This article is worth reading.   I do not condone cheating (of course), nor does the author.  But as proper humans, we are to empathize and to empathize it helps to try to understand why people make poor choices.

The real reason for saving this article and sharing is to keep in mind what traits is this particlular paragraph:

I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their marriage even one-tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affair, their home life would feel quite different. Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments. Yet while I say this, I also think back to a poignant scene in the movie A Walk on the Moon. Diane Lane’s character has been having an affair with a free-spirited blouse salesman. Her teenage daughter asks, “You love [him] more than all of us?” “No,” the mother replies, but “sometimes it’s easier to be different with a different person.”

I want to learn to be different people – or really, to exercise all aspects of my personality – with one person, my wife.

1. Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman
2. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
3. Joys of Living – Orson Swett Marden
4. Mises – The Last Knight of Liberalism – Jörg Guido Hülsmann
5. The Discovery of Freedom – Rose Wilder Lane
   1. Mises.org FREE PDF Link
6. Does God Have Everything Under Control? – Michael R. Saia
7. Why Pray? – Michael R. Saia
8. Education: Free and Compulsory – Murray Rothbard
   1. Mises.org Free PDF Link
9. Economics and Ethics of Private Property – Hans-Herman Hoppe
   1. Mises.org Free PDF Link

Origins of the Federal Reserve – Murray Rothbard

The following is a list of commentary based on The Origins of the Federal Reserve by Murray N. Rothbard.  This helps me personally by keeping together all the important details of each book I read and what I write about it.  I hope it serves to help you to if you want to find more information about a particular book.

1. Book Quote List
2. Relativsm

Confessions of an Economic Hitman – John Perkins

Preface, pg xii
And we wonder why terrorists attack us?

Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice.  This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.

The concept is, of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small portion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth’s resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it.

Preface, pg xiii
No country or combination of countries can thrive in the long term by exploiting others.

A Bubble That Broke The World – Garet Garrett

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 1
Introductory Quote: “The Lord giveth increase, but man devised credit.”

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 1
First, the idea that the panacea for debt is credit.

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 2
Second, a social and political doctrine, now widely accepted, beginning with the premise that people are entitled to certain betterments of life.

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 3
Third, the argument that prosperity is a product of credit, whereas from the beginning of economic thought it had been supposed that prosperity was from the increase and exchange of wealth, and credit was its product.

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 20
With the American Government borrowing credit to lend at low rates of interest to people who will build ships, thereby to foster an American merchant marine, American credit is loaned in large sums to German shipping companies; they use it to build German ships in German shipyards, with German labor and German materials, to compete with American ships.

With American chemical science dimly in sight of its goal, which is to make this country independent of Germany’s synthetic chemistry, American credit is loaned to the German Dye Trust, whereby its offensive powers, in trade or in war, are strengthened.

If these are not cases in which we could not afford to lend American credit on any terms, still, where was the benefit to our own foreign trade? Lending very large sums of American credit to the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate Trust does neither increase the volume of American exports nor foreshorten the time in which we may hope by synthetic chemistry to free ourselves from dependence upon foreign sources of nitrogenous fertilizers and the essential chemical products of nitrate; and the same is to be said of loans of American credit to German and Italian corporations for the purpose of building nitrogen fixation plants. Lending forty million dollars of American credit to a foreign oil company, for drilling and exploration, can hardly be called an investment in our own foreign trade, nor a loan of one hundred and fifty million dollars of American credit to the Dutch East Indies to pay off its floating debt. It would be difficult to explain how lending large sums of American credit to the fabulous Swedish Match Trust, which in turn made loans to European governments in exchange for monopolistic trade concessions, benefited the sale of American goods in the foreign trade. Certainly a loan of American credit to a Latin-American republic to pay a debt it owed in Europe for armament had no beneficial trace in the American foreign trade. Or fancy any benefit to the American export trade from a loan of twenty millions to a German bank for the specific purpose, as stated by the bankers, “to finance German exporting corporations.”

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 21
But of all the ways in which the lending of American credit in Europe did not increase the American export trade, the one most extraordinary was that of lending our debtors the credit with which to make payment to us on their debt. American loans to Germany enabled Germany to pay reparations to the Allies; reparations from Germany enabled the Allies to pay interest on their war debts at the United States Treasury, hardly touching their own pockets. We were paying ourselves. For a long time this simple construction was denied and concealed in the elaborate confusions of finance. The Senate Committee on Finance kept asking its banker witnesses to face it. One of the best answers was by Otto H. Kahn, who said:

“There is no doubt that if Germany had not been able to borrow money it would have been unable, long since, to pay reparations, and, therefore, to that extent, it is a generally correct statement to say that out of the money which Germany borrowed it did pay reparations.”

