Although there are more spectacular
problems in the world, one of the more fundamental ones is the question of how
people without capital ownership can become capital owners without harming
anyone else. As regular readers of this
blog are aware, this can not only be done without harm, but in a way that
benefits everyone by reforming the monetary, tax, and ownership structures in
society. So today we present a few
thoughts on the subject:
• Gold Standard Push. Just Third
Way proponents are, arguably, among the strongest advocates for a stable
reserve currency by means of which all economic values in an economy can be
measured. This could even be on a global
scale, simply by pegging every country’s national currency to a single global
reserve currency, and having all contracts specify that consideration is
measured in terms of the global reserve currency instead of, or as well as, the
relevant national currency. This is all
the easier because in a broad sense, “money” is a means of measuring what goes
on in a transaction, as Louis Kelso noted in Two-Factor Theory (1967). That is why we have antonymous feelings about
the current push for a return to “the gold standard.” Yes, measuring all values in terms of gold
would give a stable measure to a reserve currency. Keep in mind, however, that what is being
measured is value . . . and the value of gold can change relative to
everything else. It’s not like an inch
or an ounce, which once having been set stays the same forever. Yes, an ounce of gold is always an ounce of
gold, but an ounce of gold doesn’t always translate into the same value of
fourteen or fifteen ounces of silver (a burning question when an economy is on
a bimetallic standard). There is also
the problem in that some of the people tossing around the term “gold standard”
aren’t precisely clear on what they mean by it.
1) Do they mean that gold is the only “real money” and that nothing is
or could ever be money? 2) Do they mean
that gold is the only reserve currency, and that all other forms of money must
be convertible into gold on demand? 3) Or
do they simply mean that all money is valued in terms of gold? Historically, #1 has never been the case,
either for gold or any other standard.
Usually what has been meant by “gold standard” is a combination of #2
and #3, with all (other) values expressed in terms of gold, with occasional
convertibility. Thus, in order to
discuss a stable currency intelligently, whether the standard is gold, silver,
or anything else, two questions must be answered, neither one of which is being
addressed by either side in the debate: 1) What do you mean by “money”? and 2)
What do you mean by “standard”? First
answer those questions, then and only then will it be possible to decide on
what standard to use . . . and the best one may not be gold.
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| R. Buckminster Fuller: "Why not an energy standard?" |
• Money is Power. As we noted above, the best monetary standard
might not be gold. For one thing, it has
not exactly been stable in value, rising and falling in response to discoveries
of new deposits, civil and economic instability, and a host of other factors
having nothing to do with the value of the gold as gold. For another, to ensure public confidence in a
standard, all forms of money — not just the reserve currency — should be
convertible into the standard itself on demand.
In English, that means anyone can purchase as much of the standard as is
wanted, anytime it is wanted (at least during normal business hours, that is). There is simply not enough gold to go around
to be able to do that, at least not without changing the value of the currency
in response to the supply of and demand for gold. Without going into our reasons (at least not
right now), perhaps it’s time to consider adopting an electricity or power
standard. Unlike gold or silver,
power-as-power is pretty much nothing.
It is only valuable (and then extremely valuable) when it is being put
to use. Power can be stored, of course,
but only for future use, and for no other reason. This actually comes very close to the
philosophical understanding of the use of money: in Aristotelian philosophy,
money-as-money has no value whatsoever, and the proper use of money is, well,
to be used, that is, spent. The
actuality of power, therefore, conforms most closely to the abstraction of
money. You’ve heard that “money is
power,” haven’t you? That’s something of
a logical fallacy of equivocation the way we just used it, but it turns out to
be true, after a fashion, especially if something like the price of the
kilowatt hour is used as the standard.
That changes only when the cost of producing electricity changes, not
because somebody got into a panic or in response to other emotions.
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| Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke |
• Reparations. In a Wall Street Journal
piece this morning, there is a commentary comparing the latest demand for
reparations for slavery with Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French
Revolution, the two-hundred and thirtieth anniversary of which is coming up
this weekend. In “Reparations and the
Spirit of 1789” (07/12/19, A-15), Liam Warner of the Wall Street Journal
quotes Burke: “To take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as a
ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty acts, except in names
and general descriptions, is a sort of refinement in injustice belonging to the
philosophy of this enlightened age.” Interestingly,
Burke put his finger on the problem that still plagues us today, and not merely
in the demand for reparations. That is
the essential philosophy of two kinds of liberalism imposed over a third. European/French liberalism that assumes the
sovereignty only of the collective and was the philosophy of the French
Revolution, has combined with English liberalism that assumes the sovereignty
of an élite, to displace American liberalism that assumes the
sovereignty of the individual human person.
All three are “liberalism,” but the first two simply assume that
ordinary people don’t count; that their rights may be overridden at will or
that they never existed in the first place.
Burke was clearly of the American variety of liberal, but he was locking
horns not only with the French type liberals across the Channel, but the
English type liberals in his own country, and whose activities would lead to
the development and spread of socialism, modernism, and New Age thought.
• Reparations, Part II. One
possibility that no one seems to be considering as an acceptable form of
reparations for currently unjust social structures that affect everyone
adversely, is removing barriers that prevent full access to the common good by
everyone. This, as thoughtful people
throughout the ages have noted, requires capital ownership. That being the case, it makes sense that the
best and most effective form of reparations for current injustice is to figure
out a way to make everyone a capital owner — without taking anything away from
existing owners except a monopoly over future ownership opportunities. This can be done with a Capital Homesteading program.
• Shop online and support CESJ’s work! Did you know that by making
your purchases through the Amazon Smile
program, Amazon will make a contribution to CESJ? Here’s how: First, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your Amazon account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift through. Once you’ve typed (or copied and pasted) “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you will be taken to
the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• Blog Readership. We have had visitors from 31 different
countries and 41 states and provinces in the United States and Canada to this
blog over the past week. Most visitors are from the United States, Canada, Spain,
India, and the United Kingdom. The most
popular postings this past week in descending order were “News
from the Network, Vol. 12, No. 27,” “When
Did Notre Dame Become Notre Dumb?,” “America
Delenda Est?” “Why
Did Nixon Take the Dollar Off the Gold Standard?” and
“More
from Mortimer!”
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.” Due to imprudent
language on the part of some commentators, we removed temptation and disabled
comments.
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