Your ideal world is one in which people die on a regular basis due to preventable ailments, and the fortunate ones that survive are run roughshod over by amoral corporations that have millions of times more money than any individual.

Effectively, your ideal world is one in which companies replace government. Yes, government may be inefficient and corrupt, but I greatly prefer that to an equivalent entity that's efficient at its goals, which are the very things that in government we call corrupt. At least the government is supposed to be helping. The only thing a company is there to do is make money.

That's not a world I want to live in.

Some specific points:

Would your ideal government be in the business of issuing currency at all? I'm guessing not, and that we'd all be trading gold coins. Except that's a pain in the ass. So a bank would come along and offer to deal with your money for you, and people could trade their promissory notes. Then the bank realizes that, hey, we've got all this gold here, and not all of the people want their gold coins all at the same time; let's do something with that. So they start lending. Pretty soon, they've loaned over half of their gold coins, but things are going well, and it's all coming back in. Then a disaster occurs. Could be a huge storm, or a terrorist attack, or any number of things well outside the control of the bank, its depositors, or its borrowers. Suddenly a lot of the depositors need their gold back to pay for things related to the disaster. At the same time, the borrowers are defaulting on their loans, for the same reason that people need their coins back. All of a sudden, all of that house of cards of money that the bank "created" through lending more than it really had comes crashing down.

How is this situation different from your idea of how a government controlled fractional-reserve bank works? Well, other than the obvious part about how the government's not involved and therefore not requiring that the bank keep at least a certain percentage of cash on hand.

The traditional libertarian argument is "well, those depositors were stupid to deposit their money in a bank with such bad practices". Well, guess what? All the banks were doing that. And that assumes that everyone has a solid knowledge of relatively advanced economic issues. In other words, in your language, "perfect knowledge" is a crock.

Also, I guess, Alexander Hamilton doesn't count as a Founding Father.


Edited by wfaulk (19/11/2010 21:46)
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Bitt Faulk