Landsburg Calls Out Latest Krugman Smear
I was starting to get mildly annoyed at Steve Landsburg, because he’s been very infrequently posting on his blog lately, and when he does, it’s math riddles, rather than economic analysis. But all is forgiven because in his latest two posts (here and here) Steve defends Heritage Foundation scholar Salim Furth–whom Steve apparently knew at the University of Rochester, so he took the smear personally I think–from Krugman’s character assassination at his blog.
If you’re interested in this Krugman-Bites-Right-Winger non-newsworthy story, you can go read Steve’s posts. To sweeten the pot, let me entice you with Steve’s best line: “Which brings us to the other reason these numbers differ: Furth’s come from the historical record, while Senator Whitehouse’s come from somebody’s ass.”
However, as much as I like Steve’s treatment, I feel like Spock watching the flight pattern of Khan: “He is intelligent, but inexperienced.” Steve is open to the alternate hypotheses that (a) Krugman dishonestly endorsed Whitehouse’s reading of the OECD data, or (b) Krugman smeared Furth without really checking the numbers.
But there’s a third explanation, and one which I think is closer to the truth: Krugman didn’t bother checking the data, and carefully framed his post such that he technically didn’t lie. Look again closely at how Krugman worded his post:
OK, this is really shocking: a Heritage Foundation economist has been accused of presenting false, deliberately misleading data and analysis to the Senate Budget Committee.
What’s so shocking? Not the false, misleading data and analysis — that’s SOP at Heritage …. What’s shocking is that they got called on it, in real time.
See? Krugman technically isn’t saying, “A Heritage Foundation economist just presented deliberately misleading data.” No, Krugman said–quite correctly–that the Heritage Foundation economist had been accused of doing so, and Krugman backed up his claim with a link to the accusation.
OK dropping the cuteness, the Keynesians really were sloppy on this one. Look at the Wonk Blog post on which Krugman relied. Its author, Dylan Matthews, had to cross out a whole paragraph (go look) because he falsely accused Furth of dividing by actual GDP, instead of “potential” GDP (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld and I would say), and Matthews also reproduced the ridiculous Whitehouse chart, which showed (for example) that Ireland had a “fiscal consolidation” of 95 percent of GDP, which is pretty big if you think about it.
One final point: It’s really amazing to me that in this fiscal policy debate, when someone adopts a convention for choosing baselines of deficits by comparing an alleged “austerity” budget to government deficits at the height of an unprecedented boom, that this is taken as prima facie evidence of deliberate deception. Let me make sure you got that: After you take away all of the simple mistakes in the critics’ allegations against Furth, it seems the one bit of spaghetti that sticks to the wall is that he had the audacity to compare government deficits recently in Europe, with levels in 2006-2007, and since (at least in a lot of countries) it is higher even as a percentage of “potential” GDP, Furth was saying this isn’t actual austerity. And for making that point–with clearly labeled charts, as far as I have been able to determine–he is being accused of “deliberately misleading” Congress in his testimony. The episode reminds me of the time Krugman bit off Veronique de Rugy’s head for having the audacity to report to readers the actual budgets of various European governments. You see, the poor rubes out there in the blogosphere can’t be expected to understand those numbers; they need Krugman to interpret them first. Someone reporting actual budget numbers, in a debate about government spending, is deliberately misleading you.
Oops one last thing: The people in the comments at Steve’s blog, who are expecting Krugman to apologize to Furth, are cracking me up. Remember kids, Krugman recently wrote (in the context of the health care/insurance debate): “But bad-faith arguments don’t deserve a civil response, and if the attempt to be civil gets in the way of exposing the bad faith, civility itself becomes part of the problem.” So I’m not going to be looking for an apology at the NYT blog.
Religious Views Can’t Well Be Compartmentalized
There is an understandable strain in the classical liberal tradition stressing the importance of “religious tolerance.” I am most familiar with Ludwig von Mises’ position on this topic, who defended toleration out of the need for peace. According to Mises, religious wars were the most terrible, because there was no hope of settling the underlying conflict.
I see a related (and again perfectly understandable) vein in modern arguments among libertarians over atheism and theism (usually Christianity). Typically, the arguments go like this: Some atheist will wonder aloud how so many libertarians can believe in a God, in particular the God depicted in the Bible, and worries about the effect such evil and irrationality will have on our movement. Then some well-meaning atheist/agnostic will say, “Hey, as long as those guys aren’t initiating aggression against me, I don’t want to delve into their metaphysical views.”
