Feb. 19, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:44
2914 The Inevitability of Economic Collapse - A Conversation with G. Edward Griffin
Stefan Molyneux and G. Edward Griffin look at the central banking scam, the crisis in Greece, the inevitability of economic collapse, the possible collapse of the Euro, widespread panic in the Eurozone, Gold as a historical store of financial value, the practical impossibility of solving the problems in Greece and fiat currency withdrawals.To purchase "The Creature from Jekyll Island" go to: http://www.fdrurl.com/JekyllIsland
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio, back for his second engagement.
Not live from Vegas, but it really should be.
G. Edward Griffin, author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, which is an absolute...
Well, you want to read the book, but you want to read the book while sitting comfortably in ice water.
Otherwise, your blood will boil over and turn you into a...
It's a great book.
It's a gripping book.
It's a very well-written book.
Very well-researched book.
And it gives the history of the Federal Reserve.
And I'd like to thank you for coming back.
Well, thanks, Stephan.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So when you have a knowledge of central banking, normally that is similar to body odor when it comes to inviting people to sit next to you at a dinner party.
Oh, you're into central banking.
Is that my phone?
I gotta go.
But I think it's one of these essential things Factors to know about if you're going to be a remotely civilized human being in the modern world.
Why do you think it's so important for people to learn about the whys and hows and wherefores of central banking?
Well, that cuts right to the core of it, doesn't it, Stephen?
Central banking, first of all, what does that mean?
It's one of those words that I suppose needs to be defined.
It's like a code phrase.
If you look it up in the index of any I've come to kind of a shorthand understanding of it.
To me, central banking is simply kind of a technical phrase given to the concept of a partnership between private banks and government.
It's like a A cartel, you might say, among private banks.
And they go into partnership with the government of whatever country they're in.
And these two groups get together and decide how they're going to create money.
Who's going to control the quantity?
Who's going to set the interest rates?
In other words, who's just going to control the money of the system?
That may not sound like it's too interesting, but when you think about it, Almost every transaction that we have in our personal and commercial lives involves money, and the value of that money affects us very directly, and who has it and who doesn't have it is a very important factor.
How much it costs to get, and that's a strange way of saying it, but in other words, what's the interest rate on borrowing money?
All of these factors, when you add them together, equal a powerful leverage A force over our personal daily lives.
So, if you don't have an interest in central banking, it means you don't have an interest in what your money will buy or how much of it you have.
I don't think many people really would start from that position.
So, the short answer to your question is that central banking is a phrase for what I consider to be a scam.
A scam in which The monetary scientists, meaning the bankers, and the political scientists, meaning the politicians, get together and decide how they're going to control our lives through money.
Right.
Now, comparing and contrasting this to, I guess, before 1913, before the Federal Reserve, when banks would take your money and keep your money for safekeeping, and they would issue these sort of writs, these little checks or whatever, which later turned into paper currency.
But I think one of the things that's really interesting, which...
I sort of feel like in 1984, there's that scene where Winston Smith goes into a bar and asks an old man what life was like before the revolution.
He can't really remember very well because it's been so long.
And unfortunately, we're losing the people who, of course, they're probably all gone by now, who would remember what life was like beforehand.
But there was not a huge compelling reason to keep all of your money in the bank because it didn't lose value every year.
And I think when you think of...
If all of your money was sort of denominated in electronics dollars, in other words, if it gained value every year because electronics generally get cheaper every year, if your money gained value or at least was perfectly stable, would buy the same 10 years from now that it does now, you probably would be a little bit less concerned about keeping your money in a bank.
But I think people are constantly, if you think about how many decisions in life you make, Based upon inflation, which is the over-creation of money, which is run by these central banks in conjunction with government, think of how many decisions you make in life based upon inflation.
I think you can get a sense of how pervasive this is and how relatively new a phenomenon this is.
Well, yeah, I think that's a very astute observation, Stephan.
I was thinking your question about why would you want to keep money in the bank?
Well, You know, back in the day, before we can remember, money was, as you say, it's fairly stable.
It wasn't losing its value.
And if you put it in the bank, at least you had somebody that you thought was going to guard it for you.
