Central Banks and Domestic Spies

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  Self-government is superseded by a national security surveillance State.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.

In the United States, the privately owned central bank known as the Federal Reserve provided so much stability (sarcasm alert!) that within two decades of its creation, its centralized management of the economy helped usher in the Great Depression.  Instead of recognizing the social cost of that economic crisis as demonstrable evidence that central banks cannot prevent catastrophe, or worse, actually facilitate catastrophe, the Federal Reserve used its own failures to further justify its continued existence.  Without us, things would have been so much worse!  Where have we heard that excuse recently?  Oh, right, it’s what the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and pharmaceutical bigwigs keep saying about their experimental “vaccines.”  Birds of a feather scam the public together, after all.

The worst part of central bank tyranny is that it has destroyed sound money and private savings.  In every country, a similar story has played out.  First, people trade goods and services using some form of precious metal as a medium of exchange because gold and silver have historically retained their value over time.  Next, a government mints coins made from those metals in order to promote lucrative trade.  Then, inherently worthless paper currencies are introduced that are backed by the government’s promise that they may be redeemed for gold or silver at any time.

Finally, after people are accustomed to using paper currency, its tether to gold and silver is cut.  So long as people continue to participate under the delusion that paper currencies have innate value, central banks and governments can print more worthless notes whenever bankers or governments need money.  Inflation is the inevitable result.  Whereas a person who earns an income in gold coins can store that gold and find that the value of his labor remains the same fifty years later, a person who earns an income in paper banknotes will find that the value of his savings (his stored labor) has evaporated.  Central banks have destroyed sound money, middle-class savings, self-sufficiency, and private property.

What they have created is a government money tree that uses central bank inflation to steal from the public in order to finance the military infrastructure, policy preferences, and bureaucratic armies of the State.  Espionage agencies — with their black budgets and covert mission directives — should be aberrations for any free society.  Instead, central bank funny money ensures that they are well funded and independent operators whether the public wishes them to exist or not.

In every society, two monopolistic drives exist — one that seeks control over wealth and another that seeks control over information.  Eventually, these monopolistic forces combine in order to maximize their power over ordinary citizens.  Markets, after all, react to publicly released information, and spy agencies are only as robust as their operating budgets.  It should be no surprise, then, that former intelligence operatives fill the ranks of not only defense contractors and weapons manufacturers, but also of news corporations, social media powerhouses, pharmaceutical companies, and global investment banks.

There is a symbiotic relationship between those who possess secret knowledge and those who generate wealth.  Just as central banks manipulate the supply of money for profit, spies manipulate the supply of information for profit, too.  Companies that track and data-mine our private information are in the espionage business.  Intelligence agencies that warp public knowledge for institutional gain are in the business of destroying democratic republics.

Unfortunately, the mother lode of profitable surveillance-gathering lies just up ahead: central bank digital currencies.  If governments are permitted to foist CBDCs upon the public, the unholy marriage between central banks and espionage agencies will be complete.  In a world where money is created at the stroke of a key and private transactions are tracked in real time, there will be no such thing as private property, let alone real privacy.

However, there is a corollary to this emerging nightmare of total financial surveillance: the reintroduction of sound money based in gold and silver will support not only a return of free markets, but also a return of relative privacy.  In order to curtail the tyranny of central banks and espionage agencies, ordinary citizens must starve the State.  The easiest way to do so is to reject funny money for good.

If we were trying to explain to an enslaved society what freedom entails, we might say that free peoples own the fruits of their labor, communicate without external constraints, and trade among themselves according to their wants and needs.  Free markets, private property, and free speech are the bedrock of any free society.  We would not, however, describe freedom as a condition in which property rights are heavily regulated, trade is heavily supervised, labor is heavily taxed, monetary currencies are heavily inflated, or information is heavily censored.  Enslaved societies are already intimately familiar with these attributes because they are the essential constraints burdening anyone living in bondage.  If an enslaved people were trying to explain to us why anyone would ever choose to live in a state of bondage, they might say that most enslaved people don’t realize that they’re already living as slaves.

Central bank manipulation of money turns free citizens into debt slaves and finances the national security architecture that keeps them permanently chained.