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This is the term I think I like best to describe what I try to do. I don’t like philosopher or intellectual. Those words conjure in my head a person sitting in a corner, watching static images, and trying to connect them in static ways. What is needed is a sense of dynamism, of motion, added to thoughts, such that they are seen as cascades of ever-shifting but approximately organized flows of water.

At one point I considered coining a word where the Greek word for “approximate” was substituted in the middle of philosopher, such that the result meant “lover of approximate truth/wisdom”, but that is ungainly.

It is the case that most large, complex problems require the use of abstraction. This is necessary in our modern society. And it is necessary that we have people who do it well: hence “thought worker”, who is someone who, at the end of the day, can point to bridges built, to concrete plans of action which can then be implemented or modified as needed.

Are there Chinese agents trying to steal the secrets of our government at this moment? Of course. Are they trying to steal the secrets of our industry? Of course. We know this.

But must we assume that the stupidity of our current crop of kids is part of a grander designe? Clearly, there are many Marxists at our universities, since none of those people have ever had to accomplish any large concrete task in their lives. At least many of the Communists of the 50’s and 60’s had some sort of military service, like Obama’s grandfather.

Systems in motion are defined by their principles. Various principles which simply evolve on their own can have enormously disruptive effects. Thus, the principle of No-God, itself, has a disruptive effect on all aspects of society, in that it leads to feelings of meaninglessness, helplessness, alienation, depression, and–to the point here–avoidance. You develop this mechanism by which unpleasant thoughts are avoided, and one way of doing this is to develop this reflexive (think rubber hammer and knee) thought pattern which systematically avoids the conclusions you drew before.

In many respects, I think much of the Left, for over the last century, can be defined, first and foremost, as a mental “technology” meant to avoid the despair of meaninglessness, itself caused by rejecting everything which could not be proven, and which appearted contingent–which is to say all religion and all human culture.

The Nihilists, for example, did not need to celebrate Christmas. They recognized the calendar was contingent, and an artifact of the Church and a Base-12 numbering system. You don’t have to say thank you, and you don’t have to pray. You don’t have to get up early and work all day. You can lie around, and sponge off of others (note the “nihilists”–the name given them by their opponents–were basically hippies without the positive vibe).

This sort of thing is the result of crappy thinking. Religion taught us that codes of behavior were somehow encoded in the cosmos, that there is a natural social pecking order, some meant to be in control, some to feed them. Obviously, this was a lie. Yet, it does not follow from this that there are no rules that can be seen in human social systems, that there is no approximate cause and effect. Plainly, courtesy yields dividends, as does hard work, and having SOME type of calendar. The details don’t matter.

The ideas of God, too, as they have arisen around the world yield dividends as well. I think it can be shown prayer works, that we survive physical death, and that a limitless source of energy and order underlies our physical universe.

All of these things start with perception though. You can never cease moving perceptually.

A fly flew in the window of my car the other day. It took it about two minutes of bumping and failure, but it eventually found the other open window, and escaped. A nihilist is a fly who gets trapped, sits on the seat trying to think his or her way out, and dies of hunger.

It is manifestly the case that many, many secret conspiracies have been hatched and brought to fruition. Think of the spies we caught during the Cold War; or the secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany to carve up Poland; or the assassination of Lincoln, where attempts were also made on the lives of the Vice President and the Secretary of War the same night. If you study history long enough, it becomes clear that at times organized efforts are made in secrecy to accomplish results which appear, but the roots of which remain hidden.

Arguably, the creation of the Federal Reserve could be called a conspiracy. It was done in silence, and a PR campaign was launched in which both sides of the debate were stage managed carefully, such that virtually everyone involved was either a player, or was tricked.

At the same time, in all types of thinking, it is important to stop where you need to stop, to not go too far. One must always remain agnostic with respect to things you simply don’t know, and have no realistic means of knowing.

All living systems are in constant motion. Given this, it is important to remember that, say, the Masons may have played a prominent role in our Revolution (not unreasonably supposition, given that George Washington and Ben Franklin were both Masons), but then faded in importance. A group can be prominent in one century, and fade in another. Or the people in a group may evolve their goals. Or they may be fractured and in internal conflict, with one faction leaning one way, and another a different way. They can change their minds completely. Key leaders may die. They may simply lose interest.

