Von Mises Institute Gets It Right on Centralization

  Too much centralization is destroying America because it turns everything into a political crises. We will make localists of them yet!

Shifting Social Media Platforms and Central Banking

 When two of the largest social media companies in the world starting "tipping their hand" and making it clear that they were going to herd users towards left-collectivism, some of my more conservative friends called for the government to step in and "make them play fair". I opposed such intervention, on the grounds that in the long run there is nothing less fair than letting the government, hopelessly politicized as it is, decide what is fair and what isn't. A government whose goal is liberty should protect a free marketplace and let individuals decide where they want to be. 

To practice what I preached, I started accounts on alternative platforms like Minds.com, Parler, and MeWe under different names. Unfortunately it is against human nature to quickly see that "the cheese has been moved" and adapt one's behavior accordingly. So far as I know, few of my friends did likewise. The unfortunate side of "conservative" (and also the good side in these irrational times) is that such people are very slow to change their behavior. 

That can sometimes lead to right-collectivism (i.e. fascism), whereby they demand that the state intervenes to force everyone else to change in order to make their present behavior comfortable for them. This is ultimately just as immoral and unworkable as the left's present madness. When Facebook goes bad, you move to an alternative to Facebook. If enough do so, Facebook will either change its own behavior even without government action, or it will become irrelevant except as an echo-chamber of it's own chosen viewpoint. That's the market, and that's freedom.

There are a couple of caveats to the above. Unfortunately corporations are creations of government action, and certain large corporations are de-facto arms of the government. If a company is a monopoly or is propped up by government action then of course it is consistent with liberty to work toward removing the props, or intervention to regulate the monopoly. But social media companies are not monopolies in the way that your electric company is a monopoly. They don't require their own huge physical distribution systems which would be expensive and wasteful to replicate, creating a barrier to entry. Facebook for example, is just the place where everyone is right now. There is nothing about its infrastructure demands that physically prevents competition. Many alternatives have popped up recently and the only thing preventing them from taking off is that people don't want to move. If Facebook continues it's objectionable behavior though, in time it will happen. In a trickle at first, but once critical mass has been reached it will be a tsunami.  

The real threat to freedom in this, and so many other areas of life, is central banking. The central pillar of localism is that you cannot have central banking and a decentralized government. Indeed, you can't have central banking and a decentralized society in the long run. Those who control the printing press have a "magic money machine" which allows them to create buying power at will, by sucking it from the labor-value embedded in the currency held by all others, and give it to their friends. If you or I had control of such a machine, in time we would become all-powerful politically, and so must they. Therefore, if a nation is to remain free it must destroy the magic money machine of it's ruling class and return to honest money.

People of great wealth can always buy themselves a loud voice, that's not what I am warning about. That's just the market in operation. What I am warning about is that once you have central banking the press-masters can shift the cost of shaping society to their whims onto the backs of the rest of that society. They can herd us as they like, and we will pay the costs of our own control. 

For example, they could promote a particular social media company, say Twitter or Facebook, so that they achieve market dominance. And they could do this using money that they create out of thin air. Money whose value is ultimately drawn from the labor of the rest of us. If their venture is profitable, they pay the money back. If it isn't, they simply create more money and cover the losses. And if people resist the increasingly heavy hand of the manipulators and flee to other platforms, well once those platforms gain enough audience they can simply buy those too. Then those with alternative viewpoints will have to flee again, and again, until there is no place to hide from those who have bought up the world with money whose value is obtained by the sweat of the very people that they are enslaving. There can be no living by "free market principles" without a free market, when the associates of the press-masters have bought out everything and control all "private" property.

Aside from a lack of morality and public virtue, there is no bigger threat to our freedom today than central banking. It is the ultimate source of energy behind all other internal threats. Including the threat poised by social media herding. If neither dominant political party will address this issue, and they won't for their infrastructure has been thoroughly purchased by these same forces, then we need to migrate away from them too, just as we migrate away from social media giants. Even if we have to start one or one hundred local alternatives. 

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Books by Mark Moore