Isaac Asimov - Foundation Series - Revelation of the Method of Statism

I just finished the 3rd book in Asimov's Foundation Series.  What a thrill!  Here is an author who has written literally hundreds of books and articles spanning fiction and non-fiction.  In the first three books of this series there seems to be no lack of imagination in the fusing of a truly immersive world of interplanetary politics, spaceship battles, plot twists, futuristic technology and romance.  Overall these stories are delightfully entertaining.  It does fall upon my critical nature however to point out the fallacious premises by which Asimov has constructed this technocratic future world.  Being the free marketeer that I am it seems only fitting I blurt out the most obvious fallacy immediately.

Government brought order to a universe of chaos.

A Call to Virtue - A Call to Freedom

All this talk about politics is dizzying.  The bombardment of propaganda from every angle about subjects of irrelevance is enraging.  Democracy is the most corrupt system of government possible as a means of organizing human society.  You cannot vote on morality.  You cannot vote on what's right and what's wrong.  There is no middle road for virtue and there is no compromise with tyranny.  One cannot order freedom in sizes small, medium, and large.  There is liberty or not.

For those would say, "Freedom will never work.  The world is too corrupt.  That is idealism."  That is precisely why we need freedom.  Liberty and the decentralization of power is the only mechanism which accounts for the fallibility of human nature.  What we have right now doesn't work.  The systems of control we have right now are corrupt.  Freedom is idealism, but unlike the hierarchical structures of power and central planning proposed in the Utopian authoritative forms of government by all the great thinkers and philosophers of the past, it is the only viable and sustainable path for humanity.

Gold and Economic Freedom by Alan Greenspan

Published in Ayn Rand's "Objectivist" newsletter in 1966, and reprinted in her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, in 1967.

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense — perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire — that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.

Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.

The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.