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Henry Hazlitt dealt well with the contradictions of Keynesism. You borrow money–with interest–from the future to fund the present, and in doing create the illusion of prosperity in the present, at the cost of reduced prosperity in the future. A notable line that comes up often is Keynes aphorism “in the long run, we are all dead”. He had no children, however, and in the long run our children inherit what we create. Keynes was a vicious, selfish man, whose “morality” consisted in convivial clubbishness with those he saw as social and political fellow travellers and bon vivants.

I want to point out, though, the disruptions which his policies, when followed, create in the private sector. Let us suppose that “stimulus” money hits Smalltown, USA. They want to build a new highway, complete with rest stops and playgrounds. The economy is somewhat down, but some businesses are holding on. Where the going wage for, say, a plumber is $15/hour, he will now pay $30/hour. In our country, all Federal contracts have to pay Davis-Bacoin wages, which are substantially higher than what would otherwise be free market prices.

The whole town goes to work on this project, which is scheduled to last some 5 years. During that time, they live well. New restaurants are opened, clothing stores, laundries, and put-put courses. Plumbing companies have a hard time finding workers, since they all go to work for the government. Some go under.

Then the project finishes and the money runs out. Nobody can go out to dinner any more. Nobody buys clothing any more. They stop going to the put-put course, and revert to doing their own laundry. All the businesses that were created by the Stimulus now go out of business. Many or most of the private enterprises that existed before the “blessing” of the project have folded. The town is now in a much deeper Depression than before. Unemployment is even higher than before. What is the Keynesian solution? Either unemployment benefits, funded by some combination of deficit spending, and increased taxes on those businesses that remain productive in other parts of the country. Alternatively, if we use his example of the “benefits” of pyramid building, we use deficit spending to build a second highway next to the first. Now everybody is employed again. Now, the Socialits running the thing have created one more drag on the private sector.

Make no mistake: the end goal is for every man, woman and child in the United States and around the world to depend entirely and he and his for every last detail of their life: food, clothing, shelter, medical care and everything else you need.

This program has been enacted many times around what I will call for convenience the Third World. The IMF loans money for some project. The money is spent (after a suitable amount is siphoned off by the ruling elite), apparent wealth is created for a period of time, then things are twice as bad. The country is in debt, with no private sector resources to pay the taxes needed for survival. What then? Either another round of borrowing (the IMF creates money, as I understand it, so there is no practical limit to their ability to lend), or paying bills with printed money, which creates they hyperinflation we read about around the world. Such policy benefits the ruling class, and wrecks the lives of everyone else. The people with the money, though, have the guns, so things continue on as before.

If people accept the Keynesian argument that spending money creates jobs, this is their fate.

The alternative? IF we are going to spend money for job creation, it MUST be made available to private enterprise, in economically sustainable enterprises. Such loans must be short term, and they must be paid back, as in the microloan program.

To foster global development, we must exorcise the ghost of this very clever, very evil man. And we need to end both the IMF and the World Bank, in a manner like I have proposed for our own national financial system.

[Edit: I’m not fully satisfied with this post, but it’s close to the mark.]

I used to wonder how it is that currencies change “value”. Why is a dollar worth “X” euro one day, and 1.1X the next?

The answer is really quite simple: values change acccording to the perceptions of institutional and other investors of the relative rate of inflation of one currency compared to another. People are holding a lot of dollars now. Why? The Europeans and Chinese seem to be pursuing even more inflationary policies than we are. We sank a ton of money into various financial groups to stabilize them, but that money simply served to refresh money they had lost in failed investments. Only slowly will it find its way back into the wider economy. Likewise, the so-called Stimulus was really not that large. A third of it is propping up Medicaid programs for various States that spent themselves into bankruptcy. A third of it is going to send “vote for me” checks to likely Democrats, with some reserved for corporate tax cuts, which really isn’t spending at all. And only a third of it–roughly $250 billion in all–is getting spent. Of that, only about $148 billion has been spent in the last two fiscal years.

