Month: May 2010

The first casualty in war is truth. The second is money.

Santayana once commented that “fanaticism is redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” (not directly germane, but quotable is Churchill’s definition of a fanatic as “someone who won’t change their mind, and won’t change the subject.”

As I see it, politics serves two principle purposes for people. For genuine Liberals–whose views on an array of issues can differ quote considerably–the point of politics is to get things done. They have concrete problems they see, and they are willing to vary their means of solving them, never losing focus on the end goal. As an example, a true Liberal would realized that the ways we have been trying to end poverty in the inner cities haven’t worked. They have been tried, and they have failed. This means continuing to do what has always been done is necessarily counter-productive, since it is throwing good money after bad. We have to understand the system in place, and work that point forward to new ideas.

Yet, for many people politics serves a very different purpose. For them, it is an end in itself, since it leads to a sense of meaning, a sense of belonging, and to power, all of which motivations can be mixed together at once. Note, though, that these are all selfish, personal goals. We can take it for granted that that inner reality will invariably be cloaked in rhetorical appeals to the common good, sacrifice, and nobility, no matter where that person is on the political spectrum.

For that reason, the only politicians who are to be trusted are those who already have a sense of meaning, already belong to a community, and who do not desire power. Logically, then, good politics is simply an outflow of Goodness, generally. Logically, then, the only way to solve our political problems, in the long run, is through a reinvigorated, serious pursuit of moral virtue. I have made this case many times, in different variations.

This leads to the necessary conclusion, though, that efforts to muddy the moral waters, and to stymy or prevent coherent moral discourse necessarily lead to human suffering that is unnecessary, particularly in the long term.

Like any other problem, the problem of what to do and why to do it can be solved through discussion. The moment that discussion ends, though, without good answers, the stage is set for misery. In many respects, we are at that crossroads right now. Moral relativism is a rejection of the possibility of meaningful moral debate, since it has already rejeced in advance the possibility of an answer, outside the confines of blunt power.

Consider that the driving voices behind the formation of both the UN and the IMF–Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White–were Soviet agents. If you look at what the IMF actually does, it does not sponsor capitalism at all. It sponsors New Deal sorts of public works projects, that undermine existing businesses, disproportionately line the pockets of elites, and leave trails of debt that are never repaid.

Patently, the goal was a world filled with dictators who met at the UN to determine the fate of the rest of us, after dispensing with the US through currency devaluations that were utterly out of the control of Congress.

Here is my piece on what the Fed and IMF need to go: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2010/05/going-out-today.html

HOW is a topic dealt with there as well.

Many years ago, I read some conspiratorial large black book that suggested a link between Marxism and Communism, the name of which I have forgotten. It was suggested to me by a friend whose family was politically connected. Well, I Googled those words today, and found this interesting link.

There are numerous interesting quotes from Marx here, but this will need to stand in for all of them:

With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the face of the world,
And see the collapse of this pygmy giant whose fall will not stifle my ardor.
Then will I wander godlike and victorious through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.

In the intervening years I have developed this notion, that of Cultural Sadeism, in which the simple desire for pain, death and destruction is expressed politically and disguised–as indeed all Satanic naratives must be–in the rhetoric of compassion and community. No proper Sadeist tells the truth, unless in so doing he can hurt someone. That is just how it works.

When you add to this the frequent admiration that Saul Alinsky expressed for Lucifer, you see a common pattern. Now, I am not a Christian, per se, but it is manifestly obvious to anyone with eyes that there are evil people in this world, those who enjoy the power that comes with being able to hurt other people.

This is, I am increasingly convinced, the task which those who run the IMF in particular, and to a lesser extent the Federal Reserve, have set themselves.

In the end, I only perceive two primal motivational structures in this world: that of Love, and that of Power. In this, I agree with the Christians. Both are mixed in most people, and each expressed to varying extents during the course of their lives.

Yet, every Bell Curve has a beginning and an end: these are our saints, and our demons. Marx was a demon, as have been his followers ever since. No beliefs in non-material realities are needed to accept this view. One simply need term him an aggressively violent sociopath, who worked through his books–as did, by and large, Sade himself–to accomplish pain and destruction.

An image that just popped into my head is that we are flickering flames, where the “wax” from which we emerge is the actual principles which inform our actions. Most people have two reasons for doing things (this insight is not original to me, by the way): the reason they give, and the actual reason. The actual reason is who you really are, which may be quite different than the face you offer to the world.

