A Review of Rudy Fritsch’s Beyond Mises — Part 1

A Review of Rudy Fritsch’s Beyond Mises — Part 1

Thomas Allen

The following article is a review of Beyond Mises: Based on the Work of Antal Fekete by Rudy J. Fritsch and published by Hypnonaissance, Canada, 2010. This book may be bought at http://www.beyondmises.com/about-Rudy-Fritsch.html.

Mr. Fritsch has written an excellent book. I enjoyed reading it and learned from it. I especially like his examples and analogies. This is a book that I highly recommend for anyone who is interested in monetary theories in general and Prof. Fekete’s theory in particular, which is the true gold-coin standard accompanied by the real bills doctrine. It is an excellent introduction to Prof. Fekete’s theory. For anyone who is new to his theory, this is a good book to read before reading his writings. For anyone familiar with his work, it is also a good book to read as a refresher and to bring certain aspects of his theory into a better focus.

Also, this book is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn about real money. It provides an overview of the real bills doctrine, the quality theory of money, and other aspects of money not often found in other monetary writings.

Any comments about fiat money reformers are solely mine. Mr. Fritsch does not mention them in his book. He only refers to the Keynesians and Friedmanites. I have used remarks that he makes to expose the irrationalities, absurdities, and frauds of fiat money reformers. Unless I specifically mention Mr. Fritsch making the comment, the reader should assume that the comment is mine.

Mr. Fritsch contrasts Prof. Mises’ concept of gold certificates and bank notes with that of Prof. Fekete. Prof. Mises claims that gold certificates and bank notes have present value like a gold coin. Prof. Fekete rebuts this claim. He argues that they were obligations, a future good, and not a present good like a gold coin. Prof. Fekete is correct. Gold certificates and bank notes are like checks, and if I understand Prof. Mises correctly, Prof. Mises considers a check to be a future good, a continuing obligation. Gold certificates, bank notes, and checks are all forms of credit money, which makes them obligations and future goods. The transaction is not completed until the gold is transferred, which extinguishes the credit.

Mr. Fritsch gives a good overview of subjective valuation and individual value scales.

In some of my critiques of the fiat monetary reformers (money cranks as others call them), I use the individual’s value scale to show that their reforms are doomed to fail just as the current Keynesian system is. Under a fiat monetary system, a small group or an individual decides how much money should be created and placed in circulation. To know how much is really needed, they have to know the value scale of every individual on the planet, which is about six billion value scales. The only thing constant about these value scales is that they are constantly changing as Mr. Fritsch illustrates. For any small group to know how much money is needed, when it is needed, and where it is needed — and getting that amount there at the right time — is impossible. The markets will always do a better job. And the freer the markets, the better the job it will do.

To deviate from his book for a few paragraphs, the reason that I have exposed fiat monetary reformers like Mr. Dale, Mr. Cook, Mr. Norburn, and the American Monetary Institute is that they are misleading many people. (For my critiques of their proposals, see “Analysis of Byron Dale’s Monetary Reforms as Presented in Bashed by the Bankers,” “Analysis of Richard Cook’s Monetary Reforms as Presented in We Hold These Truths,” “Analysis of Charles Norburn’s Monetary Reforms as Presented in Honest Money,” and “Analysis of the American Monetary Institute’s American Monetary Act.”) After listening to talk radio shows, especially on shortwave where these reformers get a forum, I find many otherwise intelligent people following for their poison.

They deceive people by accurately describing the current monetary system and its destructive effects on the economy and society. They usually focus on the Federal Reserve or the banking system in general. According to them, a major part of the problem is the private ownership structure of the Federal Reserve. Now comes their false solution. The government should acquire ownership of the Fed or abolish it and transfer its monetary authorities to another governmental agency. For them, the problem is not centralized banking itself, it is the ownership structure (I have never heard a good rationale explaining away the Bank of England, which is a governmental agency.) Furthermore, if the government would just issue the money directly, our economic problems would go away. They differ on the criteria for issuing the new money. None seem to have a mechanism for removing excess money from the economy other than the government having a budget surplus, which is highly unlikely. To them, the problem is who issues the fiat money and how it is issued. The problem is never fiat money itself. They also agree that gold should not be money.

