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I found this article interesting, on a number of levels.

Ponder this phrase:

Switzerland, the nation that hasn’t gone to war with a foreign power since Napoleon, is reluctantly debating a generational taboo: ceding monetary independence to win a battle over its runaway currency.

“Runaway currency”? What has happened here? Switzerland has pursued a rational monetary policy, which to this day, in my understanding, includes gold backing. What has happened around them is OTHER countries have pursued insane, unaffordable spending, and paid for it by printing money.

The next paragraph reads:

Swiss National Bank Vice President Thomas Jordan said the central bank is assessing “a whole range of options” to prevent the franc, which reached a record against the euro this month, from making Swiss goods prohibitively expensive. Even a cup of coffee at Cafe St. Gotthard in Zurich costs $8.30, with one Swiss franc buying $1.2816 at today’s exchange rate.

Please understand this: coffee has not gotten more expensive IN FRANCS, which is what the Swiss use. It has gotten more expensive in DOLLARS, because–like the EU, but to a lesser extent–the US has also pursued stupid monetary policies. In our case, we can’t help it: we don’t control our money. Ben Bernanke and an elite group of bankers and large corporations do.

But you have to ask about the journalistic integrity of Bloomberg, in phrasing it like this. I sent an email to the author, but have not heard back. Several points needs to be made, though.

The most important is that this emphasis on export through devaluation is Keynesian. It is what the IMF and World Bank that he helped found always promote. It leads to short term gains, and long term losses. It leads to the erosion of national sovereignty, and indebtedness to global elites like the IMF.

The argument being made in favor of devaluing the franc–more on this in a second–is that it will promote exports, by making Swiss goods–chocolate, watches, pharmaceuticals–less expensive in foreign markets. Half of their income comes from exports, according to the article.

Logically, then, half of their income does NOT come from imports. What is being proposed is helping half the economy at the expense of the other half of the economy. As things stand, imports are cheaper, and domestic production and consumption is entirely unaffected by exchange rates.

Inflation erodes value. It makes savings less valuable. It erodes property values. It is a tax, or a property seizure.

We need to be clear about what the Swiss National Bank is proposing, in discussing a “target”. They are talking about consciously inflationary policy designed to erode the value of the money the Swiss people use. This will benefit some, and hurt others. It will benefit, presumably, those lobbying for this, and hurt those who do not understand what is being presented.

The Swiss National Bank is talking about printing money. Where does this money go? How is it distributed? In the United States, we very literally have NO way of knowing where the TRILLIONS of dollars that the Fed has printed have gone. But let’s consider some scenarios.

Let us say I am John Smith, and I run ABBA, which designs and builds Swedish supergroups. We are a publicly held company. I have a friend at the Swiss National Bank, and we spend a lot of time in the wild drinking schnapps and yodeling together. The SNB determines that inflation is needed. But how to put money into the economy? Well, why not buy up a whole bunch of my stock–which we will issue for the purpose–so we can fund a business expansion? This is a great deal for me. It doesn’t affect the SNB in the slightest. But it hurts, in the long run, the Swiss consumer, the value of whose money goes down, and he doesn’t know why. I got money for free, though, which is a very good price.

Or let’s add a level. Let’s say that the money is actually granted through the banking system. Let’s say that the SNB buys shares in WBBB, the We Be Bankin’ Bank. That bank now has more money to lend, and it lends it to me, at a very attractive rate of interest. The same thing has happened. Ostensibly the economy has been “stimulated”, which is not entirely inaccurate, but at the cost of transferring, over some period of time, some portion of the general wealth to the bank and to me.

Bloomberg is published and controlled by people with business interests. So are all other financial publications. In this particular case, given the language, and given the failure to explain what is actually being proposed, one can infer that the author had a vested interest, for whatever reason, in supporting a view of reality that to be generous was incomplete, and to be honest was likely openly, cynically misleading.

BANKERS UNDERSTAND THESE THINGS. The rest of us don’t. As Henry Ford said:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Hopefully I have done something to further that revolution by pointing out some of these normally hidden realities.