If you were one of the future, one of the fortunate ones, I should say, that had a lot of money, you don't want to keep it around in the house.
You don't want to keep it in the mattress and so forth.
So you take it to the bank and those good folks down there would guard it for you and maybe give you a little Pittance of interest on it, maybe give you a free toaster or something like that for putting it in.
But it was all sort of mundane stuff.
Now you put it in the bank because you depend on the bank to spend it, to exchange it.
All transactions are done.
Most of them are done now with credit cards and internet transactions and everything is electronic and digital.
Increasingly, you don't take something out of your pocket and pay the merchant for it.
Money now is in a bank for another reason, because that's where it came from and where it's got to end up, and you have no use for it much in your pocket.
But yeah, your second observation is especially poignant, I think, about this inflation factor.
Yeah, we've just become used to it.
We don't even question it.
Is it right?
Is it wrong?
It's not an issue.
It's there.
So let's just live with it.
So what's the inflation factor?
Is it 5%, 6%?
So let's see, if we want to return on our investment, we've got to get enough above the inflation factor and all that stuff.
It's just become automatic.
It's like becoming used to evil.
You know, you don't challenge it anymore.
You can say, well, that's the way it is.
We live in a crooked society and we just have to do what the masters tell us to do.
And banks, of course, used to, some of them in America and in other countries, would issue their own, quote, currency, which, again, was just supposed to be little pieces of paper that were saved around than actual gold.
They would compete with you for the stability of their currency and the fractional reserve banking, which is lending out more than you currently have.
I mean, some libertarians or some economists really dislike the idea.
I personally, it's like, hey, if you want to gamble with your money, if you want to have the bank lend out 10 times the capital that it actually has on hand, well, you'll get greater returns or the bank will go out of business.
To me, it's just what stakes do you want to have in Vegas?
That's everyone's decision.
But all of that competition...
And you could, of course, pay the bank $10 a month to simply keep your stuff secure, and then it would have zero fractional reserve lending.
Or you could say, well, the bank will give you the windfalls or carve out your money if it loses, and you can go on a roller coaster if you want.
All of those decisions about where people's risk tolerance is has all been taken away.
And now it's in the hands not of business people who are trying to satisfy a customer, but Exactly true.
I think, yeah, the decisions are gone.
It's all made not, as you just said so well, not to satisfy the desires or the whims of the investor, but to satisfy the desire and the whims of the banking fraternity.
It's got to be to their benefit.
And the common person, well, he's just in the equation because he has no place else to go.
That's the value of having a monopoly in the system.
I've always believed myself that sound money is the only way for a society to go and to have a sound money, meaning in my definition it has to be backed by something of tangible value like gold or silver or A warehouse full of cases of cheap white wine or something of tangible value.
But I'm not here to say that I'm going to or want to force everybody to my way of thinking.
The libertarian or the freedom-minded person says, well, how about freedom of choice?
If the banks want to offer a fractional reserve money or if somebody has a Ponzi scheme they want to promote and you want to buy into it, you ought to be free to do so if you know what you're doing as long as you're informed.
So I believe that we need freedom of choice in currencies.
As long as we're not required to use a state currency, a fiat currency, or any other kind of currency, we can use our intelligence, and some of us will make wise decisions, and some of us will make bad decisions, and out of it at least we have freedom.
And I value that more than anything else in my life, is freedom to choose.
It's interesting to me the degree to which the bankers and the politicians have this symbiotic, parasitical relationship on the economy as a whole that benefits both individually, again, at the expense of the collective, because it seems to me that, I guess, in America, gearing up for another election, another bribe fest of an election.
And in politics, it seems to me it used to be the art of the possible.
That was sort of a definition of politics from long ago.
And now it seems to be art of the impossible, or as they talk about with the European central banking and Greek crisis, the extend and pretend, extend loans and pretend that someone who's bankrupt is not.
Because politicians seem to me to get into power these days, not by appealing to sacrifice or the common good, but by offering stuff without raising taxes.
And it seems to me that that would be impossible without central bank in The illusion of getting something for nothing would be impossible without central banking.
Am I way off the chart of that, or is that where you think it is as well?
