Contrarians and the Keynesian Myth
by Nelson Hultberg
August 11, 2003
There is a strange incongruity, observable throughout the intellectual
history of man, that never ceases to amaze me. Why is it in the field
of ideas that dramatic new visions of truth are so often met with
vehement opposition from a society's intellectuals -- the very men
of the mind who are most dedicated to the pursuit and demonstration
of truth? How can the intellectuals of today's era -- so acutely
aware of humanity's bigoted resistance in the past to Galileo, Semmelweis,
Pasteur, and other radical discoverers of history -- succumb to the
same blind obstinacy in face of the new truths confronting them?
There are several reasons why this propensity for intolerance to
new thinking has prevailed throughout history among intellectuals.
As the physicist Fred Hoyle tells us, scientists are human. They
are, far more often than the lay public perceives, victims of dogmatism
and the tendency of all humans to argue from pre-set ideas.
Despite their much-heralded pledge to objective inquiry, scientists
are quite capable of bias and suppression in order to preserve their
long-standing beliefs. When a large portion of one's life has been
passionately devoted to the validation of an idea, it becomes most
difficult to accept the invalidity of that idea. Therefore truth,
the most highly prized goal of all, is often forsaken to protect
fragile egos and support previous convictions.
This tendency of scientists to be obstinate in the face of new truth
manifests itself through the paradigm shift. As Thomas S. Kuhn demonstrated
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all of science
is based upon the establishment of paradigms, or what can be termed
an overall "way of viewing things" in a particular field. And once
a paradigm is established, it becomes difficult for most thinkers
to dispute its basic premises even when that paradigm is found to
be in error.
For example, the 1st century Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, established
the Ptolemaic paradigm of the solar system, which depicted the earth
as its center with the sun and planets revolving around the earth.
Copernicus and Galileo came along and overthrew this way of thinking
with a truer paradigm that depicted the sun as the center of the
solar system. Newton established the mechanistic paradigm in physics
during the early 18th century, and Einstein followed with a much
truer relativity paradigm two hundred years later. Pasteur established
the germ paradigm in medicine during the 19th century, while Darwin
gave us the evolution paradigm in biology.
A paradigm is thus an all-inclusive Big Picture based upon a fundamental
premise in a field of study that undergirds the "why of things" in
that particular field. Even when false, a paradigm often prevails
as accepted truth for a long period of time because the prevailing
minds and methodology of the era are inadequate to grasp reality
more clearly. But falsity persists as truth also because humans fall
prey to inertia. They seek mental comfort and choose paths of least
resistance, which leads them to settle into a certain paradigm as
if it is inviolable. For example, even after Copernicus made it obvious
around 1500 AD that the Ptolemaic concept of the universe was a fallacy,
it still prevailed in intellectual circles for another 180 years
until Galileo drove the final nails into its coffin.
Herein lies one of the great human dilemmas: Once a "way of viewing
things" is entrenched in any given field, even when new knowledge
comes along to refute such a paradigm, it becomes practically impossible
(because of the flaws of human nature) for most intellectuals to
think outside that paradigm's constraints. They will defend the entrenched
view even when its basic conception is shown to be foolish and impossible,
especially if they have devoted a vital part of their lives to the
teaching and promotion of that "way of viewing things."
This is presently our situation in many intellectual fields. Like
the medieval dogmatists, today's academic community also clings to
irrational paradigms in face of overwhelming evidence that their
views are as untenable as the flat earth theories of old.
The Keynesian Paradigm
Let's take one of the most entrenched paradigms of our day as an
example: Keynesian demand theory in economics. Despite severe and
demonstrable weaknesses in this economic view, our establishment
scholars cling to it like dependent children to stuffed animals.
When presented with strong, logical refutations of this paradigm,
80 percent of our academic community reacts with bemused scorn.
Both theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrate that the Keynesian
model is not just a false and dangerous way to approach political
economy, it is a ludicrous sham, one of the biggest cons in history.
Inflating consumer demand with fiat currency is not some kind of "new
economics" as Keynes and FDR's brain trust of the 30's claimed. It
is not legitimate economics at all, but just another example of powerful
governments debasing the currency so as to confiscate their citizens'
wealth, and in the process deluding themselves like tribal primitives
dancing in front of idols to bring good fortune.