I don’t think this really holds up well, though. For example, if a young man in Afghanistan truly believes God wants him to attack Western military outposts in his country, then appeals to human rights and international peace aren’t going to dissuade him–just like they don’t dissuade American Christians from going off to war in defense of what they think is right.
By the same token, I can definitely understand why an atheist libertarian would find it very disturbing to know that popular figures in his movement hold views that sound inconceivable to him. This isn’t simply a matter of, “Some of us like rap music,” these are the most important questions of our existence.
Having said all that, the reason I don’t argue this stuff on Facebook or in social settings is that such arguments are pointless, in my observation. This isn’t merely a religious thing on my part, either; I don’t even argue politics in person. At a recent debate at Columbia, a young man came up to me afterward and was trying to get me to agree we needed a strong State to keep multinational oil companies in check. I spent a few moments just explaining my postion, but eventually I said, “Look, you and I are coming from such different perspectives, there’s no way we’re going to change each other’s minds right now.”
But, I obviously write books and blog posts, and give public speeches, on my political views. And I am not shy about my religious views, I just think the most effective way to persuade others is by concentrating the discussion in my Sunday posts.
Come See Woods-Murphy Live, the Zombie Returns
Hey kids, just a reminder that this event is Saturday. Note that THE TIME CHANGED from the original poster. Now, the doors open at 2, so make sure you realize that.
Here’s where you go to get tickets and see the details.
My History With the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC)
[The following article is adapted from the May 2013 issue of the Lara-Murphy Report.]
My History With IBC
Robert P. Murphy, PhD
May 2013
In this article, I will summarize Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) for the novice, but I will do so in the context of my own experience in learning about it. I’m making the article autobiographical because part of the story involves the newly launched IBC Practitioner’s Program, and I can’t fully explain the rationale of the program without describing the situation that I (and the other founders) perceived beforehand.
Related to this is the fact that, going forward, I will be talking more about the economics of life insurance on my personal blog and YouTube channel. This may seem strange to some of my long-time followers (who have come to expect my musings on libertarian political theory or a critique of the latest Paul Krugman blog post), and therefore I’d like to give them the whole background in one self-contained piece.
Thus this article serves several purposes. First, I hope it clarifies for Austrian / libertarian readers why I became so interested in the economics of life insurance. Yet I also hope it further explains to people already in the IBC community why I think the IBC Practitioner’s Program is such an important component in bringing this message to a wider audience. Finally, it will hopefully prove useful as a general introduction to IBC for any reader, told in the style of “one guy’s journey.”
Before jumping in, I need to add one last caveat: I am not a registered financial advisor, and the information I offer in this article is not intended as a formal recommendation for any reader to change his or her financial situation. Obviously the reader should check with other experts before taking any action. I am merely telling my own history with Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept.
Meeting My (Future) Co-Author, and Discovering IBC
In the summer of 2008 I was contacted by Carlos Lara, who told me he was currently reading my Study Guide to Murray Rothbard’s giant economics text, and he realized from the author bio that we both lived in Nashville. We began meeting for lunch to discuss the unfolding financial crisis and other such weighty matters. At an early stage in these meetings, Carlos—whose consulting business focused on setting up trusts for businesses and households—explained that in addition to being a big fan of Austrian economics, he was also an avid proponent of Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept (IBC). Carlos lent me a copy of Nash’s underground bestseller, Becoming Your Own Banker, and asked me to evaluate it.[1]
The basic idea of BYOB [Becoming Your Own Banker] is that the typical American household is flushing away boatloads of money in interest expenses to outside financiers. If people could become disciplined and save up before making major purchases—so that they were relying on their own accumulated capital rather than what others had saved—they would be able to finally start getting ahead.
However, Nash wasn’t preaching a simple “get out of debt” philosophy. Instead, he was okay with gross borrowing in order to finance major purchases, but it had to be done under special conditions such that really you weren’t borrowing on net. For various reasons (some of which I’ll sketch out, later in this article), Nash argued that it made a lot of sense to accumulate a stockpile of wealth inside one or more high-premium, dividend-paying, whole life insurance policies. (!!)
Now for the “becoming your own banker” part: Whenever a person needed to buy a new car, send a kid to college, pay for a wedding, go on a cruise, fix the furnace, etc., he wouldn’t borrow from a conventional lender, and he wouldn’t even draw down “cash” sitting in a bank CD or other type of “savings account.” Rather, the person would get a policy loan from the insurance company, using his (well-funded) life insurance policy as the collateral. Then, instead of making periodic “car payments” (or whatever the big-ticket item was) to the conventional lender, the person would direct the same cashflow to the insurance company. Nash had several numerical illustrations to show that this strategy would make a person a heck of a lot wealthier over time, compared to other ways that the average American household might run its affairs.