I will add, actually, that one title for the book I keep threatening to write that occurs to me is “A Capitalist Revolution”. For anyone new to this blog, the ideas are here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

I’m a JJ Cale fan. Have been for many years. I was listening to an interview with him, where he was asked why he places relatively less emphasis on vocals than most other producers (he apparently produces his own music most of the time). His answer was that he didn’t like his voice, so he deemphasized it.

He was then asked how he gets this sound like he is backing himself up, like there are two of him. He replied that his singing is also pitchy, so he overdubs it (I think was the term), so the flats and sharps cancel out.

In trying to avoid the consequences of having an outstanding song-writing ability but poor voice, he achieved a style which is distinct, and which I (and many others) really enjoy.

So many stories in the world. Would that we could live long enough to hear more than a fraction of them. This is not a world of triangles. No one need fear that. What we need fear are the people who cannot live without them.

What did it mean? Was I drinking? Was that an attempt at humor? Was I trying to be mysterious by being vague and stupid?

There is an answer, but I would like to submit the actual answer doesn’t matter. Let us suppose that you grasp, fully and completely, every nuance of meaning I intended. So what? That is not generative. That is imitative. Don’t copy me. Any version of you is superior to an inferior version of me. How many people any more know how to sing in their own voices? How to be stupid and reckless and sanguine and loud?

I provide a sign in the wilderness. Walk up to it, then keep going. Or maybe in trying to follow my meaning you get lost. Figure out where you are, then explore. Surely there is something interesting there. Much of what I do might be seen as amounting effectively to spinning myself 9 times around, then walking until the night, taking care to see what I pass.

Does meaning inhere in statements, in the interpretive process, or in the creative synthesis of the two? Self evidently, I believe it is the last.

Be yourself. You can’t in any event be anyone else.

There was once a 10th Dan thinker who tripped over a; semicolon.

The End.

This may be obvious to more serious techie types, but if you choose to, you can add this blog to your RSS feed, where all the blogs you are following will pop up automatically, as I understand it; and you can get a daily email with whatever I wrote the day before. I change it sometimes, and I don’t know if the updates get sent out, but it’s not a bad feature.

I didn’t look at my stats until about six weeks ago, when someone was asking if I even had evidence anyone was reading this. I thought about it, and hints were few and far between, so I started looking, and now I check it almost every day. I think if you get the email or RSS your stats disappear, but that’s OK.

This blog is written largely out of my own psychological necessity, but it is good to know at least a few people read it. Thank you!!!!!

For my part, I have thoughts flowing through my head all the time, and they don’t leave me alone unless I note them somewhere. I used to note them privately–I probably have a thousand pages of unpublished random musings–but most I now just put here.

I can and have taken on entire websites for months at a time. What I mean by this, is that I intentionally go places I know I am not welcome, and post opinions which get me vilified. I have had posts–to be clear, posts that in most contexts would be seen as benign and innocuous–that attracted hundreds of insults.

None of this matters, though. The point is that you can be one single person, and no quantity of contrary opinions can overwhelm a correct idea. The world was not flat when all of humanity believed that it was. Light was still bending even when that was considered impossible.

Thus, I can “debate” 10,000 people, and not be touched, if the views I am defending are the best available on the topic.

You could not take 100 million people of average intelligence, and EVER get the Theories of Relativity, or Newton’s Laws of Motion. There is no quantitative addition that creates quality. It is a different beast. It answers to a different master.

This is why the idea of individualism is so important. We don’t want the average. The average happens naturally. We want the special, and the special disappears in the soup of aggregation.

The interesting thing about Ron Paul is that not only should he be able to garner much of the Tea Party vote, but he ought to be able to get the hard left vote as well, of those who think Obama betrayed them by not attacking “corporations” enough. Some of the most left-wing people I know love Ron Paul.

As I see it, the Federal Reserve is the primary cancer that has made us so sick. They created the Depression that FDR exploited to enact socialism in this country. They are setting the stage for massive inflation, if and when people start borrowing again. They are the principle and primary agent of wealth redistribution in this country.

