Moderates United

I went to a Lip Synching show put on by parents at my kids school tonight. With a couple notable exceptions, it was awful. It was hard to watch.

Yet, I support mediocrity that shows up. I think the point of art is recreating yourself through spontaneous expression AS WELL AS YOU CAN. It is dumb to expect everyone to possess talent. But if they express what talent they have as well as they can, and grow from the process, then that ritual act was worthwhile.

The Tibetans perform a ritual in which they carve things out of butter. After a time, they melt the butter, and incorporate it into their food. They also make sand mandalas, that are ceremonially destroyed in rivers.

Once this art is gone, what remains is the effect it had on the people who created it, and that can be quite seperate from what it looked like, while existing.

All worthwhile societies give each person in them a space and a time where attention is paid to them, and in which they can rise to the occasion. The point of liberty is enough space to grow.

As I view it, growth is inherently a creative act. Economies grow when inventors invent, marketers market, and entrepreneurs entrepren (couldn’t resist).

When people innovate, they in effect create new money, by creating new value. This fact is hidden by the parasitical nature of our financial system.

Think about this word, “growth”. If you ponder it, can you not call to mind an image of a tree growing? When a tree is a seed, it is small. Then cells are added, form is added, and this process is continued until something small is something large. Every single cell which forms that tree is not only created, but recreated for the duration of that tree’s life.

In my own terms, the strength of the adult tree is weaked by parasitical vines and molds, which exist on its strength, without adding anything of their own.

Can that tree be forced to grow in the winter? Only with heat. And even then, if the heat ever stops, it will be out of season, and will die.

The ebb and flow of our economic life is the result of the ebb and flow of money creation. If we fix our currency, then what we get is the economic equivalent of the Mediterrean, with long growing seasons, lots of sun, and very little winter.

What advocates of government intervention want to do is dump fertilizer–bullshit in this case–on the tree, to try and force it out of a natural cycle. They want the tree to pretend it’s summer when it is winter.

Above all, they want to arrogate to themselves not just control of the economy, but to impose on the rest of us the idea that only they know what to do. This despite never having run businesses, or even done ANYTHING practical with their lives, other than perhaps changing a tire once.

The fact is, all they can do is move around wealth that has already been created, and that has a finite lifespan. It is like saving the tree by cutting it down. You can consume it, but its life is at an end.

Nothing grows economies like confidence in the future and freedom. Nothing kills economies more than uncertainty, and excessive burdens in the forms of taxes and unnecessary regulation.

Think about it: who is in charge when the government is asleep? Who does the work? Everyone else. They forget this. Remember that when a leftist says “The People”, what they really mean is “me and mine”.

Thus when some hack says Republicans don’t “do” anything about the economy, they are betraying a fundamental disdain for, and misunderstanding of, the vast bulk of working Americans and business owners.

In toy news, Hasbro recently announced that Paul Krugman will be sponsoring a Magic Eightball for economic prognostication. After looking at the prototype, Republican spokesperson Mitch McConnell complained that no matter how you shook it, the answer always came up “spend more money.”

Democrats, however, were quite enthusiastic. According to Berkeley student Ima. B Thistlewhite, the results were “astounding”: “Every time I use it, it gets the right answer. It is almost spooky. In fact the only time it was wrong was when I asked it about Defense Department spending.”

Despite the controversy, a new Krugman action figure is being developed, with a pullstring which causes it to say “you’re not spending enough”, “spend more”, and “don’t worry about the deficits.”

Sales are expected to be brisk in California.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html?WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1110-L22&ei=5087&en=d1dd38e101e9a450&ex=1305003600&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1289574074-cA2ncPA3IhBKYtTq4zCMqg

Argument: Obama erred by not spending twice what he did, and indebting us twice what he did. Subtext: government action is necessary to create jobs, and that its job is to “do something”.

