AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

Divide-and-conquer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

SELF IMPOSED BORDERS

I read an article in the LA Times titled, “British Choice Of Churchill On 5-Pound Note Leaves Women Out”, by Henry Chu, in which women are upset that Winston Churchill’s image will replace Elizabath Frys on the five-pound note starting in 2016. They’re saying “It’s another instance of women’s contributions being wiped out”. Because we have accepted the political model that each of us belongs to a different group; whether it’s men or women, white or black, rich or poor, old or young, gay or straight, union or non-union, democrat or republican, etc, etc, etc, we think of every politically contrived situation as an us versus them zero sum battle. These self-imposed borders become an imaginary ideological prison that we can’t reason our way out of. This prison prevents us from understanding that the true battle is between each person individually, vs. the only entity that can take individual liberty away, Government. This entity of Government exists only because we allow it to keep the power we originally gave it. It is led by politicians who gain control of the driver seat of  power by dividing us into as many separate groups as they can.

LIBERTY PROMOTES COOPERATION, POLITICS PROMOTES DISCORD

Individual liberty doesn’t pit each person against the other, it promotes cooperation. That sounds counter intuitive because individual liberty gives us an island of sovereignty to pursue our own interests, upon which no individual, group of individuals, or Government can intrude. On the surface it seems like this would breed conflict, but thinking below the surface shows us the opposite is true. Because each persons power stops at the border of the other persons sovereignty, you can’t steal what the other person has produced, or force the individual to do anything he does not want to do. If you want what another individual has produced, you have to trade something of greater value [according to what the other person subjectively values], for it. You can’t force another person to trade with you, because they have veto power over the trade, as do you. The only way you can possess something, for use in trade, is to produce it. If you can be self-sufficient through your own production you have every right to pursue this life choice inside your sovereign world. Since we all have different skills and interests, and we’re limited by time, the odds of you producing everything you need and want is very small. Cooperation naturally happens under individual liberty, but the seeds of discord are sown when we are split into groups by politicians. Individual liberty promotes an ever-expanding pie of possibilities, versus the zero sum world of one persons gain being another persons loss in the divided world of politics.

HIDING THE RELEVANT BY FOCUSING ON THE TRIVIAL

Whose image is on the 5-pound note is trivial, compared to the economic destruction, read here, caused when paper money is counterfeited through the electronic printing press. The important issue is the assault on individual liberty that occurs when The Bank Of England expands the money supply, and the trivial issue is whose image is on the notes. If the politicians can keep our minds on the trivial, instead of the relevant issue concerning money, they can hide their theft and redistribution of each individuals production, and the expansion of their power through the funding of Government debt. The exponential increase of both of these can only  happen as a result of electronically printing counterfeit money, because taxing and borrowing can only procure a limited amount of real resources from producers. One sure sign the limit of what can be stolen or borrowed is being reached is when the Fed starts electronically expanding counterfeit money at a greater level than before. All the QE’s, read here, are evidence of this point being reached. If you keep your eye on the trivial issues the politicians are talking about, you will miss the relevant issues they are trying to hide. Misdirection is the technique magicians use to trick their audience, it is also the technique politicians use to gain more power at our expense. Keep your eye on the ball.

Two of our recent posts talk about this counterfeiting process, “Financial Markets Move When The Puppet Master Speaks“, and “Real Savings vs. Counterfeit Savings“.

Related article, Are You A Democrat, A Republican, Or A Libertarian? at austrianaddict.com.

This entry was posted on July 22, 2013 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Government and Politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Cooperation vs Conflict, Counterfeit money, Federal Reserve System, Government, Group Politics, Liberty, Politics, Winston Churchill