Category: Uncategorized

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.

I was reading the intro to a book on Happiness the other day, and he asked: if you knew you were going to die in 15 minutes, what would you do? I thought about it, and decided I would do whatever I was going to do anyway.

In a very real sense, everything you do matters, but it also doesn’t matter at all. It is the relative motion that matters. For me, I feel like I have been swimming upstream without break my entire life. I don’t say that to complain, simply as a statement of fact: that’s how I feel.

Yet, I have kept going. I have not faltered. I have fought my battles, and constantly struggled to do what is right, and further to the best of my ability what is Good in this world. I have never let up.

So whether my time comes soon or many years from now, I think I will face it in the spirit in which you get a cavity filled. It’s not something I look forward to, but it is something that is necessary. If I am right, then life is better and easier on the other side. If I am wrong in my metaphysics, then I will never know it.

Either way, I have no regrets. I have done with my time what I can. As Camus put it, “Judgement day is every day.” If you remember that, then I think you can go out calmly.

In one of the Federalists–I think it was 51, but don’t quote me–Madison commented that if we were all angels, we would need no government. As I think about it, that is in fact the task: coverting ourselves en masse to angels. This is the only path forward to sustaining liberal orders, and preventing the emergence of autocratic world government.

In the end, the doctrine of Goodness is one trending towards benign political anarchy. No need for a UN, standing armies, or even police. This is the goal. I have provided one means.

Viewed as a strategic thrust in its totality, Demand side economics is about the State making purchasing decisions for the public. It is about funding projects whose economic utility is between uncertain and nil. Is it really the lack of a road or dam that slows economic progress, when no one wanted to use the road anyway, and when access to power already exceeded what was needed?

Ponder this: as we sit in our collective chairs this Sunday, looking at the future, no few American consumer and businesspeople have money THEY DON’T WANT TO SPEND. Why not? The future is uncertain. It’s unclear what effect Obamacare–if unrepealed–necessary tax increases, and possible discretionary energy tax hikes will have on our economic life, especially if the Democrats somehow hold on to one or both chambers of Congress.

In the real world, people understand that your savings is your cushion against the unexpected. It is your cushion–with insurance–against unexpected loss, injury, unemployment. It is also your nest egg, to be used in old age, or to invest in a business. Keynesians want that nest egg. They have literally engineered an internally consistent economic theology in which you are better off giving your money to the State now, in exhange for the guarantee of benefits. They take your money, and give you unemployment benefits, health benefits, retirement money, and every other little thing your heart could desire. They just WANT YOUR MONEY. Give it to them, and nobody gets hurt. Don’t give it to them, they will take it through taxes and inflation. One way or the other, and they get it.

This is the goal. What would rational economic thinking look like?

Let us look at the glut situation. You have too many cars. What do you do? Sell them at a loss, reduce production, and INVENT SOMETHING NEW that people actually want to buy. Come out with a new model, such that the sex appeal or fundamental value is so powerful that people spend their money on it. This creates profit, which gets reinvested, which causes job growth.

The problem is that innovation cannot work to produce growth if no PRIVATE capital is laying around, and the surest way to KEEP–not get, but KEEP–private capital in circulation is by not confiscating it in the first place through taxation or onerous regulation that bulks up costs that can’t easily be passed along.

There can be no question that Supply Side Economics (aka common sense) works. The people who practice it always run deficits because they increase their SPENDING. It happened under Reagan and both Bush’s. It didn’t happen under Clinton since he had an activist conservative Congress for 6 of his 8 years. Even they, though, did almost nothing to address the debt.

We need to be clear: nothing short of a revolutionary fix is going to make the some $600 billion we pay (or soon will) annually in interest go away. How in God’s name do people worry about Halliburton, when they could be thinking about the people who get this money, year in, year out, guaranteed by the US Taxpayers? Halliburton, as big as it is, is chump change.

Again, my fix makes all this go away, eradicates the vestiges of Keynesism and what for lack of a better term I have called “Monetary Mercantilism”, and puts on a just economic footing as a nation–and potentially as a planet–for the first time EVER.

