Reponse to Occupy Wall Street supporter

The below is my response to a friend posting this video on facebook: http://front.moveon.org/this-powerful-clip-is-exactly-why-we-support-occupywallstreet/#.TqbvKhuY9mc.facebook

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Glass Steagal was only partially repealed. The two repealed provisions wouldn't not have stopped the banks from doing what they did had the provisions stayed on the books (See Woods, Rollback, p57).

Not only that, the video makes NO mention of Nixon's closing the gold window in the 70s. After that and now free of almost all restraint, the government printed money to its heart's content, precipitating such stated crises as Savings and Loan. People really ought to read some Austrian Business Cycle theory (http://mises.org/daily/606) if they want to stop being taken advantage of by bankers and politicians peddling their snake oil.

Yes, Audit the Fed. There should not be a government monopoly that powerful.

And what's with that anti-business stuff at the end? There's only two ways for a firm to be successful. The first is to secure monopoly privilege for themselves under the guise of regulation and plunder the citizenry.(case in point: Glass-Steagal was a move by the Rockefeller ambit to hobble Morgan interests [p.315:http://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf. Or better yet, look to the New Left historians like Gabriel Kolko if you'd rather trust them) This is to be condemned and corrected by removing their monopoly privilege (ie. the Fed) but NOT by imposing more so-called regulation (after all, it's the financial industry who's going to write that regulation).

That's the one way to make money. The other way is to engage in voluntary, peaceful exchanges with people, in which both parties are made better off. How do we know they're better off? Because they wouldn't have made the exchange if they had believed ex-ante that the trade would make them worse off.

Synopsis: yes, hating the bankers is good. They've been ripping us off for a century. But banking and business are good, as long as they don't use government to rip us, the 99%, off.

Peace