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 22
Since John Law and his Mississippi Bubble, individuals have been continually appearing with the same scheme in new disguise. The principle is very simple. You have only to find a way to multiply your creditors by the cube and pay them by the square, out of their own money.

Ch1: Cosmology of the Bubble – Pg 22
The fatal weakness of the scheme is that you cannot stop. When new creditors fail to present themselves faster than the old creditors demand to be paid off, the bubble bursts. Then you go to jail, like Ponzi, or commit suicide, like Ivar Kreuger.

There is nothing new in the scheme. What is new is that for the first time the whole world tried it. The whole world cannot put itself in jail, nor can it escape the consequences by suicide.

When the delusion breaks, people all with one impulse hoard their money, banks all with one impulse hoard credit, and debt becomes debt again, as it always was. Credit is ruined. Suddenly there is not enough for everyday purposes. Yet only a little while before we had been saying and thinking there was a great surplus of American credit and the only thing we could do with it was to export it. How absurd it sounds in echo. It was absurd at the time.

Ch2: Anatomy of the Bubble – Pg 32-34
All of this may be seen, and will be easier to do than you would think. To see credit rising at its source, to see whose it is to begin with, to see how it moves from the spring to the stream and then anywhere, even to the maelstrom, and to see at the same time Sumner’s Forgotten Man, you have only to go to the nearest bank and sit there for half an hour in an attitude of attention. Any bank will do. The first one you come to.

Observe first the physical arrangements. There will be along the counter a series of little windows, each with a legend over it. Above one window it will be “Savings.” Over the next two or three it will be “Teller.” Then one, “Discounts and Collections.”  And at one side, where the counter ends, you will see behind a railing several desks with little metal plates on them, one saying “President,” another “Vice President,” and another “Cashier,” unless it is a very small bank, in which case the cashier will be behind one of the windows.

Then observe the people and what they come to do. Some go straight to the window marked “Savings.” These all bring money to leave with the bank at interest. One is a man in overalls. That is wage money to be saved. Another is a farmer’s wife, and that may be milk or butter money. Next the poultry man with some profit to be put aside. Then two or three housewives, evidently, such as regularly include in their budgets a sum to be saved. After these a foreman from the railroad and a garage mechanic, and so on. Each one puts money between the leaves of a little book and pushes it through the window; the man there counts it, writes the amount in the little book and pushes the book back to the depositor. That goes on all day. At the day’s end all the money received at this window is counted, bundled and tossed into the safe, and then written down in the big book of the bank as “Time Deposits.”
Those who go to the windows marked “Teller” are somewhat different. They represent local trade, commerce and industry. Their accounts are current, called checking accounts or credit balances. They bring both cash and checks to deposit; and besides making deposits they may tender their own checks to be cashed, often at the same time. For example, the man who owns the sash and blind factory brings nothing but checks to deposit; everybody owing him money has paid him by check. But he hires ten men and this is pay day. Therefore, needing cash to pay wages, he writes his own check for the amount of his pay roll and receives that sum in cash. But this money he takes away roll and receives that sum in cash. But this money he takes away presently comes back to the bank through other hands. The employees of the sash and blind factory spend it with the grocer and butcher and department-store keeper who immediately bring it to the bank and deposit it at the “Teller” windows where it came from. What the employees of the sash and blind factory do not spend they themselves bring back to the bank and leave at the window marked “Savings.” Such is the phenomenon called the circulation of money. The same dollar may go out of the bank and return again two or three times in one week. The speed with which a dollar performs its work and returns to the bank is called the velocity of money.

At the end of the day the men at the “Teller” windows count up in one column what they have received and in another what they have paid out, and the difference is written down in the bank’s books as an increase or decrease of “Demand Deposits.” The rule is that more will have been received than was paid out, so there is normally each day an increase of deposits. It is normal that all these people representing local business should bring to the “Teller” windows more than they take away, because their activities are severally productive, giving always some increase, more or less according to the state of the times.

Well, then, this daily increase of “Demand Deposits” from the “Teller” windows is tossed into the safe, along with those “Time Deposits” from the window marked “Savings.” Thus the bank accumulates deposits—that is to say, money. What does it do with the money? A bank pays interest; therefore, a bank must earn interest. It must earn more interest than it pays out, else it cannot make a profit for itself. So the bank must lend its deposits. To receive money on which it pays interest and to lend money on which it receives interest—that is a bank’s whole business

Ch2: Anatomy of the Bubble – Pg 34
Now, what proportion of its total deposits do you suppose a bank lends? How much would you think it was safe to lend? The half? Three quarters? All? The fact is—and even those who know it well and take it for granted are astonished in those moments when they stop to reflect on it—the fabulous fact is that a bank may lend ten times its deposits. That is to say, for each actual dollar of other people’s money it has received and locked up in its safe, it may lend or sell ten dollars of credit money.