I spend a lot of time pondering the nature of self and identity, since our answer to those questions cannot be separated from our political commitments. Conservatives view “politics” as a means of preserving a way of life that already exists. If you ask them what they want for the future, that is an easy question to answer: the same as today, except that we implement our core historical ideals even better than we have to this point.

Leftists have a much larger problem. So much of their “doctrine” is actually praxis. Their “orthopraxis”, if I might be permitted that word here, is the rhetorical rejection of injustice, within which is enfolded inequality. Their orthopraxis consists in an effort to achieve rhetorical and then political dominance over anyone who disputes their leveling narratives.

Yet one searches in vain for actual positive principles by means of which they define themselves. Obviously, they are not racists, sexists, “adultists” (an amusing word I did not make up), elitists, homophobes, Christo-cenric, ethnocentric, or classist. What, then, are they?

Logically, if no differences are permitted in how we view different groups, however, they might be constituted, then the movement is necessarily in the direction of homogeneity. This flows from the ineluctable conclusions that I can’t priviledge me and mine, simply because that is what has always been done, and because those are the people I feel closest to.

For now, various cultural “others” are permitted their identities. For the purposes of western leftists, the current dichotomy between Us and Them in our own cultural system–which is to say the Politically Correct versus everyone else–is sufficient to let pass the racisms and sexisms of other nations and cultures. They presume such cultures are on their side, since they are speaking AGAINST the posited oppressions of the people–the non-PC–in our own culture who have “hurt” them.

It is an undifferentiated ocean of rhetoric backed by praxis, but unbacked by articulated or articulable principles. Why should difference be eradicated and not negotiated, for example? To take a concrete example, how is it that leftists can be so plainly bigoted against white Christian males that they refuse to accept their mere existence, and yet claim to be enlightened?

The key, here, is not what they think, but what they DO. Action is the point of propaganda, not coherence. In fact, mutability is a primary intended outcome of propaganda, since the needs of the Party change.

All of this matters because when you look at, say, the outcomes of the World Bank, which was founded by Leftists, you see they have been appalling. Yes, rich white men have played their part and made their fortunes. But on balance, the INTENT of the thing was to build a Communist world–also an invention of rich white men, I might add–which looks like 1930’s America, but forever and with an infinite array of surveillance gadgets to keep the people thereby “saved” from ever mounting an effective resistance.

How do people seek these things? How do they fail, after decades and generations of potential learning, to learn the lessons?

One can only explain this by positing that for leftists their belief system is an article of faith. If they do as they are told to do, if they repeat the mantras they are given, they are rescued from the tyranny of freedom. They don’t have to think about who they are, and what to do.

In a culture in which traditional values survived–take as an example any intact culture which the Left wants to “protect”, say South Vietnam before it was invaded by the North, or Sudan–these questions would have been answered for them. Gender roles, social roles, cultural patterns, all would have been assigned.

In the modern world, though, so much of what we took for granted has been destroyed. Space has been cleared for a “New World”, but no one knows what it might look like. Marx never spoke to it, and in neglecting morality, discouraged consideration of it as more important than impersonal historical and economic forces.

Yet as Emerson rightly said, history, proper, is biography. There is no history outside the concrete decisions of individuals, as leaders and in groups. We CANNOT build a positive future without the cultivation of good decisions, which themselves depend on coherent moral codes.

One tends, in studying history, to think of groups as relatively static in their motivations. One tends, as an example, to think of the Federal Reserve and IMF as composed of people who cannot be swayed from the conviction that what they do is acceptable. Yet, people do wake up, at times. A good example is Whittaker Chambers, who outed a whole spy ring in Washington, although he was ignored by FDR and Truman for some years.

Such things are possible. People can reach new decisions, based on perceptions that are new to them. One never knows how things will play out, but, again, it helps a lot if you have a means for making decisions, and a plan.

I have said that our purchasing power should be 20x what it is. As I ponder this further, I think a more accurate way of putting it is that we should have 20x the money in the bank that we do.

Inflation is like taking taxpayer money and depositing it in an interest bearing account which belongs to someone plugged into the system. That account is jointly owned, in my view, by Wall Street and the Federal Government. Internationally, it is co-owned by international Wall Street equivalents, our Federal Government, and its counterparts, mainly in Europe.

This deposit was made some 100 years ago. Each year, it accrues interest in an amount equal to the inflation rate. My math may be a bit off–since I know from practical experience that markup and Gross Margin are related, but two different calculations–but it is close. Let us say it is 3%.

