Author: White Whale

What if all of our problems of money disappeared? What if the entire planet had enough to eat, shelter, access to medical care and all the other things that econonic growth can bring? What then?

It seems to me we would have to invent problems. We need problems, to be happy. But this would be a good thing. We could invent intelligent problems, ones which consistently fostered growth. As things stand, some people are emboldened by, say, war or poverty. They become braver and more compassionate. But many more are ruined, turned into mean, nasty selfish persons.

The root problem with Socialism is that it is a one note song. It has no character, no flavor, no charm, nothing suitable for engendering a world any human would want to live in. Their worlds are grey because in the end, they don’t believe human INDIVIDUALS can be improved, morally or otherwise. The only possible task is the improvement of the SOCIETY, and the definition of that begins and ends with the eradication of both poverty and wealth.

Yet no decision in the history of the human species has been made by a group. No thought has been thunk (just go with it) by a group. Decisions are made by individuals and RATIFIED in groups. Thoughts are thunk by individuals, and shared and embraced by groups.

And manifestly if you look at any Communist nation, what you see is not the eradication of Individualism, but the apotheosis of it, in which one man controls a small group of men, who make decisions for EVERYONE. Soviet socialism was not organic. It was not what The People, or The Workers chose. It is what LENIN chose.

Always invert whatever you see coming from the mouth of a leftist, and you will be close to the truth. If they speak of truth, hear lies. If they speak of socialism, think dictatorship of the masses by one person. If they speak of economic growth, hear poverty. If they speak of justice, hear unchecked tyranny.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opinion/29krugman.html?ex=1304395200&en=5418dde9be746a20&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1103-L18

He ends it with “be afraid, be very afraid.” And we are the fear-mongers?

This is just generic pap for the masses. He’s reminding them they are right and the Republicans are wrong. Obama is a conciliatory moderate, but those big meany-head Republicans won’t listen to him, and will do the same big meany-head things they did in 1995.

He continues his meme that it is necessary for the government to do something to fix the economy, and that absent help, the economy will not recover. This has been a successful tactic for them. Republicans think ordinary people are quite able to make decisions on their own. It’s not that they are saying nothing should be done, but that a tyrannical government is not the right entity to be doing it.

Governments can’t and don’t run businesses. They provide needed public services that can’t be had any other way. Printing money to pay for things the people would be unwilling to pay for in open taxation is not one of those services. “Stimulating” the economy by taking our money and disbursing it arbitrarily and mainly to fellow-travelers is not one, either.

We want to be left alone. Don’t try to help us. Obama, go golfing. Pelosi, go find a better plastic surgeon. Reid, go burn up ants with a magnifying glass, or chase Vegas showgirls.

And Krugman, I think you should take up sailing. Buy yourself a big boat with the money you have made advocating economically ruinous policies, and spend the next two years sailing around the world, without a cell phone. You will see how much we needed you when you get back. It might be humbling for you, but frankly you need some humanizing. Not sure if you got the short man thing going on, but you would most bless the world by remaining silent.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/opinion/01krugman.html?ex=1304395200&en=ccbeef7810685380&ei=5087&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1103-L20

S2D2. Some of you will know what that means.

Net argument: we need to spend more. Spin this time? Moral factors are preventing it from happening. Rehash of fatally flawed Keynesian arguments, that if no one is spending money, everyone’s wealth decreases.

First off, you obviously cannot solve the problem of debt with debt. Private debt cannot be financed sustainably with public debt. If I use one credit card to pay off another, have I really accomplished anything? This point is inescapable.

The goal, of course, always with these people is to transfer control of private capital to either the government, or reliable entities like some extension of the Fed.

Second, let us ask why it is people would not be spending money. First off, dunce that he is, Krugman conflates consumers with businesspeople. BOTH spend money, do they not? When someone builds a new corporate headquarters, expecting growth, does not a lot of money flow into the economy?