This brings to mind a fundamental fact about the Great Depression. We all know that a lot of banks failed, but not the reason. The reason was that our currency was attacked. First, some numbers with respect to the Great Depression:

During the major contraction phase of the Depression, between 1929 and 1933, real output in the United States fell nearly 30 percent. During the same period, according to retrospective studies, the unemployment rate rose from about 3 percent to nearly 25 percent, and many of those lucky enough to have a job were able to work only part-time. For comparison, between 1973 and 1975, in what was perhaps the most severe U.S. recession of the World War II era, real output fell 3.4 percent and the unemployment rate rose from about 4 percent to about 9 percent. Other features of the 1929-33 decline included a sharp deflation–prices fell at a rate of nearly 10 percent per year during the early 1930s–as well as a plummeting stock market, widespread bank failures, and a rash of defaults and bankruptcies by businesses and households.

Now, that piece is by the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. I have posted that link elsewhere, but only just now read it all the way through. The gist of his explanatin of the cause of the Great Depression was, in essence, that the Fed pursued inflationary policies in the 1920’s, and then tightened the money supply, causing first the Crash of 1929, and then the following failure of roughly half the banks in the United States. They protected–through extensions of credit–banks within the system, but did nothing at all to protect those outside the system.

This contraction, combined with banking failures–which caused net losses in the money supply, since the money they held simply vanished into thin air (the same way most of it was created)–caused deflation. Deflation decreases lending, since if you borrow $1, and have to pay back $2, you are paying back more than the nominal interest rate you commited to. This means that there is no money for borrowing, and what money there is, most people don’t want.

He blames the gold standard for the deflation. Let’s think about that. What the gold standard is designed to do is prevent inflation. It is designed to protect the value of the money, by limiting how much you can print. In theory, if $1 is worth 1/10th of an ounce of gold, you can go to a bank and ask for the gold instead of the money. You can then take that gold to another country, and exchange it for their money.

Let us think about this, though. The United States in the 1920’s held X amount of gold, let us say 10,000 tons. In THEORY, there would be only enough money in circulation to equal out the exchange rate. In theory, it should match to the penny and ounce. Let us say, for example, that $1=1/10th of an ounce of gold. Let us say there are 16 ounces in a pound (there are troy ounces but I don’t understand them, and it doesn’t matter enough to look it up). If my math is correct, that means no more than $200,000,000 could be in circulation.

If you look at my piece on Money Creation, though, what you realize is that printing money is a very unimportant part of how money is created, and that the Federal Reserve (and all central banks) have the ability to create essentially unlimited quantities, and did even when we were theoretically on the gold standard. This means that, for example, that if our reserves (the Federal Reserve of New York, btw, holds the largest gold reserve in the United States to this very day) would imply $200,000,000 in circulation, that there could easily be, following inflationary policies of the sort in place throughout the 1920’s, $1 BILLION in circulation. Our dollars would be worth 1/5th, in gold, what they should have been worth, but that they could be REDEEMED for full face value. Phrased another way, that you could get $1 Billion in gold, for a mere $200 million in cash.

Now, the amount in circulation is a function of many things, such as the required bank reserve requirements, and what the Fed is doing as far as their open market operations (described in my piece on Money Creation). Phrased another way, the relative trajectory of the value of money can be influenced by Fed policy. In point of fact, that is almost the only factor, in the end, that matters.

Bernanke, here, tells us that the policies the Fed pursued were, in effect, allowing the forest to burn to clear out the dead underbrush. Yet, they also had the effect of strengthening the power of Wall Street banks, and those within the Federal Reserve system. What we need to understand, is that those same banks COMPRISED the Federal Reserve System. The same man might literally sit on the Board of Directors of the Fed, and at a large multinational bank that stood to benefit from the policies the Fed pursued. This is patent–and UNREGULATED–conflict of interest. We are not even sure who owns all the “stock” in the Fed. This is patently ridiculous.

We need to remember, too, that the value of all the loans which the member banks of the Federal Reserve held increased substantially as a result of deflation. Deflation forces the debtor to pay not just the interest, but to use money whose worth is increasing to do so. This creates an added stress, over and above the normal stress of doing business, and of course for that reason is economically damaging.

