This last one year has been wild for the classical liberal torch.
•Three US presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump and RFK Jr. spoke at the libertarian convention.
•The next US Vice president JD Vance agreed with Ron Paul's stance on central banking.
•Argentina elected a libertarian Javier Milei as president.
•Owners of two of the biggest social media platforms are starting to lean libertarian in their views, publicly in the case of Elon Musk, privately in the case of Mark Zuckerberg.
•And of course, the performance of Bitcoin and Gold.
Make no mistake.
This won't be restricted to the west. Ideas spread. No army or government can stop an idea whose time has come.
And no idea is more powerful than the idea of liberty.
One big gang of thieves decided to not interfere with local production and hence allowed a local supply chain to emerge organically, drastically improving productivity.
Other big gangs of thieves around the world are responding to this by interfering with local production, and will end up drastically reducing productivity and disrupting existing supply chains.
Those who are productive will be the ones who end up suffering, unless they are favoured by a particular gang of thieves for some reason and get some special treatment.
This is the 'global trade war' in a nutshell. Just thieves and leeches fighting over territory and resources they can steal from.
'The Intellectual Poverty of Racial Polylogism'
An article that criticises Racial Polylogicism, the fallacy that different human races have different ways of logically reasoning about the world or are driven by different sets of incentives.
People constantly use this type of thinking to label the universal values of individual freedom, financial sovereignty and free markets as 'western', 'foreign' or 'colonial'.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/intellectual-poverty-racial-polylogism
Best thing a person living in a Socialist society like India, China, Venezuela or Argentina can learn about:
'Spontaneous order'
Especially the definition of it by F. A. Hayek, an intellectual giant of the 20th century.
It gives one this understanding that humans don't require a top-down, violent, coercive authority to make them organise themselves, but can do so by respecting each others natural rights and acting in their self-interests.
It instills in the reader a sense of wonder, amazement and relentless optimism about human beings.
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The leftists and socialists pile on by calling this system 'capitalist' while their own foremost intellectuals Marx and Engels advocated for the 'centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly' in their Communist Manifesto.
What then, do you need for a real free market capitalist system?
Here are a few things:
•Legal tender laws, central banks and foreign exchange controls must be abolished.
•Free banking system that resembles the one from the Scottish era.
•Free market in interest rates and the cost of capital.
•Free market competition in currencies with no restrictions or taxes imposed on the exchange of gold, bitcoin or any form of money at all.
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The same way the communist, command and control dictatorships collapsed, central banking is bound to collapse at some point.
Make no mistake, this is far from anything that can be called as free market capitalism. Anyone who says this is and throws around meaningless terms like 'late stage capitalism' has no idea what they are talking about.
It's an insidious, invisible and complex system that Governments and the special interests close to the money spigot use to siphon off wealth from the productive, hardworking and competent who create capital and replenish the capital stock.
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Whether a central bank raises or lowers rates isn't that important.
End of the day, setting benchmark rates isn't very different from a communist dictatorship imposing price controls on goods and services 'for the common good'. In the same way they cause shortages of that particular good or service, price controls in the cost of capital will cause a shortage in capital itself.
The question is what the market-determined interest rates for savings and investments are, and how much the central bank is interfering with the market discovery process for these rates done by savers, investors, lenders and borrowers.
Notes by Austrian Revivalist | export