For entrepreneurs, one must always weigh risk versus reward. For established businesses, same thing. As exciting as playing the horses can be, when you are risking your own money you want some sense of stability. With Obamacare looming large, and a Socialist in the White House, American businessmen and women have no faith in the future; not enough to bet big on anything, until Obama gets stopped.

And to be clear, the money invested by businesses is the root of consumer spending. Toyota, say, creates a Prius, at considerable cost, since it feels people will spend money on THAT car, who would have sat on their money had it not existed. People who will not pay $2 for an apple WILL pay $1. Hence investments in apple harvesting technology and transportation, making it more efficient, will also spur spending growth.

The solution to slowdowns in spending is innovation. Innovation, in turn, is a function of private individuals, acting in their own interest.

And underlying all of this is the fundamental inflation/deflation/boom/bust cycle that causes slowdowns like this.

Krugman asserts that blaming Fannie Mae is ridiculous, but he doesn’t say why. Shortly, I will be laying that argument down in black and white. I have not read his book, but I suspect Thomas Sowell has already done so, as no doubt have others. It’s patently obvious. This is a classic inflation/deflation cycle. We are still seeing deflationary pressure from the housing market, which has yet to hit bottom.

Krugman is a paid hack. He shills for an agenda that WILL put us in a Depression, and which will be absolutely ruinous for everyone but he and his.

I don’t believe in hope. Hope is what enables you, when your head is being held under water, to believe it will end soon. If it doesn’t, you die. Far better to be able to live without oxygen. I have had my head held underwater figuratively for years, yet survived. Why? I don’t hope: I keep moving.

Purpose is the alternative to hope. For me to keep trying, there does not need to be any prospect for success. I do what I do because it seems like the right thing to do, and I therefore choose to do it.

Hope is a dependence on the future. It is a dependence on external events. People whose hopes have been dashed repeatedly tend to become cynical and apathetic. Yet, we can all control our internal states to a great extent. I’m not an unhappy person. Most of the time, I actually feel pretty good, especially considering the emotional asceticism of my life. I laugh a lot; I sing (badly) a lot.

I see so many people getting into these profound funks of one sort or another. It’s all falling apart. There’s no use. blah, blah, blah.

Maybe thing are falling apart, but I speak from experience when I say the antidote is to get yourself in the game, and work to make things better. Hope is not necessary for this.

It makes no matter how small the effort is, and results don’t matter. Obviously, try to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but any action forward is better than pessimistic hand-wringing. Fire, then fire again. All great successes in the world have been largely the outcome of small things done by forgotten people.

If you hope in yourself, then you can determine the outcome, n’est ce pas?

In today’s world, it is easy to forget basic history. It sometimes seems to me that is, in part, the GOAL of much of our media, to surround us with so many unimportant details that we lose sight of the big picture. It is for precisely that reason that I consume very little media, spending perhaps 30 minutes daily reading news stories on the internet, and in general avoid editorials entirely. I prefer to form my own opinions.

It is worth noting, though, that much of the continent of Europe has seen autocratic regimes in power within the lifetime of many citizens. Spain and Portugal were ruled by dictators, if memory serves, until the mid-1970’s. Ireland and Greece fought civil wars in the 20th Century. Germany, of course, was ruled by the Third Reich (in their view, the first “scientific” one, since they were the first to grasp the essential importance of race and biology; this is one of many reasons we need to watch how the word “scientific” is used); as were most of the nations of Europe for some five years. Italy had Mussollini. Norway had its Quisling government. Austria wasn’t sad when Hitler came across the border. De Gaulle, as I understand it, may as well have been a dictator. Sweden, Britain and Switzerland are the only nations I can think of (perhaps Luxembourg and Lichtenstein and some other little nations excepted as well) that have not seen tyranny or civil war in some form in the last 75 years or so.

Further, as I understand the matter, there is NO nation that has a Bill of Rights like ours. There is no nation, as I understand it, that has a Freedom of Information Act. In Holland, Geert Wilders was charged with committing a crime for saying some very obvious, very common sense things about the unwillingness and seeming inability for most Islamic immigrants to join their larger social, political, and cultural order.