Inflation is created when banks create money from nothing to loan. Deflation is created when they contract the money supply. Self evidently, the failure of half the banks in the US caused severe deflation. Those positioned correctly win in both directions.

Bernanke cites apparently empirical evidence that the longer nations stayed on the gold standard, the worse they fared. This is of course an argument in favor of Keynes flexible currency, and in favor of what he, as Federal Reserve Chairman, does. Let us suppose this is accurate (as proper propagandists never lie: they interpret, lest we draw the “wrong”–which is to say correct–conclusions.)

Why would this be? Gold makes it harder to inflate–at least in theory–which means less credit is available. Deflation further makes it harder to justify taking out loans for business expansion. Hitler, to use one example–one cited by Keynes as a good example of his policies at work–used his central bank (which had inflated away all debts in the early 20’s) for massive public spending program. How did he intend to pay them off? Simple: conquest. America did not have that option. Nor have we paid off the debts we incurred in that war, which was in fact inflationary.

Throughout the 1920’s, Benjamin Strong, who was the Federal Reserve Chairman, worked in close collaboration with his counterpart at the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. When Churchill–a bit out of his depth, I think, economically–put England back on the gold standard, they set the price of the pound a bit high. In the course of implementing Labor (Socialist) policies, they had created problems for themselves in affording all it, particularly when their war debts were added to the mix. [Edit: this is written from memory. I may be wrong in part on this part, with respect to the details, although I think the larger picture is correct.]

What does this mean? Let us say that one pound ought to have been worth 1 ounce of gold, based on the amount of gold they held, and the quantity of pounds in circulation. They set it at, say, 2 pounds, such that they immediately created money for themselves. This sort of thing is exceedingly difficult to measure. Only very few would have grasped this. They then pursued ostensible fiscal tightening, in the form of tighter monetary policy relative to the United States.

For his part, Strong–a pronounced Anglophile–kept interest rates (here, we are talking mainly about the Discount Window, which was much more important, prior to the Fed getting unlimited freedom for their open market operations, although open market operations were pursued then, in the form of buying the securities of member banks, and thus providing them money to lend) lower than they should have been. This made our money weaker than it ought to have been relative to the pound, and thus made holding pounds relatively more attractive to international investors than the dollar. It allowed them to buy more, domestically and abroad, than they ought to have been able to afford.

At a certain point, the scheme collapsed, and people who had held pounds, asked for gold instead. This led to England abandoning the gold standard. Then, as Bernanke put it: With the collapse of the pound, speculators turned their attention to the U.S. dollar, which (given the economic difficulties the United States was experiencing in the fall of 1931) looked to many to be the next currency in line for devaluation.

If my understanding is correct, this is fundamentally disingenuous. The value of money has nothing to do with economic circumstances, and everything to do with monetary policy, specifically the extent to which Federal Reserve policy has enabled the overvaluation of our currency to begin with. Put another way, it only makes sense to “buy” money if that money is undervalued, and it makes sense to “sell” it when it is overvalued. Both terms are best understood with reference to gold. If there are too many dollars relative to the gold we have, it makes sense to get the gold, and dump the dollars; or, alternatively, to buy some other currency, like marks or yen.

Let me think out loud for a moment. Once large scale deflation set in, it would have made sense to hold dollars again, provided other currencies were not deflating faster than us. The fear of devaluation that Bernanke says led to the panics that closed so many banks would have been the fear that international markets would recognize that we had inflated far past our ability to redeem our money in gold. This would have led to dumping dollars in favor of other currencies. Why did money not flow back in, though? Maybe it did. Maybe international banks DID hold dollars, and simply didn’t spend them. We did not see widespread transfer of ownership of our economic assets to foreign interests, though. Perhaps members of the Federal Reserve system held them themselves, for later use. This is plausible. If you can create money at will, then getting cash is never a problem. Sometimes you might just want to sit on your money. In deflationary times, that amounts to an investment.