Original orthodox Keynesianism may be dead as a viable theory, but
just as neo-Ptolemaic theories hung around for 180 years after Copernicus,
neo-Keynesian variants still control government policy today after
Mises. They are still entrenched as the basis for centralized statism
and are the reasons for the exacerbated boom-bust cycles in our economy
over the past decades. One observes the exasperating efforts of Austrian
economists such as Kurt Richebacher trying to inform the Keynesian
pooh-bahs about the falsity of their paradigm, and one is reminded
of what Pasteur had to endure when he set out to explain to the ignorant
physicians of his day that putting leeches on the skin was not rational
medicine.
As everyone knows, Keynesian economics got its start during the
Great Depression. In essence, Keynes' message to a bewildered 1936
world was this: What needs to be done is to create vast amounts of
government investment so as to stimulate and perpetually maintain
consumer demand at a high level. If this is done, the problems of
poverty and business cycles will be alleviated. The weakness of free
enterprise is that in its mature stage it lacks the ability to produce
enough "purchasing power," i.e., demand among the people. The government
must step in and take control of the monetary system, for Say's Law
of Markets is no longer valid.
Say's Law of Markets is the brainchild of J.B. Say, the 19th century
French economist. It states that production is the cause of consumption,
or that the people's productivity determines their purchasing
power. For example, if a man plants and harvests a ten acre field
of corn, his purchasing power in the marketplace will then be whatever
that corn is worth in trade to his fellowman. His production of corn
has created the level of his demand for clothes, transportation,
entertainment, etc.
When Say's Law is considered along with Ludwig von Mises' theory
of money and credit, one can easily see the fallacy of Keynes, for
no amount of paper money, injected into an economy in excess of the
growth of goods and services, will increase the "purchasing power" of
the people. This is because the prices of those goods and services
rise in response to the increase in the money supply, which negates
the effect of the extra paper money in the people's pockets and eventually
even creates a situation where overall purchasing power dissipates
because of the inevitable runaway aspect of all inflationary economies.
If Say's Law is valid, then the way we should have handled the Great
Depression of the 30's would have been to let prices and wages seek
their own level and allow Say's Law to operate. If this had been
done, the natural productivity of the people would have created the
necessary purchasing power to climb out of the Depression.
The reason we didn't handle it in this way is because Keynes was
supposed to have "refuted" Say's Law showing it to be unworkable
under modern day conditions.
But as Steven Kates' demonstrates in Say's Law and the Keynesian
Revolution, Keynes gravely distorted Say's Law in order to "refute" it. 1 He
created a straw man, and then denounced it. Such intellectual legerdemain
allowed Keynes to pose as some sort of super-savant with a brilliant
new theoretical insight into how the world works.
Many years ago, Henry Hazlitt also saw the fallacy of Keynes and
pointed out that his allegedly "brilliant refutation" consisted of
declaring Say's Law invalid because it is invalid. 2 This
is akin to a physicist suddenly declaring that the Law of Gravity
is no longer applicable to humans because it is no longer applicable,
and then expecting men to suddenly be able to flap their arms as
wings and fly through the sky upon the utterance of such a declaration.
Why it all sounds absolutely marvelous, one can almost imagine FDR
replying to his brain trust when informed of the wonders to be worked
with Keynes' "new economics." If capitalism has reached its mature
stage and can no longer produce enough purchasing power, then we
in Washington must step in and get the system going again. If people
don't have enough money, then all we have to do is print up more
and our problems will be solved. It's really all very simple, isn't
it? Our growth can actually be as great as we want it to be. Our
wealth will be unlimited. The power to create that wealth lies with
benevolent leaders such as us in Washington. We can usher in an unbounded
future of government managed prosperity. Oh, happy day! How could
we not have thought of this before?
Stripped of all the eloquent conceptualizations and slick technical
jargon, this was the great "innovation," the great "revolutionary
insight" of Keynes: If we want to become wealthier as a nation and
avoid economic recessions, then all we need to do is print up
more money.
The outrageous folly of such a proposal and the willingness of learned
men to fall for its lure when encased in sophisticated verbiage,
are terribly embarrassing when one thinks through the basic principles
involved and projects into the future what the long run ramifications
will be. Nevertheless, the most powerful office of the most powerful
country in the world accepted such fiscal flimflammery as valid economic
theory. And every administration since FDR has been doing the same
thing -- printing up more money to make us all more "prosperous." But
as any legitimate economist knows, money itself is not wealth.
