As people worry a new world war may rise out of Ukraine, RPI Advisory Board Member Lew Rockwell proposes Wednesday on the Tom Woods Show that the creation of central banks makes world wars possible. Rockwell’s comments regarding central banking are made in a wide-ranging interview that begins with a discussion of Rockwell’s book Against the State, which will be published in June.
Looking back to Rome, Rockwell notes that successive reductions in the silver content of coins helped fund government activities. Rockwell then explains that limits of this old method of money debasement were overcome in Britain in the 17th century with the creation of the Bank of England “specifically … to wage war.”
Speaking of the Federal Reserve’s creation in the United States on the eve of World War I, Rockwell comments:
I sometimes wonder—you know this was just before World War I of course: Was the Fed established to fund the wars or did they run the wars to make use of the Fed?… It all went together. Without central banking, for example, there could not have been, I don’t believe, world wars. There have always been wars, as long as there have been governments. The sort of world war … the unbelievably massive destruction and murder and politically, economically, morally horrendous World War I and World War II, these sorts of wars could only take place with central banking because there is no way people would ever agree to pay the taxes. And people can resist paying taxes. They call it ‘war weariness.’
Listen here to the complete interview, in which Rockwell and Woods discuss this topic in detail as well as other topics including the US government’s mass spying program.