Well, I think you're right on the track, except I'm thinking of today it has become the science, not of, or the possible or the impossible, but the science of the fantasy.
This is...
Magic!
Magic money, yeah.
Magic, yeah.
It's all possible.
But there's a price to pay for it, you know, and the price, of course, is the value of the dollar or the unit, whatever the purchasing unit is.
You can do all of these things if you accept the sleight of hand that will take the purchasing power away.
You have a bowl of soup and it's not enough to feed 100 people, only 50 people.
You can feed 100 people just by pouring water into the bowl of soup.
And so now you've fed 100 people, but they don't have any more vegetables or any more nutrition in them before, so it takes twice as much soup to keep those people alive.
That's sort of a half-baked analogy, but yeah, you can keep diluting the soup until everybody's just drinking water and saying, this soup isn't doing any good anymore.
That's what happens to the currency.
Then you can keep inflating it and putting more water into it forever, but somebody's going to die of malnutrition down the line.
And that's the voter and the consumer, of course.
There is something interesting, I think, happening in Europe.
This is an odd idea, but tell me what you think.
So, of course, Greece got into, with I think the help of Goldman Sachs cooking the books, got into the Eurozone, and thus Greece has been a basket case financially for, I don't know, like 130 years.
I think of 130 years, like 70 of them have been in financial crisis of one kind or another.
So they got into the Eurozone and they got to piggyback on the better and more Protestant, maybe anal, spending and saving habits of places like Germany and so on.
And they went on this spending binge to end all spending binges, spent like $10 billion on the Greek Olympics in 2004.
And normally, of course, what they would be doing right now, because there's so much, what is their debt?
I think I wrote it down somewhere here.
It is 323 billion euros, which, I mean, it might as well just put a little sideways infinity symbol there and it'll do about the same thing.
But What they would be doing is they'd be doing a soft default.
They'd just be printing drachma like crazy and they'd just be paying everyone off with devalued money.
That's how they would avoid the outright appearance of bankruptcy.
But because Greece doesn't have the power to print euros, that's for the European Central Bank, there is a kind of standard...
It's not objective, of course, because it's not like gold or something like that, but it is also not under the control of individual governments.
And I think that's provoking economic crises in Europe faster than, of course, if each country was able to devalue at will.
Well, I think that's a good analogy.
It's similar, in my way of thinking, to the 1913 crisis.
era in which all of the central banks of the various states within the United States, each of which was operating its own central bank scheme, and each state was experiencing crises at one time or another, all going through the same problems that the virus causes in any person it strikes.
So, what was the solution?
To get rid of the virus?
To get rid of this concept of fractional reserve banking?
No.
The solution was to bring them all together.
Let's unify them, put them all together so that now we have a bigger problem.
No state is going to go under one at a time because they're all tied to the other states and that makes it a bigger entity.
So we can draw upon the resources of the other states as well.
And that worked for quite a while, of course, but now the thing has grown and grown to the point where the whole system is experiencing this and the whole system will go down.
And there will be no states that survive because they're just part of a larger system.
So I think that's the analogy that you were alluding to in Europe.
You've got various countries like Greece, which could go through a crisis of their own.
At least they weren't tied to the rest of Europe.
So by hooking their wagon to Europe, Other countries in Europe, it looked like it was a much better deal because it was a bigger wagon altogether.
But now the whole system is under crisis and there seems to be no way out except to keep pumping up the bubble for the whole system.
But eventually all of those things have to come to an end in one way or another.
And we've been talking about how they will come to an end.
Usually it's just complete Destruction of the purchasing power of the monetary unit, whether it's the Greek drachma or the euro or the US dollar or whatever it is, they all finally lose their value to buy anything.
Then we're back to this fantasy again.
Well, let's have a new system, and it'll be the same as the old system, but we'll call it another name, and everybody will be happy.
We'll redistribute the monopoly money, and we'll start the game over again.
But meanwhile, every year, the consumer is being cheated out of a portion of his savings, out of his wealth.
He's earning capacity, and he's so focused on these little daily events in the news, and who says this, and how much money is owed, and what are they going to do about it today?
