Moderates United

One: buying gold is short selling the dollar. There is no other way to look at it, in my view. Had you bought a ton of gold in 1812, you would have lost a third of your money in the last two centuries. Had you put it in the stock market, you would have realized at least a tenfold increase in constant dollars, and likely much more.

These rough stats are from Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics”, which is excellent in everything but his treatment of the Fed. He understands it, and fractional reserve banking, but does not connect the dots. This is a persistent failure across the board with all economists not willing to endure being called cranks.

Two: when we were on the fractional reserve gold standard, our government bought the gold, did it not? We the People bought the gold, either through the allocation of taxes, or through the Federal Reserve creating money for the purpose, and hence taxing us indirectly through inflation.

This gold, then, belongs to Us. When is some Senator or other elected official going to have the balls to ask what happened to it? Nixon just ended the tenuous gold standard we have been on since Bretton Woods, but did not speak as to what was going to be done with the gold.

Why can’t we sell it on the open market to defray our debts? This is literally a trillion dollar question. Who has the balls to ask it besides me?

If we start down this path, I think everyone knows a stinking can of worms will get opened, but it is one that NEEDS to get opened.

When we see that Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street banks are donating to both the Romney and Obama campaigns, what we need to read is that the FED is donating to these campaigns.

Most people do not understand that the Fed is a private corporation, whose stocks are (or were: we have no way of knowing) sold on an invitation basis only to banks on an Approved list. It is a corporation that operates to the benefit of the shareholders, which is to say the banks comprising it.

The exact membership is secret. Even though the Fed controls our money supply, and thus the value of our money, and the value of our work and production, we know next to nothing about it. This is farcical.

What is clear, though, is that they are perfectly fine with either Obama or Romney. They are also, therefore, with the United States continuing to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars every month. After all, they are the ones doing much of the loaning, generally with created money.

As I think about it, when you create money, if you loan it to banks, it is inflationary. This because the banks loan out 90% of it, then 81% of it, and so on. If you want to make big money without creating inflation, you need some entity that can suck it up and use it. That entity is the United States Government.

Effectively, then, money is being transferred from the taxpayer, via the Fed, to the government, in the form of eventual, if mild, inflation, and the member banks of the Fed are making large amounts of money on this process.

I may be in error on this, but I suspect the reality is close to this.

More generally, I would like to offer the definition of the Fed as: a private corporation consisting of large banks, which is operated by and for the benefit of the banks, and whose principle activity is transferring wealth from American citizens to itself on an as-needed basis.

Think about this with me. When the Fed uses its Open Market buying power to create money, it adds to the money supply. This is inflationary, and thus constitutes a wealth transfer. When it uses the Discount Window to create money, it underwrites the process of fractional reserve banking, which itself is inflationary, and thus constitutes wealth transfer.

It is a Goebbelsian triumph of these nearly infinitely rich banks that they have kept up this fraud for nearly 100 years. All of us are the poorer for it.

It is stupid to blame Obama for today’s gas prices. It will, however, be unavoidable blaming him for prices once we reach a point where the Keystone pipeline–which is entirely funded by private enterprise–would have been built.

Most people have short memories. I don’t.

Edit: as I note on the side there, I reserve the right to challenge and change my own opinions. As I saw noted elsewhere, Obama has in fact put a stop to all domestic oil exploration. This cannot but have had an effect on oil production, and hence supply, and hence price.

Frankly, if the entirety of Alaska fell into the ocean tomorrow, I would spend the rest of my life in ignorance of this fact, outside of news reports. I don’t care about the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. It is a blizzard blasted, end of the world nothing-land, which we can and should use to ease oil prices.

As far as memory, apparently I forgot what I forgot. I need to try to remember that this happens.

It seems to me that if no major member of our political establishment is willing to address our out of control spending in a substantive–or even meaningful–way, that Ron Paul ought to give serious thought to a third party bid.

Logistically, of course, you lose the support of a party apparatus with long experience. Regretably, though, that experience is not in the political expression of principle, but rather in getting people elected who have a certain letter next to their name, and about whom we can infer little else.