I must confess—and I’ve said this several times in front of Nelson; he’s okay with it—that at first I couldn’t make heads or tails of BYOB. I’d be reading along, thinking, “This guy is really wise, I just love his worldview.” Nelson would make very profound statements about the human condition, the weaknesses and temptations we all face, and he was very skeptical of commercial bankers and—most of all—government programs. Further, Nelson was very well-read in the great Austrian and libertarian works, and heaped praise on the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) as well as the Mises Institute—two places for which I had done a lot of work. So there were a lot of things pushing me to tell Carlos that, in my opinion, BYOB was a great book.
But then I’d keep reading and come across a statement that sounded nuts to me. What the heck was this guy Nash saying? Was he making some elementary error at Step 1 in his analysis? Could I just toss this slender book aside, and not have to waste any more of my time trying to figure it out?
Part of the problem was that I knew absolutely nothing about whole life insurance; I thought all life insurance was term insurance, where you make premium payments during the contractually specified slice of time, and the insurance company sends you a check if you die during that period. (My joke at the time was that I had always been baffled at the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart’s character tries to bargain with the greedy old man, using his life insurance policy. That seemed as nonsensical to me as someone trying to raise money by pulling out his fire insurance policy.) So, when Nelson in BYOB showed various tables talking about the dividends paid out on an insurance policy, and how you could use them to buy more “paid up insurance” and boost your “cash value” and death benefit to higher levels, I didn’t really understand what was even going on, let alone could I determine if his numbers seemed plausible.
As an aside, let me remark that my ignorance at that time is really a profound statement on how much things changed in the financial sector over the 20th century. Here I was, with a PhD in economics from a top-15 program in the world, I had done a dissertation on capital and interest theory, and I had even worked for a financial firm, helping with research papers for clients and calibrating the computer model that ranked stocks according to various criteria our chief economist (and head of the firm) would tell me to plug in. Yet I didn’t know what permanent life insurance was, even though an economist like Ludwig von Mises—about whose work I had written a Study Guide—casually mentions in several places in his writings that the average household saved via life insurance.[2] To people of my age and younger, we grew up being taught that “saving for retirement” was basically the same thing as “buying into IRS-approved mutual funds with large exposure to Wall Street equities, where you’re not allowed to touch your money for decades.” In hindsight, it is stunning that I was so naïve, since my career was based on being suspicious of all these shenanigans!
A Brief Introduction to Whole Life Insurance
In case the reader is also unsure of how whole life works, let me explain very briefly: In a whole life insurance policy, the coverage never expires. So long as you keep making the (same) premium payment, your coverage remains in force (your “whole life”). Eventually, the insurance company will send the death benefit check, either when you die, or when the policy officially matures (which on newer policies might happen at age 121). Because the insurance company knows that it will eventually have to pay out on a whole life policy (whereas it probably won’t pay out on the typical term policy), the insurance company must use a portion of the incoming premium payments to begin building up assets held on behalf of the whole life policyholder.
With each passing year, the implicit liability to the insurance company from your outstanding whole life policy grows larger and larger. (You are getting closer to death, or to age 121.) Thus, it would be worth more and more to the insurance company, if you were to eliminate that possibility of a big payout. This is why you can choose to surrender your policy at any time, and receive a cash surrender value lump sum payment from the insurance company. There are guaranteed cash surrender values at every point in your contract, specified at the outset. In practice your actual cash surrender values will probably be higher (assuming you tell the company to use dividends to expand your policy), but the crucial point is that you have a guaranteed scale of rising values over time, showing how much you can get if you surrender at various years into the policy.
Finally, the whole life contract spells out the guaranteed interest rate (or the rule for how the rate will be determined) at which you can take out a loan from the insurance company, with the cash surrender value serving as collateral. Unlike other types of collateralized loans—such as a home equity loan—the insurance company doesn’t ask any questions when you apply for such a “policy loan.” The reason is straightforward: The insurance company itself administers and guarantees the value of the collateral, so the insurance company doesn’t care when, if ever, you make payments on the loan.
In contrast, if you go to your local bank and try to take out a home equity loan, they are going to ask your sources of income, what you intend to do with the loan, and so forth. Why the difference? The value of the collateral (your house) is uncertain, and it would be a pain for the bank to foreclose on you if you default. The commercial bank would very much prefer not to find itself in a position of seizing your collateral. In contrast, the market value of the collateral on your life insurance policy loan can’t go down (the way the real estate market can crash), because the insurance company itself guarantees it. And “foreclosing” is a piece of cake: If you still have an outstanding policy loan when you die, the life insurance company just subtracts the balance from the death benefit check on its way out the door.