As I have argued in my series on economics inflation is a means by which to transfer ownership of real property through leveraging a protected position in the economic system, without thereby creating anything of real value. It is anti-Capitalist. If Capitalism is harnessing the powers of motivation and creativity to create wealth, our financial system in large measure, as currently constituted, acts to reallocate the fruits of that system to people who have added nothing of value. This process is quite similar to the process portrayed by Marx, in which people who sit in the right place get richer, at the expense of everyone else. To be redundant to emphasize the point: THIS IS NOT CAPITALISM.

What happened, then, is that our currency was made less valuable throughout the 1920’s, during which process people creating the money attached de facto liens to our means of production, and then it was devalued through a financial disruption in which half of the banks in the United States failed, and as a result of which all outstanding loans increased in value. Competition was destroyed, and existing loan “assets” went up in value.

Given that the same people created the policy and benefited from it, it is exceedingly hard not to see this as the result of planning. How would we know what happened in the meetings at the Fed? We don’t even know with certainty who the members are. The meetings are closed to the public. At that time, they did not even announced their targeted Federal Fund rate, as they do now (this is what creates the Prime Rate).

Then we add Keynes (who by the way was a member for some time of the Board of Governors of the Bank of England). What was the proposed solution to deflation? Deficit spending by the Federal Government. Who financed that spending? The same Wall Street banks that constitute the Federal Reserve. Funding deficits is a primary function of central banks the world over, although we are unique in having one that is accountable to no one. They use open market operations to buy Treasury bonds, which are interest bearing.

Now, I don’t think Keynes was on the same page as Wall Street. With his pal, Soviet agent Harry Dexter White, he tried to nationalize the Federal Reserve, presumably to get precise control over this process. They failed. But they did succeed in creating a de facto World Central Bank, in the IMF and World Bank.

In politics, economics is everything. Hitler only came to power because of the economic dislocations of the Great Depression. Lenin was only able to seize power in the aftermath of World War 1, and the generalized economic problems that caused. Mao seized power in the aftermath of World War 2, facing a financially depleted government.

Given the foregoing, consider the recent news that global financial chiefs reached new rules on reserve requirements. It is all the central banks–the Federal Reserves of the world–reaching an agreement to require all banks to keep more money in the proverbial safe. This is categorically going to have deflationary consequences. It will pull money out of circulation. It will make banks more stable, but it will likely push some over the edge, and it will tighten credit.

Consider, too, the INSANITY of the Fed making policy internationally, when it is not accountable to anyone. There will be no Senate hearing on this. We are in effect entering into a treaty that will be signed by someone who was appointed, but who can do ANYTHING he wants after that.

This system is utter and complete lunacy. Here, again, is my solution.

The process of earning more money than you need to survive, and allowing it to accumulate, until you can create something with it, is fundamental to Capitalism. With a sound monetary system, everyone would over time own their own means of production. They would invest in small businesses–shops, production facilities, restaurants–which they would control. The end aim of Capitalism is very simply for everyone to be a Capitalist, and for there to be no “workers” as such at all. Where things can’t get done by individuals, they could aggregate as a collective and own things in common, as in some corporations, which are owned by the employees. Socialists will claim this for themselves, but quite obviously such arrangements are both common sense and common, already. I know any number of companies that are owned by a group of people. Generally, they will have employees, but all that needs to happen to convert an employee into a Capitalist is the opportunity to buy in.

As I have argued often, Socialism is not a system for improving the shared experience of humanity at large. Socialists–true Socialists, not people with “tribal” orders characterized by uniformity of moral belief and culture, such as the Scandinavians, that operate as high trust cultures–are quite willing to accept, for others, a uniform poverty, in exchange for eradicating both the relatively rich and the relatively poor.

Their views, external appearances to the contrary, are shaped neither by genuine compassion and empathy, nor by the sincere desire to create anything like freedom. On the contrary, their views are shaped by their own internal necessity, which typically is the formation of a moral code–a meaning system, in my terms–in a condition of atheism, and moral pessimism if not outright nihilism. The “Nihilists” were in fact the literal ideological forebears of Lenin. I will be writing on that shortly.