The history of third party bids is not good. Perot, arguably, gave Clinton the Presidency, as Teddy Roosevelt certainly gave Wilson the presidency (only one Democrat having been elected otherwise since Abraham Lincoln, the Democrats having been blamed for the Civil War, which was of course a valid claim).

Yet, the history of financial disasters is not one of gradual declines from top to bottom. Rather, a tipping point is reached in which an apparently steady state, stable situation, suddenly tips over. Other than the people who consciously cause such events, no one can predict when they may happen. What we can certainly say is “WE ARE VULNERABLE”. We have points in which attack is possible, and thus at some point likely.

Only Ron Paul has the integrity to acknowledge the fact that we cannot continue to borrow trillions a year, and that increases in taxes do nothing but validate the enormous expansion of our government that has happened under Bush and Obama. We spend $2 trillion a year in Clinton’s last year. Obama this year wants to spend some $3.5 trillion. This is not a problem of undertaxation, but rather vastly excessive spending.

There is no correllation between GDP and government. The second need not expand pari passu with the first. It is always a false correllation when people try to explain away spending as a percentage of GDP. The fact of the matter is that every time the government grows, our freedoms shrink. This is inevitable, since all the bureaucrats hired with our money have to find something to do, or they are out of cushy jobs with fantastic benefits.

In my view, it would be a huge mistake for him to run as a Libertarian. Most people–which I will here define as me, with the perhaps overly presumptive assumption that this belief is shared widely–view Libertarians as either hippies upset that marijuana is illegal, or Ayn Rand zealots who have read Atlas Shrugged ten times and memorized large sections of the dialogue.

Something like the “Save America” Party, or Fiscal Sanity Party, or something on those lines would be good. It would be interesting to see that if he brought out a sizable following, if he would be invited to debates. I suspect not, but TV is not the only medium for the communication of information.

It really does seem to me we are being asked to choose the pace of our failure, and ignored entirely as to whether or not that is the outcome we want. Our problems are solvable and preventable. That so few are working with integrity to protect us does nothing to change this obvious fact.

When I saw Putin crying when he won, the only thing I could think of was Sally Fields also crying, and saying “you like me” in her Oscar acceptance speech.

Look at this man, who misses no chance to show the world how wonderful he is. He is in my view a clinical narcissist. He is someone who quite literally lacks the emotional ability to differentiate his own well being from that of the country as a whole. He assumes that what is good for him, what makes him feel good, powerful, whole, must perforce be good for Russia.

This basic dynamic, I increasingly believe, is ubiquitous in our public sphere. Lenin was a narcissist, as were Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot. FDR was, as was Kennedy, and as likely is Bill Clinton, and categorically beyond any possibility of doubt Barack Obama.

Such people seek power because they need attention, or what some psychologists call “narcissistic supply”.

Last night I dreamed of meeting Oprah. She said “glad to meet you”, and I responded “glad to meet you also”. She said “you don’t mean that”, which was true, as I am not a fan, but I responded honestly “that is half true”, but that was not good enough for her, and she showed me the door.

She is not the sort of person who can suffer half acceptance. If you are not fully in the thrall of admiration for her, she doesn’t want you around. She needs to be “loved”–I put it into quotation marks, for the reason that narcissists, lacking a self, are not able to receive or grant actual love–just as does Putin. In Putin’s case, being a man, being feared is sufficient, but I suspect he wants to admired as well for his virtue, good looks, and just general awesomeness he is quite willing to stage manage in order to improve. Does anyone seriously think he just happened to find an ancient urn while scuba diving? Of course not. Many of his photos are probably improved or even created digitally.

Does Putin feel an actual need to improve his nation, or Oprah to improve human lives? Yes, to the extent it makes THEM look good, and gets them more narcissitic supply. People miss the point that you can do actual good works for the wrong reasons. They also miss the point that if actual good works are not the goal, then wide deviations between rhetoric and reality are not just possible, but virtually inevitable.

Leftism is tailor made for narcissists, since it is big on high minded rhetoric, and indifferent to actual outcomes. They don’t care what happens as a result of their policies, since because they are perfect, whatever they do must be perfect, and anyone who says otherwise is either a liar and/or an enemy. Since “the people” chose them, then their enemies are the enemies of the people. If “the people” oppose them, then they obviously oppose them in error, meaning that someone out there–Trotskyites, Capitalist running dogs, the Koch brothers–must have gotten to them and corrupted their minds.

