Rob Kall: Just for background, North Dakota has had a
Public bank for over fifty years, and North Dakota is the only state that has
not had major problems with maintaining their budget. I'll be speaking at a Public Banking
conference that is going to be in California this summer. Boy.
It would be neat to have you there, but -- I've got to get you looking at
this, because Public Banking could really pull the rug out of the banking
system that we have now. It does exist
in other countries.
Paul Craig
Roberts: I don't think it can happen
here until the banking system collapses.
Rob Kall: What would that look like, a collapse of the
banking system?
Paul Craig
Roberts: Well, it'll be, I mean, who
knows? (laughs) It'd be horrific. But you have to rebuild and
re-create. And so, if people have learned
their lessons, and there are any sensible people available to lead, you could
rebuild it on public banks, or certainly you would want to modify dramatically
the system that is in place now. It's a
total failure. See, a lot of people --
Libertarians - keep taking issue with the title of my book. They say, "How can you call this Crony
Capitalism we have now 'Laissez-faire?'"
"I don't call it Laissez-faire," I said. "It was the failure of Laissez-faire." What is Laissez-faire is deregulation,
and we've had twenty-five years of deregulation in the United States; and it's
happened in England, and France, and Australia, New Zealand, and (to a lesser
extent) Canada. They didn't deregulate
the banks in Canada.
Rob Kall: And this is the model that Friedman and the
Chicago school of economics talks about, really, isn't it?
Paul Craig
Roberts: Well, I don't know. I think Friedman gets a lot of bum raps. As I've said earlier in our discussion,
sometimes regulation goes too far, becomes counter-productive. I don't think Friedman ever advocated
repealing Glass-Steagall. He was an
expert on the Depression and the failure of the Fed. The Great Depression was caused by the
Federal Reserve, it made policy mistakes and shrank the supply of money, and
that's what caused the Great Depression.
So the government can screw up just as badly as the private
sector. Anybody can screw up. This comes back to what we're saying about
how the Left always trusts government, and the Right always trusts
business. You really can't trust
power! So you have to have a system that
constrains it, wherever it is. So I
think on the whole that Friedman was a man of his time, and he helped us understand
things we didn't know, like what caused the Great Depression. I think he was a humane person: he didn't
want to throw widows and orphans out into the street. He was Jewish. He had a social conscious.
But, you know, the Left likes to demonize people. Many demonize me: "Oh, he worked for Reagan. We can't believe him." Reagan's rhetoric really did upset the
Left. And they still are going on about
Reagan! Here's Obama with all his crimes
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