Translating Frameworks
Anyway, back to the story: Because this new acquaintance Carlos seemed like a pretty sharp, no-nonsense guy, who lived in a wealthy neighborhood, advised very wealthy clients on financial matters, and gave the most intuitive PowerPoint presentation on fractional reserve banking that I had ever seen, I kept giving this odd book BYOB additional chances. Carlos thought so highly of this guy Nelson Nash and his IBC philosophy, that I didn’t want to prematurely dismiss it.
Eventually it started clicking for me. What happened is that in order to feel comfortable with IBC, I had to reinvent the wheel, and reach Nelson’s conclusions through my own chain of logic. In other words, I had to run Nelson’s ideas through a “wind tunnel” of my own educational background, even though one of Nelson’s main themes is that we need to stop thinking that way, since the conventional framework could be very misleading and was pushing people into erroneous decisions all the time. But, we have to work with what we know and trust, and I couldn’t fully embrace IBC until I had broken it down and understood it with the conventional tools of analysis that I had from my economics background.
The “Rates of Return” Trap, and Other Objections
Let me give some examples of what I mean. Nelson often stresses that IBC “isn’t about rates of return.” At first, I thought he was basically admitting that the critics were right, and that whole life insurance was a “terrible investment” because of its abysmal internal rate of return.
But of course, that’s not at all what Nelson is saying. His point is that you aren’t “investing in life insurance,” rather you are setting up a very conservative financing system over which you have much tighter control, compared to any other readily-available option. If you spot a great investment opportunity that will yield (you think) 20% in the first year, then great! Go ahead and borrow against your whole life policy, and acquire the investment. IBC simply describes a headquarters or “home base” for your wealth, not a final destination (or prison!) the way 401(k)s are currently designed.
Indeed, some of the most powerful portions of his book show how both the average person but also a business owner, can end up wealthier at a future date by using IBC instead of conventional lenders. Obviously, if you end up with a higher net worth at age 65, using the same out-of-pocket cashflows, then you must have earned a higher “internal rate of return” with IBC than the alternatives Nelson considered. So to say “this isn’t about interest rates” wasn’t to reject standard accounting; I could still come in, using conventional financial analysis, and make sense of what Nelson was recommending. It’s just that it was such an unusual idea, that at first I didn’t even know how to apply the equipment in my toolbox.
Let me give another example. Dave Ramsey is a radio talk show host who (admirably) counsels people on how to get out from their crushing debt load, through obvious but crucial things like making out a budget, communicating with one’s spouse on financial affairs, etc. Ramsey is very entertaining and I can certainly understand why his show is so popular. However, Ramsey absolutely has it out for whole life (and other types of permanent life insurance) policies, advocating instead that people “buy term and invest the difference.” For example, in a post from his website, Ramsey implies that you won’t have any cash value for the first three years of a new policy. He goes on to explicitly say that the rate of return on your money is much higher in mutual funds, that you won’t need life insurance after 20 years if you follow his plan, and that the insurance company keeps your cash values when you die, giving your beneficiary only the death benefit.[3]
Every one of these (typical) objections is either misleading or downright false, at least when it comes to Nelson Nash’s IBC approach of using whole life policies. First, if you set up the policy properly with a “Paid Up Additions (PUA) rider,” then right off the bat, a portion of your periodic payment is buying a chunk of fully paid-up life insurance. Thus, your cash value begins rising immediately, and you can begin borrowing against your policy right away (if you need to).
As far as comparing rates of return, again the problem is that Ramsey is viewing permanent life insurance as an investment, rather than a cashflow management strategy. Yet even if we use the standard tools of financial analysis, it is a non sequitur to point out that a mutual fund is expected to have a higher 30-year (say) average annualized rate of return, compared to the internal rate of return on an insurance policy’s projected cash value growth. Such a bald statement ignores the difference in risk between the two strategies. (Whole life insurance policies have guaranteed minimum rates of return. Do equity-based mutual funds have that?) Ramsey could just as easily “prove” that nobody should ever buy a corporate bond, because stock issued from the same company will always have a higher expected return.