I say this since many people tend to have this–in my view naive–view that there is some sort of “them” out there. What I personally think happens is that interests– for some period of time, to some greater or lesser extent–can become shared. What I have called Inflationists want to make more and more money off of money they create. Socialists want to spend money they don’t have. Industrialists want access to easy money, since if they can grow faster than inflation, they still win.

The way to counter conspiracies, however one may frame them, is simply to remove the incentives to cheat, and where possible the means.

The money facing anyone who would want to bring down the Federal Reserve is astronomical, but I choose to believe, for example, that not all beneficiaries of this process are necessarily interested in our national demise. They are just greedy, and indifferent to the suffering their greed causes others. But need this remain that way forever? Can one not hope that among the ranks of the Inflationists there might still remain genuine patriots, or decent human beings, who have hitherto viewed the priviledges their cartel offers them as the spoils of superior intelligence?

I hope so. No system can endure that is filled with bad human beings, and any system which is filled with good ones can evolve in positive directions. The two are always mixed in different ratios, but one can hope ours has not devolved too far. I may of course be wrong, but there is no need to infer any indomitable or uninfluencable force out there. People are people. Some of them are sons of bitches, but not all of them.

I was thinking about this today while working out: Marxists foresee a period of time in which the proletarians (by which we should understand “non-intellectual”) will need to be ruled by their betters, the so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat. After that, in some magical fashion, a workers utopia will evolve.

Yet, how will this happen? What Marx is describing, implicitly, is a self organizing system, where the “workers” get together and create something beautiful, noble and lasting. Yet, the presupposition of the self organizing system is ordered motion in each of the parts. The individuals in the collective need, each, to be operating as sentient agents, and the whole goal of dictatorship is to STRIP them of initiative and the capacity for independent thought.

Thus, the means and purportedly desired result are at loggerheads. Marx never thought it through; nor do his followers, who as intellectuals themselves tend to view all ideas as equal, since they can be thought. People who have actually accomplished something, though–say building a bridge–understand that ideas are NOT all equal, that there are many wrong ways to do things, and that failing to plan is planning to fail. Obviously, failure is the legacy of all utopians to date, and this was both predictable and preventable.

I think the reason that Libertarians failed to see–assuming I am right, of course–that a precisely defined amount of money is desirable is that they want as little government as possible. Yet, too little means chaos. If we allow money to expand and contract, then real purchasing power likewise goes back and forth in ways that can be manipulated.

If we posit, as I did in a previous post, that what is desirable is NO CHANGE in the money supply, and MUCH CHANGE in the supply of material goods, then that is a function of the government.

Let us call the opposing poles Capitalism and Inflationism, where inflation is a means of wealth redistribution (perhaps, it is the outcome, but the net effect is the same, so it doesn’t matter).

What is the means to fix this problem? We abolish the Fed–which prints all our money–what then? Libertarians think that a market will evolve for money, where everything gets sorted out. I see no value in this, since it does not fix, formally and finally, the underlying problem of fluctuating money supplies.

My proposal is that each State print its own currency. You take any dollars you have now, and exchange them for new ones on a certain date. Any money in your bank account automatically transitions. You transition from Federal Reserve Notes, to, say, Texas Reserve Notes.

We need gold in vaults. Who pays for it? This is the question I am having trouble with. Banks? And what is the proper role of banking? Right now, they in effect loan “on margin”. They loan out money, in the expectation that all the depositors will never demand their money at once. Part of the role, now, for the Federal Reserve is to make short term loans so that their books are balanced at the end of each day. Who does that in the future? The States? Does that not replicate on a smaller scale the same problem?

One general statement that can be made is that banks, like any other business, need to be free to stand or fall as businesses. I am not opposed to States providing something like the FDIC to prevent panics, but perhaps we pass laws that state that the Board of Directors and CEO of any firm that uses that money go to jail for 5 years. We get the protection, but we disincent risk taking with other peoples money.