To this, he tries to sneak in the idea that Obama is “bank friendly”, but not as “bank friendly” as the Republicans. What should we take away? That Obama is actually a moderate, who has just been trying to get along, rather than a radical socialist whose patent distaste for all forms of private enterprise has had an enormous chilling effect on the optimism of those who actually risk their own money, rather than someone elses.

Recommendation: double down.

My response: read my piece, Keynes in a nutshell. I have been pondering a short addition, and will make it right after I click “post” here.

As I explored here, the official explanation of the collapse of WTC7, a 47 story building built according to modern building codes, is that it was the result of the combustion of office furnishings. It is not stated how the fires started, nor are any calculations offered on the difference between the heat needed to damage a steel I-beam treated with flame retardant, and what is possible if you built a bonfire of wood desks and books, which nobody claims happened.

The official account is simply untenable. This leads necessarily to the conclusion explosives were involved, and then necessarily to the conclusion that more people were involved in the plot than have been accounted for. Given how much we have sacrificed in Afghanistan–which war was a DIRECT outflow of the attacks–this is morally wrong.

Personally, I find it impossible to believe George W. Bush had any involvement in this, but the logic is inescapable that SOMEBODY, who has yet to be named, did. This constitutes a national security threat.

I wanted to further comment that given the foregoing thesis, the conclusion seems inescapable that the actual target for United 93 was WTC7. Here is the timeline:

Flight 11 takes off from Boston at 7:59 and crashes at 8:46 into WTC1.

Flight 77 takes off from Boston 8:14 and crashed at 9:03 into WTC2.

Flight 93 takes off from Newark–right across the river–at 8:42. Figuring 15 minutes to hijack it, this would have it crashing at about the same time as Flight 77. Bam, bam, bam.

In my view, the intent was to get coverage, get a lot of cameras, then blow all three buildings. They were supposed to go down together,one after the other.

Remember, too, that the Emergency command center for NYC was in WTC7, and that some high level officials in the Guiliani Administration said they heard explosions prior to either WTC going down. You can Google it, if you care. Their interviews are on YouTube.

What must have happened is that for whatever reason the United 93 crew screwed up. They likely just waited too long.

Their “support crew” must then have had to improvise, rigging some fires in WTC7, then blowing it, hoping that in all the confusion nobody would wonder too long or too hard how a 47 story modern skyscraper just drops like a rock when it hasn’t even been hit by a plane.

And that is what happened. People just don’t want to awaken to the horrible truth that buildings like that don’t just fall down because the curtains are on fire. As the official version commented, this would be the first time in history something like that has happened.

I’m not conspiratorially minded, in general, but it seems clear to me that somebody got away with a lot of murder on that day. May have been unidentified Al Quedists, or someone else. We may never know, but if we are to resolve this mystery, we have to first accept that that is what it is. The story we have been given is plainly wrong.

I’ve had a couple of days to digest this, and wanted to make some observations.

1) When you devalue a currency, it is like putting your nation on sale. How do you increase exports? Cut your price and your margin. This works both ways: for those with money, all tangible assets in this country get cheaper.

What should have happened is that when the Fed announced the devaluation of the currency was a run on the dollar. Problem is, inflation is always relative, isn’t it? And the Europeans have screwed up more royally than we have, and the Chinese have had their country on sale for some time.

Thus the dollar is strengthening, ironically. What those who came up with this policy, though, could have reasonably expected was an immediate discount. Which leads to

2) In concrete detail, we have to grasp what is actually happening. First, the quote from Keynes that should be burned into everyone’s mind, since it was quite honest, rare for him:

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 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.

Well, the number is now more than one in a million, is it not?

Who gets this money? How does this process work? The fact is, we can’t know for sure, since the Fed is–when it wants to be, and breaks no law in so doing–as secretive as the CIA, and less supervised.

But it seems safe to say that what will happen is that checks will be written to large member banks, say Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. In December, a $50 billion check will be written to each, in exchange for Treasury Bonds they hold, at what may or may not be (likely not) their actual market value. Self evidently, if they could sell them more dearly, they would. They haven’t, ergo. . .