That is now money which is growing, but which we the people who provided it can’t touch. That is money that would have been used by our grandparents to pay off loans, and invest in real estate. It would have been used by our parents to create a nest egg to pass on to us, their children.

It is hard for many of us to imagine, but there are a not inconsiderable number of people in this world who have millions of dollars in reserve. Most of them live like the rest of us, but when they need money, they have it. Most of us live on the edge. It has not always been thus. Everyone in America should have a large savings account.

Our net worth should be 20x what it is. I think that is a better and more accurate way of putting it, although this remains a work in progress.

I will comment editorially, though, that from what I can tell professional economists likely do a decent job of describing theoretically what IS happening, but a horrible job of describing what COULD have happened, or what SHOULD happen, within a radically different system, based on real money.

As far as I can tell, no one has proposed a truly fixed money supply based on gold. Of course, it may well have happened, and the author laughed out of the academy. It is a radical idea, but our straights are increasingly and unnecessarily dire.

It seems to me that our current system of “Capitalism” is in fact drawing us ever nearer an autocratic socialism, and that the only secure means forward to a socialism that would improve the world is through more complete capitalism.

Our markets are not free. Big Money, in partnership with Big Government, has the power to levy almost unlimited taxes–in the form of wealth redistribution called inflation–with NO regulatory checks whatsoever. This is the state of affairs. Taxes are levied both domestically, through deficit spending, which necessarily involves money creation, since money is spent that we don’t have; and internationally, where MORE money is spent on our behalf–for example the bailout of the Euro–that we don’t have.

Now, one fact that is easy to miss is that inflation can happen without prices increasing here in the United States. The value of money only diminishes when it is competing with other money, which for our purposes would mean money that was being circulated in the United States.

What happens, though, when dollars flow out to, say, the Chinese, in exchange for goods, and stay there, in effect hoarded? Those dollars represent real buying power, and hence a real net transfer of our wealth. Yes, we get in the exchange real goods, but in the process–since that was fiat money–our net wealth decreases invisibly. If the Chinese dumped their dollar holdings, in the form of securities and actual dollars, the hidden wealth transfer would become obvious in the fact that our money would no longer be worth anything. That transfer happened with the dollar transfer, and is merely hidden, for now. It may remain hidden for the foreseeable future, since China will not for some years be in a position to challenge us directly; yet things are flowing, for them, in a positive direction. We are bleeding, and the more debt we incur, the faster the blood loss.

I believe that one can infer economics is not a science from the mere fact that diverse opinions exist among equally intelligent and erudite men (and presumably women, although I know of no major female economists).

In point of fact, I believe it is not only possible to be a complete idiot in the field of economics, but that this is the most common condition. Look at our current state of affairs. If we were to evaluate our economic situation through the lens of private enterprise, it is in horrible shape. Our balance sheets are filled with debt, our assets are shrinking, and revenues are shrinking as well. We carry on through hard work, creativity, and the sheer tenacity borne of necessity.

Consider Keynes. It is quite possible to paint him as a socialist. He was a member of the Bloomsbury group (where he was a bisexual), and palled around with Fabians.

No one can be so stupid as to miss the fact that deficit spending in the present leads to taxes in the future: in actual taxes, interest payments, and inflation. Thus, you are borrowing, at a disadvantage, money from the future, and using it to fund, today, enterprises which will not be self sustaining, which will not move an inch once the money is gone. This is absolute idiocy, yet trillions of dollars have gone and continue to go into such projects. During the Great Depression, it literally would have cost less simply to pay unemployment than to build the roads and bridges they did.

What such “Keynsian” spending DOES do, however, is discourage private enterprise. Who creates sustainable jobs, in ANY economy? The private sector. If you have no private sector–as in Communist nations–you have no real jobs, and no wealth. You sink into poverty almost immediately. If you like, it might be useful to think of Cuba as a nation that went into a Great Depression, and never exited.

In our own case, FDR did NOTHING to build the faith and trust of private enterprise, and virtually everything in his power–including exorbitant, ridiculous tax rates–to discourage it.

“Keynsian” economics is good at moving capital from the private sector to the public sector, with all the shift in political power that implies.

And when one considers that what the IMF does internationally is implement Keynsian spending in developing nations by loaning the money (which we financed with deficit spending) which is used to build things like dams and highways, you realize that perhaps Keynes was no fool in economics; he was a fool in politics, for thinking any good could come from squelching the desires of individuals the world over for political freedom, and economic self reliance.

