It is interesting to note that Robert Maynard Hutchins believed that federal funding would not turn American academia into a brainwashing factory . . . but at the same time he wanted federal funding of all education, including religious schools. Federal funding is not a danger as long as there is competition, at least according to Hutchins:
Obviously the Ukraine situation is at the top of the news this week. Instead of trying to justify what cannot be justified, however, we prefer to suggest what may be a peaceful way to resolve the situation:
In yesterday’s posting, we looked at a few things Putin might have overlooked in his ongoing — since 2014 — invasion of Ukraine. Of course, there are things that a number of pundits in Europe and the United States are overlooking as they (with great sorrow, of course) declare that if Putin wants to take over Ukraine, or even a little bit here, a trifle there, until he has the whole thing in his new empire, what concern is it of anyone else?
There is an Irish saying that Russian president Vladimir Putin might want to heed: England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. At last count, there are more than twenty major separatist movements in Russia alone, not to mention the significant number of dissatisfied, even outraged people in the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Virtually the whole of economics today assumes that you can only forestall the otherwise inevitable cycle of economic boom or bust by following the prescription of whatever school of economics they happen to belong to. The fact that none of the prescriptions touted today has ever really worked doesn’t seem to matter. As is usual, if something isn’t working these days, it’s because of a hidden conspiracy, people aren’t trying hard enough, not enough (or too much) money is being spent, the dog ate it, or anything else that comes to hand.
This week we have another lecture by Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, this time on where America is going . . . and in color! Again, this isn’t really a religious episode, although it does mention the G-word and religion a lot. That’s okay; if you’re allergic, just filter it out.
If you can take time from the weekly FPF — Friday Phone Frenzy (that more and more consists of spam calls instead of people making last minute calls before the week ends) — or making a four-day weekend out of a three-day one, you might find this week’s news items of particular interest:
Back in the Stone Age, i.e., 1971 . . . or maybe it was “the Stoned Age” . . . anyway, John Lennon released the bestselling song of his entire career, “Imagine.” Although the song technically gives Lennon (or Yoko Ono, whom Lennon later claimed gave him most of the lyrics and content) a somewhat equivocal “out” by inserting a strategically place “if,” the point of the piece is to get people thinking how peaceful the world would be if there was no materialism, no borders, and no religion. Ho, hum, stop us if you’ve heard this.
In the previous posting on this subject, we noted that the Industrial Revolution made it possible for a few people to produce far more than they could ever consume, while the discovery by politicians that they could finance government operations using newly created money backed only with their own debt made it possible to consume massive amounts of goods and services without producing anything at all.
Today we’d like to look at money. Well, not just look at it, but offer a few random thoughts.
When the subject of money comes up, some people tend to look exclusively at how (other) people who have money use it. Apparently explaining widespread enthusiasm for the Great Reset, inclusive capitalism, and so on, such individuals often believe the wealthy use their money properly when they provide employment for workers or give it directly to the poor.
This week’s podcast is a little heavy on religious stuff (as you might expect from a show done by a couple of priests for their parish), but don’t let that stop you. It started out as being addressed to the Great Reset, but covered a lot of other stuff, too. In any event, consider it a special Valentine for St. Valentine’s Day since we’re not sending out any cards:
Maybe it’s just us, but we can’t understand how people keep complaining about debt, and at the same time insist on going with Keynesian economics that has never worked as promised but which requires massive debt that not only won’t, but in the Keynesian framework should not be repaid! At the same time, simply by going with the Economic Democracy Act, many of the problems people are currently complaining about would become moot:
In the previous posting on this subject, we looked at what happened in the global financial markets as the result of the transformation of government debt from something people were forced into accepting, to a blue chip investment. Not only did this give government control over money and credit, it gave it as much other power as it could get citizens to accept by freeing governments from the necessity of having to ask the citizens for taxes.
Regular Readers of this blog may have gotten the idea that we’re not exactly enamored of Keynesian economics. If so, they have the right idea: we’re not. And there are a lot of very good reasons for it. For today, however, we’ll confine ourselves to the alleged tradeoff between inflation and employment.
In the previous posting on this subject, we saw that with the way the British financed the war against Napoléon, combined with the Financial and Industrial Revolutions, set up a surreal situation. People who owned capital were able to produce far more than they could consume, while the government, which produces nothing, could consume by manipulating money.
This week’s podcast offers yet another lecture by Fulton Sheen, author of Freedom Under God, this time on building character. As you watch, you can understand how “America’s first televangelist” wasn’t really a televangelist at all, at least as that term is usually meant. He was a guy who happened to be a Catholic prelate giving lectures on subjects of interest to a great many people, not just Christians.
Is it just us, or is the world becoming an ever-more surreal place? Russia parks 140,000 troops on the eastern Ukraine border and claims it is being provoked. The U.S. government creates over $30 trillion in counterfeit money and Keynesian experts confirm that this is funny money by maintaining that the government doesn’t have to make good on any of it because — in common with all counterfeit money — the issuer isn’t really on the hook for it! We could continue, but why go on? This week’s news notes are depressing enough (except for the Fireside Chat notice, of course):
We closed the previous posting on this subject by wondering why, when the history of backing a financial asset with government debt had proved so disastrous in the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme (which we didn’t go into), anyone would have been tempted to try it again. After all, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results — and the one thing Ebenezer Scrooge was not was crazy, either before or after his completion.
Continuing our practice of using answers to some questions as blog postings, we recently got a question about how widespread capital ownership is financed. Specifically, is money given to people so that they can become owners by purchasing existing assets or is there a fundamentally different way. As our questioner questioned,
As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, how the British government chose to finance the Napoleonic Wars embodied what amounts to legal counterfeiting as a primary source of financing government operations — something Ebenezer Scrooge, pre- and post-reformation would have had a hard time swallowing. Had the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come shown Scrooge where John Maynard Keynes would take the bizarre belief that government can actually create wealth out of nothing, maybe he would have been inspired to do something about preventing the spread of such an insane idea.