The task Socialists set themselves, then, is primarily the acquisition of power over their fellow human beings. That is the primary goal. It is not wealth creation. It is not freedom creation. It is not even eradicating injustice, since their policies create far, far greater injustices than the worst abuses of Capitalism in its worst periods. One will not find people digging up their dead and eating them in any period of modern history, until one gets to Mao’s unnecessary famine.

Self evidently, one will find nowhere in Capitalism the systematic use of torture, murder, and deportation as political tools. There have been deaths, yes, and patent cruelties, but they disappeared 100 years ago or more. One has to look to modern nations like China to find their equal. And China, today, is far more cruel than we were even in the so-called Robber Baron era.

To the topic. Logically, if savings is the process of the democratization and generalization of the means of production and personal freedom, then it is the antithesis of the project of centralizing control of the means of production and generating autocratic control.

In my view, Social Security is an attack on savings. Prior to the Great Depression, people saved money. It was quite common, since savings was your safety line, your protection against the unknown. Now, if you can depend, instead, on the government, then you no longer need savings.

When it was first introduced, in my understanding, the program was intended primarily to furnish unemployment benefits. Many millions had no way of feeding, clothing, or housing themselves. In no small measure because of Communist agitators blaming Capitalism for their plight, revolution was in the air. One could, I suppose, call Huey Long the Obama of his day, with the difference that Huey was more honest, and a much, much more capable leader.

Now if you want to fully eradicate savings you need a two-pronged attack. You first need to convince people that whatever bad thing happens to them, Uncle Sam will be there to the rescue. This includes illness, unemployment, and old age.

Then you need to make credit easy, which is equivalent to pursuing inflationary policies. The first allows people to own, now, what they want (albeit at a price). The second disincents savings, since money held in a condition of inflation counts as a negative investment. It loses value.

Keynes was adamant we had to get off the gold standard. Why? Simple: it is much harder to inflate a currency backed by gold. I don’t think the hyperinflation of the 70’s would have been possible if Nixon had not taken us off the gold standard. I read some time ago that the Fed intentionally pursued a policy of increasing M1–which is basically money in circulation–throughout the 70’s. This was on their website.

In 1980, they got the permission of Congress to perform “open market operations” with respect to any security whatsoever. As I understand it, this was to help them “tame” the inflation they surely created.

Would one of necessity have to be conspiratorially minded to see this as at least possibly a policy that was pursued with clear eyes, and great deceit? I can see no way to explain the inflation of the 70’s without an increase in the money supply, and no way to explain an increase in the money supply without active Fed control.

I have said a number of times, that the Fed is an organization that only solves problems that it creates. No Fed: no problems.

I got off track there. Some people want to link the people who run the large banks with Fabian Socialism, or some other scheme to rule the world. It’s impossible to say, of course, what plans might have been hatched, but it is quite clear that greed is a constant in human history, and that where motive and opportunities exist in the same place, quite often immoral behaviors result.

This is Keynes term for the rule of all by an elite. It was to be undemocratic, since the people simply were not as clever as he and his, and did not know what was good for them. They possessed, to use an overtly Marxist word, “false consciousnes”, which is codespeak to say they had not yet been indoctrinated sufficiently as to be reliable.

Here is my own definition of Salariat: that class which makes rules for OTHER people. They retain another set for themselves. By that standard, Congress is already half there.

I see these constant debates on conservative websites on whether or not Islam is “fundamentally” capable of moderation. I read a piece tonight by David Solway, where he did his homework, and quoted a variety of sources on both sides of the issue.

Here is my take: we really don’t know what the people who profess an allegiance to Islam are capable of. Neither do they. Clearly, Muslims have coexisted more or less in peace with other faiths in many places for many years. Clearly, many of the nations that speak Arabic as their primary language do so as a result of conquest.

The question, to me, is “what should we do, now”? I want to get along, but not at the cost of my culture and country. I want peace, but am quite prepared to fight for our Liberal order.

