but only on things government officials think are good for him. The producer is not free to make what he wishes but only what government officials think is good for the country.
The whole system of priorities, allocations, quotas, and licenses causes endless delays, keeps efficient concerns from expanding, and keeps inefficient concerns in business. Production is lost all around not merely because an army of men is created to issue orders rather than produce, but because producers themselves must spend so much of their time trying to get licenses and allocations instead of finding out how to reduce costs and prices and make the goods consumers really want.
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중앙은행은 무엇보다 정부의 금고를 채우기 위해 설립되었다. 중앙은행은 통치자나 통치 계급이 대중을 대규모로 약탈할 수 있도록 해주는 기관이다.
화폐 발행권을 독점한 중앙은행은 이로써 상품 즉 자연 화폐를 법정 화폐로 대체할 수 있게 되었다.
법정 화폐는 시간이 흐르면 구매력을 잃으므로, 성격상 인플레션을 유발한다. 법정 화폐가 발행되면 인위적인 호경기를 만들지만 결국은 불황으로 끝나고 만다. 또 법정 화폐는 소비자, 기업, 정부가 부채를 짊어지도록 한다.
화폐의 양이 시장에서 증가하면, 다양한 상품의 가격은 각기 다른 시점에서 각기 다른 정도로 영향을 받는다. 그로 인해 사람들의 상대적인 소득과 부의 지위는 영향을 받는다.
한 마디로 새로 발행된 화폐의 초기 수령자들은 부자가 되고, 후기 수령자들은 가난해지는 일이 벌어진다.
시장에서 법정 화폐의 양이 증가하면 소비자 상품의 가격이 상승한다. 또 그것은 증권, 부동산, 주택가격 등의 자산 가격을 끌어올린다. 따라서 가격이 상승하는 자산을 지니고 있는 사람들은 절로 인플레에 따라 혜택을 보게 된다.
법정 화폐는 부의 불평등을 더욱 심화하고 부익부 빈익빈을 더욱 악화하므로, 사회적으로 정의롭지 못하다.
Central Banks Enrich a Select Few at the Expense of Many
Thorsten Polleit
The message unanimously churned out by politicians, central bankers, and ‘mainstream’ economists is that central banks are there for the ‘greater good’. They provide the economy with sufficient money and credit, and they fight inflation, thereby supporting output and employment growth. What is more, central banks are supposedly in a position to effectively fend off or at least mitigate financial and economic crises. However, unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
Throughout history, central banks have been created, first and foremost, to fill governments' coffers. To increase the king's or elected government's financial means through an inflationary scheme – usually too elaborate and too treacherous for most people to see through. Central banks are instrumental for putting the ruler — or the ruling class — into a position where they can plunder the people on a grand scale and, by way of redistributing the loot, making a growing number of people financially and socially dependent on it.
To that end, central banks have been assigned the monopoly of money production. This has made it possible to replace commodities, or "natural money" with unbacked paper or fiat money. Central banks provide commercial banks with fiat central bank money, and commercial banks are free to pyramid a multiple of fiat commercial bank money on top of it. This is what monetary experts typically call a “fractional reserve banking system,” which is a genuinely inflationary scheme.
Murray N. Rothbard even speaks of a cartel between the central bank and commercial banks. In practice, the central bank acts as a cartelizing agent: "to cartelize the private commercial banks, and to help them inflate money and credit together, pumping in reserves to the banks, and bailing them out if they get into trouble." The fiat money cartel, formed between the central bank and commercial banks, has far-reaching economic and social-political consequences.
For instance, fiat money is inflationary in the sense that it loses its purchasing power over time; it cannot, and does not, serve as a much-needed store of value for savers. Also, the issue of fiat money sets into motion an artificial upswing (boom), which, however, must sooner or later flip to a downswing (bust). What is more, fiat money makes consumers, firms, and governments run into ever higher amounts of debt, pushing them towards a situation of over-indebtedness.
There is an additional severe problem with central banks’ fiat money: It affects income and wealth distribution, and it does so in a non-merit-based, anti-free market way. To understand this, we have to consider that if and when the quantity of money increases in an economy, the prices of different goods will be affected at different points in time and to a different degree. In other words: A rise in the quantity of money changes - and necessarily so - peoples' relative income and wealth position.
The early receivers of the new money will be the beneficiaries, for they can purchase goods at still unchanged prices with their fresh money. As the new money is passed from hand to hand, prices are rising. The late receivers are put at a disadvantage: They can purchase only goods at elevated prices with their new money. In other words: The early receivers of the new money get rich(er), the late receivers get poor(er). Needless to say, those who do not receive any of the new money will be worst off.