First off, the term “Supply Side” economics did not exist until Keynes hoodwinked several generations of American economists and politicians that you could spend you way into prosperity. Obviously, it doesn’t work, but academics and pol’s have always been quite content simply to have a scape-goat for their failures.

I want to look at this in a bit more detail, though. The stupidity will shine through–or darken the room, as you prefer–soon enough.

Here is the argument: a recession is called by the systemic glut caused when people save rather than spend their money. Companies have made something–say cars–expecting to sell them, and horror of horrors no one wants to buy them, at least at the price they are charging. How exactly this happens, I don’t think he’s quite clear. Let’s say it is a “loss of confidence”.

If the companies can’t sell the cars, then they can’t maintain their current levels of employment. If they don’t do that, then they law people off, such that the ability of the overall public to consume is reduced, causing the glut to be even worse. Money is needed to eliminate the glut, keep those people employed, and keep the economy moving.

Keynes offers two solutions. First in the long term he wants direct State control of personal and corporate savings, such that it can be allocated in a “rational” way by smart people like him, what he termed a Salariat, modelled on that found in the Soviet Union.

Phrased alternatively, he wants a Command economy, at least when it comes to private capital. He wants to be able to control not just the rate of savings, but the ability of people to move their (own) money in and out of the country. He wants a hermetically sealed system, of precisely the Fascist sort, which is why Mussollini thought so highly of him, in the only almost honest exposition of his real objectives, in his piece “The End of Laissez Faire”.

Secondly, if the private sector lacks the will or ability to spend, then the government has to take up the “slack”. Since by definition the economy is in a slow down, the government will have to use deficit spending to inject cash into the system. Tax revenues will be down, and any surpluses already spent. This money is spent. It really doesn’t matter what it is spent on–with his “multiplier” effect, it will sooner or later eliminate the glut.

What has happened, then? Our government has taken the money of the taxpayers, and in effect paid off the debts of a particular industry–say cars–with borrowed money we will now owe interest payments on.

Reasonable Questions: How is it that we have not made our situation worse? What is to prevent that same industry from again running up a glut?

Ponder what was done: the taxpayers still owe, in reality, all that money to the automotive industry. We didn’t really pay them back. The situation at Point A (pre-loan) remains, on the books, the same. No final solution has been achieved. And not only has the problem not been solved, we now have to pay back MORE than we otherwise would have had to, since we have to pay interest on our national debt. And as anyone with credit card debt knows, you can make the minimum payment literally FOREVER, and never touch the principle. And in point of fact, some part of our current debt dates back to the 1930’s. Our net national debt has never reached zero. The Treasury Bonds, when they reach maturity, are just rolled over. It is precisely equal to paying credit card debt YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. In so doing, you eventually pay back 3-4-5 or more times whatever the initial principle was.

And to the point, if there was a glut initially, it was due to failing to adhere to business fundamentals. Price–as any competent, sincere economist (in short supply, admittedly)–is an informational signalling system which indicates the current demand for whatever supply you intend to make. Within a free market, no long term misallocation of production resources is possible. As sales decline–say everyone owns a car already–then production will decline. As sales increase, production will increase.

Quite obviously, it is sheer lunacy to say that the health of our economy depends entirely on consumer spending. It depends on job creation, which is the result of people perceiving business opportunities, and having the available capital to take advantage of them.

Capitalism is a system for converting innovation into wealth. It is a system for developing new markets, new products, new distribution systems, and improved efficiency. When it works properly EVERYONE saves money, such that in the long run EVERYONE becomes a Capitalist. The lifeblood of economic health and freedom is small business.

What disrupts this process is not savings, but the theft of savings as a result of monetary policy. Keynes–socialist bastard that he was–well understood this. Consider this quote, from 1920:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.

Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become “profiteers,” who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Let me be clear: I don’t think Keynes was so stupid that he encouraged governments to intentionally, overtly engage in inflationary spending. He was quite clever and always thought a few moves ahead. This trait–and the culturally congenital stupidity and moral cowardice of most modern economics–is what has enabled his patent nonsense to continue being preached as gospel.

