Month: November 2010

I strongly agree with the statement by Chuang Tzu that “perfect goodness is crooked”. I further agree with Lao Tzu who said we should “Renounce sainthood: it will be a thousand times better for everyone.”

We have all met people who were self consciously trying to do “good”. Most of the time, to me at least, they come across as superficial, not infrequently covertly pretentious and judgemental, and the consequences of whose actions are quite often quite different than what they intended.

Certainly, neither Chuang Tzu nor Lao Tzu were encouraging people to be bad. They were just saying that compulsion and spontaneous Goodness are incompatible. In my own terms, I view personality as a chaotic system, as a system in motion which traces a repeated pattern that is the outcome of the the decisions you make, which necessarily reflect your ACTUAL rather than your stated values. This pattern–imagine drawing a figure eight over and over–will be disrupted if you set a rule that you can NEVER, under any circumstances, go past a certain boundary. In my example, would you not have to greatly constrict your range of motion? Would your 8 not get much smaller? Would you not have to draw slower, and with less energy?

This is the effect, say, of stating that the sexual instinct can NEVER be expressed spontaneously. This rule, in my view, is one of the principle reasons for the social retardation of Islamic cultures. There are some rules–actually many rules, in many iterations of the doctrine–which get you killed if you break them. This makes their culture rigid and, yes, fearful.

At the same time, if there are NO rules, then there is no order, no pattern in the chaos. Plainly, we need some rules in sexual relations. The question is what they should be. In our own society, sex is in our face at the checkout lanes of the grocery stores, on billboards, on the radio, on the TV, at the movies, pervasive on the internet, in many restaurants, and pretty everywhere but church. And some people go there to meet partners.

This is the topic of another post, but in my view we have simply asked too much of the sex instinct. Actually, I will leave that for another post.

For now: no perfect person is a good person. The instinctual bias I at least feel for mild sinners is in my own view quite warranted.

Actually all the biases I have I feel are quite warranted. I can say that with my tongue in cheek since I’m quite aware I am neither perfect, nor perfectable–at least at this stage and manner of existence.

One needs “bon mots” on occasion. “Communism is cannibalism, barbed wire, and the Gestapo.” That’s my take. It’s a variation on Churchill’s summation of the Royal Navy as “rum, buggery, and the lash”.

Take two: “Communism is a hate crime.”

I already know that “revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals”. My point here is that well meaning people will simply DROP any association they may have, with any people or groups who advocate, albeit often implicitly, the crime of Communism.

Communism is a horror. It is vicious men and women killing defenseless men, women and children. There is no good there, and much evil, no matter what apparently harmless intellectuals may say to the feeble minded.

I don’t know if any are reading this, but I divide them in two groups: sincere ones, and devious ones. Milton Friedman was sincere. Karl Marx was sincere. Keynes was not, and it’s difficult for me to believe Paul Krugman could really be as dumb as he appears to be, so I lump him there too.

For the first group: an old Turkish proverb has it that “no matter how far up the wrong road you have gone, turn back.”

This is going to sound arrogant and presumptuous, but I really think even the Chicago School and the Austrian School failed to FULLY grasp the implications of the mere fact of the EXISTENCE of a monetary policy. Intrinsically, the ability to create money constitutes the ability to confiscate wealth through the police power of the state–which is either doing the confiscating, or enabling it through granting banks and others priviledged places in the system (typically with a justified expectation of kickbacks of various sorts.)

As far as I can tell, none of them argued forcefully enough against fractional reserve banking and central banks. They argued against government interference in private enterprise, and specifically against central planning in all forms. This is all too the good, but not enough.

We need radically new thinking. A new paradigm. If you think I’m full of it, confront me, take me on, take me down.

For the devious people: look in your hearts. At some point in your life, presumably you actually wanted to help people. That’s why you adopted your politics. Yet, it isn’t working. Leftist policies don’t work to alleviate human suffering. They CREATE human suffering.

Somewhere along the line all of you, in order to get the power to pursue policies that were politically unpopular, compromised. You decided that a little lie here and there wasn’t going to hurt anyone, and that the ends justified the means. But then you forgot the end, didn’t you? Other than getting power for you and yours, of course.

What I have put on the table is a solution to the problems of poverty that can be supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. Look at it, evaluate it.

And if it warrants it, advocate it.

My first thought, strangely enough, laying in bed this morning was of the eye on the pyramid on the back of the $1 bill. The pyramid felt like a pile of gold, with an ever vigilant eye on it, protecting it. Researching the matter, I found this link, which puts the creation of the symbols at our founding–symbols which indicate belief in divine providence.