If money was wealth, then the government could just print up a million
dollars for everybody and wipe poverty off the face of the earth.
Money is just a substitute for wealth. True wealth is the goods and
services that we have produced. It can never be created with a printing
press.
Contrary to all the technocratic government wizards and advocates
of "new economics" that have descended upon us since 1932, Say's
Law of Markets has not been refuted, and it will never be refuted
as long as there is a universe and a thing called human nature to
exist within it.
Actually the Keynesian intellectuals knew all this. They just conned
themselves into believing that Say's Law would not work quickly
enough to get us out of the Depression, and that they would only
print up a little bit of money whenever they needed it (to prime
the pump so to say) and always keep the boom of prosperity going
whenever it was showing signs of slipping into a recession.
This is the reasoning of the drug addict though. He also cons himself
into believing that he will only take a little bit of his drug whenever
he needs it (to pep himself up so to say), and always keep the boom
of a pleasant high going, whenever it is showing signs of slipping
into a depression.
The problem with such self-deception is that neither drug addicts
nor federal bankers can ever stop with just a little bit of the drug
they have become accustomed to. They always need ever increasing
doses to maintain their high, and invariably they continue such injections
to the breaking point of either death or massive depression.
Why We Bought into the Keynesian Con
If one wants to know why we got onto the inflation-deflation roller
coaster of Keynesian economics, this is the reason. Ideologically
warped intellectuals, with grandiose dreams of ushering in a utopian
economic order, succeeded in convincing the American people that
their economy is dangerous if left alone. Adopting the rationality
level of witch doctors, these cerebral parvenus taught two generations
of pundits and politicians that all modern economies need the regulatory
guidance of government's "benevolent" hand to smooth out the rough
spots and continually "increase" the purchasing power of the consumer
through inflation of the money supply so as to create a prolonged
boom of prosperity.
What has taken place during the past 65 years is a prolonged boom
all right -- the most ungodly and unrestrained inflationary spiral
that America has ever seen throughout her entire history. Keynesians
proclaim that their theories and policies cured us of the Depression
of the 1930's and gave us all this beautiful "economic growth." But
here's the rub. It's not genuine growth! It's a pseudo-stimulated
growth created with excessive paper dollars.
Crashing addicts taking heroin to get rid of their withdrawl symptoms
don't delude themselves into the fantasy that they are curing themselves
and that everything will be all right the next morning. They know
very well that what they are doing is simply consuming more of the
very poison that jacked up their body's system in the first place,
which can only bring about a deeper addiction and more severe complications
later on. They continue their destructive habit because they are
hooked, but they don't delude themselves with fantasies of physiological
propriety. Keynesians lack even this semblance of rationality.
What we have done to our economy under the name of Keynesian economics
is to inject the heroin of paper dollars into its bloodstream, and
now we consider ourselves cured from the Depression of the 30's.
This is what Keynesians teach in the schools. But the truth is we
never did get out of the Depression genuinely, because we didn't produce
our way out -- because we didn't have the wherewithal to let
Say's Law of Markets operate. Instead, we rid ourselves of our economic
malaise with nothing but a giant fix. We stimulated into being
a huge economic boom of technological might and false prosperity
on a foundation of collapsible paper money and massive debt.
When Keynesian liberals attribute our recovery from the Depression
to Roosevelt and his supposedly ingenious New Deal policies, they
are speaking the moronic nonsense that communist ideologues utilized
to promote their Potemkin villages under Stalin. The New Deal did
not cure the Great Depression. In 1939, after seven years of massive
government intervention into the marketplace from a phalanx of ABC
bureaucracies invented by Roosevelt's planners and a convoluted array
of opportunist economic programs, we were as firmly and as deeply
mired in the Depression as before.
"[I]n his first two full terms of eight years," writes biographer
John T. Flynn, "President Roosevelt never produced any recovery whatever.
When he was elected there were 11,586,000 persons unemployed. In
1939 -- seven years later -- when the war struck in Europe, there
were still 11,369,000 persons unemployed. These figures are supplied
by the American Federation of Labor. In 1932 when he was elected
there were 4,155,000 households with 16,620,000 persons on relief.
