Money, Militia, and the Market: Three Elements to Secure Liberty

1

Introduction

Three intersecting elements are essential to the security of a free state and also form the basis of sound political economy.  They are money, militia and the market.  Each one of these elements intersects with the others to form an interlocking and mutually reinforcing edifice of public policy oriented on self-governance.

Taken together, these three elements provide a structure for securing the ‘blessings of liberty’ by deliberately denying power to entrenched bureaucracies beholden to political oligarchs; what in recent times has been termed The Deep State.

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Money and Culture

We start with sound money and the cultural impact that ensuring a sound money regime has on people.  The ideal, as stated by Thomas Jefferson in his First Annual Message to Congress as president, is a population ‘educated in the love of order’ and ‘habituated to self-governance’. The maintenance of a free society requires institutions that foster a cultural orientation of respecting other people and their property, of understanding the importance of civics, and the duties of citizenship (or just being a good neighbor).

This cultural orientation obviously implies that those agitating for socialism, institutional hostility toward private property, or looking to ‘fundamentally transform’ a free state into a redistributive central authority, undermine constitutional order and, therefore, are not only unwelcome but and are, in practice, actively excluded from civil society and political community.

Economics professor Guido Hülsmann’s insightful book on The Ethics of Money Production describes the cultural impacts that a sound money regime, or the lack thereof, has on cultural values, attitudes, and behaviors.

People enjoying sound monetary policies have more confidence in their income, holdings, and savings and are consequently less desperate, are less present oriented, and can think about long term plans.  They can invest in their ideas, their hopes and dreams, because they are relatively confident that the money they save today will be available for future use.  They can take on longer term projects and build capital towards increased future production.

Conversely, when money is unsound, when inflation is part of public policy, people come to sense that the money they have today will not be worth as much in the future as it is in the present because of the inflationary environment in which they live.  They then become more present oriented.  They have higher time preferences and ‘live for today’.  That means that they seek satisfaction in