But take the case of the Great Depression. Irrefutable are the following facts: the Federal Reserve consciously pursued inflationary policies in the early 1920’s, and deflationary policies from about 1928 to 1933. Inflation, to be clear, cannot happen unless someone gets something for nothing. As Keynes admits, it “enriches some”.

Also irrefutable is that there was a run on our gold, by parties unknown, which led to a devaluation crisis that in turn led to the closure of some one half of American banks. In essence, our currenty was theoretically backed by some percentage of gold. The amount doesn’t matter. Let us say that we had agreed to only print $100 per ounce of gold. People back then had the choice of taking money and redeeming it for gold. They wouldn’t do it, unless they thought the gold was worth more than the cash. In other words, unless the government had inflated the money supply.
In that case, you could get $200 face value of gold for $100 dollars.

This sort of thing is what causes runs on currency. All currency trading is, is trying to figure out which nations are inflating the most. You keep the lower inflation currencies, and sell the higher inflation currencies. In a highly revealing detail, Keynes–privy to much inside information around the world–made millions off of daily currency speculation. He understood currency manipulation like the back of his hand. He engaged in it daily for most of his adult life.

How does Keynes, then, get private savings into the hands of the government? How does he force inflation which favors a few at the expense of the many, without making his intention (the above quote was from a best selling book he wrote, and quite public) obvious?

Let’s look at a foreign example, then a domestic one. Watch the movie “Life and Debt”. Jamaica, following England freeing her from direct control, was in an economic mess. They needed money for development. The IMF came in with loans, but required all sorts of stipulations, including the prevention of any trade barriers, State support of any industries, and a demand that their currency be devalued.

We always see this infernal demand for currency devaluation. What is happening, is that whoever and spends that money–usually the government–and whoever gets that money–usually a power elite–benefits. Everyone else suffers. The reason that is always offered for the loans is that it “enables exports.”

Reading most of the jackasses posing as serious thinkers and wearing the suits of economists, one would think that no self sufficient economy could ever be possible. Jamaica was always destined, from Day One, to being an economic subordinate and dependent. Yet, they had many indigenous industries–farming, dairy and the like–that were absolutely wrecked, moving them from self production to importation. Now, most everything they consume comes from other countries.

Their money won’t buy hardly anything. Theoretically, when you devalue your currency through inflation, you make your exports cheaper. For example. China seems to have done this. The problem, though, is that life for the ordinary citizen gets much harder, since inflation prevents true entrepreneurialism from taking root. It prevents the emergence of private capital. China as a whole–once you get past the top tier of their Class System–is facing hard working conditions, with increasingly little to show for it. They are being used, in effect by their own government acting as an imperialist power, to make a very few very rich.

This is the flip side of inflation/currency devaluation: it also makes it easier for people holding other currencies to buy up your country. Remember, the IMF forced you to allow this as part of the agreement.

And remember too that loans come due. The loans dont’ work. They peter out. And yet you have to repay them. What do most countries do? Another round of inflation, combined with another deal with the devil.

Let’s look at a so-called “Keynesian Stimulus” here in the US. Money is printed and spent. It is spent, say, on green jobs, whose intrinsic value is a matter of utter indifference. As such, in “stimulus” conditions, normal pricing signals are completely absent. While the money is flowing, you do well. You take that money and invest further in infrastructure and head counts. Then at some point the money runs out. If you’re lucky, you might have a viable business. Much more likely, though, you are grotesquely overvalued, and what you have built will wither on the vine and die. The system eliminated the normal fail-safe mechanism from the equation, resulting in nothing but waste. Money is now owed, but it is now gone, and over time a multiple of what was owed will be paid, since the debt will never to ended.

How is this money paid? In the end, with inflation. With a truly stable currency, there would be NO inflation. On the contrary, unless stolen by the State and a power elite, the purchasing power of our money should–would–be steadily increasing. I make this full case on my other web page, here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page14.html

In the end, Keynes wanted all private capital to disappear, for all wealth to be dependent on the ability of the government to outlast everyone, in that it could create money, and with that power destroy any and all other money and wealth–and power–that could stand against it.

People need to grasp these realities. Moral midgets like Paul Krugman continue to hawk this salt water as the one and only solution for thirst.