All kinds of mischief are explained by the miscreants of good intentions that are the basis for the article. Under the Austrian theory of the business cycle, Schumpeter's creative destructionism function that is part and parcel of capitalism is perverted in a way to leading to booms and busts. Fractional reserve banking, the creation of credit out of thin air which in turn becomes a money-substitute created out of thin air which becomes the primary source of the perversion.
This is not the end of the story. It gets even worse through compounding. Socialism, political predators buying their own re-elections by redistributing the wealth created by producers to the non-productive, leads to progressive impoverishment of everybody, and gross misallocations of capital that ensure the problem only gets worse.
The inevitable end of this sorry story is chaos, serfdom, and another dark ages. Ronald Reagan said this in 1964, "We have come to a time for choosing; we will preserve for our children this the last best hope for man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.....history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening."
The last part of the quote is worth repeating, "..history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening." The people who frequent Free Republic do not generally subscribe to socialism, the Federal Reserve, or democracy. Jim Robinson has been trying to restore our Constitutional Republic for at least as long as 1996 when he founded Free Republic for that express purpose. So far, his efforts and those of the Freepers who regularly participate in the forum have not borne productive fruit. The reawakening of publications within the so-called main-stream-media like the WSJ with articles like this one are indicative of the coming opportunities for change that are going to be triggered by the arrival of the now overdue Kondratieff Winter. The time for Jim Robinson and Free Repulic to make a resounding difference has arrived!
Thomas Paine wrote these words in 1776, "We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again." This was the spark that spawned America's war for independence and freedom. The beginning of the End of America occurred in the 1912 election which gave us the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and moved the United States closer to being a democracy than a republic by stripping the states of the power to elect United States Senators. Thankfully, exactly one century later, the election of 2012 provides Jim Robinson, FreeRepublic, and every American another chance to get it right this time:
Happy New Year Free Republic
Well, let's start here. Isn't any and all credit really the fiat creation of wealth based upon a fractional reserve of something?
I thought so.
Can we quit pretending that all credit is evil?