Fiat money reformers are the Jannes and Jambres (2 Timothy 3:8) of the reconstruction of America’s monetary system. They are like Pharaoh’s wise men who confronted Moses with their magic (Exodus 7:11).

Besides the fiat money reformers, another barrier that adherents of the true gold standard, the gold-coin standard, face comes from “hard money” folks. Nearly all advocate a fiat monetary system that incorporates gold. Most support using gold to back the money in some fashion. Under the true gold standard, gold does not back the money: Gold is the money. Many of these folks seem to support some kind of gold-exchange standard. (Gold-exchanged standards are political contrivances and are not market creations like real bills or the gold-coin standard. For an explanation of the gold exchange standard, see my article “Gold-Exchange Standard.”) Some seem to want a system similar to the euro where gold backs a fraction of the money. Only a few seem to want to require the paper money to be redeemed in gold on the demand of citizens of the issuing country.

Many of these hard-money folks appear to oppose returning to the true gold standard because they believe that there is not enough gold. Without the real bills doctrine, their concern has some validity. However, as I show in “There Is Enough Gold” with further explanation in “Response to Dale’s Analysis of ‘There Is Enough Gold’” when the real bills doctrine accompanies the gold-coin standard, enough gold is available to accommodate world trade many times over. Even under the silver standard, enough silver is available to accommodate world trade several times over.

Now back to Mr. Fritsch’s book, his description of Keynesian economics reminds me of allopathic medicine. Keynesians attempt to cure chronic economic problems by attacking the symptoms while ignoring the underlying cause. Allopathic medicine attempts to cure chronic diseases by attacking (suppressing) the symptoms while ignoring the underlying cause.

One thing is missing from his discussion of real bills. He does not discuss selling a bill (commercial money) to a bank and having the bank convert the bill into bank notes and checkbook money (bank money). In my “Response to Dale’s Analysis of ‘There Is Enough Gold,’” I give a brief discussion of this action. I also mention it in some of my other articles.

Mr. Fritsch remarks that labor is a poor selection for money, resulting in poor quality money because it lacks the ability to store value. This inability to store value is one of the several reasons that Mr. Dale’s fiat monetary reform would result in poor quality and inferior money. He claims that his money would be based on labor associated with building roads. (An irony is that Mr. Dale has a better understanding of the true gold-coin standard than many hard money folks. Like most people, he is convinced that there is not enough gold for it to function as money today.)

In his discussion on credit, Mr. Fritsch gives two examples: John borrowing $200 and Ricardo selling a TV today for payment 60 days later. These types of transactions could not occur under Mr. Cook’s monetary system. At least they could not occur without governmental approval. Mr. Cook asserts that all credit should be the property of the government. Only the government should be allowed to create credit.

I have a minor correction to make about Mr. Fritsch’s comment on the Federal Reserve’s assets and liabilities. He states that U.S. government bonds are assets of the Federal Reserve and liabilities of the U.S. Treasury and that federal reserve notes are liabilities of the Federal Reserve. In the bookkeeping sense, he is correct. Bonds are on the asset side of the ledger, and federal reserve notes are on the liability side.

If I understand the U.S. monetary laws correctly, federal reserve notes are not liabilities of the Federal Reserve. They are the liabilities of the U.S. government. To enhance their acceptability, Congress made them obligations of the U.S. government. Thus, it appears that the law gives the Federal Reserve “its cake and lets it eat it too” by making the Federal Reserve’s liabilities the U.S. government’s liabilities.

Mr. Fritsch asks if the U.S. Treasury tried to buy back its bonds, where would it get the money. The U.S. government can buy back a little less than $347 million by printing U.S. notes. As far as I know, the law that allows the Department of the Treasury to print that many U.S. notes still exists. Congress could always increase that amount to cover the entire debt. That would make the fiat money reformers happy. It would also quickly expose the fraud and bankruptcy concealed by the current system.

