Shades of The Informer. We admit this one has us completely
baffled. An Irish student who was in the
United States legally on a student visa had her visa revoked and was told (in effect) to “get out of Dodge” by mid-June.
This was after she was turned in to
U.S. authorities . . . by a group funded by the Irish government established to
help Irish immigrants.
She would have been better treated had she been an illegal
immigrant working illegally instead of engaging in a technical violation of her
visa to forestall becoming a public charge.
I hope that the group that informed on her, the Boston-based “Irish
International Immigrant Center,” got whatever reward had been offered for the
apprehension of such miscreants. It used
to be £5 for a priest or a wolf.
Of course, if the student had a Capital Homestead Account
generating enough income for her so that she didn’t have to violate her visa by
picking up survival money by working as a barmaid, all of this would have been
moot. So, here’s what we’ve been doing
to rectify that situation and decriminalize working and owning for a living:
• True to form in a stock market bubble, prices on the
secondary markets have been fluctuating wildly.
All the experts seem to be ignoring the fact that all the money being
poured into existing shares is backed not by private sector hard assets, but by
government debt. This is similar to what
happened in 1929 when massive money creation resulted in high “demand-pull” inflation
that drove up the price of stocks artificially.
The difference between then and now, of course, is that 1) there was at
the same time money creation for new capital investment; so much so that there
was a temporary over-supply of consumer durables, giving the illusion of the
dreaded Keynesian “market glut.” 2) Even
the money created for stock speculation was backed by private sector hard
assets — greatly over-valued, true, but the assets existed. Today’s massive money creation is backed only
by government debt — meaning the ability of the government to collect taxes in
the future . . . which becomes increasingly unlikely if there is little or no
new capital formation or even replacement to keep up production, and jobs
disappear without being replaced by capital ownership to keep up the consumer
demand that drives the economy.
• Norman Kurland, president of CESJ, attended a seminar at
the New America Foundation, where the speaker was Gar Alperovitz. [http://www.garalperovitz.com/] Go to “minute 49” of the video to see Norm’s
questions and Gar’s responses. Let us
know if you’d like to see an exchange between Norm and Gar on the relative
merits of our respective approaches, especially in Cleveland, where great
progress is being made.
• We are seeing increasing evidence that academia and the
political world is coming to the realization that they have run out of
ideas. A letter to the Wall Street Journal regarding an op-ed
piece by Phil Gramm and Steve McMillin this past week did not get a response
from the Journal, but Mr. McMillin,
to whom we sent a cc., praised the letter for its insightful analysis,
particularly the observation that paying down the national debt does not mean
that the money supply will disappear.
Instead, restoring the Federal Reserve to its proper function of financing
private sector growth instead of monetizing government deficits will match the
money supply directly to the present value of existing and future marketable
goods and services. Adding that all new
money created for new capital formation must be done in ways that expands the
number of capital owners will ensure that consumption demand and production are
either in, or close to equilibrium.
• The response to CESJ’s critics we’ve been working on is
being revised, but should be ready soon.
It takes time to put together a reasoned response, rather than to just
throw thoughts out at random.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 62 different countries and 50 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and India. People in Japan,
Ireland, the United States, Argentina and Maldives spent the most average time
on the blog. The most popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “Aristotle on Private Property,” “Defining Money, VII:
Expanded Capital Ownership,” “Social Justice IV: The Characteristics of Social
Justice,” and “Defining Money, VI: The Real Bills Doctrine.”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least that we
know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next
“issue.” If you have a short (250-400
word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog —
do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated anyway, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#