Editorial Note
Written April 2014. A polemical defense of unconventional monetary thinking, turning the 'money crank' accusation back on the mainstream.
(Excerpted from: blogger@nakedcapitalism.com, April 8, 2014. The author is a research assistant at Kingston University in London.)
What constitutes a money crank? A money crank is a person who views the money system from a position in which [he] has a substantial emotional investment. Was Keynes a money crank? I think not…Were Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz money cranks? I would answer in the negative…Murray Rothbard is, I believe, a money crank. But he is of a more softcore variety. On the left is Sylvio Gesell, albeit he is [also of] a more softcore variety.
Antal Fekete is what I would consider a hardcore money crank. In his poorly written work The Gold Standard Manifesto: “Dismal Monetary Science” he writes:
“Governments and academia have utterly failed in discharging their sacred duty to provide a serene environment for the search for and dissemination of truth regarding economics in general and monetary science in particular. This failure has to do, first and foremost, with the incestuous financing of research ever since the Federal Reserve System was launched in the United States in 1913… Under the gold standard government bonds were the instrument to which widows and orphans could safely entrust their savings. Under the regime of irredeemable currency they are the instrument whereby special interest fleeces the rest of society.”
Or, again,
“Unknown to the public, at the end of the day the shill alias the Federal Reserve, is obliged to hand over her gains to the casino owner alias the United States Treasury. There is nothing open about what is euphemistically called ‘open market operations’. It is a conspiratorial operation. It has come about through unlawful delegation of unlimited power, without imposing countervailing responsibilities. It was never authorized by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. It defies the principle of checks and balances. It is immoral. It is a formula to corrupt and ultimately to destroy the Republic.”
Such passages are pretty off-the-wall. The money system is portrayed as a vast conspiracy set up to defraud widows and orphans. Here we see that Fekete is far more hardcore than Rothbard. Whereas both agree that the government “meddles” with money and this is undesirable and leads to some sort of personal injury, Fekete goes one step further and portrays the system as an organised conspiracy set up against the vulnerable.
Reproduced here without commentary.