Friday, April 10, 2015

News from the Network, Vol. 8, No. 15


“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:

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).

"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.

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).

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.

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