Ch2: Anatomy of the Bubble – Pg 44
Now suppose a third man comes and borrows all of that money to build a toy in the meaning of a pyramid that has no economic value, or to make an unlucky speculation, or to buy something he is impatient to enjoy before he has produced anything of equivalent value and then afterward fails to produce the equivalent, so that it turns out that he is unable to pay interest or return the principal. We say in that case the money is lost. Really it is not. It still exists. But what the money represented is lost, and that was the amount of labor necessary to produce two cords of wood.

There is neither value nor power in money itself, only in what it represents. Every dollar of actual money should betoken that a dollar’s worth of wealth has been somewhere in some form produced; every dollar of credit multiplied upon that money by the banker should signify that somewhere in some form a dollar’s worth of wealth is in process of creation.

Ch5: Operating the Golden Goose – Pg 84
To make it clear, suppose you have at your bank two separate accounts. In one account you owe the bank a million dollars on a long-term promissory note which you have undertaken to pay off gradually with interest. The other account is current. You have there a credit, say, of fifty thousand dollars. That is the account in which you transact your daily business. Now suppose you go to your bank and say: “I cannot pay the interest on that million-dollar note. I am bankrupt if you make me pay.” Saying this, you put yourself in the hands of the bank. It can demand payment and sell you out, foreclose on your business, take all your property. But the bank does not want to do that. It says: “All right. These are hard times. Let the interest go for a year and let the note run.” You say: “But how about my current account in which I have fifty thousand dollars? What will you do with that?” The bank says: “Well, of course you have to go on doing business. We will treat that account as if you were solvent. Go on drawing your checks against it as before and keep your business going. All of this will work out in time.” Very good. It is a reasonable arrangement. But suppose the next day you walk into that bank and say: “I’m afraid of this institution. It’s too loose with its credit. I’m afraid my current account is not safe. I am closing it out. Here is my check for fifty thousand dollars and I want it in gold, please.”

Ch6: The Gold Invention – Pg 104
All of it has happened. It was not the gold standard that did it; it was breaking faith with the gold standard that did it, and the case would be the same if the standard were anything else.

Origins of the Federal Reserve – Murray Rothbard

The Beginnings of the “Reform” Movement: The Indianapolis Monetary Convention – Pg 15

The Republicans had long been the party of prohibition and of greenback inflation and opposition to gold. But since the early 1890s, the Rockefeller forces, dominant in their home state of Ohio and nationally in the Republican party, had decided to quietly ditch prohibition as a political embarrassment and as a grave deterrent to obtaining votes from the increasingly powerful bloc of German-American voters.

In the summer of 1896, anticipating the defeat of the gold forces at the Democratic convention, the Morgans, previously dominant in the Democratic party, approached the McKinley–Mark Hanna–Rockefeller forces through their rising young satrap, Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. Lodge offered the Rockefeller forces a deal: the Morgans would support McKinley for president, and neither sit home nor back a third, Gold Democrat party, provided that McKinley pledged himself to a gold standard. The deal was struck, and many previously hard-money Democrats shifted to the Republicans.

The nature of the American political-party system was now drastically changed: what was previously a tightly fought struggle between hard-money, free-trade, laissez-faire Democrats on the one hand, and inflationist, protectionist, statist Republicans on the other, with the Democrats slowly but surely gaining ascendancy by the early 1890s, was now a party system dominated by the Republicans until the depression election of 1932.

The Panic of 1907 and Mobilization for a Central Bank – Pg 93

With the New York monetary conference over, it was now time for Aldrich, surrounded by a few of the topmost leaders of the financial elite, to go off in seclusion and hammer out a detailed plan around which all parts of the central-bank movement could rally. Someone in the Aldrich inner circle, probably Morgan partner Henry P. Davison, got the idea of convening a small group of top leaders in a super-secret conclave to draft the central-bank bill. On November 22, 1910, Senator Aldrich, with a handful of companions, set forth in a privately chartered railroad car from Hoboken, New Jersey to the coast of Georgia, where they sailed to an exclusive retreat, the Jekyll Island Club. Facilities for their meeting were arranged by club member and coowner J. P. Morgan. The cover story released to the press was that this was a simple duck-hunting expedition, and the conferees took elaborate precautions on the trips there and back to preserve their secrecy. Thus, the attendees addressed each other only by first name, and the railroad car was kept dark and closed off from reporters or other travelers on the train. One reporter apparently caught on to the purpose of the meeting, but was in some way persuaded by Henry P. Davison to maintain silence.