In a similar vein, Ramsey is engaged in simple hand-waving when he says you can just buy a 20-year term life policy, because you can “self-insure” when it expires. Fine, but you still need to account for the implicit option value in a whole life policy, which allows you to have coverage in force for your whole life at the same, original premium. There are ways to account for the fair market value of an in-force life insurance policy of a particular death benefit, and your portfolio would take a big hit when that asset suddenly expires if you use the “buy term and invest the difference” approach.
By making these comments, I’m not “proving” that more life insurance is always the best thing to buy, from a conventional “asset class” allocation perspective; otherwise we would have the absurd result that everybody should put every last dollar of his wealth into life insurance policies, with nobody owning stocks, bonds, real estate, or precious metals. (Obviously somebody has to own a share of corporate stock or a piece of real estate, and that ownership must be voluntary. So their prices adjust to make it attractive for someone to acquire and hold.) All I’m making is the modest point that in Ramsey’s critique of whole life and related insurance policies—when he compares them very unfavorably with “buy term and invest the difference in mutual funds”—he isn’t even attempting to set up an apples-to-apples comparison of the two strategies. He’s pulling one set of statistics—internal rates of return—out of context and trumpeting them as if they’re decisive, when the actual situation is much more nuanced.
Finally, the oft-repeated objection that the sneaky insurance companies “keep your cash value” when you die, completely misconstrues what the cash surrender value on a whole life policy is. Intuitively, the cash surrender value is closely related to how much of a liability your policy represents to the insurance company; the textbook definition (where we are abstracting away from some real-world complications) of the cash value is: the actuarially expected, present discounted value of the future death benefit payment minus the future premium payments. (In a world with no overhead expenses and perfect competition among insurance companies, when the policy is first signed, the expected flow of premium payments would exactly equal the expected death benefit payment—accounting for mortality risk and the time-value of money—and so the formula for the cash value would be $0 at the start.) The cash value goes up over time, because with each year you are (actuarially) that much closer to death, while there are fewer premium payments for you to make.
Thus, the cash surrender value is something like the equity you build in a house, as you pay down the mortgage. In the whole life case, the “mortgage” is your stream of contractually specified premium payments, and the “house” is the death benefit payment (either when you die, or when the policy matures at age 121, let’s say). With each “mortgage” payment, the insurance company’s lien against your “house” shrinks, which is why your “equity” in the policy grows.
In that light, of course you don’t get your cash value on top of the death benefit, when you die. The cash value was simply the on-the-spot (correctly discounted) anticipation value of the looming and uncertain future death benefit, netting out the premium payments you’ll have to make in the meantime, which is a big lump sum payment that might not come in for decades. If you take out a whole life policy at age 20, and then happen to get hit by a bus at age 41, that helps your estate; your grieving spouse isn’t going to get merely the “cash value,” but instead is going to get the full (i.e. non-discounted) death benefit, much earlier than expected. In this case, you made out like a bandit with your whole life insurance policy, earning a far higher “internal rate of return” on your premium dollars, compared to Ramsey’s strategy (in which you would have dropped your life insurance coverage the year before).
Now it’s true, if you are doing a sophisticated comparison of “buy term and invest the difference” versus “put everything into a big whole life policy,” then you need to worry about the complication that the cash value is simply a derivative asset based on the underlying life insurance; it’s not a separate entity like it is in the mutual fund. But my point is, there’s nothing sinister going on here; it makes no sense at all to complain that the insurance company “keeps the cash value” after mailing out a death benefit check.
One final way to see it, going back to the mortgage analogy: With each passing month, you pay down more and more of your principal. Your CPA tells you how much equity you’re building up in your house. Then after 30 years, you finally make the last payment; the house is yours, free and clear! You go down to your local bank, get the deed, and then ask for a $300,000 check as well. The teller is shocked, but you explain, “My CPA says I now have the full $300,000 in equity in my house. So where is it? I sure hope you guys aren’t planning on keeping my equity from me. I want the house and my equity value.” Dave Ramsey and others are making a similarly confused point when they warn their fans that the insurance companies “keep your cash value” when you die.
The IBC Think Tank
Returning to the narrative: I became further reassured that this whole thing wasn’t crazy when I first attended the “IBC Think Tank” in Birmingham. (This would have been in February 2010.) Because of Carlos’ efforts on my behalf, Nelson Nash and David Stearns (who ran the day-to-day operations of IBC) had asked me to be the after-dinner speaker on the first night of the two-day conference. Because I really wanted to get to the bottom of this IBC stuff, I made the 3-hour drive down to Birmingham the day before I was scheduled to speak. This allowed me to sit in on part of a Nelson Nash seminar (which catered to regular people who wanted to use IBC for their household finances), and also ensured that I could attend all of the sessions of the Think Tank itself (which catered to financial professionals who were using IBC with their clients).
