[ExI] Bank of England

[Stefano Vaj]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Dan<dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The two views are not necessarily opposed.  It's a myth that any government is under democratic control -- in the sense that "the people" has a major say in the decision making process in government. All governemnts are rule of a tiny minority over the rest of society. (This is not to say that the rest of society is powerless, but democracy works more to calm the masses than to limit elites.)

Yes. Another way to put it is that *all* governments (we should rather
say "political regimes", since legislation and regulatory powers
administered by career bureaucracy are included here) are "democratic"
at least in the sense that they are held accountable for what they do
by the people they rule, so that at the end of the day, continued
dissatisfaction leads, if not not to electoral defeat, to a
revolutionary change.

In this respect, their own interest may or may not correspond to the
interest of their subjects. For a central bank, which as such is not a
public agency but a private entity, thus not under the direction of
the government, and the representatives of which does not serve at its
pleasure, its interest exclusively corresponds to... its interest,
period. And as long as it is protected by law - especially
monopolistic laws - it is under no pressure to (probably cannot even)
take into account anything else.

-- 
Stefano Vaj