It’s time to man the barricades. The British are up in arms over a new portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
It seems that, in the opinion of some, the portrait makes ’Er Majesty look
loike a bloomin’ bloke inna wig. If only
we had so little to worry about on this side of the pond.
Unfortunately, we have bigger problems. The stock market continues its wild fluctuations,
and this is somehow supposed to be a good thing — it proves the economy is
really, really active and productive,
raising prices of shares on the secondary market, and all kinds of
(unspecified) good stuff.
That there is nothing in the primary market to warrant a
doubling of the Dow over the last five years an irrelevant little detail. Judging from the real economy instead of Wall
Street and political pronouncements, the Dow probably ought to be around 5-6,000
— if that. Any good stock analyst or
financial advisor can tell you that unless the “underlying” (i.e., the asset behind the security) is
sound, the security is not sound.
The increase in the price level of the stock market is,
however, fueled by the trillions in stimulus money and quantitative easing . .
. all of which is backed by more and more government debt. This is now starting to tip the scales at
nearly $17 trillion. Adding in the
“off-budget” items, the projected obligations of the U.S. government amount to
over $124 trillion, according to the National Debt Clock as of this morning.
Here’s the catch: the government can only fund this
liability by collecting taxes. Projected GDP for the United States for 2013 is a little over $16 trillion,
or less than the booked and acknowledged debt.
If the government stopped all spending immediately and instituted a 100%
tax on all transactions (i.e.,
instead of paying anyone for their work or their marketable goods and services,
you simply pay the government), we could be debt-free in 8 years at current
levels of economic activity.
Or we could do the rational thing, and institute an
immediate aggressive program of expanded capital ownership like Capital Homesteading. By having people take over
responsibility for their own wellbeing, while maintaining an adequate social
safety net, the U.S. could possibly pay down the booked debt in approximately
65 years, and get out from under the $107 trillion or so in contingent
liabilities. The choice is ours. In the meantime,
• The Core Group of CESJ is exploring the possibility of
co-authoring a book with the U.S. chapter of the Global Harmony
Association. The idea is to show that,
without a sound understanding of justice, there can be no harmony in the social
order, or peace. As Pope Paul VI said in
a conscious revision of the noted military aphorism from Vegetius, “If you
desire peace, work for justice” (Message on World Peace Day,
January 1, 1972). (In the Prologue to
Book III of his The Art of War,
Flavius Vegetius Renatus advised, Si vis
pacem, para bellum — “If you desire peace, prepare for war.”)
• Work proceeds in Cleveland to surface a model company to
demonstrate the feasibility of the concepts of the Just Third Way, at least as
far as can be done under current law.
• Guy Stevenson, Our Man In Iowa, has been putting together
a rather significant number of videos to explain the Just Third Way and Capital
Homesteading. As a financial
professional, Guy is probably in a better position than some to explain what
strikes most people as something so esoteric that they think they can never
understand: money, credit, banking and finance.
It would take too long to explain each of his videos in detail, but you
can watch them for free on his YouTube channel.
If you want to watch some short videos that will probably answer some of your
questions, pay a visit.
• We have almost finished the first draft of the first
volume of a projected three volume series on the rise and growth of the new
socialism, the legal, social, and economic changes that encouraged the new
socialism, and how the work of Kelso and Adler counters this development, that
has infiltrated every aspect of life on the globe today.
• As of this morning, we have had visitors
from 59 different countries and 51 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, Australia, and India, and Canada. The most
popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” “Defining Money, VII: Expanded Capital Ownership,” “Binary
Banking Theory, I: The Types of Banks,” and “Binary Banking Theory, V:
Fractional Reserve Banking.”
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#