My problem with the “debate”, such as it is, at the moment, is that people seem to want to reach some clear, stable, non-negotiable stance with respect to “Islam”, when in reality many, many people fall under that rubric, and we can’t with justice sit in judgement on them all. This is the tendency we ALL have that academics call “essentializing”.

Always, always, always, judgments have to be localized. We have to have specific policy questions in front of us. Solway, in a four page essay, is only truly useful in one paragraph, where he offers CONCRETE policy proposals:

These would include the shutting down of terror-preaching mosques (as well as the cancellation of the Cordoba project), the deportation of extremist imams, a ramped-up prosecution of phony Islamic “charities,” the stringent oversight of Wahhabi-inspired madrassas with a view to eliminating them altogether, the delicensing of Islamic organizations allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, tightened immigration policies, the prohibiting of shari’a law and finance, the close monitoring of Middle East Studies departments in our universities whose real mandate is not to teach but to proselytize and indoctrinate in favor of Islam, and an all out campaign to dry up the sources of Islamic funding in all areas of public and professional life.

In my own view, these are–considering the global context–reasonable proposals.

Bottom line: we don’t have to decide–nor can we with justice EVER decide–what sort of people “Muslims” are. The questions, always, are policy oriented. How do we protect American lives? How do we support what is good in the world, and starve what is bad?

Would I like to see a Muslim renaissance, in which they approach something like the universal values of the Enlightenment? Of course. We need to work to build up everything that is good and wholesome anywhere Muslims congregate. Will such efforts in the end matter? Only time will tell. We have to make the effort, in my view.

I am very fond of a line I saw in the Kentucky Derby Museum, and have quoted it often, but hopefully not so often as to be dull: “Mint juleps should never be made by novices, Yankees, and statisticians”.

Never count the odds bef0re the fight, if you are right. Do what is right, adjust as needed, and keep firing until you prevail or fall. That is a very simple life strategy, and one I embrace whole-heartedly.

I did some work today for a very large multinational company. I met the CEO, briefly. He’s netting well into six figures, and maybe 7 figures. This company’s headquarters is in another country. I got to thinking about this.

The people who work there are all capitalists, whose “capital” begins as labor, and can expand, through savings, into “excess” money, that can be invested. The people who own the place contribute information. All companies start as ideas. Ideas start in the heads of specific people. All new projects consist in information–which is to say ideas that are followed, developed, altered as needed, and which gradually enable corresponding material enactment, in the form of production lines, new versions of the product, etc, etc.

Economic development begins as an idea, as li, as an idea for a new form (see my previous post). It becomes embodied in chi, which here is both the physical means of production–the stuff–and the energy of the people running it, their labor. Logically, if development begins with ideas, then they are the source–the Fountainhead, if you’ll excuse me–of all material development.

The next conclusion, then, is that those systems which reward innovation and creativity will, in the end, be most wealthy.

Socialism, in this rendering, then, as a system for the subtraction of information, and the enfeeblement of personal imagination through the ubiquitous use and thread of the use of force to ensure compliance, is NECESSARILY a system which leads to poverty. Manifestly, this is what happens, so I’m not doing anything but stating the obvious, but I am trying to put it on a slightly more mathematical footing.

Goodness, in my rendering, is the effort to innovate on the level of personal identity, which itself is the result of perceptual capacity. Such innovations are in the direction of greater personal felicity, with less and less need for material support. Goodness is an expansion of li, with a corresponding decrease in the need for chi, which is to say all the economic goods we think will make us happy, and which generally don’t.

I had more to say, but it felt like a long day–even if maybe I’m just a wimp–so I’m going to call it a day with the blogging.

I was thinking today about this distinction, from classical Chinese philosophy. It layers nicely on to current models of reality.

Chi can be either energy or matter. Really, if we take E=MCSquared as accurate–and some very large explosions say it is accurate–then matter is a type of energy, and energy is a type of matter. What is “real”, within Einsteinian General Relativity theory, is the field within which they operate. Most people don’t grasp this point: that General Relativity is, in the end, a materialistic theory within which “God does not play dice”, or something close to that. Within General Relativity Theory we can, in principle, trace all causal lines forwards and backwards to the beginnings and end of Time. It is simply a much more sophisticated–and empirically useful–version of the billiard ball theories of the nineteenth century.

