“Tax Day” (as if every day wasn’t sufficiently taxing in the
global economy) is nearly upon us. As
you rush around like a chicken with your head cut off frantically trying to
complete something plausible, or sit back smugly because, like Ned Flanders,
you filed your return at 12:01 am January 1st, reflect on how easy
life could be under Capital Homesteading reforms. You’d not only have an easier return to
prepare, you might actually have the money to pay it . . . if you made enough
to be taxed (which, at least initially, wouldn’t be a problem for a lot of
people. Here’s what we’ve been doing
over the past week to try and establish and maintain such a happy state of
affairs:
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| Get out next Friday and march for justice. |
• Own or Be Owned! Do you want to be a force for good and reform
of the system? A bunch of us are
rallying at the White House (okay, across the street from the White House) to
draw attention to the serious need for ownership, monetary, and tax reforms as
a sound solution to a number of growing problems, e.g., the growing wealth and income gap, unemployment, the “jobless
recovery,” the over-emphasis on stock market gambling instead of true
investment and production, and a host of other ills. These days, if you’re not an owner of
capital, you’re sooner or later (probably sooner) going to be owned by someone
who owns capital. When: April 17, 2015. Where: across the street from the White
House. A little bird told us there might
be some “man in the street” interviews . . . not in the street, of course, but
on the sidewalk, so come prepared to state your views (and sign a release).
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| "Ja, you gif us money, und you keep gifing us money!" |
• Be Afraid . . . Be Very Afraid.
This past Wednesday the Swiss government issued 10-year bonds bearing an
effective negative interest rate, i.e., that people pay to hold. Evidently the Swiss are counting on the Euro,
U.S. Dollar, and other currencies over the next decade inflating to the point
where it becomes profitable for speculators to use their non-Swiss Franc cash
to purchase Swiss bills of credit denominated in Swiss Francs, and then pay for
the privilege of hanging on to them to maturity. Factoring in the time value of money and a
reasonable rate of return over ten years, and the bottom line is that the Swiss
are, to all intents and purposes, expecting a financial Armageddon to destroy
other currencies, making it profitable to hold your cash in Swiss Francs, and pay a fee to do so. Of course, if Capital Homesteading tax and
monetary reforms are enacted any time over the next ten years, anyone who
bought such bonds is going to lose a lot
of money as the currencies of the countries adopted Capital Homesteading start
to appreciate immediately.
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| Harold G. Moulton |
• Our Manuscript for a book showing where social ethics and thus the
understanding of economic and social justice got off track over a hundred years
ago has been accepted by a publisher. We
hope to have more information over the next several weeks as to when it can be
scheduled for publication. This
is important to show the roots of where people’s understanding of private
property, as well as money, credit, justice, charity, and a multitude of other
concepts were seriously distorted in order to try and circumvent the slavery of
past savings while relying on past savings to finance new capital formation. The real solution, of course, is to get away
from past savings as the source of new capital financing, and switch to “future
savings.” The theoretical basis for that
is found in Dr. Harold G. Moulton’s book, The Formation of Capital (1935) and applied in Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler’s
The New Capitalists (1961).
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| Why should filing your taxes be an annual Marathon? |
• Capital Homesteading Tax Reform, Anyone? We just finished filing the state corporate
tax return for an S-Corp that had no loss and no gain (i.e., paid out all profits to its shareholders). To give an idea of how easy tax filing could
be under the proposed Capital Homesteading reforms, preparing and filing the
corporate tax return took approximately 20 minutes . . . but that’s because we
took our time.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 66 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, Canada, Poland, Kenya and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “The
Purpose of Production,” “You Asked, Kelso Answered,” “Aristotle on Private
Property,” and “What is a Central Bank
Supposed to Do?”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those 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, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#