Topic: Is it true that the Fed is privately owned - page 6. (Read 9428 times)

The Federal Reserve Bank is a quasi-private institution that is given monopoly powers by the U.S. Federal Government.

The Fed, in attempts to smooth out short-term economic fluctuations per keynesian economic theory, loans money to large private banks at close to 0% interest rates in an attempt to stimulate the economy.

Much of this "free money" goes to risky mortgages to people who would not otherwise qualify, but the vast majority of it goes into the stock market and the massively risky derivatives market. The risk is on the taxpayers but most of the profit goes to the banking executives. A tiny (insignificant) amount trickles down into the hands of the working class and lower.

Obviously, this system is a massive failure.

With Neo-Keynesian economics, the housing bubble popping is a REALLY BAD thing and the response is to re-inflate it so that home prices go back up, home builders get their jobs back, etc., which is "Good." This makes sense to your Average Joe watching the Evening News. 

With Austrian economics, the housing bubble popping is neither good nor bad; it is a reflection of an overbought situation in the housing market. It means that sectors which produce goods which are less desirable to the public at that point in time (housing and fraudulent mortgages) will be downsized and other sectors in higher demand will pick up the slack. This is an understanding of an economy as a living, breathing organism with complex interrelated parts and systems.
Unfortunately, with organizations like the Fed which have far too much power, and banks which have been propped up "TBTF" by the government time and time again, bubbles grow FAR bigger than they ever would in an economy which is permitted organic sector realignments as necessary. So this bubble popping has disastrous results and the knee-jerk reaction is to instantly attempt to re-inflate it again, partially via Fed monetary policies, and partially via irresponsible government fiscal policy.

Well, it's more like an unholy marriage, but the governments are definitely not the "man" in the relationship.

Not really that silly. "Pwned" is about right

You know better than to say something that silly.

No....

The government is owned by the private banks, and they're using it to fuck us all over.

Since private banks do provide a useful service, it would be silly to get rid of them. Instead, we should make them unable to fuck us over with the government by removing the government. The natural result of a central locus of control is a battle for domain over that central locus. Decentralize the control, and nobody can gain the central locus and use it to benefit himself.

Actually, this is a brilliant thread. Thanks to this thread I have come to realise what I think is the error in the thinking of a lot of AnCap's and Libertarians.

Those guys seem to think that the Fed is owned by the government, hence the government is fucking us over.

The reality however, much like I have stated on the first page of this thread, is that it's more like the other way around. The government does not *really* own the Fed, because the government is itself owned by private banks.

It's the private banks that own the fed directly.
It's the private banks that own the fed indirectly through regional fed's.
And it's the private banks that own the fed indirectly through the government.

It might be the government that is the wizard of oz, but it's the private banks that are behind the curtain.

It's the private banks they should really be after.

No.

This is a silly thread.

You fool.  You utter fool.  You left out the Freemason-Jihadis and the Kalahari Vikings    Get your act together!

In the Tory-Bilderberg Trotskyite thermonuclear Pentagon-Communist's  Federal Reserve Printing Company empire of the Union of ZioNazi Socialist Republics all land ALREADY IS "public" (FedResCo) property, this is why you must pay tax-rent to the imperial Federal Reserve Printing Company to hold onto it.  Otherwise one of their state or city corporations must evict you and repossesses it for them.

Not only that there is now the precedent of "Eminent Domain" which permits local corporate-soviets to appropriate land not only for "community" Trotskyite FedResCo projects but the fancy private projects of their elite-Menshevik minions as well.

Permanent war is the old fashioned term for "communism", that's why they used to call normal, temporary wars "acting in the common defence". Of course none of the preemptive permanent offensive wars of the ZioNazi Communists are "defensive" any more. This is why once-heroic warriors have now become commodity "war fighters" since that mundane job is now a permanent standing commodity export.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I have trouble agreeing with this statement. What about the network effect (ie. google, ebay, and yes, bitcoin)? What about the self-reïnforcing mechanism of surplus value and scaling?

I don't know, you might be right, but I'll have to think about this one a little bit. Any reads you can recommend?


Ah, so you're actually saying land should NOT be defined as property then? It seemed like you argued the exact opposite in the initial (misspelled) post. In this case I absolutely agree!

Although, I would actually like to propose an alternative. (I think.)

How about defining land as public property, as opposed to not defining land as no property at all? 'Cause the latter seems rather unfeasable; we might all want to live in the heart of London or Paris or whatever.

By having the government manage it, we could have the good aspects of the market (incentive to contribute to society in exchange for a nice place to live) without the bad (the posed problem of surplus value of land a.k.a. neo-feudalism).

For this to work we obviously need to get money out of politics first, since governments are privately owned at the moment, which would therefore completely defeat the purpose of making land 'public' property.