In the crisis 2008/2009, for instance, it was the banking and finance industry (“Wall Street”) that was bailed out in the first place. Central banks printed up new money balances, injected them into banks’ balance sheets and offered them generously with extremely low refinancing costs. In the US, for instance, the balance sheet of the banking cartel is now way bigger than it was before the outbreak of the crisis. The banking cartel has weathered the crisis pretty well it has helped to bring about by issuing fiat money in the first place.
It is misleading to think a rise in the quantity of money would be “neutral” in the sense that it would leave peoples’ income and wealth position unchanged. In today’s fiat money regime, the relentless increase in the fiat money supply provided by the banking cartel does not only drive up consumer goods prices. It also pushes up asset prices such as stock, real estate, and housing prices. The holders of assets whose value goes up due to inflation benefit, those holding money balances lose out: The latter’s purchasing power is diminished.
It is difficult to pin down exactly who is a net-winner, and who is a net-loser of the banking cartel's inflationary scheme. As a rule, however, fiat money holders bear the brunt – especially if central banks push interest rates to negative levels in inflation-adjusted terms; the income of wage earners falls behind the income of those owning assets whose prices inflate. Those getting bank credit are among the first receivers of the newly created money and thus benefit while those who don't get bank credit are on the losing end.
Those taking side with the “deep state”, which is financed by vast amounts of credit provided by the banking cartel on favorable terms, enjoy secure employment and comfortable pension packages. Firms get profitable business from government orders. In particular, the commercial and investment banking industry, with its privileged access to central bank credit pockets enormous profits and pays downright obscene staff compensations.
It would be a mistake to argue that the banking cartel's fiat money scheme works for the greater good. It benefits some — typically the few — at the expense of others — typically the many. So it does not come as a surprise that a growing number of people have raised the question: Does the banking cartel make inequality worse? Of course, inequality of income and wealth has many reasons, and as long as people are unequal in terms of inventiveness, industriousness, talent, and perseverance, income and wealth will be unequally distributed.
However, sound economic reasoning reveals that the banking cartel contributes to income and wealth inequality, even to a growing gap between the net-winners and net-losers of the fiat money scheme. This kind of inequality cannot be convincingly justified by economic or ethical considerations — for it is the direct outcome of the state monopolizing the production of money, and special interest groups taking advantage of the state’s money production monopoly to serve their purpose(s).
Public resistance against the wheelings and dealings of the banking cartel has been held in check so far, presumably because people have been enjoying a rise in real incomes over the past decades. What they do not see is the counterfactual: The banking cartel has kept most peoples’ income and wealth below potential; they could be better off, but the banking cartel has been preventing it. This statement opens the door for a counter-argument: Without the banking cartel and its fiat money scheme, there would have been no economic growth at all .
This, however, represents one of the perhaps most noteworthy errors in ‘mainstream' monetary theory. To explain, money — the ultimate means of payment — is useful only for its exchange value. A rise in its quantity does not confer any social benefit; the economy is not better off if the quantity of money increases. As pointed out earlier, an increase of the money supply only benefits some at the expense of others. It is a means to slyly strip the uninformed of their resources, shovelling them into the coffers of the informed.
One question remains: Does a rise in the quantity of money not induce additional economic activity? This question implies a proposition that has no basis in sound economic theory. It is a seductive promise at best. For it can be logically argued that there is, and can be, no constant relation between external factors (such as a change in the quantity of money) and human action (such as, for instance, inventing, investing, or producing); the hypothesis “increasing the quantity of money induces growth” is thus logically unsustainable.
So, unfortunately, this article ends with a bitter insight: Sound economic reasoning will come to the conclusion that the fiat money scheme – represented and upheld by the banking cartel – contributes, and necessarily so, to income and wealth inequality within society. It is one source of widening the gap between the rich and the poor. By all standards, fiat money must be considered socially unjust. The same applies to the collusion between central banks and private banks.
So what is to be done? The solution is straightforward: Establish a free market in money, shut down central banks, dismantle the banking cartel. As Murray Rothbard says: “[A]bolish the Federal Reserve System, and return to the gold standard, to a monetary system where a market-produced metal, such as gold, serves as the standard money, and not paper tickets printed by the Federal Reserve.” Perhaps the debate about growing inequality helps to rehabilitate our money system — something economic insights have failed to achieve so far.
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