moneymetals's soup

Mike Gleason:It is my privilege now to welcome in Paul-Martin Foss, founder and president of The Carl Menger Center for the Study of Money and Banking, an organization whose mission is to educate the American people on the importance of sound monetary policy. Prior to starting The Carl Menger Center, Paul-Martin worked on Capitol Hill for seven years, including a six year stint with none other than Congressman Ron Paul. As Paul's legislative assistant, he worked closely with Dr. Paul on his Audit the Fed and End the Fed bills.

Paul-Martin has a Master's degree from both the London School of Economics and Georgetown University, and has dedicated much of his professional life to the cause of sound money and the values of Austrian economics. So it's a real pleasure to have him on with us today. Paul-Martin, thanks so much for joining us and welcome.

Paul-Martin Foss: Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Mike Gleason: Well, I guess we'll start at the beginning here, and I'll ask you to explain why you've made it a goal and a mission to spread the ideals of sound money and sound banking. So first off, what does sound money and sound banking mean, and why should the average American citizen even concern themselves with these causes in the first place?

Paul-Martin Foss: Sound money basically is money that the government cannot debase and devalue. It's money that allows civilization and commerce to flourish. It protects savers. It protects consumers. It allows individuals to save and invest and plan for the future. What we're seeing is for the past century since the Federal Reserve was created is basically unsound money. It's money that is constantly being devalued. It favors debtors, especially the biggest debtor of all, the Federal government. It's silently taking money out of the pockets of savers and the average individual and putting that money in the pockets of Wall Street. The average American person doesn't really understand or see... who was it, I think Keynes quotes Lenin as saying that “the surest way to debase a civilization is to debase its currency.” This is basically what's happening in our country today, so I'm trying to make it an important issue and make people realize just how important sound money and sound banking is in the United States.

Mike Gleason: Furthering the point here, you wrote a great article about how the government essentially funds itself through three methods, taxation, borrowing, and inflation, and you explained how sound money is essential to keeping spending in check. Talk more about that, and then also explain more about the role that gold and silver can serve to rein in government spending.

Paul-Martin Foss: Yeah, it's like you said, you have taxation, you have borrowing, and you have inflation. Those are the three methods that the government can use to fund itself. Taxation is kind of self-limiting because once you get the tax rates high enough, people are going to stop paying taxes and the government's not going to take in as much money. Borrowing, eventually people… if you are spendthrift and not paying back your debts, they're going to stop lending you money or they're going to lend you money at higher interest rates, so there's kind of a self-limiting factor there too.

So inflation ends up being their preferred method of funding themselves, again because it's very subtle. The Fed says 2% inflation rate every year, that's their definition of stable prices. Well, that's devaluing government debt by 2% every year. Over the course of a decade, you devalue your debt by 25%, and you can pay back your debts in devalued dollars, so it's a win-win for the government all around, basically spending a lot more money than it actually has.

Gold and silver have always been great checks against the government because there's just a limited supply of it, and the government doesn't have a monopoly on the possession of gold and silver, the use of gold and silver. It can't print gold and silver. It's an item. If it wants to issue bank notes and spend money that way, it's limited by the amount of gold and silver that is physically in its possession. So it's always been a great check on government spending, and that's why governments around the world for the past 100 years have done everything they can to demonetize gold and silver, keep people from being able to use because they don't want gold and silver to be money because it limits their power.