Now, it is far from clear those bonds were not purchased initially with money ALSO provided by the Fed. My suspicion is that they were.

Remember, we are not even privy to who all the stockholders are in the system, much less who is given money for what. We do know that the people voting the money out are collecting it as well. They vote themselves money over an expensive breakfast, then figure out how to spend it over an expensive dinner, with cigars and brandy, and hookers and coke, according to their taste.

Anyway, they get these huge checks, and then, what? Well, the skies the limit. GE sits on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, by design the de facto head of the system. Why not buy a bunch of GE stock? Jeff’s a good guy, they got a lock on the lightbulb market, and tons of Federal dollars flowing to their green technologies. GE stock goes up, and now these banks have a larger position in GE. They now, to be clear, OWN a part of GE which they have purchased with fiat money.

And the price of GE stock is higher than it would have been, had the number of dollars in circulation remained constant. This is inflation in the stock market, which will affect the valuation of other stocks in unpredictable but real ways.

Maybe they buy a bank in China, if the Chinese will let them. They start making loans to Chinese corporations, and in so doing get an ownership claim on them.

Maybe they buy a diamond mine somewhere.

Maybe they buy a Brazilian energy company. Or Mexican. Or Nigerian.

Whatever they do, they now own things that they didn’t earn. The money was given them.

I want you to be clear on this. This is literally like me giving you a checkbook with effectively no limit, that you can use to write checks to anybody for anything. Anything. Do you think you could make money like that? Find some winners? And what if you don’t? What if your trip to the racetrack flops? Well, you just write more checks. This is what the Fed does for its core members.

And yet all of us suffer from this process, as Keynes pointed out. This is a formal system for wealth transfer and economic dislocation. Inflation can only happen when somebody gets something for nothing.

3) My suspicion is that the timing was intended to disrupt Republican momentum. If my thesis is correct, that our recovery is jobless since those with capital are scared of Obama and his policies, then we should have seen a collective sigh of relief in the form of hiring in the immediate aftermath of the election. Yet what has happened? A new doubt has been introduced, which will mute this effect considerably, lessening the ability of Republicans to point to the manifest connection of conservatism and economic dynamism and growth.

4) The effect of this money injection will be to keep interest rates on the debt artificially low. This will make the trainwreck we are heading towards less obvious. Currently, we are paying some $400 billion annually on our debt. Given fixed interest rates and our current annual deficits, that is expected to be some $600 billion annually by 2012.

But given our debt, rates should be rising. Given the risk of default over the long term, what we have to pay investors to get them to buy our bonds should be going up. Thus, absent this action, that $600 billion might have been $800 billion, or even a trillion.

Yet, we are still being taxed, through inflation. We will still, in effect, be paying that $800 billion, since the buying power of our currency has been debased. As Keynes noted, this form of taxation, of property confiscation is very subtle, and understood by very few. He himself understood it to perfection. He made a fortune on currency trading. He was a genius, just one committed an evil doctrine, that of Fabian Socialism.

5) It occurred to me this morning that when a debt is paid, that is deflationary, since money lent is inflationary only as long as it is out. This is an open thought I will have to develop further in some cigar smoke, but you can follow my logic in my piece on Money Creation.

Net: it is hard to know who these people really are, and what their real intentions are, but it is plainly obvious that getting and staying really, really rich is a key element.

As I have stated in other essays, it seems to me that the quest for power and the quest for righteousness really are the two primary forces in our political world. Leftism is just one particularly vicious iteration of an age-old desire to rule the world. America is the best-run experiment in world history of a nation based on sincerely held ideals. We have many enemies in our midst, but we can still prevail, in my view.

It all starts with awareness. Share this link if it made sense to you. Copy it and call it your own. Restate it in your own words. Modify it to correct what you see as my mistakes. Above all, though, keep the spirit of wanting the truth and understanding foremost in your mind, and act on it by doing what you can to educate everyone around you.

My own metaphysics posit that the good go to heaven, no matter their metaphysics, and the evil to hell of some sort.