In 1939, seven years later, there were 4,327,000 households with
19,648,000 persons on relief. In the presence of these undisputed
facts how can any sober-minded citizen suppose that Mr. Roosevelt
brought recovery to the United States?" 3
It is difficult to believe scholars of any stature can continue
to claim that Roosevelt and his New Deal legislators got us out of
the Depression, for the "undisputed facts" certainly tell a totally
different story. None of the policies put forth by these disgruntled
collectivist schemers did anything but further confuse an already
dismayed business world. In 1939, the country was still floundering
deep in the throes of the Depression. Confidence in the economy had
failed totally to materialize, for how could businessmen have any
confidence to act and plan when they had no idea what the administration
in Washington was going to do next. Roosevelt's pervasive interventions
into the market to manipulate and suppress its forces through Mussolini
style planning bureaucracies shut down the entrepreneurial risk
takers that create productivity. Staffed with rabid collectivists
like Rexford Tugwell and Alvin Hansen, his brain trust effectively
destroyed any hope of recovery that only the free flow of prices,
wages, interest rates, and profits could bring.
Roosevelt and his aides had no understanding of this need at all.
As a result, every one of their suppressive controls and redistributive
programs only made matters worse. The Federal Reserve's previous
expansion of the money supply in excess of the growth of goods and
services during the 20's was what created the collapse because such
fiat money expansion cannot be continued indefinitely. But the severity
of the collapse was compounded by FDR's moonshine economics following
Hoover's disastrous price, wage, and tariff follies. The primary
point to be learned from all this is that excessive monetary expansion
and contraction brought on the Depression, which was then intensified
by the failure of the government planners to realize that it was
their pre-1929 policies that had caused the crash in the first place
and their post-1929 policies that were extending it. 4
In end, it was World War II and its accompanying inflation that
got us out of the Depression, not any of the New Deal fiascoes that
welfare statists are so proud of. It was only after the war with
Japan and Germany began that "recovery" took place. Roosevelt did
nothing to aid recovery with his economic programs! What he did was
what all statists do when their domestic programs are self-destructing
-- he maneuvered his country into war, which requires millions of
men and armaments to be paid for with massive fiscal deficits that
are monetized by the Fed. It is this "monetary drug stimulant" that
gave us the appearance of getting America moving in a healthy economic
way again. Today's statist meddlers will, of course, attempt the
same thing again. Our War on Terrorism will be monetized.
As for our situation today, we have quite simply never come down
from that inflationary high generated by World War II. We have pumped
massive doses of paper money into the economy for over six decades
now at an arbitrary rate decided by federal bankers. Where it will
all end is anybody's guess. How long it can be sustained without
incurring either runaway inflation or another devastating depression
is impossible to say with certainty.
We can say this, however: The distortions and malinvestments
over the past 65 years (brought on by Keynesian theory) have become
so grotesque that a severe protracted liquidation of the resultant
massive debt must now take place before any kind of genuine health
can be restored to our economy. Because the Fed is fighting this
severe liquidation process at every step along the way, it will take
many years to complete, and it will result in far more misery than
if it were allowed to take its natural course.
What the grand pooh-bah Greenspan cannot bring himself to face is
that our Keynesian "boom-bust" economy will never be improved as
long as government (and its corruptible policy makers) try to control
and manipulate the financial workings of the marketplace from behind
their mahogany desks in Washington. To face this, Greenspan would
have to admit that he and his fellow pooh-bahs are not only irrelevant,
but actually the primary cause behind our present plight. The chance
of such an admission tumbling forth from these bureaucrats is about
as good as Bill Clinton making a guest appearance on O'Reilly's "No
Spin Zone" to confess how sleazy his life has been.
The most important insight to be grasped from this 65-year Keynesian
travesty is that there can never be a full-scale depression in any
economy without a full-scale deflation of the money supply.
But there is never any need for a full-scale deflation of the money
supply unless there has first been a full-scale inflation of
the money supply. Economies only crash AFTER they have been hyper-stimulated
with fiat money inflation. In light of the fact that it is only the
federal government and its fascist central banking monopoly that
can create a full scale inflation, would it not be prudent to suggest
that we get the government and the Federal Reserve out of the money
creation business? If we want stability in our economy, providing
power seeking bureaucrats and bankers with the means to arbitrarily
inflate the dollar is hardly the way to bring it about.