The conferees worked for a solid week at Jekyll Island to hammer out the draft of the Federal Reserve bill. In addition to Aldrich, the conferees included Henry P. Davison, Morgan partner; Paul Warburg, whose address in the spring had greatly impressed Aldrich; Frank A. Vanderlip, vice president of the National City Bank of New York; and finally, A. Piatt Andrew, head of the NMC staff, who had recently been made assistant secretary of the treasury by President Taft. After a week of meetings, the six men had forged a plan for a central bank, which eventually became the Aldrich Bill. Vanderlip acted as secretary of the meeting and contributed the final writing.

The only substantial disagreement was tactical, with Aldrich attempting to hold out for a straightforward central bank on the European model, while Warburg and the other bankers insisted that the reality of central control be cloaked in the politically palatable camouflage of “decentralization.” It is amusing that the bankers were the more politically astute, while the politician Aldrich wanted to waive political considerations. Warburg and the bankers won out, and the final draft was basically the Warburg plan with a decentralized patina taken from Morawetz.

The financial power elite now had themselves a bill. The significance of the composition of the small meeting must be stressed: two Rockefeller men (Aldrich, Vanderlip), two Morgans (Davison and Norton), one Kuhn, Loeb person (Warburg), and one economist friendly to both camps (Andrew) (Rothbard 1984, pp. 99–101; Vanderlip 1935, pp. 210–19).

After working on some revisions of the Jekyll Island draft with Forgan and George Reynolds, Aldrich presented the Jekyll Island draft as the Aldrich Plan to the full NMC in January 1911. But here an unusual event occurred. Instead of quickly presenting this Aldrich Bill to the Congress, its drafters waited for a full year, until January 1912. Why the unprecedented year’s delay?

The problem was that the Democrats swept the Congressional elections in 1910, and Aldrich, disheartened, decided not to run for reelection to the Senate the following year. The Democratic triumph meant that the reformers had to devote a year of intensive agitation to convert the Democrats, and to intensify propaganda to the rest of banking, business, and the public. In short, the reformers needed to regroup and accelerate their agitation.

Rothbard vs. The Philosophers
Edited by Roberta A. Modungo

The following is a list of quotes I found worth keeping, sharing, processing, writing about, or in general just enjoy.  As is typical, I will attempt to write about these quotes.  Either how they personally effected me, or just a couple interesting observations on it.

—–

Individual human beings are not born or fashioned with fully formed knowledge, values, goals, or personalities; they must each form their own values and goals, develop their personalities, and learn about themselves and the world around them. Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human. – Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action II: Applications and Criticism from the Austrian School (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 3–4. Originally prepared for the Symposium on Human Differentiation, for the  Institute of Paper Chemistry in Appleton, Wisconsin, 1970, and sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies
Pg 19-20

… Hayek beings very well in the first chapter by defining freedom as meaning “absence of coercion,” but fails badly in defining “coercion.” For Hayek, “coercion” is defined a arbitrary, specifically harmful acts; the term is thus used much more broadly and yet more narrowly that its proper definition: “the use of violence.”
Pg 72

The question as to whether a code of social living is revealed and established as fixed as a series of Divine Commandments given to men or discovered as absolutes of social law by human trial and error may turn out to be different ways of viewing the same set of rules. . . . Both the ideas of the revelation and of the discovery of social and esthetic values are opposed to the notion that all such concepts are merely relativistic and changeable and have no fixed sanction of any kind.
Pg 119
Leonard Carmichael, “Absolutes, Relativism, and the Scientific Psychology of Human Nature,” in Schoeck and Wiggins, eds., Relativism

There are several things to be said about this worship of the primitive. First, it is absolutely illegitimate to infer, as Polanyi does, the history of pre-Western civilization from analysis of existing primitive tribes. Let us never forget that the existing primitive tribes are precisely the ones that didn’t progress—that remained in their primitive state. To infer from observing them that this is the way our ancestors behaved is nonsense—and apt to be the reverse of the truth, for our ancestors presumably behaved in ways that quickly advanced them beyond the primitive stage thousands of years ago.
Pg 122

