Capitolo 4
When Government Tries to Fix What It Broke
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke repeatedly assured Americans the economy and financial institutions were strong, even as the housing collapse began affecting the broader economy. Despite their failed assessments, these same officials demanded unprecedented powers when the crisis accelerated in September 2008.
The government's intervention began with the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which held $5 trillion in mortgage liabilities. This was followed by the Fed orchestrating Bank of America's purchase of Merrill Lynch. While Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail, with Paulson briefly expressing concern about moral hazard, the next day brought an $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG-"the most radical intervention in private business in the central bank's history."
The "too big to fail" argument claims large, interconnected firms can't be allowed to collapse without devastating ripple effects. However, there's an alternative perspective: these companies are actually "too big to be kept alive." Just as a single company benefits from discontinuing unprofitable activities, the broader economy benefits when wealth-destroying activities cease.
Keeping failed firms on life support through bailouts only drains capital from sound companies that could put those resources to productive use, ultimately discouraging capital formation and economic recovery. When Lehman Brothers with its $639 billion in assets and 26,000 employees failed in September 2008, what was worth preserving found other homes while what wasn't disappeared.
By September 2008, the Bush administration decided individual bailouts weren't sufficient and proposed a comprehensive rescue package. Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke warned of economic catastrophe without immediate action, allowing no time to read or debate the 442-page Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. The bill authorized Treasury to purchase $700 billion in troubled assets "at any one time"-meaning they could repeatedly buy, sell at a loss, and buy again.
Despite the panic rhetoric justifying the bailout, the crisis was largely exaggerated. A Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis study revealed four major scare claims were false: bank lending hadn't declined sharply for most businesses and consumers; interbank lending remained "healthy"; non-financial businesses showed no sharp decline in securing short-term loans; and about 80 percent of business borrowing occurred outside the banking system anyway.
The Treasury pivoted to direct capital injections into banks, with Paulson allocating $250 billion for ownership stakes-half to nine large institutions including Citibank, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs. Even Venezuela's socialist president Hugo Chavez found this stunning, remarking "Bush is to the left of me now."
The Treasury and Fed's erratic interventions created greater uncertainty rather than confidence, leaving market participants with the impression that authorities had no coherent strategy. These interventions actually slowed down necessary deleveraging, as financial institutions holding toxic assets delayed difficult decisions while hoping for government rescue.
The government's bailout funds must come from somewhere-either through borrowing, printing money, or seizing it from taxpayers. The Fed's balance sheet exploded from $900 billion to over $2.2 trillion between September and December 2008, with projections reaching $3 trillion. This massive money creation will eventually trigger consumer price inflation once banks begin lending again, unless the Fed contracts the money supply and prolongs economic chaos.
Capitolo 5
The Boom-Bust Cycle: A Government Creation
The economy's cycle of booms and busts is treated as an inevitable fact of economic life, like the waxing and waning of the moon. But what if these cycles aren't inevitable features of free markets but are caused by something outside the market itself?
Why would numerous businesses suddenly make errors in the same direction at the same time? Individual business failures are normal and expected, but when many businesses simultaneously suffer losses, we should question why. The market typically weeds out poor performers through the profit-and-loss system, so these widespread "clusters of errors" demand explanation.
Interest rates function as prices in a free market, coordinating production across time. When people save more, interest rates fall naturally, signaling businesses to invest in long-term projects. Lower consumer spending now indicates higher future consumption, making long-term investments rational. Conversely, when people prefer immediate consumption, higher interest rates discourage long-term projects and encourage immediate production.
When the Federal Reserve artificially lowers interest rates, it disrupts this crucial coordination function. Businesses are misled into believing long-term investments are profitable when they aren't. The public hasn't actually increased savings or postponed consumption, creating a fundamental mismatch-the economy is stretched in two directions simultaneously as both investment and consumption increase.
As projects progress, businesses discover necessary resources are scarcer and more expensive than anticipated. The pool of real savings is smaller than entrepreneurs expected, forcing interest rates back up as firms borrow more to cover rising costs. Like a home builder who mistakenly believes he has more bricks than he does, businesses initiate projects that cannot be completed with available resources.
Keynes proposed a fantasy: keeping interest rates perpetually low to maintain a "quasi-boom" state. But this approach is doomed-the more the Fed inflates, the worse the eventual reckoning. Each wave of artificial credit further deforms the capital structure, making the inevitable bust more severe as more resources are misallocated.
The Austrian business cycle theory explains that artificially low interest rates cause malinvestment in unsustainable projects. The housing boom exemplifies this theory-artificially low rates directed enormous resources into unsustainable construction. The sooner manipulation ends, the sooner misallocated resources can be redirected into sustainable lines.
Even businessmen who understand Austrian theory may still borrow during artificial booms, hoping their projects will succeed before the bust hits. If they don't, competitors will gain market share. The Austrian theory explains the boom and bust, not the length of depressions, which are prolonged by government interventions that prevent necessary reallocation of resources.