The Modern Rationalization
Here is where our dilemma lies, however. Neo-Keynesians, who control
political-economic policy in Washington today for both Republicans
and Democrats, justify their relentless monetary inflation over this
past century with the claim that such policy is necessary to "create
economic growth." Without the steady expansion of paper money throughout
the economy, they tell us, our society would never be able to achieve
prosperity. This is one of the most egregious self-cons in the history
of man! And it is readily seen for the lie that it is by simply investigating
our economic history.
I have presented the following figures in previous articles, but
they are so important to be aware of, they bear repeating over and
over again. As recorded in The Statistical History of the United
States, real wages for the workingman tripled in the years 1850-1913,
and the GDP increased over 500% averaging 4.3% annual growth from
1870-1913. 5 This was all done without any inflationary
infusions of fiat money from the Fed because there was no Fed. This
highly productive era, based upon the "barbarous relic" of gold,
was accompanied by an actual deflation of prices. From 1800
to 1913, there was an overall 30% reduction in the Consumer Price
Index from 43 to 30. 6 That's right, we had 4.3%
annual growth amidst gently deflating prices all without government
fiat money, all without FOMC pooh-bahs, all without today's Gargantua
on the Potomac.
Despite these irrefutable facts, Keynesian statists still maintain
that government inflation of the money supply is mandatory for a
productive economy. This in face of the total destruction of the
dollar since 1913. This in face of the fact that average GDP growth
is only 2.5% annually today. This in face of the fact that real wages
have been stagnant for the past 30 years because the combine of monetary
inflation and government taxes negates the workingman's increased
wage income. This in face of the fact that hundreds of thousands
of the elderly on fixed incomes have the sunshine ripped from their
lives by the insidious theft of inflation.
What is so upsetting is the difficulty involved in getting establishment
intellects to focus on these travesties? Teaching the facts of reality
to Keynesian statists is like trying to train a cat not to mess up
the living room rug with its excretions. You have to rub its nose
in its mess repeatedly and then show it the litter box over and over.
I fear we have a lot of nose rubbing left to do with Keynesians.
They haven't a clue as to what a fetid mess they have created.
It is easy to understand why the Keynesian establishment does not
want to face the economic facts of reality regarding this issue.
It would mean that its revered paradigm is (and has been for 65 years)
theoretically wrong and thus responsible for the financial chaos
that plagues us today. Accepting such a truth would mean the same
thing that accepting Copernicus' discoveries meant to the Catholic
Church in the 16th century -- relinquishment of substantial power
and prestige. In this case, Washington's neo-Keynesian bankers and
politicians would have to relinquish substantial power to the private
sector, which of course is anathema to government establishments.
Therefore, Keynesian and neo-Keynesian irrationality is not dead
by any means. The idea that governments can direct their economies
for the betterment of the citizenry by manipulating interest rates
and injecting relentless rounds of "paper liquidity" into the marketplace
continues to hold sway over today's intellectuals, even though such
a centralized planning paradigm is slowly evolving into economic
fascism. It lives in the minds of statists everywhere as the ruling
economic dogma of modern times, and they cannot (or will not) think
their way out of it. As a result, mankind continues to suffer needlessly,
and is now facing a possible financial apocalypse of unimaginable
horror.
Salvation Comes Only from Contrarians
Sadly, this kind of blindness and dogmatism in face of error is
the inevitable nature of the discovery of truth. The great majority
of a society's intellectual community becomes locked into its established
paradigms even when those paradigms are shown to be as moronic as
treating disease with leeches and creating wealth with paper money.
The great majority sees only what is established, never new truths
to be discovered. Only a select few who are contrarian thinkers
can see the truth and are willing to endure the inevitable ostracism
to promote it.
It is to such contrarian minds that the world owes its advances
(i.e., its paradigm shifts) -- socially, politically, morally and
scientifically -- for the contrarian is possessed of the vision to
see beyond his fellows and the courage to challenge firmly entrenched
error. He has the ability to mentally encompass wider vistas and
integrate more profoundly the vast conceptualizations necessary to
get at the truth in any given field of inquiry.
Most importantly the contrarian mind is not plagued with the desire
to be popular and acclaimed in his own time. He cares little for
establishment acceptance. Not that he will shun acclaim if it happens
to come to him, but it is not the primary motivation driving him.
