The IMF is a real disgrace

Again the International Monetary Fund grants facilities to Argentinian government which is characterized by going into debt and then settling in its state of serial failure. Always an explosive for the next government and so on in a macabre collapsing carousel but in all cases the collapse is suffered by ordinary people who systematically see their prospects shrink.

In a country where impoverishment measures are repeated with maddening monotony, there is no choice but to reiterate the alarms and propose measures to reverse the serious problems caused by the statism that we have suffered for many decades against the Alberdian values ​​that made our country the admiration of the world until the always devastating statism broke out.

our governments begging for loans to finance an elephantine state apparatus which eats away every remnant of productivity against a backdrop of unbearable tax burdens, chronic deficits, astronomical inflation, suffocating regulations, a closed economy and an anti-work labor market, and here we are in a second boastful trick that you don’t have to “pay with money the hunger of the people” (which the rulers themselves cause) without realizing that the creditors do not intend to cash in with famines but with dollars.

Henry Hazlitt the star economist of Newsweek for decades and the famous author of Economics in a lesson and the detailed and voluminous analysis of Keynesian theory titled The mistakes of the new economy, wrote a column on November 11, 1963 that seems prepared for the instances that are running. It was titled “Cancel IMFwhere he explains that this institution it was created to replace the monetary discipline established by the classic gold standard instead of giving free rein to inflationary processes. Once the Genoa and Brussels agreements of the 1920s were established, which allowed the taps of inflation to be opened through the central banks, this “central bank of central banks” was installed, which later became a lender to failing governments. Hazlitt recalls that “the parents of the entity were Harry Dexter White for the United States and Lord Keynes for England. White was executive director of the IMF which in 1945 was denounced by the FBI as a Russian spy which was ratified by justice in the United States (…) And Keynes – the greatest apostle of inflation of all time- to the British Parliament on May 23, 1944, he declared: “If I have the power to say what is the essence of the gold standard and what it is not, I would say that this plan is its exact opposite, i.e. the collapse of money independent of political power.

In this line of argument, it is relevant to recall that in his prologue to the German edition of General theory of employment, interest and moneyIn 1936, at the height of the Nazi era, Keynes wrote that “the theory of world production, which is the subject of this book, is much more easily applied to the conditions of a totalitarian state than to the production and the distribution of a given volume of goods. “goods obtained under conditions of free competition”.

In this context, Hazlitt concludes that “the real solution is to dismantle the International Monetary Fund (…) since it is a gigantic global inflation machineand later points out that “it is truly astonishing that this system made in Breton Woods in 1944 is not only tolerated but considered sacrosanct”.

For his part, the quadruple candidate for the presidency of the United States and former congressman Ron Paul at the Ron Paul Institute, on March 24, 2015, in a column entitled “Eliminate, not reform the IMF” recalls that this institution is financed coercively by taxpayers in different countries to supporting corrupt and bankrupt governments as a result of the application of state measures, and when they are about to resign or admit their failures, they receive tons of dollars at interest rates below market rates and with repeated periods of refinancing and discount of different sizes. As an example, it shows the funding that Saddam Hussein received from the IMF and the latest outrageous support for Greece.

According to economists of the stature of Peter Bauer, Doug Bandow, Robert Barro, Karl Brunner, Ronald Vauvel and Raymond Mickesell, this institution serves to fund incompetent leaders driven by the reality of their mistakes, instead of allowing their failures to be reversed. . policies receive substantial resources from the Fund. These professionals affirm that this has been the case on several occasions in Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Pakistan, Tanzania, the former Cambodia, the Philippines, the Ghana, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Zambia, Uganda, Turkey. , El Salvador, Egypt and Ethiopia.

During his visit to Buenos Aires, Yuri Yarim Agaev, sent by Vladimir Bukouvsky – one of the most prominent dissidents in the former Soviet Union along with Alexander Solzhenistin – reported that after the collapse of the Wall of Shame , the Russian liberals were on the verge of accepting the government “if it were not for the hasty irruption of the IMF which provided millions of dollars to the members of the nomenclature from which the current government finally emerged”.

The case of General Mobutu Sese Seko who usurped power in Zaire, which was the largest recipient of IMF aid relative to its population, was widely publicized. Mobutu’s power was absolute, condemning people to the most horrible tortures in a context of permanent looting which allowed this satrap to accumulate a fortune of eight billion dollars at that time.

To what was recorded must be added the juicy essay by Anna Schwartz (the co-author with Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman of the highly publicized American monetary history) entitled “It’s time to put an end to the IMF and the Stabilization Department of the Treasury” and the book of the doctor in economics of the University of Oxford Dambisa Moyo entitled When help is the problem detailing countless pathetic cases of countries receiving vast resources amid alarming corruption and economic absurdities fostered by aid coercively coming from the pockets of others.

In the context of the external public debt, it is interesting to recall that when Thomas Jefferson, being ambassador in Paris, received the brand new North American Constitution, he wrote that “if I could have added an additional clause, I specify it in the government’s ban on contracting debtwhich, as another Nobel laureate in economics, James M. Buchanan, put it, “means coercively compromising the assets of future generations that they did not even participate in the electoral process to elect the government that contracted the debt.

Thus, the International Monetary Fund feeds bureaucrats paid colossal fees at the expense of taxpayers to ultimately promote waste and, therefore, the impoverishment of all but especially the most vulnerable whose wages are reduced by growing statism.

In this scenario, governments that find themselves in serious trouble because of their glaring mistakes will have two options: rectify their mistakes by opening up the market and strengthening civilized institutional frameworks or, on the contrary, continue the blunders but financed by Korea. from the North, Cuba or similar… if they found dollars there, but not from Washington and its allies. Thus, the fund of the Fund is to put an end to this entity as soon as possible, which has caused so much damage and continues to do so.

I recommend to readers interested in this subject to consult the many texts compiled at the Ludwig von Mises Institute where multiple authors agree on the basis of very diverse documentation that the IMF must be liquidated as soon as possible for the good of the free world. . In this scenario, as has been said, the heavy bureaucracies would disappear and the private banks would direct their resources to where serious institutional frameworks prevail and, consequently, an economy free from chronic statism and alarming corruption.

Britannica says, “The impact of IMF lending has been widely debated. Opponents of the IMF argue that its loans encourage member states to pursue very poor domestic economic policies, knowing that the IMF will bail them out if they need it. This safety net, critics say, delays needed reforms and creates long-term dependencies. Opponents also point out that IMF bailouts extend to banks that have provided loans to insolvents, encouraging them to approve even riskier investments.”

It will be possible to wonder and wonder how it is possible that the IMF insists on lending again and again to terribly irresponsible governments, but it should be noted that unlike those willing to take risks with their own resources, the bureaucrats of this international entity do so coercively with the fruits of others’ labor and – I notice – they receive monstrous salaries. This is not to do anything ad hominem but for illustrative purposes only, but it is necessary to point out that at this point we need crystal clear politics and not Kristalina politics.

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