Javelin:
Thanks for the "Empire of Debt" tip.
I will check it out.
If you have time please look at Ellen Brown's Web of Debt Blog.
There appear to be many points of agreement regarding what some call "debt slavery" among left and right in this country.
When you say "No government intervention...get rid of it." some might interpret that as a call to privatize the US Treasury Department or even the entire Executive Branch. I share your distrust of monopolies whether of commodities or stocks or violence, but I don't see how replacing "one person:one vote" with "one share:one vote makes us any "freer."
Regarding the relations between inflation and monetary policy, hasn't the Federal Reserve managed monetary policy since 1913? One of those points of agreement I mentioned earlier is that the US Dollar has lost 95% of its value during that time.
Is the Fed part of the US Government? Or Wall Street?
This goes to a first principle of markets.
Are markets natural forces like gravity?
Or social constructs like government?
I am going to move backwards in responses to your post:
Markets are more like natural forces similar to if you will "gravity". This is why they cannot be controlled, period. Control in other forms also fail and it has been proven within this collapse. Here we have a combination of government control/intervention which forced the hands of banks to co-operate with additional control/intervention especially in the finance and housing markets. Furthermore we see where greed kicked in from the markets (stocks,futures,banks and such) all the way down to the consumer utilizing liar loans. Add in shady practices of inflating home values to create additional money for 2nd mortgages to create alternative financing options for individuals and the manipulation as you can see escalated out of control.
Essentially, if the markets were a free market this would have never been allowed to perpetuate itself. You would argue that we have existed under a free market system. I argue that the moment the government entered into the marketplace as a player rather than a buffer the natural forces of the markets have been thrown out of balance.
Within a free market with no government interference a market will correct itself rather quickly and at times violently. Yet even with a sudden crash the correction would often be rather fast allowing for a very short recession, much shorter than what we have experienced over the past decades.
If you will look back at the year 1919 and 1920. The government in those years realized the problems they caused, backed out and allowed natural forces to occur. When they did they immediately turned a market around that posted numbers equally as significant as the great depression at its worst in the early 1930's. The proof is within history.
Yes the Fed Reserve has managed monetary policy since 1913 and if you look at history this is not the first time. It was also done in the early 1800's until the president Andrew Jackson came along and abolished the concept doing away with national banks. Within those times they also suffered from government interference via a governmental control of the market systems of that time.
The Fed should not even exist period yet due to our present condition this would be virtually impossible to abolish as Andrew Jackson did in his day. We are too deep in the doo doo if you will to even think about it. The best that we could do at this point is to step by step strip away the power of the Fed and remove the Federal governments ability to manipulate the Fed. In essence allow it to become more privatized over time until it can be removed completely. In real terms you and I both know this will never happen unless a real revolution were to take place.
The system is far too gone and used up for any kind of recovery. It will literally crash and burn within a currency crisis and I am afraid a more sinister and evil monster will emerge. I understand that you are more socialistic in your thinking and beliefs. Yet when one looks at history you must look at where that road has consistently led to. How are we any more special, different or unique that we cannot meet that same fate? Despite your socialistic beliefs, I seriously doubt you would vote for tyranny and oppression.
I do understand your ideas of trying to make the world better, yet when it comes into real world practice, there is a reason why our founding fathers instituted what they did. They themselves saw first hand what communism or socialism was like for in their time it was watered down into what was called a monarchy.