This basic concept, linking narcissism with political aspirations, governing style, and overall worldview, is an interesting one with much potential. I have seen the word megalomania used, but most narcissists do not think big enough for us to want to use that word. It is hard to think of Oprah as a megalomaniac, even if the term is appropriate, but not as someone who is self involved to such a high degree that she manifests ample signs of clinical narcissism.

I have long felt that conventional psychotherapies are between barely useful and harmful. The problem, as I see it, is that people focus on discussing emotions, rather than processing emotions. You can discuss the feeling you had when your mother or father did x, y, or z to you, and what you felt, until it’s your turn to die, and increase your emotional well being little or at all.

Everything you have done and felt is encoded in your body, both in your “static” posture (there of course is no such thing, which is why Moshe Feldenkrais invented the work “acture”), and in your decision making and sentimentation (if that is not a word, well now it is) throughout the day; in your movement, in other words.

Logically, if the problem is encoded somatically, there is where the solution arises, and no conventional psychotherapeutic schools incorporate it, other than in the form of Autogenics, which to my mind is missing some key components.

I will have more to say, but an analogy I would draw to close this post is in the use of lacrosse balls to soften hardened, unresponsive muscle tissues. You lay on them and consciously seek out areas of pain, then FOCUS on those. The end result is greater responsiveness, and a DECREASE in pain.

If I were a member of the power elite, I would be putting big money on Rick Santorum right now. It’s a can’t lose proposition. If he fails in the General Election, as appears overwhelmingly likely, you get Obama again, who is deep in their pockets, and more or less reliable, provided one can ignore his lack of intelligence (he probably genuinely thinks he won the election on his merits).

But if Santorum by some miracle wins, his mandate will revolve around social issues, which are highly energizing for many conservatives, and which have NOTHING to do with addressing the on-going attacks on our liberties–particularly the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights–and which ignore entirely the increasing consolidation of power and money (related, obviously) in fewer and fewer hands.

Since he will make no cuts in spending, the Fabian “miracle” will continue to progress apace, and he will be irrelevent to the continued implementation of a global system of government. He is no conservative: this is obvious. He’s a Catholic school boy whose moment may well have come as a result of conscious manipulation of the political process. If one is unwilling to grant that, it is abundantly clear that he has made the most of opportunities handed him with peculiarly auspicious timing.

Look around you. Look at your freeways, your Taco Bells, your post office, your grocery store. Look at the choices on your cable television, the gun in your closet, the freedom to pick up and move any time you want, to marry who you want, to raise your children as you choose. Ponder upon the fact that, today, you can go anywhere and do anything within reason you like.

All of this is perishable. None of it will endure forever. This is a historically immutable fact. Forget it at your peril.

Here is a simple idea which is guaranteed to work: people who start companies pay no corporate taxes for their first two years. They pay income tax on their personal earnings, as of course do their employees, but the organization itself pays nothing.

The more companies that get started, the more jobs get created, and the more taxes get paid. This is simple enough. It is complicated by the fact that most scum sucking bureaucrats are unintelligent, unimaginative cowards who simply cannot grasp the balls needed to plunge your savings into a risky venture.

I will add that government bureaucracies are literally the mirror image of productive private ventures. Where private ventures can only grow by creating added benefit for society, bureaucracies grow precisely by expanding the domain of their control, and by sucking money out of the private sector in so doing. They exist at the expense of the actually productive members of society. Ayn Rand had that part right enough.

This should be clear, but I have no desire to make money from any of my writing. Scratch that: of course I want to make money. Everybody wants more money.

HOWEVER, it also pleases me to think that people might appropriate some of my ideas into their own work, and push it out into the world that way. Effectively, if I let people “steal” my ideas, they get out more efficiently. Therefore, I renounce all rights to anything I’ve published on the internet.

It would actually make me happy to see something literally cut and pasted from my website in some philosophical magazine, or political website, or wherever. I see traces of such, I think, already, but can’t remember if I have posted on this, and wanted to make my intent, and the legal status from my perspective of my work, completely clear.