At the Think Tank, I saw a CPA give a presentation explaining the proper way to document interest income and deductions, so that the IRS wouldn’t object. (This reassured me that the whole thing wasn’t some big tax evasion scheme.) Another presenter pointed out that, when you figure in the favorable tax treatment on whole life policies (if they meet certain requirements which I won’t discuss in this article), their “awful” internal rates of return actually become pretty decent, considering the guarantees in the product and the ease with which you can access the money. Furthermore, several other of the presenters were insurance producers who had plenty of anecdotes of how they had shown clients ways to improve their cashflow management by incorporating IBC. It’s not so much that they proved IBC was the best possible technique imaginable; it just happened to be a heck of a lot better than what their clients had been doing before.
Writing How Privatized Banking Really Works
I had seen enough to be convinced to get my own (starter) policy, to learn more about how IBC worked. In this same time frame, Carlos kept telling me that the Austrian economists saw the problem with our financial system—the fiat money central bank, and the fractional reserve commercial banking system that it controlled and nurtured. The Austrians preached, correctly, that the only genuine solution would be a total reform of government policy, to return money and banking to the private sector.
Yet even though the other Austrians and I were touring the country, speaking out on these topics, our solution—educating the masses until the government had to change course—seemed like a hopeless pursuit to too many people. In the meantime, Carlos explained, Nelson Nash and his IBC disciples were allowing households to secede one by one from the corrupt system. In other words, if you “became your own banker” the way Nelson recommended, then you were effectively privatizing banking in your own life.
This insight hit me so hard that I physically recoiled. That was the hook that would allow Carlos and me to try to “introduce” these two camps to each other, who were each doing the Lord’s work (some quite literally, in their understanding of it) in their own respective fashions. You had the academic Austrians writing articles and preaching to large crowds that there would be a day of reckoning from Bernanke’s mad money printing, and recommending bank runs to bring the fat cats down a notch. On the other hand, you had the IBC community meeting with individual households, showing them how to shield themselves from the commercial bankers and Wall Street, yet many of them didn’t tie it in to the broader macro framework.
Showing the complementary goals of these two groups is what Carlos and I tried to do in our book How Privatized Banking Really Works.[4] Most of the book is spent explaining how money and banking work in a genuinely free society, and contrasts it with the corrupted institutions in our actual world. Then we introduce the basics of IBC, and stress that when you take out a policy loan, the insurance company cannot create the money “out of thin air” the way a commercial bank does. Thus, the more households who practice IBC, the less demand for commercial bank loans and the harder it is for them to inflate. Furthermore, fewer people will be taken down when the stock market crashes again.
In researching our book, Carlos and I read a lot, of course, but we also traveled to insurance company home offices to interview their key personnel. We began learning more and more about the life insurance industry. In particular I began focusing on the actuarial side of things, because that dovetailed so well with my background. The more we learned about whole life policy design, the more “obvious” Nelson’s IBC approach seemed.
The Night of Clarity
Carlos and I released our new book in the summer of 2010 at the “Night of Clarity,” a Friday/Saturday event held in downtown Nashville. We assembled an all-star team of Austrian lecturers for the Friday session, including Nelson Nash, Paul Cleveland, Richard Ebeling, and Tom Woods. This was basically the diagnosis of “the problem,” telling everyone why the financial crisis had occurred, and what the Austrians had to say about a long-term fix.
Then on the following Saturday, we held a workshop on IBC. Here we presented “the solution” at least for the individual household, which could be implemented right away without relying on protests in DC or any type of political activism. Here was this old, conservative, boring financial product—a dividend-paying whole life insurance policy—that seemed remarkably designed to aid us in our current environment.
That particular event was very well received, with great presentations given all around. In addition—for those who don’t know—Nashville is a wonderful travel destination, with a lively downtown, especially if you are a music fan. This year we are thrilled to announce that at our Night of Clarity (August 23-24) we will once again have Tom Woods and Nelson Nash, but we will also feature FEE president Larry Reed and our headliner is Dr. Ron Paul. Check out http://NightOfClarity.com for the details.
The IBC Practitioner’s Program
At this point, Carlos and I were well poised to “evangelize” the IBC message to Americans, especially those with a prior interest in Austrian economics. However, there was one snag: Not just any insurance agent can properly set up an IBC policy the way Nelson Nash intends. There are various subtleties (Can IBC work with Universal Life or other products? With what company? How should the premiums be structured?) involved, which lie outside the scope of this introductory article. Suffice it to say, a person can’t simply hand BYOB to a random insurance agent and say, “Give me one of these.”
