Ep. 529 The Walls Are Contracting on George Selgin’s Credit
Taking a recent Twitter exchange as a springboard, Bob argues that George Selgin has unwittingly conceded the entire argument they had at the SoHo Forum: namely, fractional reserve banking by its very essence causes a mismatch between the community’s saving and the funds made available for loans via the banks.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- Keith Vencel’s new book, A New Monetary System.
- The SoHo Forum debate between Selgin and Murphy.
- Selgin’s posts on ABCT and FRB (one and two).
- Bob’s Human Action episode on Mises and FRB.
- Bob’s QJAE article on FRB and the business cycle.
- Help support the Bob Murphy Show.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
On these topics Dr. Murphy is a paladin. A knight in shining armor.
Would you use physical force to ban FractionalReserveCoin6 and FractionalReserveCoin7, but allow coins like BitCoin and Monero? You and your followers have frequently actually said the former two are evil and/or fraudulent. Evil and fraud must be banned, right? And if the former two really are evil (ie. universally wrong/immoral), anyone would be rationally justified in intervening in neighbouring citadels too, to stop such evils/frauds, right?
But what exactly is the fraud – do you think people don’t know that their money is being gambled with, and the downstream effects of this (less reliable metrics of population savings/preferences, etc)? Cuz this can be trivially solved – surely this isn’t the core of your position – that people don’t know what’s going on, and are thus being defrauded?
It’s interesting how almost everyone has this need to control others. I think it’s a low-level monkey temptation that we all have. Bob, if people want to risk some of their savings, in order to get easier access to credit perhaps, let them? Did I really need to say that?
I’m pretty sure you didn’t need to say that Dennis, right? For sure I didn’t say anything about “fraud” in the SoHo forum. I may have said Rothbard thought it wouldn’t be allowed legally in an an-cap society. Can you remind me what I said that is causing you to unload on me with such scorn and sarcasm?
No, we should not use physical force to ban things, only to resist evil physical force from being applied to us. So we should use physical force to stop a murder, but not to punish a murderer after the fact.
What we should do is disassociate with murderers and fraudsters, and publish about how they engage in fraud and murder, and hope that other people realize this and also disassociate with them.
Pretty sure this is also Bob’s position but he is clearly trying to gently guide you into dealing with the content of the show rather than things that weren’t a part of the show. Maybe a show about why FRB is fraud and how a free society would deal with fraud is a good idea.