He doesn't look at the big picture and realize that every day these people have got their hands in his pocket, and in his savings account, and in his future, and they're just extracting his lifeblood out of him every day.
And until they get that bigger picture, they're never going to solve this, I don't think.
Yeah, I mean, it's something that, I sort of call it the zoom out, where you have to sort of get out of the daily newspapers and get deep, or sort of the satellite view of where things are.
Price stability in the 19th century was astonishingly stable.
I mean, and gold, you know, as I've said in the show before, 100 years ago, an ounce of gold would buy you a really nice suit.
Now, an ounce of gold buys you a really nice suit.
Somebody wrote to me the other day about how they calculated that 1 20th of an ounce of gold would get you a pretty decent meal 150 years ago, and the same thing is true now.
So relative to gold, things have actually remained fairly constant.
And the way that this crazy print money to buy votes, borrow money to buy votes, bribe public sector unions with massive pensions down the road to buy votes in the here and now, these are the actions of crazed addicts.
These are not the actions of sober statesmen and stateswomen.
You can see this with threes now.
They've just put, we'll give them one more week's worth of money.
It's come down to that.
It's come down to, we'll buy one week.
It's like the drunk just looking for one more drink.
He doesn't even care about anything else.
It's just the next drink, the next hit.
Now, this 20-year experiment of the euro is down to, well, we'll just give them one more week.
Do they have a plan at the end of that week?
No.
They're literally now trying to buy seven days with the money printing presses.
And this is the big picture of where things are.
You had...
I mean, the British pound sterling was stable for hundreds of years.
In fact, I think it's the only government currency that has remained even remotely stable for the last 400 years.
Gold has remained stable for thousands of years.
Silver, similar.
But this crazy fire up the money printing press is just to buy one more week.
This brinksmanship, this what we can't let Greece get away with not paying its debts.
Otherwise, nobody else is going to pay off their debts.
But if Greece doesn't pay off their debts, our banks are so leveraged that it's going to be a giant smoking crater where the financial sector used to be in town.
This is how desperate and crazed it is at the end, I think, close to the end of this abhorrent system.
Well, once again, Stephan, I cannot find anything to disagree with in there, except that I look back over this period of history in my lifetime, at least my aware lifetime since about 1960, gradually began to wake up to these things.
I thought at the time that this cannot stay together another three years.
I thought we would be through and in the trash can by the end of the 1960s.
1970, I thought we'd never see as a stable economy.
And of course, I was wrong.
I've been wrong all along, not in principle, but only in my appraisal of how long they could stretch this out, how big they could make the bubble.
How passive the population would be, how much insult to their intelligence they would take.
That was wrong about the timing.
And I wonder still, can we go much longer than you say?
One week?
Is that the end of it?
I don't know.
We may go two weeks.
Who knows?
Well, you know, and of course, I've read the same criticism of libertarian doomsayers.
You know, the sky is falling, still standing.
The sky is falling still.
We know that that which mathematically cannot continue at some point will not continue.
And there is a limit to the amount of debt that the world can sustain with a straight face.
I think that's, you know, when it happens, who knows?
I think that this is a bit of a...
But I do think that the introduction of, you know, out of the 1960s when computers cost like $2 million a piece, there was never any idea that there'd be like worldwide money transfer, Bitcoin, instant messaging, and all of the efficiencies that come out of that and the degree to which...
You know, 90% of Americans used to be involved in farming 100 years ago.
Now it's now 2% or 3%.
And the amount of human labor and capital that has been loosened up by electronics and technology is staggering.
And nobody can really foresee what amazing productivity is going to come out of human ingenuity that's going to prop the system up for just a little bit longer.
You know, if...
3D printing allows all kinds of crazy, cool things to happen.
Or if driverless cars come up and allow people to be productive when they're going from A to Z without having to have a driver, it will be a similar release of people into the productive pool of potential labor.
So we don't know.
I mean, we can all make predictions based on math, but the creative destruction of the remnants of the free market keeps throwing up these amazing volcanoes of productivity that seem to me just keep this hot air balloon going, even though there's no gas left in it.
Yeah, I think that's very true.
The productivity issue has certainly sustained the sick system.
It's like an unknown source of nutrition that's coming in.
