Propostas do arquivo mises.org: Deflação, porque a devemos desejar

Audio referenciado como Deflation and Liberty: Hülsmann explains the relationship between the slow deflation produced by a gold standard and free-market money and general increases in overall Liberty. Recorded June 10, 2003. [59:59].

Se a opinião dominante é tratar a deflação como uma espécie de peste negra no domínio dos fenómenos económicos, Hülsmann apresenta o argumento oposto, de como a deflação é uma condição de sanidade económica e de uma ordem social funcional.

Presta-se a reacções estranhas fora do pequeno círculo de miseanos ortodoxos.

O texto base correspondente é: Deflation and Liberty (mas aconselho o audio). Fica uma citação:

“The production of money in a free society is a matter of free association. Everybody from the miners to the owners of the mines, to the minters, and up to the customers who buy the minted coins—all benefit from the production of money. None of them violates the property rights of anybody else, because everybody is free to enter the mining and minting business, and nobody is obliged to buy the product.

Things are completely different once we turn to money production in interventionist regimes, which have prevailed in the West for the better part of the past 150 years. Here we need to mention in particular two institutional forms of monetary interventionism: (fraudulent) fractional-reserve banking and fiat money. The common characteristic of both these institutions is that they violate the principle of free association. They enable the producers of paper money and of money titles to expand their production through the violation of other people’s property rights.

Banking is fraudulent whenever bankers sell uncovered or only partially covered money substitutes that they present as fully covered titles for money. These bankers sell more money substitutes than they could have sold if they had taken care to keep a 100 percent reserve for each substitute they issued.[19]”

e em especial, na introdução, capaz de deixar com uma ataque apoplexia a muitos:

“It is true that without further government intervention there would be a deflationary spiral. It is not true that this spiral would be bottomless and wipe out the economy. It would not be a mortal threat to the lives and the welfare of the general population. It destroys essentially those companies and industries that live a parasitical existence at the expense of the rest of the economy, and which owe their existence to our present fiat-money system. Even in the short run, therefore, deflation reduces our real incomes only within rather narrow limits. And it will clear the ground for very substantial growth rates in the medium and long run.

We should not be afraid of deflation. We should love it as much as our liberties.”