Truth is what compels him. Herein lies his strength and one of the
important reasons for his acute clarity. The contrarian is not obsessed
with popularity, and therefore does not delude himself with the entrenched
dogmas of the herd as the more common minds do.
There is a law of life that is identifiable here, and it can be
stated thusly: Truth will always reveal itself only to the contrarian,
for his is the only mind open enough and creative enough to see it.
Not that all contrarians speak truth, for the world is chock full
of nuts wading in delirium. But the truth will always come to us
only through contrarian minds -- thinkers like Socrates, Galileo,
Adam Smith, Pasteur, Einstein, Ludwig von Mises. Establishment intellectuals
are needed to solidify and disseminate already confirmed truths,
but they are not capable of promoting new truths (or they are not
willing to). And because of the flaws in human nature, they invariably
become roadblocks to those contrarians that are capable and willing.
Such is the condition of our intellectual fields today. As always,
the contrarians are at war with the establishment, and there are
profound revolutions going on. Old established paradigms are being
shattered. New discoveries and visions in economics, physics, philosophy,
biology, medicine, etc. are pouring forth to stir up elemental debates
presumed to be settled by those who argue from pre-set ideas.
Every advance that mankind makes throughout history is accomplished
because small groups of contrarian thinkers are willing to challenge
the old order. In doing so, they foment a mental revolution and
teach their fellow men a new way of thinking.
This is the paradigmatic nature of intellectual progress; the great
majority of thinkers in any given era is forever imprisoned in the
old order and need to be enlightened. If one wishes to know truth,
he must understand that the established order will seldom provide
it for him. He must possess the power to think for himself, or as
Ayn Rand put it, "see through his own eyes." He must cultivate a
totally independent curiosity, and he must be desirous of whatever
the truth turns out to be -- even when it spoils his fondest, previous
convictions. The reason why human civilization advances so haltingly
and laboriously is because there are only a few intellects capable
of such independence in any given generation.
Our great danger today is that the Keynesian paradigm is not relegated
to just one specific academic discipline such as medicine or astronomy.
Because Keynesians control money and economic policy, they also control
political policy, which means they link up with the State. Because
they control these three all-important areas of our lives, they possess
the power of Samson to pull the entire house down around us. Because
their poisonous ideas have become so entrenched over the decades
and have extended the debt pyramid to such stratospheric levels,
we are now faced with a choice like Ulysses between the monsters
Scylla and Charybdis. We can go cold turkey by cutting off the "fiat
money stimulant," which would bring several hard years of deflationary
misery, but would allow us to rebuild our economy on freedom and
gold. Or we can succumb to illusory hope by trying to reinflate a
comatose economy and pray that somehow the laws of reality can be
suspended, which will compound our addiction and stretch the crisis
out over a far longer time span with far more misery. The grand witch
doctor Greenspan is obviously bent on doing the latter. Heaven help
us.
Notes:
- Steven Kates, Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution,
Edward Elgar, 1998.
- Henry Hazlitt, The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis
of the Keynesian Fallacies, D. Van Nostrand, 1960.
- John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, Revised Edition, Devin-Adair,
1956, p. 426.
- See Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression, Mises
Institute, 2000. For a less technical treatment of the subject,
see Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression, Ivan R.
Dee, 2002.
- The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial
Times to the Present, Fairfield Publishers, 1960, pp. 91,
141, 409, 413.
- The World Almanac 2002, World Almanac Books, 2002, p.
103.
(A previous shorter version of this article appeared in Ideas
On Liberty, November 2002.)
Copyright © 2003 Americans for a Free Republic
This article is published here by permission of the author.
Origunally published HERE
Nelson Hultberg is a freelance writer in Dallas, Texas and a graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin with a degree in Economics. He serves as the Executive Director of Americans for a Free Republic. His articles have appeared in publications such as The Dallas Morning News, Insight, The Freeman, Liberty, The Social Critic, and on numerous websites such as FreeMarketNews, FinancialSense, SafeHaven and Gold-Eagle. He is the author of Why We Must Abolish The Income Tax And The IRS and Breaking the Demopublican Monopoly. In addition he has just finished a book on political-economic philosophy titled, The Golden Mean: The Case for Libertarian Politics and Conservative Values.
