The Ultimate ‘Success
Through Failure’ Manual
by Gary North
I have just written a success manual.
http://www.garynorth.com/proverbs.pdf Actually, it’s a book on
the world’s oldest, best, yet least implemented success manual. I posted
it on-line this week. It’s free – a bonus for my readers.
You can be a success, just not at zero price. The price is high. The
manual’s price isn’t. It’s in the public domain. But the cost of
implementation is personally much higher than most people are willing to
pay.
It’s a lot easier to sell a
success manual than a failure manual. To sell a manual based on a record
of personal failure, you must first gain the reputation of being highly
successful. That isn’t easy. But, as I shall show, it’s doable.
Begin with a slogan: "Nothing
succeeds like failure." You must believe this with all your heart. Next,
you need a verifiable track record of failure: a career-long series of
failures which nevertheless gains you the reputation for being an
extraordinary success. You need to be like the pointy-haired manager in
"Dilbert." He survives, no matter how much havoc he creates. The Federal
Reserve System surely qualifies. I can see the headline in a full-page ad.
Wake up the financial idiot
inside you! How you can cash in big-time on your own failures. Then there
are the bullet teasers.
World’s leading experts
reveal:
-
You’ve heard the phrase, "a
license to print money." How to get one.
-
How to plant your very own
tree that everyone says money doesn’t grow on.
-
How to get the reputation of
being a brilliant rescue specialist when you actually caused the
disasters, some of them catastrophic.
-
How to get all the money you
want and then decide how much to pay the government at the end of the
year.
-
How to silence your most
dangerous potential critics by hiring them or else by buying them off with
money that costs you nothing.
-
How to get your few unbought
critics labeled by the media as conspiracy nuts.
-
How to bamboozle Congress in
full public view at least four times a year, decade after decade.
IS THIS A JOKE?
When you read the ad, you
think, "This is some kind of joke." Indeed, it is: a practical joke – the
most successful practical joke in modern history. It’s highly practical
for central bankers. The joke’s on us!
The Bank of England pioneered
this failure-guaranteed system in 1694. It was a privately owned bank that
had the right to issue currency and buy the government’s debt. As its
powers were expanded by Parliament over the years, its notes became legal
tender. Creditors had to accept them in payment of debts.
It was only at the end of the 19th century that central banking became
universal. It took until December 22 (House) and 23 (Senate), 1913, when
most of Congress had gone home for the Christmas holidays, for the Federal
Reserve System to be enacted into law. President Wilson signed the bill
that same day. All the Democrats voted for it. The Democrats had
traditionally opposed central banking. Republicans tended to oppose it,
they who had always favored central banking.
William Jennings Bryan, who had been the Populist opponent of Eastern
bankers and banking, was President Wilson’s agent for getting the Federal
Reserve Act passed. As Secretary of State, he lobbied Congressmen to vote
for the bill. Years later, he said this had been his greatest mistake. Too
late.
It is always too late.
All it took was a name change.
It is called the Federal Reserve System. The work "bank" is nowhere to be
seen. It has 12 regional banks, so as to confuse the rubes. The New York
FED was for decades the main decision-maker, not the Board of Governors.
The New York FED is the only permanent regional bank with membership on
the Federal Open Market Committee, which decides to buy or sell debt.
My point is simple: all it
took was a name change and the creation of insignificant regional reserve
banks to gull the rubes in 1913. Today, no one cares.
This is the central fact: no
one cares.
Economists of all views
(except the Austrian School, and even some of them do) accept the idea of
central banking. Economists are employed by the hundreds by the system.
The freshman college economics textbooks are all favorable. So are all the
upper division textbooks on money and banking.
There is no other agency of
government that has universal acceptance, yet all but the Board of
Governors are not part of the government, as their websites’ addresses
indicate. They are all "org."
The FED is the most powerful
privately owned monopoly in the United States and therefore the world. Yet
anyone who points this out as a negative factor is dismissed as a crackpot
or a conspiracy theorist or both.
No other organization in the
United States is equally immune from criticism in the Establishment media.
When you find any idea or
organization that is immune from criticism from the major institutions,
you are inside the temple. This was the title of William Greider’s book on
the FED,
Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (1987),
which was unwilling to call for its abolition.
In a 1988 review in
The Washington Monthly, a liberal magazine, the author made the point:
nobody cares any more.
Ironically, the Federal
Reserve had its philosophical roots in the populist uprisings of the late
1800s, when farmers and small businessmen rose up against the power of the
big banks. But the bankers managed to frame the new institution in a way
that gave them effective control. Reforms made in the 1930s diluted the
power of the banks over the Fed but left intact an unusual, hybrid
government institution with little direct accountability to the public.
The president appointed Fed governors, but they held 14-year terms that
assured their independence. The chairman held only a four-year term, but
that term was set so that one president could saddle his successor with an
uncongenial central banker.
The unusual arrangement went
unnoticed by most people. As Greider points out, the "money question" was
the subject of great debate during most of the nineteenth century, when
William Jennings Bryan stirred thousands with his famous "cross of gold"
speech, calling for an abandonment of the gold standard. But in the
twentieth century, the Fed succeeded in convincing the public that
monetary policy was an arcane undertaking that need not concern the
average American. Never mind that the Fed had the power to bankrupt
thousands of small businesses, to erode a lifetime’s savings, or to throw
millions of people out of their jobs.
Maybe the most accurate book
title on the FED is this:
The Federal Reserve: An Intentional Mystery. It was published over
two decades ago by Praeger, an Establishment publisher.
The plan worked. No one cares.
FED-MADE DISASTERS
The basic disaster is this:
ever since 1914, the dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power,
according to government statistics. (Inflation
Calculator, Bureau of Labor Statistics)
The secondary disasters have
been the recessions, above all, the great depression of the 1930’s, which
was a consequence of the FED’s monetary policies in the 1920’s. The best
book on this is Murray Rothbard’s
America’s Great Depression (1963). It’s free
here.
Each time, the FED has escaped
blame. The only exception was Milton Friedman’s attack on the FED for its
policies in the 1930’s (A
Monetary History of the United States, 1963), which he argued
could have been solved with more FED-money creation. He did not blame the
FED for the fiat-money funded boom of the 1920’s.
The FED is praised when the
economy booms. The bubbles are an unfortunate side effect. What is a side
effect? An effect we don’t like.
The FED is criticized when it
fails to intervene with more fiat money in any liquidity crisis brought on
by the FED’s slower rate of money creation in the post-bubble period. The
critics say that the FED must take action to lower interest rates. The FED
always does.
Then the praise resumes. Price
inflation accelerates. Debt accelerates. Bubbles reappear. All this is
blamed on speculators.
The FED has the reputation of
being the man on the white horse: the rescuer of last resort.
Here is the program: (1)
Create a problem. (2) Solve the problem. (3) Get praise for having solved
the problem. (4) Make sure the solution leads to the next problem. Repeat
forever.
Continued in part two