We hadn't anticipated it, as you said so well.
And it reminds me of the fact that a moment ago you said that for a 20th of an ounce of gold, you could still buy a very good meal.
If it hadn't been for the drain being put on the system by inflation, And everything else, I think a solid currency like gold or silver or anything backed by something of tangible value would purchase a huge amount more today than it is now.
It's not just a question of remaining stable.
I think without this inflation effect, we would find that those who had saved that 20th of an ounce of gold would now be able to buy maybe meals for 50 people.
Who knows?
We don't see that because it's no way to measure it because all we see is the output of the present system.
How do you measure the unknown, the thing that never happened?
But I'm sure that had we had gold or silver as a basis for our monetary system over these years, anybody that was prudent enough and saved some money would be rather wealthy.
Yeah, there are, of course, the arguments that the minimum wage, if it was still denominated in silver dollars, would be $25, $26.
It's not wages that are broken.
It's the currency that is broken.
So I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about the stated goals, of course, of central banks...
Not that you really want to read their mission statements with a straight face, but the stated goals are full employment and managing interest rates.
I think those are sort of the big two prongs that occur with central banking.
Do you think that it's a human frailty or a system frailty that they're just unable to achieve any of this stuff?
In other words, there is the fantasy that if you have a bad system, if you get better people within the system...
It's going to be fine.
If we get the right people in charge of communism, we're all set.
Do you think that there's any people, the philosopher kings of the Platonic ideal, are there any people you think could make this central banking system and political system work, or do you think it's simply impossible?
I think the answer is that those goals that you mentioned, you know, full employment and fighting inflation and all that sort of thing, those are lies.
Let's just face it.
Those are not the real goals at all for central banking.
What do these people care about?
Full employment or interest rates or anything like that?
That's not their mission.
We must remember that they basically are a cartel.
And like any other cartel, a banana cartel or an oil cartel, all cartels have only one mission, and that's to advance the interests of the members of the cartel, period.
Now, in order for these people to To maintain their positions of power and authority and respect, they have to go through the motions of pretending to be interested in you folks.
They have to pretend like they really care about what happens to people.
They want to have full employment.
Well, they probably do because when people are employed, then they can afford their taxes more and all that sort of thing.
But that's not their primary goal.
They just don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but they're primarily interested in the golden egg, not the goose.
And so that's the point I'm trying to make, is that they're not really telling you the truth.
If they were to tell you the truth, they'd say, well, we raised interest rates today, not because we wanted to cool inflation, but we thought we could get away with it.
We thought we could make more money that way and we thought you suckers out there would probably go along with it and there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
Now that would be their honest statement perhaps, but why would they make a statement like that because that would ring a few alarm bells, wouldn't it?
So I think my answer to your question is that the reason they are not achieving the goals that they state is because those are not their goals.
If we understood what their goals really were, which is to enhance the profitability And security of the banking industry and of the politicians who support them, we recognize that those are their goals.
They have achieved their goals magnificently.
They're doing great.
Why should they change?
Yeah, and certainly the long-term empiricism of people's repetitive behavior is where you find out where their true values are.
Sort of like some guy keeps walking north even after he says he wants to keep going south.
Well, obviously he kind of wants to go north if you keep telling him that's not the direction.
And they may lower interest rates because they may say, well, you see, our political masters are paying too much interest on the national debt.
We're going to lower rates.
Or our banks are kind of stressed that we don't want to have them pay out more money to the depositors in any interest rates.
So we lower that.
And I don't think it has – I think it's all to do with the short-term jigging of get through the next day, get through the next day, get through the next day, which is addictive behaviors.
You don't think about the long-term consequences, not part of your plan, because they can make so much money that they can retire in two weeks if they want, I think, from this kind of jigging.
We have this funny thing, you know, the old lot act and saying that the power corrupts and absolute power tends to corrupt.
Absolutely.
We all understand that deep down, you know, power corrupts, power corrupts, power corrupts.
Yet at the same time, we have this split in our way of thinking.
I've never had any luck really trying to understand it, but I'd like to get your thoughts on it.
Everybody knows that power corrupts.
