Federal Reserve

In interview, Hoppe gives a great example of how printing money causes malinvestments and savings increases the standard of living.

"I’ll give you a simple example. Imagine Robinson Crusoe and Friday on their desert island. If Robinson catches fish and consumes some of them, but not all, he can lend those to Friday who can eat them for a few days, and invest his time in the construction of a fishing net of his own. With this net he can catch so many fish that he can feed himself and to give Robinson the borrowed fish back. Both are doing even better than before. But what happens if Robinson does not save, but eats all the fish himself and gives Friday only a certificate that can be exchanged for this fish? If Friday wants to go to Robinson to redeem the certificate, he finds that no fish is there. Friday must therefore quickly obtain food himself and has no time to finish the net. It remains an abandoned project. The standard of living of Friday and Robinson drops."

Hoppe reminds us that as bad as things are, they can always get worse.

"The central banks are trying to save the paper money system by any means. I’m afraid the next step is to eliminate the remaining currency competition through a centralization of money and banking. At the end there might be a kind of global central bank, with a global single currency, into which the dollar, euro and yen are merged. Freed from competition with other currencies, this central bank would then have even more room for inflation. The crisis would not be over, but would return with a vengeance on the global level."

Maybe this is the exit strategy our rulers are preparing. It fits with the rumors ten years ago about about a North American amero currency.

"For China, it would be a clever move to back the yuan by gold to push the dollar from the global dominance. With a gold-backed yuan, the days of America’s economic dominance and the dollar would be numbered. The West will therefore do everything possible to prevent China from doing this."

But it seems to be happening.

"States generally have the tendency to centralize their power. In Europe, powers are transferred to Brussels to eliminate competition among countries. The dream of the statists is a world state with uniform taxes and regulations, which robs the citizens of any opportunity to improve their lives by emigrating. Citizens recognize that basically the European Union is a huge redistribution apparatus. This fuels discontent and incites the envy of nations among themselves.
...
For the cause of freedom it would be best if Europe were to fall apart into as many micro-states as possible. This applies to Germany as well. The smaller the spatial extent of a State, the easier it is to emigrate and the nicer the state must be to its citizens in order to retain the productive people."

I hope this happens in the US, soon.

"The classical liberals underestimate the extent of the state’s inherent tendency to grow. Who determines how many tax-financed police officers, judges and soldiers there are in the night-watchman state? In the market, based on voluntary payments for goods and services, the answer is clear: milk is produced to such an extent and sold at such prices that consumers are willing to pay. However, to the question “how much” the government of any country will always answer: The more money we have, the more we can do. Because they can force citizens to pay taxes, the government will ask for more and more money and deliver a continuously poorer performance. The idea of a minimal state is a conceptually faulty design. Minimal states can never remain minimal states.
...  If the state protects property by state police, it requires taxes. However, taxes are expropriation. The state thus becomes an expropriating property protector. And a state that wants to maintain law and order, but can itself issue laws, is a law breaking law maintainer."

The state is internally inconsistent. This is a really good interview about the advantages of stateless societies and people's fear of them. Naturally the interview ends with the free rider question regarding security, which Hoppe rejects on moral grounds.