One final point: the next time you hear some call America “imperialist”, ask them: Compared to whom? In the approximate era when we were fighting our Civil War to preserve the Union and free the slaves, the British were carving out a hunk of Africa that they renamed Rhodesia after Cecil Rhodes. The Belgians were causing mass death. The French were colonizing North Africa, and southeast Asia.

And they were doing this for financial gain. That is what imperialism is. It makes little sense to invade another nation and give them money. You take their money. That’s how real imperialism works. You negotiate sweetheart deals or just take things by force.

What we do is spend American lives and money to help other nations form democratic systems which protect liberty. And for that, we often get spit on by many in the other nations, and by our own Left here, which is utterly lacking in the ability to differentiate cultures based on universal standards. They start from the idea that we are wrong, then infer any and all Others, no matter their behavior, must be right. This is the result of long-term conscious indoctrination, and avoidance of adult, responsible judgement.

As I get older, I have more fantasies of what gets called isolationism, but which is really just not going out and forcing stupid, fratricidal people stop killing each other. Say Hussein had gotten a nuke. We could nuke him. Figure out where he is, and take him out. Would significantly more people have died? That would depend on the details. It’s a guarantee less Americans would have died, though.

Sometimes I think we should cut our military in half, enact compulsory State militia (National Guard) service for all able bodied citizens, perfect our missile shield, no matter the cost, and just tell other nations that if they screw with us they will get nuked. Self evidently, we build a fence with the Mexican border, and put in place SERIOUS security. All the shores have good sensors. We build superior satellite telemetry, which we likely already have.

It should be said, too, that people obsess about defence contractors. The real money in war is loaning the money for it. Never forget this. And that applies to Wars on Poverty, too.

I was talking with a social worker today who said she didn’t like her job. I asked her why, and she said she didn’t feel she was “making a difference”. Her idea of where to go was the public school system, where she wanted to be an administrator of some sort at some point.

I thought about this, and the only thought that kept coming back to me was: can you really help people who are unwilling to help themselves? Why are so many of the people who claim to be able to speak on behalf of “disadvantaged minorities” not themselves from the same place? Why are they normally white leftists, who figure that without their expertise nothing can get done?

One of the cruelest things you can do for a person is to help them carry their burdens, when their burdens need to be making them stronger and more able. Where is the self organization in the black communities? Where are the block leaders, saying “we need to police ourselves”? Where are the parents, setting up study groups?

It’s not a question of poverty. Drop any illiterate person from Japan or China or Tibet in a poor neighborhood, and they will work three jobs so their kids can go to college. Give the poor of almost any nation the chances that the average poor American has, and they will use them.

It’s not a question of race. Prior to the upheavals of the 60’s, black neighborhoods were every bit as peaceful, and their children every bit as eager to learn–an opportunity often denied them, or offered inequally–as anyone else.

No, the problem is cultural. It stems directly from the basic philosophy offered by the Left, which is that the task is not to lift yourself and the people around you up, but to extort money from the “rich” as retribution for the supposed injustice of inequality of outcome.

Part and parcel of this socialist package is the denigration of God and the church (which has been perverted into an extension of politics), the nuclear family, and self restraint and self sacrifice outright.

It really is this simple. The left wants to argue that black people can’t make it on their own. I disagree. They are just the victims of really, really, really bad ideas that have grown legs; and which are reinforced daily by those who depend on the votes of those who have only languished and suffered from their long term loyalty.

You think Democrats help African Americans? Where? What Democrats do is BUY their votes. None of them have to live in the hellholes of most inner American cities, nor do they send their children to the schools where those who vote for them send their own children. They know damn well they would get an inferior education.

This is a complex topic, but quite clearly what has been done, IS NOT WORKING. This means something different needs to be tried. Vouchers would be a good start. I have a few more ideas, but lack the time and energy to defend them at this moment.

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.