I am often tempted to pretend that the horrors of Communism never happened. The history is so nauseating that it is quite impossible for me to see any possible motivation other than garden variety sadism. Millions killed, for the rest to live in chains under tyrannical despots.

Yet, for the same reason one cannot reject this history–patently, it happened–I cannot reject out of hand that all of the negative consequences that flow, inevitably and invariably, from implementing the supposedly “counter-cyclical” (where the “cycle” itself is a function of fiat money) policies of government make-work projects, were not precisely those intended by Keynes himself. He was–along with Soviet agent Harry Dexter White–a “fountainhead” of the bad ideas that flowed from Bretton Woods, and which went on to cause so much hunger, poverty, despotism, and terror.

Can one not accede some merit to the Christian idea that this world is ruled by forces of darkness? It does sometimes seem that way. Still, we all get a voice, don’t we? We know the terrors of history must, in some infinite expanse of time, end. Perhaps one is even justified in hoping it will be sooner rather than later.

Subject: Federal Reserve/IMF

Yes, I know this is the province of the “right wing crazies”. The principle lecture series on it on YouTube ends with an endorsement of the John Birch Society.

Please hear me out, though. I have studied this topic carefully, and come to the conclusion that it literally doesn’t matter who we elect, in the long run, as long as unelected people have the power to devalue our currency through inflation.

You don’t often see it stated this way, but inflation is WEALTH TRANSFER, and it is my contention, which I can and will argue in the piece, that our purchasing power as a nation should be many times what it actually is.

For most people, inflation is something you see out of your intellectual peripheral vision. You know it’s there, but if it’s in the “normal” range of 2-4% or so, you don’t pay attention. Most of us graduate school with this vague notion that growth in production leads to higher prices, and that’s just how it works. Sometimes the Fed has to pull money out, sometimes put it in, to keep things growing steadily. This is the received wisdom, that the Fed is sort of like the regulating rods in a nuclear reactor, keeping things from getting too hot or too cold.

This isn’t right. Prices should be DROPPING, with constant wages. Let us posit that there is, for simplicities sake, $10 trillion in “dollars”, which is to say money held in banks and in paper and coin. 3% of that is $300 billion created out of thin air every year. Somebody gets that. That is now buying power the rest of us don’t have.

The trick is to keep it low enough that nobody asks too many questions.

This is the most important issue facing us. Nothing else is close. All the problems of wealth and poverty can be solved, if we just grasp this one fact. And if we don’t, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, in the long run, who gets elected in November.

I would appreciate a shot at writing a piece on this.

Profit is nothing more or less than motivation. Why did I make that widget? To earn a return. Why did you paint that picture? I was hoping to make my living as an artist. Why did you open that trendy East Village boutique/CD Store/sex shop/Communist bar? I was hoping to make a living at it.

There are no leftists writing today who did not at some point benefit from the profit motive, and very few who pay their bills who do not currently benefit from the profit motive.

Why do people do anything? BECAUSE THEY WANT TO.

What is the proposed motivational structure in a socialist utopia? That people make things for others for no profit because they want to contribute. They want to do the right thing. They want the social order as a whole to do well, and they thus act selflessly. Socialism depends, therefore, on considerable moral development.

Yet, most socialists have no developed moral sense. They are quite good at pointing to what they see as the inequities of the Capitalist system, but Marx himself had nothing to say about morality, and Lenin rejected the concept altogether.

Logically, if one wanted to build a paradise where everyone was nice, and produced just out of their love of their fellow man–a condition I will not reject out of hand as impossible–the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to get there is through fostering genuine altruism, which in turn depends on a coherent and replicable moral code.

Where is the evidence of efforts in this direction? From where I sit, what I see are people obsessing about presumed affronts to notions of cultural, racial, social and moral uniformity, but who offer no POSITIVE, actionable set of thoughts for moving forward.

This is a massive structural deficit. Let us posit that many of these people are in fact well-meaning. Let us further observe, as historical fact, that into their midst invariably fall people (like Mao, Lenin, Pol Pot) who are NOT well-meaning. How can they fight them, when they lack a positive moral code?

Practically, this defect gets expressed as people being FORCED to produce for others at pain of hunger or worse. This does not build morality; rather, it destroys it. It teaches people to be crafty, dishonest, mistrustful, and lazy.

The ONLY way forward for people who advocate a reduction in the importance of the profit motive is moral education. This requires the development of a coherent moral system, that is not relativistic, and in which certain core truths are unimpeachable. That is what I myself am trying to develop, a project in which I have in large measure succeeded. See my other blog to learn more.