Yet at the same time, they believe that there are these godlike beings who can push and pull these giant levers on a three or four hundred million person economy and somehow make better decisions than each individual's aggregate decision with his or her own resources.
So power corrupts, power corrupts.
But there are these people who power doesn't corrupt and are going to act wisely for the common good with all the power that really can be crammed into a single human head.
Well, I just think that's political naivety, that's all.
They can't read.
It's like a person who can't read.
They just don't have this information.
They are operating on fantasies, fairy tales, conventional wisdom.
When you look at the television during the times of the major elections, you see all these people all enthusiastic about the elective process, and they're going to elect a president, and there's one party against the other.
It's hard not to forget the fact that this is primarily a show.
You begin to think, well, this is real, isn't it?
Because so many people are participating in it, and why, you know, why do they care who's going to be president anyway if it's not because he's going to be the best man?
If they understood that it doesn't make any difference that they're all crooks anyway, or that if they're not crooks the minute they get into power and they see all this power, as you say, they will be corrupted very soon and become crooks if they don't realize that it's the system itself.
That corrupts people, even honest people.
Until they get that picture, they're going to go through the fantasy of saying, well, if we can just get the good people into office.
And I think of that famous letter that was written to Thomas Jefferson shortly after the drafting of the Constitution.
It was a doctor friend of his, and I know you know this, but your listeners might find it interesting, is that this doctor wrote to Jefferson and said, well, Mr.
Jefferson, now that we have our new government in place, our new system, our new constitution, how can we be sure that only good men go into office?
And of course, Jefferson was kind of irate.
You could just hear it coming off the pages of this handwritten note.
He said, he said, speak to me not of good men.
Let us rather bind men down with the chains of the Constitution.
He was basically saying, duh, what do you mean good men in office?
It'll never happen.
We know that government, because it has power, is a magnet for the predator class.
We know that.
There will always be scoundrels.
And if you design a system that depends on good men in there, you've made a huge mistake.
You're going to lose your freedom.
He was saying, let's design a system that will assume there will be crooks and scoundrels in office and make that work if we can.
And that, of course, is the secret.
That's the trick, whether we're dealing with governments or corporations or private institutions or families or any kind of relationship where you delegate authority to somebody else.
You have to keep an eye on these people, an eagle eye, and put into place certain chains of the Constitution, the bylaws or whatever you call it, to make sure that even though they are crooks, or the potential to become crooks, that they're not able to exercise that instinct that's within them.
Yeah, and almost like the reverse has happened now.
I was doing a mental exercise today, which was, let's say they put me in charge of Greece.
Aha!
I am in charge of Greece.
All the baklava I can eat.
I apparently have the hairdo to match the new finance minister.
So I'm in charge of Greece.
And what would I do?
Well, you know, there's no amount of human willpower that can disable the laws of mathematics or the basic...
Oh, well, maybe I'd fire some government employees.
Oh, no, they've got contracts, they take you to court, and you'd lose more money than you'd save.
Or maybe I'd cut this.
Oh, well, that'd be rebellion, or there'd be secession.
I mean, it really has become this system that is so...
Sticky and gooey to try and change.
It's almost like the obverse has happened.
Instead of having a system which keeps the bad people out, it's like we've got this weird fenced-in system where nothing can really change because all the contracts are multi-year and multi-generational sometimes and all the obligations are in.
I guess in Greece, what you could do, I guess, is...
I would lower barriers to trade, let people go into occupations without a huge amount of licensing and red tape.
But then you get sued by all the people who have those licenses who say, well, I had to get this license and now you're saying it cost me money.
This is why I'm happy doing a philosophy show rather than running politics because everything that you know that is right to do has a special interest group with significant legal power that is going to block everything that you try.
Yes, so true.
And that's one of the problems with the political naivety of Americans, and other countries as well, is they're always looking for the man on the white horse.
They want one man, or a few men perhaps, to change everything.
If we can just get the right guy into the White House, get the right guy elected, then everything will be solved.
And as you have so well pointed out, that's not going to happen.
First of all, you need the support, the broad support of the population for any kind of significant change.
And that's not going to happen just by getting one guy in.
Yeah, you can't unwind these things.
I think the analogy would be somebody who's a serious heroin addict.
