[p2p-research] The Advantages of Debt

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/18/10, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is a classic Austrian economics argument.  Pick up Murray Rothbard's
> history of finance and you'll feel right at home...trouble is...Austrian
> Schoolers are very pro-market and anti-socialist (esp. Rothbard & Hayek).
> The arguments you are making are straight from them and very mainstream
> right now on Wall Street (See Mish's blog, for instance).  Rothbard was a
> first class mind...Hayek one of the highest order.  If it came down to
> reading them or Marx...I'd definitely go with the Austrians.

The difference is that the Austrians are hard money cranks, and they'd
call Patrick a soft money crank.  To put it in Tom Greco's framework,
soft money cranks like Patrick (and me) see money primarily as a unit
of measure for denominating the exchange of present and future goods,
whereas the Austrians see money as a store of past value.  In a mutual
credit-clearing system, you don't need some store of past value as
"backing" for the money.  And the Austrians are all about gold
precisely for the purpose of such backing.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
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