Keynesian "pump-priming" through government-funded public works is counterproductive, based on the fallacy that spending itself creates economic health. These projects harm recovery by depriving the private sector of resources through taxation, diverting resources to potentially failing enterprises, and artificially raising interest rates through government borrowing.
The dot-com boom exemplifies Austrian business cycle theory in action. Beginning with Netscape's extraordinary 1995 IPO, the boom saw money supply grow 52% between 1995-2000 while real GDP grew only 22%. Companies discovered that necessary resources-programmers, Silicon Valley real estate, domain names-were unexpectedly scarce and rising in price.
When the Fed tightened credit between 1999-2000, the boom collapsed. The Fed's response-eleven rate cuts in 2001 and a federal funds rate of just 1% from 2003-2004-prevented necessary corrections and instead fueled an even more dangerous housing bubble.
Capitolo 6
The Great Depression: History's Greatest Economic Misunderstanding
As politicians promise a "New New Deal" and revive discredited myths about the 1920s to malign free markets, we must examine the truth. Contrary to popular belief, Herbert Hoover was no laissez-faire advocate-his unprecedented interventions transformed the 1929 downturn into the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal, far from rescuing the economy, only prolonged the suffering.
Pre-Federal Reserve boom-bust cycles followed the same pattern Austrian theory describes. The Panic of 1819 resulted from excessive paper money issuance by banks without corresponding gold reserves. When these unsound banks collapsed, severe economic disruption followed.
The depression of 1920-1921 offers crucial lessons for today. Following substantial Federal Reserve inflation during and after World War I, the economy contracted severely when the Fed finally raised rates. Production fell 21 percent over twelve months-worse than the first year of the Great Depression-yet few Americans remember this downturn because it was so brief.
Unlike the 1930s, when government intervened heavily, markets were allowed to make necessary corrections, and the economy quickly rebounded to record production levels. This confounds Keynesian economists like Robert Gordon, who admitted "government policy to moderate the depression and speed recovery was minimal" yet "recovery was not long delayed."
The Great Depression's origins have never been more important to understand. Contrary to Ben Bernanke's view, it didn't occur because the Fed created too little money. The 1920s saw substantial Federal Reserve inflation despite stable consumer prices. With major production increases, prices should have fallen naturally. Instead, the money supply increased 55% between 1921-1929, primarily through business loans-exactly how Austrian theory predicts boom-bust cycles begin.
The government's response to the 1929 crash precisely contradicted Austrian theory's recommendations, leading to fifteen years of economic stagnation rather than quick recovery. Between 1933-1940, unemployment averaged 18%. Yet mainstream media still clamors for another FDR-style New Deal, ignoring scholarly reassessments of those programs.
Contrary to popular myth, Herbert Hoover was no laissez-faire president-he launched public works, raised taxes, extended emergency loans to failing firms, hobbled international trade, and attempted to prop up wages during deflation. Roosevelt's campaign actually criticized Hoover for "the greatest spending administration in peacetime history" and for centralizing control in Washington.
FDR's New Deal largely expanded Hoover's interventionist policies. As his own adviser Rexford Tugwell later admitted, the New Deal merely extrapolated from Hoover's programs. Roosevelt institutionalized price and wage supports, mistakenly believing falling prices caused the Depression rather than recognizing them as consequences.
The persistent myth that World War II spending finally ended the Depression is, as Woods calls it, "stupefying and bizarre." While unemployment did fall during the war, this happened because 29% of the prewar labor force was drafted into military service. Meanwhile, consumers endured rationing, declining product quality, inability to purchase homes and appliances, and longer work weeks.
Capitolo 7
Money: The Root of Economic Chaos
Money didn't originate with government but evolved naturally from the limitations of barter. When people grew frustrated with direct exchange (basketballs for hats, lectures for newspapers), they sought more widely desired goods as exchange intermediaries. These goods-whether berries, shells, or precious metals-became increasingly accepted precisely because others would accept them.
Money thus emerged spontaneously as a useful market commodity, not by government decree. Woods emphasizes this couldn't have happened by fiat, as people wouldn't adopt an unfamiliar concept without experiencing its benefits first. Additionally, money needs pre-existing value relationships to function; if forced on people without established price relationships, it would be useless.
Fiat paper money always parasitically evolves from previously established commodity money through a predictable pattern: society adopts a commodity money; paper notes redeemable for that commodity begin circulating as convenient substitutes; finally, government confiscates the backing commodity, leaving people with inconvertible fiat paper.
This transition invariably involves government violation of property rights and threats of violence-never voluntary adoption. After 1933, when Americans were ordered to surrender their monetary gold, paper money continued circulating through habit and established price relationships.
While various commodities have served as money throughout history, gold and silver have been most common due to their durability, divisibility, and high value-to-weight ratio. Governments oppose precious metal-based monetary systems because they impose restraints on politicians-gold cannot be infinitely reproduced like paper money.