As I visualize it, hell is a version of the monkey trap. In this trap, used throughout Asia, in my understanding, something desirable to the monkey is placed at the bottom of a bottle, which itself is tied to the ground. The opening to the bottle is big enough to let through an open hand, but not a fist.

The monkey grabs the whatever–for stereotype’s sake lets say a banana–and refuses to let go. Since it won’t let go, it is easily captured.

As I define it, this is the sort of desire that is damaging.

Hell, then, is a repeated happening that arises out of the unresolved compulsions of the person there. What I want to emphasize is that the goal is NOT punishment, but learning. Yet to the precise extent that person refuses, over and over, learning, the system IS punishment.

Hitler: he finds himself as a young boy–say 11–in a Yeshiva School. Whenever he reads the Torah, it is upside down, and backwards. They give him tests, and he flunks every one. Then he gets held back.

The next year, the same thing happens. This goes on for 1,000 years at least.

In his real life, he never got a high school diploma. How much more traumatic to be held up in a Yeshiva?

Jean Paul Sartre. I really don’t like this guy, since he was a piece of shit. He was a Stalinist long after it was known what that meant, a misogynist, philanderer, and Speed Freak. Given what he thought was his genius, I see him in a classroom, too. He is expected to listen, essentially forever, to a dull, unoriginal teacher, who misunderstands everything he said. Yet he can’t speak, without being punished. This goes on for a 1,000 years.

Stalin I see ice-fishing. He catches something, and it is an enormous fish which swallows him whole, then shits him out. He emerges to cold water, and an inability to breathe. He gets to the surface, then the shore. Once there, he has no options but to put his line in again. Then he gets swallowed again, and it starts over.

Mao is pursued everywhere by a horde of rats. No matter where he goes, or where he tried to sleep, a large group of rats follows him. He can’t rest. He can’t stay in one place. Always he is in flight from the rats. This lasts for 10,000 years.

Pol Pot. I actually find it easier to sympathize with Hitler than this piece of shit. Hitler had his people torture people for information. The National Socialists killed because they, in their idiocy, thought it scientifically necessary.

Pol Pot set up many torture chambers, where people were put through a very systematic pain regimen prior to being shot and their bodies dumped wherever happened to be convenient.

Him, I see hanging upside down from a rope, and people beating his head with bats. This is the most unpleasant vision I’ve had, but if you really get down to it, had Hitler killed proportionately as many people as Pot, then it would have been in the 20-30 million range AT LEAST.

Anyway, I was drinking my nightly Truth Serum, and this is what occurred to me.

Another installment in my semi-occasional Bad Poet’s Society series.

My mirror died today.
Or maybe yesterday: I can’t be sure.

Once I was there;
now I am gone.

The memory of my always hungry
always keen eyes
Is already fading.

Something is missing, but I
can’t see what. My self?

Where was I before? Once I lived among the
living.
Now I walk among the living, dead.

I have fallen up: not into an abyss, but
onto a clouded mountaintop

Where I see no forms or shapes.

Darkness, that is my element.

Yet darkness has no mirrors,
and I miss myself already.

The City on the Hill, a two act drama.

Act One.

In the year of our Lord 2009 it was decreed that in order to foster prosperity and economic recovery, a city would be built on a hill, composed of federal employees paid to sit and surf YouTube and Facebook all day. It was decreed that they be paid one third more than private sector people employed to do largely the same thing, since such money would stimulate the economy.

The city was built, and lo and behold private businesses soon surrounded it. Movie theaters were built; strip malls were built; restaurants–especially sushi bars–were built. Soon enough, our 5,000 internet surfers had created 10,000 private sector jobs.

Everything was well. Paul Krugman flipped off Friedrich Hayek, and said “Screw you, buddy, we rule”.

Act Two

Then the money ran out. All the Federal employees were let go, and all the businesses that depended on them folded. Everyone moved away and never came back. Paul Krugman was seen wringing his hands, wandering off into the sunset, muttering “if only we had spent more money”.

The End.