The more I read of Maxime Bernier’s thoughts, the more I wonder how long it’ll be before he’s drummed out of Stephen Harper’s party: he’s far too sensible. Here, for example, he outlines what it is that central banks do to your money, and why it’s a bad deal for ordinary Canadians:
All this guessing about setting rates has nothing to do with capitalism and free markets; it has more to do with central planning and government control of the money supply. In a monetary free market, the interest rate would be determined by the demand for credit and the supply of savings, just like any other price in the economy.
Government control over money has serious consequences that few people seem to be aware of.
One of them is that central banks are continually increasing the quantity of money that is circulating in the economy. In Canada for example, if we use the strictest definition of money supply, it has increased by 6 to 14% annually during the past dozen years. The situation is about the same everywhere.
The effects of constantly creating new money out of thin air have been a debasement of our money and a dramatic increase in prices. The reason why overall prices go up is not because businesses are greedy, or because wages go up, or because the price of oil goes up. Ultimately, only the central bank is responsible for creating the conditions for prices to rise by printing more and more money.
With all this, it’s surprising that he has (so far) managed to stay in the Conservative party, which doesn’t appear to actually believe in anything much anymore . . . other than the need to stay in power.
Update, 9 June: His speech (from which the article linked above was drawn) gets positive reviews.