And Ron Paul is the only candidate that truly grasps this. I have not studied him extensively, but if he only conquered the Fed, that would be enough. It has to be done right, but that is the key, I am convinced, to long term prosperity for the world.

Excuses are what are left when you deduct unforeseeable circumstance and ignorance from the gap between performance and intention.

Joy is the answer to why, not the converse. How is the only relevant question.

Did Jesus have a sense of humor? If one focuses on the doctrine of love, then you must say yes. If you focus on a God who condemns the frivolous to eternal torture, then you must say no–life would be much too serious then.

If you teach a man to fish, but he can’t reach a lake, then you have accomplished little. Wealth-building always begins with jobs, no matter what they pay, and any system that ensures structural unemployment is unjust, even if those who do not work are compensated for those failures.

There is a discussion going on at the Wall Street Journal as to whether or not religion is necessary. Something to that effect. With 10,000 comments there seems little point in adding my two cents there. Still, an interesting topic.

The following will be a bit stream of consciousness, since I have a three dimensional, textured thought pattern that I am trying to import over to a linear, two dimensional format.

Let me put it this way: Goodness is the fruit we desire. It is the capacity to interact optimally with our world, our “selves” (as if consciousness were truly severable), and with others. It is a way of optimizing experience, life as it is lived, motion as it is moved (?), speech as it is spoken. The whole enchilada. The bigger sum than you could ever conceive.

This fruit exists on a bush, or a tree, or a vine. It emerges from a latent order, a latent support, latent sources of nourishment, none of which resemble outwardly the fruit itself, but whose existence enable the emergence, the fruition, the granting of continued life that the fruit represents.

What is a fruit? Is it not symbolic of renewed life? Do actual fruits not contain the seeds that enable the spread of whatever plant gives rise to them? Can we not imagine some of these seeds will give rise to life that continues even when the tree that gave birth to them is no more?

Look at an orchard. There is a lot of life in there. The trees are in rows, often, but that order is nothing compared to the order which enables water and soil nutrients to be turned into life, and then the renewed life that, say, apples represent. Every apple that blossoms, then weighs down a bough, is a child that, given the chance, can have more children. It exists in a complex harmony that is no less rich because death is always an option.

Religion, to me, is the idea behind the orchard. It is the latent idea, the one hidden. We see the life. We see the fruits to which that life leads. But real, true religion is the possibility of all of these. It is the possibility of informational complexity, of rich diversity, of INTELLIGENCE.

As I see it, families have emotional tones. They have rich patterns that, were one sufficiently perceptive, have all the rhythmic complexity of a classical Indian tabla performance. We all of us move as oceans, back and forth. We have our waves, the winds act on us. We have tides and sun.

What I am seeking in the notion of Goodness is all of this. I have given a simple name to the very surface of the sea, and indicated what I think might be below the surface, but of which I am not entirely sure.

Certainly, I have applied logic to the issue. I have thought long and hard about it. Logic is a sort of boat that allows you to connect with the ocean, but it is important to remember that it also separates you from the water.

Sometimes I feel that in poetry alone can one be rational. I am no anti-rationalist, and I see readily enough the atrocities and horrors that come from taking no heed, accepting no responsibility, and from living as one pleases. This is not what I am advocating.

Do not stop short of reason: travel through it, to the other side, and becomes so accustomed to its dictates that you can travel back and forth from A to F spontaneously, gently, without force or violence.

Few thoughts. I am content with this, even if it appears nonsensical, and may not appear to even address the topic. Put a dunce cap on me and sit me in the corner. I’ll still be happy.

Where does it go?

No one looks at two parallel lines and sees freedom. Some escape, perhaps, but never freedom. This is natural.

Oi, what we need floats between us and teases us. I see it, but I cannot name it.

May you hear God’s blessing in your own way. It was already there, but you weren’t listening.

Next day edit: whiskey was involved there. Still, my sober self understands. One could perhaps paraphrase some Sufis that “to be drunk is to be sane”, although of course in their case no “sharab” would have been involved.