The therapy chosen for this problem was simple. Perform amonetary transfusion from a healthy patient to the unhealthy one.

All the London financiers had to do was find a large and robustspecimen who, without asking too many questions, would be willing to become the donor. The specimen selected, of course, wasUncle Sam himself. It was the prototype of the transfer mechanism,previously described, which has been the life support keeping alivethe moribund Communist and Socialist countries since World WarII.

There are several ways the life blood of one nation can be transfused to another. The most direct method, of course, is to make anoutright gift, such as the bizarre American ritual called foreign aid.

Another is to make a gift disguised as something else, such as needlessly stationing military bases abroad for the sole purpose of bolstering the foreign economy, or granting a loan to a foreign 1. For an overview of the foregoing developments, see "The Federal Reserve as A Cartelization Device," by Murray N. Rothbard, in Money in Crisis, Barry N. Siegel, ed. (New York: Ballinger, 1984), pp. 115-17.

THE LONDON CONNECTION

423

government at below market rates or—worse—with the full expectation that the loan will never be repaid. But the third way is themost ingenious of them all: to have one nation deliberately inflate itscurrency at a rate greater than the other nation so that real purchasing power, in terms of international trade, moves from the more inflating to the less inflating nation. This is a method truly worthy ofthe monetary scientists. It is so subtle and so sophisticated that notone in a thousand would even think of it, much less object to it. Itwas, therefore, the ideal method chosen in 1925 to benefit Englandat the expense of America. As Professor Rothbard observed:In short, the American public was nominated to suffer the burdensof inflation and subsequent collapse [the crash of 1929] in order tomaintain the British g o v e r n m e n t and the British t r a d e unionm o v e m e n t in the style to w h i c h they insisted on b e c o m i n gaccustomed.

At the inception of the Federal Reserve System, there had been abrief struggle for power but, within a few years, the contest wasdecisively won by the head of the New York Bank, Benjamin Strong.

Перейти на страницу:

Похожие книги