Another basic flaw in any caste society—and ignored by Polanyi—is the problem of population growth. The witch doctor, the custom of tribe, the chief or king, and Professor Polanyi can all decree that X and the son of X be a baker, Y and the son of Y be a farmer, etc., but what happens when population increases, as it almost inevitably tends to do? What does the younger son do? Polanyi sneers at Malthus but the Malthusian problem is always supremely evident in the caste society. What happens when the “natural checks” of famine and disease do not work sufficiently? This is why the caste-communal society of Sparta put their babies out in the woods for an “exposure test,” not because the Spartans were inherently a cruel people but because they were faced with what was, in the context of their social structure, an insoluble problem: what to do with their population increase. It was population growth, further, that was wrecking mercantilist Europe. Population growth was the reason for the rise of able-bodied beggars and thieves in eighteenth-century England. There was no work for them to do. It was the rise of capitalism—the advance of capital to provide them with jobs, the expansion of the market to produce cheap goods for the masses—that not only enormously increased the standard of living of the masses but also provided jobs for these increasingly “excess” people
Pg 127

Adventures in Legal Land by Marc Stevens

The following is a list of quotes I found worth keeping, sharing, processing, writing about, or in general just enjoy.  As is typical, I will attempt to write about these quotes.  Either how they personally effected me, or just a couple interesting observations on it.

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– Highlight on Page 163
a “law” is just an opinion backed by violence,

– Highlight on Page 194
“contra negantem principia non est disputandum” In other words, it is useless to argue with one who denies principles.

– Highlight on Page 196
“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent” Isaac Asimov, Foundation trilogy. The Mayors book 1, part III

– Highlight on Page 198
If he’s taking control over my life and property without my consent then it’s clear this individual does not believe I have any rights, except whatever rights he in his mercy wants to extend to me. This is usually expressed by the “time worn” statist phrase “consistently rejected” by rational people: “you have all the rights the constitution gives you.”

– Highlight on Page 199
Isn’t that also true of any slave? Slaves have as many rights as the master in his benevolence wishes to extend the slave. And exactly I low docs an unsigned written instrument (“constitution”) give anyone “rights” anyway? Is my right to life really dependent on a 200 year old “written instrument” no one bothered to sign?

– Highlight on Page 199
To further prove that bureaucrats think, or at least act as though they own everything and everyone, let’s look at the definition of owner “owner. One who has complete dominion over particular property. 42 Am Jur 1st Prop § 37.” Ballentine’s Law Dictionary, page 906.

– Highlight on Page 200
If I own the books and records, then I have “complete dominion over [that] particular property.” This means for someone else to use my property, I have to give my freely given consent, because I have “complete dominion.” Remember if it’s not recognized that I am the owner, then a so-called “subpoena” would not be in my name requiring me to bring in the property. Instead, some bureaucrat would just come by and take what he felt was his. Maybe those bureaucrats just want my assistance in bringing their books and records to the court without having to pay me.

– Highlight on Page 203
“For, the very idea that man may be compelled to hold his life, or the means of living, or any material right essential to the enjoyment of life, at the mere will of another, seems to be intolerable in any country where freedom prevails, as being the essence of slavery itself Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 US 356,370

Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail by John Phillip Reid

The following is a list of quotes I found worth keeping, sharing, processing, writing about, or in general just enjoy.  As is typical, I will attempt to write about these quotes.  Either how they personally effected me, or just a couple interesting observations on it.

—–

“traveling through a country . . . influenced by no law save that which nature’s God has implanted in the heart of every man.” ~Pg 9
– Captain James Craig’s parting address on the Platte River, May 31, 1849

When we search for evidence of legal attitudes and legal behavior on the overland trail, we are looking for what Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson called legal habit. They used the term disparagingly. Alexander Hamilton or John Marshall would have used it with respect. Political theorists of the Jeffersonian persuasion feared that legal behaviorism stifled the free choice of elected assemblies; lawyers of the Hamiltonian tradition praised it as one of the soundest foundations upon which to rest the rule of law. That people behaved according to taught customs of their youths — even in a strange, hostile environment such as the overland trail, where those lessons might seem inapplicable — would to legal theorists of the Hamiltonian school be evidence not only of the strength of custom, but proof of its validity as law. ~Pg 19

In the majority of cases, overland partnerships were so informal they were concluded without reducing the terms to writing. In the typical situation, a man with funds to buy but part of an outfit, or one who was alone and sought company, would join other emigrants to form a “mess,” generally of four or five members. There was no need to draft an instrument of ratification as everyone understood the legal principles involved in private and concurrent ownership. ~Pg 131

Anything You Want by Derek Sivers

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision—even decisions  about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone—according to what’s best for your  customers. ~Page 15

It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers.  Just thrill them, and they’ll tell ~Page 15

Starting small puts 100 percent of your energy on actually solving real problems for real people. ~Page 17

To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To  be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. ~Page 51