I have. In comedy value, I'd rank it right up there with Marx (either one).

I'd agree IP isn't property, not that I would admit it publically for fear my licensees will stop paying me royalty's. But I'd go one further and say land ownership is not a property right either, and will not admit it publically for fear my tenants will stop paying rent.

Have you read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's book What Is Property? 

Have you read Stephan Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property"? He goes rather in-depth into what property is, why it is, and why IP isn't property, but land is.

I won't argue the definition is half baked, and I won't disagree the idea is radical, but then so was abolishing slavery. Hell even a fixed money supply will "causes quite a few problems" to our current system.

While I make a living creating IP, it is only the laws that make ideas as property possible, if the laws didn't exist I would still do what I do, only I would just employ a new business model and partners to monetise my IP (ideas).    

The meme of property is as damaged as current monetary system; I was just making the point that we are moving in the right direction, fixing the medium of exchange fixes half the problem.  

Agreed, although I was referring to the act of creation in reference to property as a right

That causes quite a few problems, the most obvious of which is IP.

Creation alone is not enough to make a thing property.

Here is a 3:15 minute YouTube clip that does a fair job of introducing the problem.

http://youtu.be/QdbyUy-DN80?t=11m59s  

(Stephanie Flanders at @14:30 incorrectly separates capitalist and entrepreneur, otherwise I think she does a good job, there is nothing wrong with entrepreneur using capital, but there is a problem when a monopoly is mistaken for entrepreneurship. )

Ultimately Property is a human meme, and what ownership is and isn't changes with consciousness.  
Take slavery for example, people used to be property and then it changed over time and now most of us agree people aren't property.

And if you go back to the Khoisan or Bushman from Sothern Africa for example, just out of interest genetically when you trace the human mitochondrial DNA, they come closest to being direct descendents of the first humans.  

Interestingly when the Duch settled in Southern Africa they could not make slaves of the San, as they would die in captivity, I would speculate it was because life is more than just a motive for food and warmth, but life is best understood when you are free to explore it.   Bushman culture has no concept of property, they just live in the now. (If you have Netflix a movie that gives you some insight is "The Gods Must be Crazy." A comedy about the introduction of a coke bottle to a Bushman tribe.)

By contrast the Bantu people from Africa had evolved the meme of property rights they often used cows as money in large triads they also arrived in Sothern Africa around the time of the Europeans and fought each other. It is this population group that spared through Africa and were traded as slaves in Europe and North America.    

While the Bushman living in a desert, where water is incredibly scares and not having adequate water is a life or death situation saw drinking water as communal property and a right. As nomads they would berry an ostrich egg shells filled with water and mark it with a stick so other nomads and tribes could use the resource. Whenever they encountered the marked stick in the ground, they would fill it up if they had water or drink from it if they didn't, never abusing the resource, in effect they had empathy for other humans traveling in the desert and used that collective empathy to maintain an inter-communal man made resource.  

To get to the point, if one can create a monopoly on something, one destroys the free market, usually the free market finds an alternate and monopoly dies out. Today monopolies only exist because we create them with law, they cannot exist in a free system.

Getting to the problem of property rights which are considered individual's rights, and as a right that is not directly linked to "a man’s right to his own life" to quote Ayn Rand, it shouldn't be considered to be and individual right.  Property Rights only come into existence when one has the ability through force to prevent access to a land and make it exclusively yours thus denying mans right to use that land to benefit his own life.  While I would agree the act of homesteading is creating value (even another form of property), it is denying man access to that land.

We are at a time today, where the central banks (owners of the means of exchange) manipulate peoples labour and savings, effectively enslaving them, ( a problem  Bitcoin can solve with quite effectively), We still won't have a free labour market while labour and entrepreneurs are subject to the monopoly of land owners.

So in conclusion I would define property as that which is created, without infringing on individual rights and can be exchanged in a free market.

King's had armies.

But today, the people in power have militaries with more destructive power than you could even think of.

I have often been amused by the very notion that guns alone will help people for example against their own government in the US.
France, Britain, Pakistan, India, China.

In all of those countries, I must laugh in the same manner. Germany, not so much anymore. We have problems financing our military here.

YOu see, if it was all about guns, I would agree. BUt it is about fighter planes, CX gas canisters, Special Forces, helicopters, cruise missiles, drones, tanks, paralyzing gas and so on. The disparity of power is by far greater than before. 200 years ago, people could take arms and win. Today, any government has the means to massacre them all in a strike, if they wanted to.

You can for example see Syrias Assad fail horribly at that, since he does not want western forces in his country. He could have just massacred them all with his means. We will see how that turns out...

Not in my tribe !

Yeah, this was actually my question as well, apart from the spelling. Land is defined as property?..