Then I thought about the rough edges on quarters and dimes. At one time, this prevented people from sanding off the edges from silver and gold coins ,and in effect stealing silver and gold. Our coins have not been made from precious metals for many decades, yet they continue the practice. Why? Appearances.

Which brings me to the big topic, the so-called “monetization of our debt”. Well, Paul Krugman, you’re getting the money in our economy you wanted. Happy?

As I argue constantly, you can’t have inflation without somebody getting something for nothing. This point is ineluctable. For this reason, I have also argued that inflation is intrinsically wealth transfer. Take a given Point A. Add inflation, and you find new people owning things they didn’t before. This process is subtle, though, so most people miss it.

I would encourage my reader (or readers, if I have more than one) to watch the movie “Life and Debt”. One of the things that is striking is that the IMF apparently has always pursued a policy of forcing nations to devalue their currenty, supposedly to “boost exports”. Well, think this through. What have you done when you converted a situation in which, say, one Chinese “Mao” (as I call the Chinese currency) is worth one American dollar, and made it so one Mao buys two American dollars? Or two American dollars worth of stuff?

The number of Mao’s, relatively speaking, stays the same (absent inflation on their side, too). This means that they can now buy not just our imports–supposedly the point–BUT OUR NATION. They can buy real estate cheaper, here. They can buy companies cheaper, here. They can buy sports teams, rent supermodels, spend a fortune in Vegas, and so on.

Here is what I have come to view as a fundamental truth: all nations need to be largely economically self sufficient. Take Jamaica: in that movie, they go through in detail how the much more efficient American corporations simply took over the Jamaican markets, making them fully dependent on imports. The goal was exports, not imports. The converse of the desired outcome was achieved. And of course many American businesses located in Jamaica. Tourists were drawn, but if you think about it, that too is a type of export, in which money from other nations flows to you.

We are going the Jamaica route, although of course the effects will be much more muted by our already existing very robust economic infrastructure. We can weather the storm, but that is the direction we’re going.

Who will be buying us up? Well, where is the money going? To Wall Street. The banks that compose the Fed have just decided it would be just PEACHY if the man at the head of the table would make a phone call and have a check ready for them at the front desk so that they can dump their Treasury Bond holdings. How much? Well, just leave the amount blank, and we’ll just go ahead and fill it in. Good? Great, thanks.

To be clear, in a free market (hopefully, of course: they may have used the Fed to buy the bonds in the first place) they purchased securities that paid a yield, say 1/2 of 1% over three years. If you buy it for $100, this means it pays back, assuming that yield is annual, $101.50. This isn’t much, but it is better than letting the money sit dormant, in a bad economy.

But what just happened? The Republicans won. Most rational observers believe (I am the essence of rationality: just ask me) that the FACT that many private companies are sitting on piles of cash that would normally be invested in growth is a function of fear. It’s unclear what effect Obamacare will have, but it’s a reasonable bet it will be much more than anticipated, both in bureaucratic headaches, and out of pocket costs. Cap and Trade has been in play, as are tax increases, which are inevitable at some point. To all this, our President appears to be an ardent leftist, as as such congenitally anti-business and pro-stranglehold on all but the companies that keep him in power (like GE–oh, isn’t it interesting that the GE CEO sits on the Federal Reserve Board of New York)

In any event, our economy is now poised for business expansion and job growth. Would this not be a handy time to transition from securites you bought because the economy was in the crapper to cash, that you can then use to buy control of yet more companies? Yes, of course. But what about inflation? What inflation? If you touch the dollar first, it still has its buying power.

The best possible spin on this is that in the process of transferring yet more of our national wealth to Wall Street, actual growth is funded: we make more stuff, more people get paid to make it, more stuff gets bought, etc.

Yet, this money can be used for anything. It can be used to organize anti-Republican activists. It can be used to fund labor unions. It could go overseas to buy up China or India, or Africa. It will go wherever the people getting it want it to go, and we the American people will have ZERO control over that. If people are simply greedy, which is normally a safe assumption, it will get invested wherever the best returns look to be. If they have a political agenda–and how could they not want to protect their cartel?–then some of that money will flow to preventing a close look at the Fed, in whatever way seems practical.

Globalists have long wanted a global currency. Undermining our currency–the de facto global currency–is a necessary precondition to achieving that goal. As things stand at the moment, I don’t think ANY proposals to put in place such a thing will get through a Republican Congress.

Yet, we have seen over the last half century or more how effective well run propaganda campaigns can be at changing the minds of stupid people, which candidly is a very high percentage of them. We still hear the name of Keynes with something other than contempt. This should tell us all we need about the power of defective thinking combined with apparent enthusiasm, coming from the mouths of people who are trusted “experts”.

That should do for now.