Alasdair Macleod: Drifting into fascism

By Alasdair Macleod
GoldMoney, St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands
Thursday, December 29, 2016

Most people regard governments and their central banks as forces for the good. Financial crises and suchlike are therefore blamed on capitalism, and people believe our leaders do their best to pick up the pieces from market failures, because they are elected to promote the public good.

The reality is very different, with governments acting not in the interests of their electors, but in the interest of the preservation of the administration. And the size of the administration is proportional to its degree of control over the people, so it and its burden on ordinary people just grows and grows with ever-increasing intervention and micro-management.

The logical endpoint in the reach of government is either state ownership of all private property, which is communism, or state control over what people do with their property, which is fascism. With communism discredited, the world is moving inexorably towards the latter. Every business is regulated in some way or other, and economic freedom is being progressively restricted with ever-tightening regulations.

From a government's standpoint, lack of control over private activities equates with risk to the state and its objectives. The more that people are directed in their actions, the more certain the state's security becomes. We see this in attempts to remove cash-money from circulation, because the use of cash cannot be controlled. It can be used for activities beyond government's knowledge, it can be used to evade paying taxes, and it can be used to undermine a bank's solvency. Many people who are financially aware probably thought this was a trend only to be seen in the advanced nations, but it is equally true in emerging economies, as the recent experience in India has dramatically shown. ...

... For the remainder of the commentary:

https://wealth.goldmoney.com/research/goldmoney-insights/drifting-into-f...