I’m still working all this out. You can see my method in these blog posts. I just take a thought, ponder it, chew it, move it around, stretch it, bounce it, throw it in the air, drop it in water, and somehow through the process it expands, and gets more clear. I use logic to jump from stone to stone where I can, and dream the big perceptions. It usually seems to work out, I think. Unless I am being stupid, which one must always remember is a real possibility.

To save our democracy–perhaps, to RECREATE our Republic as a representational democracy–these are the sorts of steps needed:

–Eradicate the Federal Reserve, and go back to a gold standard. What I believe would be best is if each State issued its own currency, based on physical gold reserves, but that part is still evolving.

–Eradicate Social Security completely, stop taking out taxes, and let people provide for their own retirements. I would anticipate this will mean in part locally funded, charitable homes for the elderly, for those who would otherwise go hungry.

–End Medicare. Let the States choose how to provide the elderly with medical care. My vote would be to create a tax incentive for private insurance companies to add a rider to all healthcare policies that if you, in effect, preinvest in your old age by paying some additional amount, that you will never be cancelled.

–Make Medicaid a fully State run program, and let the individual States decide how much they want to provide.

–Self evidently, reverse Obamacare, which will add to costs, increase the role of government, and do NOTHING–NOTHING–to improve our health as a nation. It will in fact DECREASE access to healthcare.

–Downsize our military considerably. We have now, and have had for many years, the ability to project force anywhere in the world within an hour, in the form of ballistic nuclear missiles. We need, simply, to announce that any nation from which terror attacks originate, will be help accountable. Period. No excuses. Then draw down our troops. Keep the Marines as a rapid response force, and limit the Navy to say a 1,000 mile perimeter of the US. Continue developing cutting edge technology, so that the Air Force always has the best stuff, and obviously keep the Coast Guard active. Most of the Army can be eliminated. We can leave Korea. If the North invades, it disappears in a pile of radioactive ash.

–Build a fence with Mexico. Increase the penalties for being here illegally considerably. Maybe we copy their policy of a two year jail term. Or we allow first time offenders to simply be deported, and second time offenders get FOUR years.

–Pay off our debt, then reduce Federal taxes considerably.

–We need to regain the proper balance of power between the States and the Federal Government. The principle means of disrupting that balance has been the Supreme Court. What we need is a Constitutional Amendment by means of which patently unConstitutional rulings by the Court, such as Roe v. Wade, can overturned.

To be clear, CONGRESS did not ban abortion. That was not a right granted to it by the Constitution. How much less, then, was that right granted to judges for life, who are appointed?

–We need to eradicate most other Federal departments as well, including Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development (including, obviously, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who have done so much damage). We need a Treasury Department, a State Department, and a Department of Defense.

At some point, I will run the numbers. I suspect that if we do all of this that we can pay our bills off, restore our democracy, and better enjoy the intended fruits of liberty.

Until then, we need to accept that we will undergo a period of relative poverty. Our system, to some extent, is going to crash. Our bills are coming due. Elderly parents will live with their children; children will stay at home for long periods of time. Homes will be built no one lives in, and our assumption that we can have anything we want any time will come to an end. We will have to learn to satisfy ourselves with simpler things, and that is not such a bad outcome.

Net, net: there is no reason to believe we cannot survive and, in the end, prevail against the problems we face. Step one, though, is to stop digging the hole. That will quite literally take an act of Congress.

In a shooting war, people who make things that go bang make profits. This makes some people think that the people who make things that go bang are behind our wars. It’s hard to say if this has any merit, but it seems clear that is not the full story. Nothing in life is that simple.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that there is a group of people–the same people, the money people we normally don’t think about–who make money in so-called Wars on Poverty. In both cases, money is borrowed. We pay interest on money.

Right now, some $400 billion is siphoned out of our pool of wealth annually, in the form of interest on our debt. That exceeds the amount we spent annually at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This happens year in, year out.

As long as money is being borrowed, the richest people out there will continue to get richer. Boeing and Halliburton are small fry, and the Left in particular needs to figure that out.

On that note, we should think of most socialists as sentimentalists given credit cards to help save the world. That is literally the case with most of them. If you like, you can add “war-mongers” given the same credit cards to go fight the enemies of democracy.

