Rockwell
The utopian dream of “limited government” cannot be realized, since government has no interest in remaining limited.

I don't believe I've ever heard a more compact, robust, and valid statement regarding the State than this.

The CB is made up of, and paid by, the bankers.
I'm looking for the 'government'...connection.
I see none when it comes to the amount of money in circulation.
The bankers did it all.

Your confusion most likely arises from your false separation of "The politicians" from "their financiers."

If you were to break everything down to the base assumption that exchange is either voluntarily agreed upon, and therefore mutually beneficial; or forced upon an involuntary party by coercion, you would have the alignment that matters.

Individuals in Society interact with one another under voluntary, cooperative structures and Individuals in the State unilaterally act upon Individuals in Society to their own ends.

It is extremely convenient for Statists to separate the political institutions from the financiers from the anonymous tyrants down your street but those separations are false. They are all one and the same.

The bankers who "did it all" are a facet of the same State apparatus as the politicians; a shell game has been played with rhetoric and pen to paper to obfuscate this fact from the casual observer, such as yourself.

Happy choose your tyrants day, everybody!!!!!

That's the principle upon which America was refounded:

Tyranny and oppression are perfectly acceptable if there are pieces of paper saying that other people want to steal your stuff and a count to certify the results.



Wow, I'm just giddy with excitement wondering which worthless bastards I'm beholden to for the next cycle.

I see the U.S. Government and States being operated as a democracy. I hear politicians everyday squawking about a democracy.

I hear politicians squawk about a lot of stuff, but most of them are too retarded to even matter. There is a dangerous level of narcissism and hubris required for anyone to self-identify as a "leader" of men to the point that those others require one's governance. They're all bastards and they should all hang.

If I live in a constitutional republic, how is it that my neighbors can vote into existence a law which identifies to whom I may marry?
A law which declares what I can and cannot do with my most personal of property, by own body? A law which allows government agents to enter my home and tap my phone without warrant?

Those are not laws. Law cannot be voted into existence. Law can be identified and codified. Some may say this description would be described as Natural Law; I would say "governance" by anything but Natural Law is an abomination of humanity. We tend to lose influence over these arguments in the public sphere because of the mediocrity that typifies the average citizen.

Whatever system of government was written down in the U.S. Constitution is not the one we are getting.

The U.S. Constitution is the most guarded and protected piece of toilet paper on this planet.

Odd that you would assume trespass as the default position when I clearly identified whose property I was referring to (mine)

All of the specific objections you mentioned suffer from continuity problems; beyond that, in the event that someone else's property is not to your liking, your only proper response is to convince them to change to your liking or move away from them.

I live outside of any municipality and everyone on my road hires trash removal services from private sector providers, not because of any private covenant but because none of us want trash to pile up on our property.

If I wanted to use my property to amass a heap of garbage, that would be my prerogative. Sure, government enforcers would shake me down and force me to stop (or steal my property...or shoot me dead) and my neighbors probably wouldn't like me very much, but that'd be their problem.

You don't have the slightest clue what FRB is.

I'm pretty sure I do.

You don't know what a demand deposit is.

You don't know the difference between a bailment and a loan.

Sure I do, but you apparently don't understand what is and what is not a demand deposit. Demand deposits create a bailment. You do not make demand deposits with a bank. You should read your account contract with your financial institution a little better.

Declaring that you want a bailment to exist for your deposits is only valid insofar as you are capable of getting that term entered into a contract with the "bailee." I bet you four clouds shaped like puppies that if you read your account contract with your bank, you sign over full title of ownership over your funds to them; hence, no bailment.

The fact that they provide a service to your account transactions as if they were demand deposits is immaterial to the fact that no bailment exists unless your contract with them says that one exists, in which case, they shall be required to return to you the exact same notes that you deposited with them.

Wishing that someone would serve as a bailee for your property does not create a bailment without the other party agreeing to be bound by those terms. It is a gross abuse of reason to assert that one may not aggress upon your person but that you may aggress upon another "if you feel like your cause is just."

You don't know what fraud is.

...drats. You got me there. Wasn't he a doctor of some sorts?

You don't know what speculation is.

Speculation is putting up property for consideration to a contract that you do not physically possess. If you think it is anything else, you are wrong.

None of this ridiculous concoction has anything at all to do with FRB.

But it does; absent State distortion, FRB is just speculative lending by a fancier name. The State has committed the fraud (and perhaps the initial recipient of the new money...which is likely a member of the State masquerading as a private actor), not the secondary or tertiary lender.

Perhaps you may enlighten me then.

At the risk of going all Chauncey Gardiner up in here, consider the following:

Note that the rates below are immaterial. They only serve to flesh out the anecdote.