He's got this habit.
Or alcohol, whatever it is.
You cannot cold turkey this guy.
You'll kill him.
He'll die.
Probably.
He'll die.
Or he'll go through all kinds of pain and anguish.
Maybe you could back off a little bit.
But there's no way in the political world in which we live that we can just cold turkey and be out of this mess immediately.
There's going to be a lot of withdrawal at best.
I mean, if the patient doesn't die completely, there's going to be withdrawal.
We have to be ready for that.
We have to be clear on that.
It's not going to be an easy way out.
We're too far at this point to expect an easy way out.
Yeah, of course, the longer it's left, you know, one of the things that's so horrifying about central banking is the degree, and this sounds like a very bland and clinical phrase, but it really is the essence of a civilization, of cities, of life itself.
The amount of misallocation of resources that occurs as a result of central banking, of money flowing, particularly, of course, to friends and pals and supporters of the state and of the banking industry, and only then, when it's really been devalued, trickling out to the poor, the amount of businesses that are started that otherwise wouldn't have been started, the amount of businesses that aren't started that otherwise would have been started, the amount of education that people invest in that is only propped up by central banking.
I think of all of these people going into the finance industry, which We're probably only 1% of its current size, if that, in a free market.
Because right now we're clogged with speculators rather than investors, people who actually know what's going on with particular businesses.
And so the amount of misallocated resources and the amount of investment that people have, you know, personal, educational, financial and so on in the current system, it would be astonishingly awful in terms of the transition.
I mean, we all know the faster it could happen, the better off everyone would be.
You know, I'm a sort of bandaid off the hair kind of guy, but it would be incredibly brutal for a lot of people.
And of course, I think in America, it's about 50 percent of people get a substantial amount of money from the government and asking them to give that up for the sake of, oh, yeah, you know, if you work hard, you'll get more in five years.
Well, you know, a lot of people got some bills that mount up.
I think like 25 or 30% of Americans, if not more, have like 500 bucks in the bank account.
I mean, it has gone on so long that the idea of change is going to be so brutal.
And of course, the longer we leave it and the less voluntary that change is, the worse it's going to be.
But nobody wants to take that on at the moment.
And of course, it takes like a billion dollars to run a political campaign at the presidential level, which means, of course, that you have to get a billion dollars in order to even run for the presidency.
And of course, why are people giving you that billion dollars?
Is it because they think you're such a great guy with great ideas?
Well, no.
It's because they want a return on their investment.
And lobbying is one of the biggest returns on investment that businesses can make, tragically.
And the whole idea of politicians, they should come like NASCARs with these stickers of who's bought their self-interest for them.
So I think, boy, you don't want it to hit the way that the Weimar Republic hit, because, of course, that resulted, or at least that propelled, Nazism.
You don't want it to hit in the way that the Greek austerity measures are hitting, which drives them further to the less, to a bunch of socialists and ex-communists.
But the longer it is left, the worse it's going to be.
And I think that's the challenge is just try and get as much information out there so that when this system does fundamentally fail, that people will recognize that it's not freedom or voluntarism or trade that has failed, but rather the what was called for in the Communist Manifesto, which was government control of currency.
That is one of our biggest dangers that people Today, think that what is failing is traditional capitalism or free enterprise is failing.
Therefore, you have the people in the Occupy movement out there.
We've got to change the system.
Capitalism is evil.
It has destroyed everything.
They don't realize that capitalism, in the traditional sense of the word at least, hasn't existed in the United States for almost a century.
You know, they don't realize that.
Their definitions are all screwed up.
So, I don't know.
Where do we go with that?
And that is that it's not looking good.
The first thing that has to happen is that people have to understand, really understand the ideologies and the economic factors that are real, not these fantasies that they've been believing in.
We're a long way from that, which means that the train is going to continue going down the track for a little while.
Don't just stop a runaway train.
You've got to slow it down.
It gradually comes to a stop, and then you have to back it up.
Either that, or it just goes over the We don't want that to happen.
So we have to talk in terms of slowing this runaway train down and reversing it and all of that.
And that's going to take some time.
So that's why we have this educational phase that we're in, because we need help with that.
