Dear Micheal Moore
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/steinberg9.html
Crony Capitalism
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/butler-b2.html
More cronyism
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSN2431703620080324
Founder of American Crony Capitalism
http://www.mises.org/story/3164
Merchantilism
In contrast to the agricultural system of the physiocrats or the laissez-faire of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mercantile system served the interests of merchants and producers such as the British East India Company, whose activities were protected or encouraged by the state.
The most important economic rationale for mercantilism in the sixteenth century was the consolidation of the regional power centers of the feudal era by large, competitive nation-states. Other contributing factors were the establishment of colonies outside Europe............
During the mercantilist period, military conflict between nation-states was both more frequent and more extensive than at any other time in history. The armies and navies of the main protagonists were no longer temporary forces raised to address a specific threat or objective, but were full-time professional forces. Each government’s primary economic objective was to command a sufficient quantity of hard currency to support a military that would deter attacks by other countries and aid its own territorial expansion.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Mercantilism.html
And lastly, from a 2003' piece quoting Greenspan himself from a 1966' article entitled, "Gold and Economic Freedom."
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense – perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire – that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.........[/FONT]
When banks loan money to finance productive and profitable endeavors, the loans are paid off rapidly and bank credit continues to be generally available. But when the business ventures financed by bank credit are less profitable and slow to pay off, bankers soon find that their loans outstanding are excessive relative to their gold reserves, and they begin to curtail new lending, usually by charging higher interest rates. This tends to restrict the financing of new ventures and requires the existing borrowers to improve their profitability before they can obtain credit for further expansion. Thus, under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north204.html
With gold as the fixed reserve, cranking up the printing press at will to print money and expand gov't is literally prohibited by the nature of the system itself. Article 1 Section 10 in the Constitution which reads:
No state shall ......make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.articlei.html (you might also read section 8 about who is authorized to "coin" money!
Talk about a powerful "check and balance" against excessive gov't by debt creation.
It even provides a further barrier to merchantilist type war by having a fixed ceiling of debt and beyond that the means of war would then become necessary only at the hand of pure increased taxation. In other words, waging war becomes a mechanism of pure defense rather than as a means of merchantilist colonial expansion. Now the burden of war becomes obvious to all through the tax burden and only those crisis of true national threat will win the day and then be maintained. Also the importance of full out "kill the threat quickly" becomes a necessity should the need arise instead of having what some has described at potentially a 100 year war. Also, provocative meddling foreign policy that generates destructive blowback would be tempered with the knowledge that the means to pay for such actions ie tax increases could cause someone to be voted out of office or political party to fall out of favor.
National debt to future generations for the pleasures of the present would drift away as we would have a gov't more on the pay as you go plan. What in the form of taxes would we pay for the gov't we have today if the mechanism of debt was restricted to a pay for it as you go? And without fiat money creation, inflation of the value of money itself would become a thing of the past so to speak thereby protecting the most threatened in this, that being the poor and those on fixed income.
Want a economic check and balance to excessive big gov't that is over reaching?
Truth of the matter with Greenspan, he completely abandoned laissez faire economics a long time ago. If what is called "conservative" today is nothing of the sort and in fact the term hijacked by people far removed from real old school conservatism and it's underlying 18th century classical liberal principles, then is it possible they have done the same with terms like free market and laissez faire economics?