Both of them are bankrupting us.

The dangers we face are Mercantilism–which is the protection of private profit by the police power of the State–and Socialism, which is a moral abyss in which a tyrannical central government seeks to eliminate all wealth and difference in the name of “justice”.

At times, it seems, they pursue one another. Why else do Mercantilists–Wall Street bankers, to be clear, who had a money trust passed into law in 1913–support people like Barack Obama? In the final analysis, as long as they have the money, they call the shots, so it doesn’t really matter who is in power. Yet, for the socialists, the mercantilists pay for their projects. They get people addicted to the crack of easy money, then get them to sell their souls for support. The socialists think they are helping the country, so they go along.

The Golden Rule of this Earth is who has the gold, makes the rules. One can buy comfort for free, in the short run, just as Esau peddled away his birthright for some porridge. Yet, when you go looking for what you had, it will be gone.

One must pass through this world with eyes open. It does no good to hide from evil: it will find you.

From great confusions, great clarities.

From great ignorance, deep knowledge.

From great clarity, great confusion.

From deep knowledge, great ignorance.

I’m still working on my Money piece, after which I will rewrite my Social Security piece (which I have decided is incoherent because it got me distracted by money), but here is my core conclusion:

Capitalism and Inflation are polar opposites. From this it follows that Capitalism and fiat money are polar opposites, and from that that the Federal Reserve is anti-capitalist. To the extent that economic freedom is both a prerequisite for and sign of political freedom, and to the extent economic freedom depends upon free markets of good, the Federal Reserve is therefore also anti-liberty.

Where Capitalism is the best system for the production of material goods ever developed, inflation is nothing more nor less than the production of money. No one wants money: they want what money will buy. Thus, the production of money is completely useless. We can, I think, posit that the creation of a fixed amount of money, once, is sufficient for any economy. What will vary thereafter is not the amount of money, but what that money will buy.

Here is my train of thought: posit a dollar bill on one side of the table, and a teacup on the other. The dollar represents all the money in existence, and the teacup all the physical wealth in existence. If I add a dollar through fiat money, I have created purchasing power for myself–I now own half the teacup–and diluted by half the purchasing power of the person who had the other dollar. This is what inflation does.

The countervailing operation is starting with the same dollar and teacup, and adding another teacup, so that with the same dollar I can now buy more. What one would expect with all the productivity gains in the last 100 years is that we could work less and own more. If our money had not been diluted through inflation (which remember equals wealth transfer) we COULD be working 20 hours a week and paying our way. As it is, we owe our souls to the company store.

To be clear, the value of money cannot go down unless there is competition for it, and competition can ONLY be added if more money is added. We expect competition to lower the price of goods and services, but fail to realize that the same thing happens with money. Since the money created by our Central Bank cost nothing, however, and since it is now worth something, that is a wealth transfer. With no fiat money, there would be no inflation, as I understand the issue. Added inventories, and added salaries will not. You can’t add to a salary without added money. What happens in conditions of stable money is production inflates, which is the primary mechanism of shared, general wealth. This is the POINT of Capitalism, which presumes Capital is in fact real money.

Thus we have three potential conditions: inventories inflate while money remains constant; money inflates while inventories remain constant; or both inflate, and people fail to see the trick, since goods and services are in fact increasing while the money supply likewise increases.

As a matter of record, in my understanding, prices did in fact drop in the 19th Century, such that what cost $1 in 1800 cost something like 50 cents in 1900. This is what you would expect with a stable currency.

Once the Federal Reserve–which enabled Big Money and Big Government–came into existence, the trend reversed, such that it would take $20 today to buy what cost $1 then. Imagine you could take the money you make today, have it be worth what it is today, and simply multiply it by 20. Unless I have badly misunderstood something, that is the real wealth you would possess. All of us could live well on what we make, and wouldn’t hesitate to share charitably.

The Central Bank of the United States made this impossible–again, unless I have badly misunderstood something.

Clearly, we need to abolish the Fed, but we need something to take its place. I am still working on that, but provisionally like my idea of 50 State currencies backed by gold. How to hold it–we don’t want State-run central banks either–is what I am trying to figure out.