The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

In other words, the Keynesian conception of the state, from which came the modern central banking doctrines held widely by all central bankers, and which shape the vast majority of economic textbooks written worldwide, comes from a place of a man who wanted government direction of two important areas of life: first, the control of money, credit, saving, and investment decisions, which meant the totalitarian centralization of capital allocation and destruction of free individual enterprise, making individuals utterly dependent on government for their basic survival, and second, the control of population quantity and quality, which meant eugenics. And unlike socialists, Keynes did not seek this level of control over individuals in order to enhance their freedom in the long run, but rather to develop a grander vision of society as he sees fit. While socialists may have had the decency to at least pretend to want to enslave man for his own good, to free him in the future, Keynes wanted government enslavement for its own sake, as the ultimate end. This may help explain why Murray Rothbard said, “There is only one good thing about Marx, at least he was not a Keynesian.”