Central banks and espionage agencies are insidious threats to any free people. The former manipulate the value of money, and the latter manipulate the perceived truthfulness of information. Both ostensibly work for the broader public’s “best interest,” but as is true of all institutions, they ultimately serve the interests of those people who run them. Spies and bankers should not have so much power over free citizens.
Both institutions are not only plainly anti-democratic but also inherently authoritarian. The central banker says, “Free markets cannot be trusted to direct the flow of goods and services, so a small collection of experts must be empowered to manipulate markets at their discretion.” The spy agency says, “Free peoples cannot be trusted to make wise decisions based upon available information, so a small collection of experts must be empowered to manipulate what the public knows.” In both instances, freedom is diminished. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the marketplace is replaced with a banker’s gloved fist. Self-government is superseded by a national security surveillance State. A small caste of people exercise enormous power over everyone else.
Should real free markets ever return to the West, future commentators will surely look back at this era and wonder how sensible people could have mistaken their economies for anything but command-and-control enterprises. “The institutions controlling their markets were literally called ‘central banks,’” they will scoff. We will appear quite gullible. Perhaps the biggest “tell” that we have been living under the mere illusion of free markets is the uncomfortable truth that the central banks of closed communist nations are scarcely distinguishable from those purporting to undergird capitalism. Both use their powers to choose economic winners and losers.
As with all human-devised schemes that ultimately betray their stated purpose, centralized control over the supply of monetary currency has been sold to the public as a necessary contrivance for the “collective good.” In this way, free peoples have handed authority over markets to a cabal of bankers who promise to maintain invaluable safeguards against economic volatility, unemployment, inflation, and poverty (even when these goals contradict one another). Just as with mice and men, the best laid plans of central bankers often go awry. On the other hand, if their plan is to create periodic inflationary bubbles that allow wealthy investors to artificially grow the value of their assets before collapsing the economy, destroying middle-class workers’ life savings, and buying up bankrupt businesses for pennies on the dollar, then the central bankers get it right every time.