Beschäftigte sich der vorhergehende Artikel

... mit einem liebenswerten Unterhaltungskünstler, dessen Geburtstag sich am 21. Dezember zum hundertsten Male jährte, so ist heute dafür eine der verächtlichsten Verbrecherorganisationen der Welt exakt hundert Jahre alt: das »Federal Reserve System«.

The Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913, was part and parcel of the wave of Progressive legislation on local, state, and federal levels of government that began about 1900. Progressivism was a bipartisan movement that, in the course of the first two decades of the 20th century, transformed the American economy and society from one of roughly laissez-faire to one of centralized statism.

Until the 1960s, historians had established the myth that Progressivism was a virtual uprising of workers and farmers who, guided by a new generation of altruistic experts and intellectuals, surmounted fierce big business opposition in order to curb, regulate, and control what had been a system of accelerating monopoly in the late 19th century. A generation of research and scholarship, however, has now exploded that myth for all parts of the American polity, and it has become all too clear that the truth is the reverse of this well-worn fable.

In contrast, what actually happened was that business became increasingly competitive during the late 19th century, and that various big-business interests, led by the powerful financial house of J. P. Morgan and Company, tried desperately to establish successful cartels on the free market. The first wave of such cartels was in the first large-scale business — railroads. In every case, the attempt to increase profits — by cutting sales with a quota system — and thereby to raise prices or rates, collapsed quickly from internal competition within the cartel and from external competition by new competitors eager to undercut the cartel.

During the 1890s, in the new field of large-scale industrial corporations, big-business interests tried to establish high prices and reduced production via mergers, and again, in every case, the merger collapsed from the winds of new competition. In both sets of cartel attempts, J. P. Morgan and Company had taken the lead, and in both sets of cases, the market, hampered though it was by high protective, tariff walls, managed to nullify these attempts at voluntary cartelization.

It then became clear to these big-business interests that the only way to establish a cartelized economy, an economy that would ensure their continued economic dominance and high profits, would be to use the powers of government to establish and maintain cartels by coercion, in other words, to transform the economy from roughly laissez-faire to centralized, coordinated statism. But how could the American people, steeped in a long tradition of fierce opposition to government-imposed monopoly, go along with this program? How could the public's consent to the New Order be engineered?

Fortunately for the cartelists, a solution to this vexing problem lay at hand. Monopoly could be put over in the name of opposition to monopoly! In that way, using the rhetoric beloved by Americans, the form of the political economy could be maintained, while the content could be totally reversed.

Mit diesen Absätzen beginnt Murray N. Rothbard seinen Artikel »The Origins of the Federal Reserve«, der sich höchst beunruhigend (doch für den Informierten wenig überraschend) von der offiziellen Version über den Ursprung und das segensreiche Wirken dieser Institution unterscheidet. Ein überaus lesenswerter Artikel, der mit den dürren Worten endet:

To achieve the Leviathan State, interests seeking special privilege and intellectuals offering scholarship and ideology must work hand in hand.

Nun — wer dächte da nicht an das »Zusammenwirken der Klasse der Werktätigen und der sozialistischer Intelligenz«, das in den Ostblockstaaten stets beschworen wurde ...?! Mit hinreichendem Abstand betrachtet, relativieren sich die Unterschiede zwischen dem Ostblock-Kommunismus und dem westlichen »Big-Business«-Etatismus und werden weitgehend zu bloßen Unterschieden in der medialen Darstellung und in der jeweils profitierenden Nomenklatura-Klasse. Die Essenz bleibt dieselbe ...