As Mr. Fritsch so well illustrates, fiat paper money does not survive the military might of the issuing government that forces it on the people. (Fiat money made of a commodity, such as the silver dollar from 1878 to 1900, can survive its issuing government to the extent of the value of the commodity.) Some fiat monetary reformers believe that money should die with its issuing government. Such a belief reveals their lack of concern for the people.

Mr. Fritsch provides a good discussion of interest. For most fiat money reformers, interest is the arch enemy to be slain. Most disguise interest by calling it a fee (generally, a one-time fixed fee or a percentage fee charged up-front, which presumably would be much less than the standard interest rate), share-the-wealth or income, or something similar. Nearly all would definitely outlaw compound interest, which would do away with conventional savings accounts. Few go as far as prohibiting any kind of payment for a loan above the amount lent, which really does get rid of interest. Most do not seem to realize the chaos and poverty that they would create by outlawing interest. They need to answer my questions for anti-usurers in my article “Questions for Anti-Usurers.”

As Mr. Fritsch notes, the dual benefit of interest for lender and borrower can occur only with commodity money. It does not occur with fiat money. As fiat money reformers want to keep fiat money, they must deal with the one-sided effects of interest under fiat monetary regimes. Thus, most seek to suppress it, if not outright outlaw it. Instead of freeing the people and the economy from the heavy hand of government by returning to the true gold-coin standard, they seek to extend it in their attempt to control or eliminate interest. Thus, instead of eliminating the governmental intervention that caused the problem, they want more governmental intervention to solve the problem. How much simpler and freer the gold standard makes life.

Mr. Fritsch discusses the leather strap that used to be used in schools to maintain order and discipline. It was seldom applied. Students knowing that the leather strap was there and would be applied was usually enough to maintain order and discipline. (Much of the unruliness in schools today comes from the removal of the leather strap.)

He uses the leather strap as an analogy for the gold standard, which he calls the “Golden Strap.” It was highly efficient and effective at maintaining economic order and restraining politicians. With the outbreak of World War I, politicians the world over saw a chance to discard the Golden Strap. Discard it they did.

The world is surely in need of it today. It has been needed since World War I. To avoid the strap, countries adopted the gold exchange standard after World War I instead of returning to the gold-coin-standard-real-bills system as existed before the war. They then abandoned the gold exchange standard in the 1930s to avoid the strap. The same thing happened following World War II. A gold exchange standard was established and then abandoned when the strap appeared.

I may have a disagreement with Mr. Fritsch’s concept of the demand for money or it may be my misunderstanding of his argument or it may be semantics. To me, a person’s demand for money is how much money he wants to hold, hoard. It is not how much he would accept if someone gave him all he wanted. In this case, his acceptance demand is only limited by the space that he has to store the money. If the money were electronic, it would exceed a googolplex. When a person spends money, his demand for what he buys exceeds his demand for the money that he spends; otherwise, he would not make the purchase.

Mr. Fritsch writes that the discovery and exploitation of new gold and silver supplies never led to inflation. Did not the massive hoards of gold and silver that the Spaniards plundered from the Indians of Central and South America and sent to Spain cause an inflation in Spain that eventually brought Spain down? Didn’t this inflation spread across Europe?

Most economists attribute the rise in prices between 1896 and 1914 as caused by the large quantity of gold entering the markets from the new mines in South Africa. Thus, an increase in the world supply of gold led to a decline in its purchasing power. (Others contribute gold’s decline in purchasing power to natural market forces and not to the South African gold entering the markets.)

I am convinced that the primary cause of the decline in prices during the nineteenth century, especially the latter part, was the increase in productivity. New goods were being offered at a faster rate than the money supply was growing — hence, the downward trend in prices. This is what one would expect under the gold standard.

Moreover, if national bank notes had been tied to real bills instead of U.S. government bonds, the deflation in the United States between 1870 and 1896 would have been reduced. Under the real bills doctrine, money to buy new goods entering the markets would have been injected into the economy along with the new goods. Backing bank notes by government bonds instead of real bills greatly interfered with this process.

Copyright © 2010 by Thomas Coley Allen.

Part 2 

More articles on money.