I have an orchard (say: apples).
In the fall I harvest my orchard.
Weather forecasts for the growing season project a bumper crop.

I am within my rights to leverage my expected harvest "later" for stuff in the "now" if I can find a trade partner willing to voluntarily accept my promise in exchange for his stuff.

I find a trade partner and we agree to exchange my entire future harvest in units of a promise of 3 future apples for 2 of his oranges "now."

I eat the oranges.

Assume that this trade partner is purchasing "many" future harvests from "many" orchard owners and has claims to "quite a few" promises.

The trade partner who received my promises for a future harvest of apples also takes time deposits of paper clips that will be payable in apples at harvest at a rate of 1 apple per every 1000 paper clips deposited.

The trade partner who has traded apple promises for paper clips creates a projection of demand for his apple promises and voluntarily contracts with a stationery company to supply paper clips for their production process on a schedule.

The trade partner also has amassed enough capital that he expects he will purchase future harvests from future seasons and leverages these promised yields at a market rate for yet more paper clips.

The trade partner who received my promises for a future harvest of apples has also found several producers of applesauce who are bidding for the apples that back his promise and they have, in turn, purchased future apples from him in exchange for yet more paper clips that he then feeds into the supply chain of the stationery company.

Oops; plague of locusts. Very weak harvest this year! The locusts also irreparably damaged the mature trees and there will be no fruit bearing trees in the orchard for at least 3 more harvests.

Not nearly as many apples as forecasts projected; all of the initial promises cannot be fulfilled. All of the people expecting to receive apples at harvest time rush to the trade partner that purchased the harvest and attempt to convert their promises for apples before all of the apples are taken.

Grandma beat everyone to the front of the line and converted her promises for all of the apples in the weak harvest. She feeds them to her cats.

I imagine you would say that the depositors were defrauded by the lender?
Or was the orchard owner defrauded by the locusts?
Or was the lender defrauded by the cat?
Or was the locust defrauded by the orange?
Or was the stationery owner defrauded by a paper clip?
Or was the paper clip defrauded by the applesauce?

What we're talking about here is speculation and failed expectations
As I see it, -without State involvement- "Fractional Reserve Banking" is just another form of speculation and carries with it risks inherent to speculative behavior!

Please identify which of the transactions in the chain above is a crime.
I eagerly await your reply.

Speaking only for myself, I believe the major problem with fractional reserve banking is not the mechanical banking practice of lending on a promise, but in the way that those mechanics are completely misunderstood and misattributed by Modelers and sophomoric politicians. Surely, a promise made against a promised claim to resources is itself legitimate if voluntarily contracted. If you disagree, then you must also destroy the concept of subrogation, which is several bridges too far.

While restricting the ability to create a chain of promises against resources to only ever allow promises so far as they are discretely covered by a tangible portion of real resources would eliminate the business cycle and would create a perfectly stable economy, this is not the way liberty, property rights, and time preferences work. I can sell a promise to the highest bidder for resources in hand and he will be left with the promise and I will have resources. As far as my context is concerned, I do not have to care about the quality of the original promise once I have arranged my affairs to mitigate risks of a run on the resource backing it(whatever that may be). My receipt of a promise, further dissection, allocation, and leveraging of it are scoped only to my own affairs.

But it cannot be ignored that if my promise is supposed to be backed by oceanfront property in Malibu and it turns out to be backed by oceanfront property in Kansas, something has gone awry in the promise chain. Objectively speaking, someone has committed a fraud, and the difficulty in ascertaining who the actual culprit is does not ameliorate the fact that resources that are promised to be there are not actually there. Surely, no one would accept a promise against oceanfront Kansas property. It is the realization of the fact that resources are not actually there that the chain of promises starts to fall apart and those in the chain seek to mitigate their harm by getting themselves out of the promise chain as quickly as possible. This cannot be ignored by Tamney because this is what actually happens. With such a naive, land-backed economy, run-ups are mitigated by the fact that allocations of the backing resources can be observed by anyone who finds the land backing their claims and sees whether they are currently in use by someone else. The primary issue as I see it regarding our real economy is that the State through the Fed counterfeits money under the bare assumption that it is backed by resources that are not really there, gives those counterfeited dollars to bankers and those bankers start a poisonous chain of lending against "clouds that look like puppies."

It also serves to reason that backing a claim with promised resources that do not yet exist is a very risky endeavor, indeed.

The fraud is not in lending against a promise; the fraud is in State counterfeiting. The Marshallian/Keynesian rubitechture that underpins the greater economy is incomprehensible to the average market participant, and with ignorance -as with everything- there is strength in numbers.