This was a problem, because if Carlos and I were successful, then people would obviously want someone to help them look at their own household or business situation, and figure out how to apply Nelson’s ideas. If we got such an email, asking for advice, and we happened to know an IBC veteran in the same city, then we could connect the person. But in general that would begin to get cumbersome, and outside of the group of long-time fans of IBC whom Nelson and David Stearns knew personally, Carlos and I couldn’t really be sure of where to steer interested people.
To give an even better illustration of the awkward situation: Carlos and I would go on the road, giving our presentations to audiences that insurance producers would assemble. Obviously, the producers were bringing us in to show the crowd that the use of life insurance they had been discussing, made sense—why, here were an independent businessman and economist saying it works, and who practice IBC personally! But the problem was, what if a stranger emailed Carlos and me, asking us to fly out and give a presentation? The person could say he knew all about Nelson’s ideas, but for all we knew he might be setting people up with something other than a whole life policy (which Nelson does not recommend). We wanted to spread the good word, but we also didn’t want to be naïve, and we certainly didn’t want people getting set up with an insurance policy that didn’t do what was described in BYOB.
In collaboration with Nelson Nash and David Stearns, we hit upon a solution: The IBC Practitioner’s Program. This is a training program run by the Infinite Banking Institute (IBI). The course is designed for financial professionals—including not just insurance producers but also CPAs, tax attorneys, accountants, and financial planners—who are thinking of incorporating IBC into their practices. Before even beginning the program, a new student must sign a contract saying (among other things) that if a client requests a Nelson Nash/IBC policy, or if a client comes specifically from the IBI website, then the student will only facilitate setting up that client with a dividend-paying, whole life policy—exactly what Nelson Nash recommends.
To create the Program, the four of us engaged in a lot of research. (Carlos and I made more road trips to home offices, developed relationships with actuaries, and read insurance textbooks.) We all developed a large Course Manual and accompanying video series with more than 15 hours of lectures, which covers such topics as: (a) the basics of Austrian business cycle theory, (b) the actuarial basis of whole life policies, (c) a line by line explanation of the illustrations in BYOB, (d) the basics of implementing IBC, and finally (e) also stressed the correct way to explain certain concepts to a newcomer, to ensure that there is no confusion about “borrowing from yourself” and other roadblocks.
At the end of the course, the student must pass an online, proctored exam administered by a third-party site. The exam is designed to be fairly straightforward for someone who has read the Course Manual and watched the videos, but to be nearly impossible for someone who just tries to wing it without any real knowledge of IBC. Upon passing, the student becomes an authorized IBC Practitioner, can call him or herself such in promotional materials, and can (if desired) be listed at the IBC Practitioner Finder at the IBI website.[5]
Among other benefits, the IBC Practitioner’s Program now clears the way for me to focus on studying the economics of life insurance, and clarifying its nature to the public through blog posts and YouTube videos. Before, it would have been impossible for me to control who was using my material to sell to clients. But now, I can always include the advice that if any reader or viewer is interested in these ideas, that there are authorized IBC Practitioners listed (by state) at this website: https://www.infinitebanking.org/finder/.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that someone who’s not listed at the IBI site is a perfectly reputable person, and is an expert in the philosophy of Nelson Nash. More generally, there may be insurance agents who have a difference of opinion with Nash’s approach, and recommend to their clients that they do things differently. But from my perspective, I am comfortable explaining how whole life insurance policies work, since that’s what I’ve spent the last several years studying. Further, it reassures me to know that the people who have graduated from the IBC Practitioner’s Program have demonstrated that they possess a solid foundation in Austrian economics, the economics of life insurance, and IBC; and that they have contractually agreed to set up the relevant clients with the type of policy that Nelson intends.
Conclusion
This article is admittedly long, but I thought it important to explain my history with IBC in one self-contained piece. Now people will understand why I am so interested in the economics of life insurance, and why I’m sensitive to what seem ill-informed critiques of whole life. The more I study it, the more I believe that Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept makes sense, and that a properly designed whole life insurance policy can be an important component in the financial arrangement of the simple household or large business.
[1] Nash’s book, and many other materials related to IBC, are available at: https://www.infinitebanking.org/store/.
[2] See: https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/08/life-insurance-the-forgotten-savings-vehicle.html.
[3] See: http://www.daveramsey.com/article/the-truth-about-life-insurance/.
[4] See: https://consultingbyrpm.com/how-privatized-banking-really-works.