The problem with it, and it is a large problem, is that it posits that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Where previous theories related all motion to a presumed “ether”, Einstein related all motion to the speed of light. Empirically, though, information can and does travel faster than light, as demonstrated in the Aspect Experiment, and as proven earlier mathematically by John Bell.

Li is form, but it can also mean information, if we take morphological details as information, or what I tend to term “Quality”. What travels faster than light is not chi, but li.

This sets up the possibility of a metaphysics in which “form/li” molds chi, but has no objective existence. Yet matter is always in some form or other, if manifest. The only chi in which li is not present is the so-called Zero Point Field of quantum mechanics, which posits that every particle is simultaneously a wave, and that those waves can only go so low in amplitude. If we calculate the absolute minimum activity of matter in the universe, as I understand the issue, we determine that there is enough latent energy in one square meter of “empty” space to “boil all the oceans on Earth”, in Richard Feynman’s interesting and useful analogy. All quantum physicists accept the necessity of this math, but ignore it for all practical purposes. They put it in their equations, then zero it out again.

Let me offer two equations that are interesting to me: 1) E+i=MC2+i, where i is information; 2) Chi plus li=observable reality. In both cases, what I have added is the possibility of form. Framed another way, I have created a template for what we could term God, which is to say an informational substrate that underlies all of reality. I have turned Einsteins’ theory into what we might term a spiritual one.

This is, I think, how we can reconcile quantum physics and General Relativity. Both work exceedingly well in their domains, but are incompatible. The basic problem is that of the four basic forces in the universe, only three can be reconciled with one another. Gravity cannot. Einstein spent much of his life trying to do it.

Here is a far-out idea that may be nonsensical, but I will put it out there anyway: what if information serves as a sort of qualitative attractor? Form is information. Form is represented in the visible universe in matter/chi. What if “gravity” was expressed not as a result of chi, but li? What if li could be a sort of “mass”? What if “form”, understood in the abstract as having almost an existence on its own, carves out a section of space, “curving” it? What if light, as a type of information, is attracted to it?

I’m not entirely sure what I am saying myself. I have an excellent book by Einstein’s protege David Bohm which I need to read when I get time. Still, as I’ve said before, the road to good ideas is paved with bad ones.

The essence of the Fabian strategy is to avoid direct conflict, to avoid showing the world the actual goal, and forcing a decision. Fabius Maximus, the general, was able to prevent a decisive battle with Hannibal during the entire course of his generalship. His strategy, however, was not liked by those with a more aggressive nature. Following him were generals who raised a large army and went after Hannibal directly, with substantially all the soldiers in the Roman army.

They were destroyed in the battle of Cannae, which should have meant the end of the war, and the end of Rome. Hannibal surrounded them, and hacked his army to pieces from all sides.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton was quite obviously the Fabian candidate. She would have continued the slow slide into tyranny that leftists want, with ample defense from a very compliant media.

Instead, the Left decided that now was the time for a frontal attack, and chose instead a man with a patently radical background, which implies for those with any sense of history a bent towards autocracy.

They did this without full control of the media, and control of the ability of the people to self organize and communicate with one another. Had they implemented something like “equal time” first, and let it run for 10-20 years, what they would have achieved would have been a gradual shift from conservative view/liberal view to liberal view/Leftist view, with conservatives shut out of the national dialogue entirely.

As things stand, we conservatives (really, I call myself a Liberal) have all the maneuvering room, and they have none. They are trapped, and we can destroy their idiotic ideology without their having any chance of counterattack. Their counterattacks have always depended on deception, and the prior indoctrination of those they target, for the simple reason that their ideas are stupid, wicked, and work to the detriment of humankind whenever they are implemented.

