Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an
interesting piece about President Emmanuel Macron of France, comparing him — at
least on the charismamometer — with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. As the article by Walter Russell Mead of the
Hudson Institute stated, “[Macron] is approaching the job like a French Ronald
Reagan. . . . Reagan presented himself as a heroic and transformational
leader. This is what Mr. Macron has been
doing.” (“Has France Found Its Ronald Reagan?”
The Wall Street Journal, 06/06/17,
A15.)
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| President Emmanuel Macron of France |
According to
Mead, Macron faces two major problems, “[a]side” (of course) “from the usual
scandals already swirling around the new administration.” These are, one, fixing the French economy,
and, two, getting the European Union back on track after Brexit. Both are tall orders individually, and the
combination could well defeat even a French Ronald Reagan.
. . . unless he
takes a page from the American Ronald Reagan’s book and gets behind a
“Homestead Act” that would extend Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 land-based initiative
to all other forms of capital, i.e.,
commerce and industry — not neglecting land and infrastructure, either.
As Reagan said in
a speech to Young
Americans for Freedom on July 20, 1974 while still Governor of California,
“Over a hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. There
was wide distribution of land and they didn’t confiscate anyone’s privately
owned land. . . . We need an industrial Homestead Act.” Nor did he neglect it while President of the
United States. As he said in a letter on
June 22, 1981 to Governor Pierre S. du Pont IV on the signing of HB 31 to
encourage the broadening of the base of capital ownership among people of the State
of Delaware,
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| Governor Pierre du Pont IV signing HB 31 |
I have long believed that
the widespread distribution of private property ownership is essential to the
preservation of individual liberty, to the strength of our competitive free
enterprise economy, and to our republican form of government. . . . [W]e must
work to create the conditions for expanding the ownership of the nation’s
wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair chance to become true
proprietors of their country. . . . Our national task today is to restore the
conditions for economic recovery, without which our prosperity and our national
security cannot be assured. We must restrain the headlong growth of the Federal
budget; enact multi-year across-the-board tax reductions to spur new
job-creating investment and productivity; roll back the tangle of regulations which
needlessly hamper enterprise; and cleave to a sound monetary policy which
preserves the strength of the American dollar. But even as we act boldly to
achieve these goals, we must work to create the conditions for expanding the
ownership of the nation’s wealth, so that all Americans may have their fair
chance to become true proprietors of their country.
Nor did Reagan stop
there. As he declared in a speech on
foreign policy presented to the American Legion on February 22, 1983, “Our
economic assistance must be carefully targeted, and must make maximum use of
the energy and efforts of the private sector. . . . Economic freedom is the
world’s mightiest engine for abundance and social justice. . . . Developing
countries need to be encouraged to experiment with a growing variety of
arrangements for profit sharing and expanded capital ownership.”
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| Senator Long and Reagan after accepting the Task Force Report |
The highpoint, however, came
in 1987 with CESJ’s
Presidential Task Force on Project Economic Justice. On August 3 of that year, Regan made a speech
to the Task Force, noting “I’ve long believed one of the mainsprings of our own
liberty has been the widespread ownership of property among our people and the
expectation that anyone’s child, even from the humblest of families, could grow
up to own a business or corporation.”
Three years later Reagan mentioned ownership-expanding techniques in an
address given during his visit to the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland in September
1990.
What all this leads us to is
the possibility that Macron can solve both of his major problems with the same
solution.
First off, any program of
economic revitalization doesn’t start with trying to figure out how many jobs
you need to create, how much more debt the government can take on before
starting to implode, or how to screw the other guy or country. No, it starts with a currency reform and an
overhaul of the tax system — in other words, where the money comes from and how
government gets funded.
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| Charlemagne reformed the currency in the Carolingian Renaissance |
Of the two, monetary reform
is the main thing. You can hold off on
taxes for a while (but not too long), but you had better get the currency in
order as a prerequisite to everything.
Every program of economic revitalization and political stabilization in
history that worked has started by establishing and maintaining a sound
currency. Solon of Athens, Charlemagne,
Henry II of England, — the list could go on for quite a while.
So, Step One for Macron is to
reform the Euro, transforming it from an application of failed Keynesian Modern
Monetary Theory, to an elastic, asset-backed, standard, uniform, and stable
reserve currency . . . and that means relaunching the European Union on a much
more sound financial foundation. Neither France
alone, nor even France and Germany, can do it by themselves. Everybody
must go along with the currency reform, or it won’t work.
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| Pope Saint John Paul II commending CESJ for its work |
How to persuade others is,
fortunately for us, Macron’s problem, not ours.
How to transform the Euro is, even more fortunately, child’s play
compared to getting all the other countries to go along with the reform. Very briefly, the European Central Bank must
shift from backing the currency with government debt, to backing it with
private sector hard assets. That’s what
commercial and mercantile banks and central banks were invented to do, anyway.
It is somewhat tedious to
describe, however, so here we’ll just say it not only can be done, it has been
done, and done successfully — until the politicians took over and cranked up
the printing presses again. The Federal
Reserve operated in this way for two years before the politicians decided to
finance entry into World War I by borrowing and issuing government debt instead
of raising taxes.
What we’re concerned with
here is Step Two — taking tax reform as Step One-and-a-Half. Macron needs to have the legislature
implement an aggressive program of expanded capital ownership. The goal would be to make every child, woman,
and man in France and, soon after, the European Union an owner of capital on a
tax-deferred basis up to a level of capital self-sufficiency, so that everyone
gains an income from capital as well as (or instead of) labor. Funding for this? See Step One.
It’s what commercial, mercantile, and central banks were invented to do. . . .
So, yes, Macron can not only
be the “French Ronald Reagan,” he can do what Reagan was never able to do:
build enough political support to implement something along the lines of a Capital Homestead Act. If Macron does that, future generations of grateful
Europeans and Americans might well be calling Reagan “the Macron of America” .
. .
#30#