Scott Sumner Tries Not to Laugh at Those Silly Inflation Hawks
Scott writes:
Back in the Great Depression the inflation hawks said two things; monetary stimulus would do nothing (it was just pushing on a string) and it would do too much, producing hyperinflation. Keynes is now viewed as a genius, because he just made one of these two errors; assuming monetary stimulus would do nothing.
Then he goes on to show that we’ve learned nothing in 80 years; the opponents of more monetary stimulus are just as contradictory now, as they were back then.
I understand where Scott is coming from; if his worldview is right, then yeah, it obviously follows that the people opposing his solution are totally wrong. I even agree that the mainstream economists who oppose Scott, are just letting their common sense get in the way of their (crazy) models.
Yet even so, there’s nothing goofy about someone saying, “At best your policy proposal will do nothing, and at worst it will be awful.”
Suppose someone wants to throw knives at cancer patients. It is perfectly fine for me to say, “They will either miss their target, in which case they will have no effect, or they will hit the patient, in which case they will injure him further.” I don’t have to give some “zone” within which throwing a knife at the patient will be a good thing.
You think that’s too goofy, and you want an economic example? OK here’s one that maybe even Scott would agree with; I know plenty of other Chicago guys would. The government proposes to make every full-time employee get a free parking space, no farther than a 10 minute walk from his or her place of work. How do we analyze that?
(a) It is something that a particular employee would have gotten in his or her contract anyway, so it’s a superfluous regulation.
(b) It is not something that the employee would have gotten otherwise–the regulation is binding–and so the employee is made worse off. In particular, employees without cars in densely populated cities will be devastated by this idiotic regulation.
As the above two examples have illustrated, there’s nothing inherently nutty about saying a policy could be either impotent or disastrous, with no in-between. I realize Scott thinks this doesn’t apply to monetary “stimulus,” because modern recessions are the fault of insufficient inflation expectations. But, that’s sort of the very issue under dispute.
Michael Lind Admits Libertarianism Has Never Been Tried
Michael Lind blows up libertarians by pointing out that we’re apparently writing books, giving speeches, and basically devoting a majority of our waking lives to make the world different from how it currently is. (It would be pretty weird if Rothbard wrote books like, The Ethics of the Status Quo but I digress.)
Tom Woods takes Lind at face value and provides a response. But, I am happy to take Lind’s article as Exhibit A, and all the libertarian-haters’ endorsement of it. Now, the next time someone tries to tell me that the financial crisis is the result of Hayekian deregulation, I will send him Lind’s progressive-approved article.
My EconLib Article on Bitcoin
At EconLib I have an article on Bitcoin. The first half is based on the article I already posted here with Silas Barta, but the second half has new stuff, sure to enrage half of you:
Economically, the chief attraction of Bitcoin is its mathematically guaranteed scarcity. Even a pure commodity like gold could eventually flood the market if a vast new stockpile—perhaps on the ocean floor or an asteroid—were discovered, or (more fancifully) if the “replicator” technology of Star Trek ever became reality, such that a machine could turn baser matter into gold bars.
…
Bitcoin has no such vulnerability. No external technological or physical event could cause Bitcoin inflation, and since no one is in charge of Bitcoin, there is no one tempted to inflate “from within.” If the computers in the Bitcoin network endorsed an illegitimate creation of new money, it would be akin to a majority of grammar teachers suddenly agreeing that “ain’t” is acceptable usage.
And:
Some critics rely on the work of Ludwig von Mises and his “regression theorem” to argue that the world will never embrace Bitcoin as a true money. According to this argument, Mises demonstrated that all money—even today’s fiat money—must have been, at some point in the past, linked to a commodity that was useful in the days of barter. Since Bitcoin has no such history, the critics argue, we have the authority of Mises himself to show that Bitcoin will never be more than a fad.
This article won’t address the question of whether this is a valid interpretation of Mises’ writings. Instead, I will make the modest point that if Mises is used to rule out Bitcoin’s acceptance as money, then it seems that Mises has already lost. If this logic is correct, then Bitcoin should never have been adopted as even a medium of exchange because it served no useful role as a regular commodity. (Recall that money is simply a medium of exchange that is accepted by everyone in the community.) But Bitcoin has already surpassed that hurdle, as there are websites on which people from all over the world exchange their bitcoins directly for goods and services.
Note the part in bold above (which I bolded here, not in the original). I am NOT saying, “Bitcoin blows up Mises.” What I’m saying is that the people who are deploying the authority of Mises to blow up Bitcoin, are taking a big gamble because what they think is impossible has already happened.
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