Let us remember, though, that Rome rose again. We have the advantage of momentum, but let us never forget what was attemped here, nor that we have no way of knowing what is going on at this very moment in the darkness.

In her book “Mara and Dann”, Doris Lessing discusses different sorts of people that might be found in her imagined future. One group is called the Hennes. Their peculiar trait is that they all look EXACTLY alike, with no deviation, as if they were all the same person. Even the men and women look alike, except that the women have small breasts.

They are dull and slow, and creatures of habit. They eat because it is time to eat, and run because it is time to run, and never question anything about the reasons why they do what they do.

The “order” of their camp seemed a useful metaphor to me, and I will quote the book:

She was surprised at the apparent confusion of this camp. Then she saw there were blocks of order, unconnected with the others. A block of tents was neatly set out, with tidy paths between, but this was set at an angle to some rows of sheds, equally well arranged, and both were unrelated to an adjacent suburb with itself was composed of rows of little boxes. To get from one part to another of this camp . . .was difficult, for she found herself following the nearest of paths, hoping to achieve the next settlement, but it ended perhaps against the wall of a house, or simply stopped. Storehouses, water tanks, stood here and there, and there was a watchtower in the very center of the camp. . . when surely it should have been at its edge?

What this reminded me of is the intellectualism of the Academy. I had a brilliant professor in graduate school–who may well have taught Jerry Wright, since we got our Master’s in the same place–who was an avowed Marxist. I talked with him a bit about it, enough to get a list of recommended texts, which I still have. He suggested I start with Gramsci. Then if memory serves it was Marx’s essay on Feuerbach. I still have not read either.

The point here is that you can have a wonderfully coherent narrative, with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, you can have a ready countersalvo to all critics, and still be COMPLETELY WRONG.

If you never leave your little neighborhood, and content yourself with equating your conceptions of the wider world with reality, you can reach a point where your conclusions are so self evident, so obvious, that to question them is tantamount to confessing some combination of idiocy and venality.

OF COURSE the paths in my neighborhood are straight. Of course the houses are lined up neatly. It’s all there. Everything you need.

But try to move from that cozy world into practice, and everything falls apart like a wet cardboard wheelbarrow. It won’t hold anything. What happens with leftists at that point is they turn to violence.

Let’s supposed I asked George Bernard Shaw this question: Mr. Shaw, if, as you suggest, all income is equalized, and the State guarantees an income, from whence comes the motivation to work? His answer–and he gave it–was that everyone would be forced to work, and if they objected they would be shot.

But Mr. Shaw, if you are calling Capitalism a type of slavery in that some are compelled to work from economic necessity, how is it an improvement if they are compelled to work through fear of sudden death, and the sundry steps short of that, such as incarceration, and various forms of torture?

His answer: my system is necessarily a just one, since Capitalism is manifestly an unjust one. This conclusion is both necessary and sufficient for my case. Please stop talking now.

That is a path from an orderly neighborhood, running into the wall of a house in the next neighborhood.

As I keep saying, perception is movement. If you are locking yourself in a ghetto, you are missing some or all of the big picture. You are failing to understand, and in so doing confessing, frankly, that what you really want is in fact a prison.

Lessing, by the way, titled a series of essays “Prisons we choose to live inside”.

Food for thought, hopefully.

I think this is one of the most primal of all fears. If we posit that the two most basic existential questions are “why do anything at all–why suffer when we have an alternative”, and “what should be done”, then allowing the possibility of qualitative alteration to enter your consciousness is tantamount to an attack on your identity.

This is the root of dogmatism. Fear leads to the building of thick, high walls, moats, and defensive artillery. If you are afraid of the dark, if you are afraid of existing in a condition of the periodic confusion that necessarily attends perceptual growth, then you will stagnate, and never know it.

The point here is that you can go very fast and very far, on rails. Trains are efficient, since they can only go along very clearly specified paths. Fanatics are often good workers, since they don’t have to question–even for a moment–what they are doing. Yet anyone who doesn’t periodically ask big questions all their lives has stunted their growth thereby.

You have to be open to big changes, and that takes courage. Very few people possess this courage.