Our fellow citizens have to understand these issues as well as we do.
And people...
I'm not sort of where there was a sort of Socratic argument that immorality was simply a deficiency of knowledge.
And if you simply taught people what they needed to know, everybody would be virtuous.
And I don't think that that's true.
And I think modern brain science is sociopathy and psychopathy and so on.
I think that sort of bears that out as being a false proposition.
That having been said, when people truly believe in the virtue and value of a cause, the amount of sacrifices that they're willing to make It's extraordinary.
I mean, the people are willing to send their sons and daughters off to war if they believe in the cause.
They're willing to accept rationing.
They're willing to forego their savings.
They're willing to have hugely high taxes.
If it's a cause that people have been morally convinced is the right cause, is the necessary cause, and is imminent.
Unfortunately, most people have to suffer a lot before they get to that point, but I'm fully convinced that if we can get people to understand the moral reality and necessity for challenging the central banking paradigm, that this is a giant leech on the neck of humanity that will take us down as a civilization.
When central banking and Currency inflation, coin inflation hit Rome.
The population of Rome went from like over a million to 17,000 in a couple of years.
The cities depopulated.
There was a thousand years of dark ages.
That's what you face if these kinds of situations go out of control.
You end up with, after the French hyperinflation, you have coinciding with the reign of terror.
After the Weimar Republic came the Nazis and a world war, that when you mess with the levers of currency, you undo the foundations of civilization and city living, which is pretty synonymous in many ways.
And if people can get that connection, that it is a desperate ancient vampire that keeps getting resurrected, that we keep having to refight, and that it is an addiction, and we know where it heads because there's so many examples throughout history.
I think if people can get that, if they really can understand that, They will be willing to go through the fire to get to the promised land because people do make those.
I mean, we only exist as a species because people are willing to get up and feed their kids in the middle of the night and, you know, sit up with them and they are ill and all that kind of stuff.
So people make prodigious sacrifices if they understand that the cause is right.
And I think that's the challenge, is bringing that moral clarity as to why this seemingly esoteric issue is so fundamentally important.
Once people get that, they will, I think, pay any price and bear any burden to throw off this ancient yoke.
Stephan, I think that's one of the bright spots in all of this picture, because increasingly I see that moral high ground, that awareness that we are doing the right thing.
And you see that more and more of that, especially among the young folks that are coming into, I like to call this a movement, it definitely is.
People sometimes say, well, you can't beat these forces of collectivism.
You can't beat the entrenched powers that be, because look, they've got all the power and they've got the physical ability to coerce people.
They make the money.
They got all the money because they make the bloody stuff.
How are you going to beat that?
And I believe honestly that the answer is we have this force that you're talking about, which is much superior to money and coercion.
It's this moral conviction that this is the right thing to do.
We have people working for us, devoting their lives to the cause that you could not buy with any amount of money.
We have talent and energy and dedication that comes out of that moral justification.
Now, there's a danger in that because, you know, sometimes the forces of evil have been able to enlist that by fooling people.
By convincing them that they're on the right side.
I'm sure there were a lot of people in Nazi Germany, for example, that thought that the fatherland was right and they had this moral justification.
They were fighting against some other evil.
They didn't realize that they were being deceived.
The American people are being deceived in a similar way.
We think we're fighting for democracy or whatever this is, and we're willing to sacrifice and send our young and send our money into other lands to kill tens of thousands of people to bring democracy to those lands or whatever this false idea is.
So the idea of moral righteousness can be used against you as well as for you, which is why we have to be very clear In our logic and in our understanding of history and the real facts.
But nevertheless, we do have this force and it's clearly on our side and it's one of the few things that gives me hope about the future.
Well, I appreciate that.
And I, of course, as I mentioned in our last conversation, hugely appreciate the work that you've put into illuminating people.
I think that your book is the best single introduction to central banking, in particular, the history of the Federal Reserve.
I will put a link to it below so that people can go and get a copy of it.
I also wanted to mention that for those who want to get more of Mr. Griffin's information, go to realityzone.com or freedomforceinternational.org.
It is always a great pleasure to touch base with you and shoot our flares of moral righteousness up across the landscape.