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was not the public-spirited legislation portrayed in civics textbooks, but special-interest legislation drafted by bankers themselves at a private meeting in Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1910. The Fed controls the American money supply through "open-market operations"-purchasing assets (typically government bonds) with money created out of thin air.
Inflation is properly defined as an increase in the money supply itself, not just rising prices which are merely a consequence of inflation. When the government inflates the money supply, new money enters the economy at discrete points, benefiting early recipients like banks and government contractors who can spend it before prices rise. By the time average citizens receive this new money, prices have already increased, effectively looting their purchasing power.
Rising prices stem directly from increases in the money supply, not from other economic factors as politicians often claim. Historically, governments have blamed innocent scapegoats like labor unions, businessmen, or "speculators" for inflation. Modern explanations like rising oil prices are equally flawed.
The popular demand for the Fed to "inject credit" into the economy represents one of our great economic superstitions. Using Robinson Crusoe economics, we can understand why: when Crusoe wants to build a fishing net (a capital good), he must first catch extra fish to sustain himself during the construction process. This illustrates how all production requires a real pool of savings.
Most critics of commodity money rely on endlessly repeated fallacies rather than serious study of the subject. When forced to address gold standards, they often dismiss them as merely "old" or "passe" rather than offering substantive arguments. The objections to gold and silver as money fail under even minimal scrutiny, revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what money actually is and how it functions in an economy.
Capitolo 8
Rebuilding on Sound Principles
The United States need not suffer prolonged recession. The free market can transition us out of the current mess efficiently, though not without some unavoidable pain, as it did during the severe downturn of 1920-21. The market is properly adjusting asset prices downward and rationing credit during uncertainty. However, government intervention through bailouts, misguided tax policies, and massive "stimulus" spending threatens this natural recovery.
Politicians' favorite recession-fighting strategy-urging Americans to spend more-fundamentally misunderstands economics. While consumer demand does guide production decisions, wealth isn't generated by spending alone. During recessions, Americans are urged to empty their wallets while saving is condemned as harmful to the economy-the fallacy behind stimulus packages.
Consumption means using things up-no country becomes rich merely by consuming. Production must come first, giving people the means to consume. As John Stuart Mill noted, "What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production."
To restore economic health and build genuine prosperity rather than the phony kind from artificial credit expansion, several free-market reforms are essential. Bankruptcy shouldn't be unthinkable. When a firm declares bankruptcy, its assets don't disappear but pass from those who failed to employ them effectively to those more likely to succeed.
The government should stop exposing itself to real estate market risks. Fannie and Freddie have drawn too much of the mortgage market away from truly free-market channels. These entities should be put into bankruptcy receivership with their assets auctioned to private mortgage guarantors.
Government spending must be scaled back swiftly and radically as it siphons resources from real wealth generators. Problems caused by excessive spending and debt cannot be cured with more spending and debt. During the Great Depression, FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau admitted: "We have tried spending money... and it does not work."
Money may be the most socialized sector in the American economy. The current fiat system began with property seizure when Americans surrendered their gold in 1933. The dollar is inflated by a central bank with monopoly privileges, while legal-tender laws force people to accept potentially devaluing currency.
The Federal Reserve should be subject to debate despite its posturing as a stabilizing force. It actually creates economic instability while remaining politically untouchable, allowing its chaos to be blamed on "capitalism." The Fed has made moral hazard a permanent banking feature-banks can lend beyond reserves and take greater risks knowing the Fed's "lender of last resort" authority stands behind them.
Central planning and monopoly privilege characterizing the Federal Reserve are the opposite of free markets. Even the Wall Street Journal noted this contradiction: "If capitalism depends on designating a person of godlike abilities to manage all forms of money and credit, we are as doomed as those wretched citizens who relied on central planning."
The Austrian approach offers the most powerful explanation for our economic crisis. Conservative attempts to blame everything on the Community Reinvestment Act miss the point-this is a systemic monetary problem with bipartisan support. Free-market advocates face a critical choice: they cannot logically support both free markets and the Federal Reserve, which represents central planning of money itself.
If you believe in free markets, you cannot support government price-fixing, including interest rates. The more important a sector, the more urgent it is to handle it through voluntary cooperation rather than government coercion.
While various government programs directed credit to certain sectors, the bubble's hot air was generated by the Fed. Only the Austrian School emphasizes this crucial role in disrupting markets. The Austrians saw what mainstream economists missed in the 1920s, 1990s, and today. Their tradition deserves serious consideration.
To avoid future bubbles, we must abandon our superstitions about Fed expertise and listen to those who predicted this crisis and offer coherent alternatives to spending and inflating our way to prosperity. We face a stark choice between repeating failed policies that prolonged the Great Depression and Japan's two-decade slump, or trying a different approach with a proven track record. Now that would be change we can believe in.
