Robert Anton Wilson on the federal reserve

[Yamato]

That says nothing about the nation state which was always allowed to print money.

Br Cornelius

Of course, but by making gold and silver legal tender in the payment of debts and limiting the states to using it, the argument can't be made that gold and silver isn't money. Especially the vacuous arguments you're making here which can just as easily be applied to any form of money.

Gold is just impossible to discuss in my thread about it. Why do you ignore my requests? You brought it up, you called it roundly routed, you have a host of unanswered questions there and another buildup of unanswered questions here. What are you scared of? Bump the discussion and let's continue it.

This topic has nothing to do with gold nor how the concept of money, any money, is some abstract conceptualization. It's a critique of fiat and only fiat, and a bait and switch to yet another socialist rant about gold. Gold is a lot of things to a lot of people who have much different sentiments than you do. On one hand you admit it's about sentiment and on the other hand you're so self-serving you decree that only your sentiment matters.

[Guest]

Yamato - the FED is a private bank so you have what you want already. Look where private banks have gotten you !!

Br Cornelius

[Guest]

Of course, but by making gold and silver legal tender in the payment of debts and limiting the states to using it, the argument can't be made that gold and silver isn't money. Especially the vacuous arguments you're making here which can just as easily be applied to any form of money.

Gold is just impossible to discuss in my thread about it. Why do you ignore my requests? You brought it up, you called it roundly routed, you have a host of unanswered questions there and another buildup of unanswered questions here. What are you scared of? Bump the discussion and let's continue it.

This topic has nothing to do with gold nor how the concept of money, any money, is some abstract conceptualization. It's a critique of fiat and only fiat, and a bait and switch to yet another socialist rant about gold. Gold is a lot of things to a lot of people who have much different sentiments than you do. On one hand you admit it's about sentiment and on the other hand you're so self-serving you decree that only your sentiment matters.

i just don't accept that the set of problems with Gold are better than a correctly managed Fiat Currency. You don't accept that there are any problems with gold - which makes discussing money with you all but impossible due to your absolute certainty in your one position. As hacktorp again pointed out - any practical gold currency is just another form of Fiat (your preferred option i believe) subject to market manipulations like any other.

This thread was never just an opportunity for you to bash Fiat currency, it was a space to discuss the shortcomings of the FED and explore other currency options - of which other Fiat forms are alternatives. It is a discussion of RAW's ideas on economic matters - and the fact that he was not an advocate of Gold Money is as important as any of his other thoughts on money.

Br Cornelius

Edited July 26, 2013 by Guest

[Yamato]

i just don't accept that the set of problems with Gold are better than a correctly managed Fiat Currency. You don't accept that there are any problems with gold - which makes discussing money with you all but impossible due to your absolute certainty in your one position. As hacktorp again pointed out - any practical gold currency is just another form of Fiat (your preferred option i believe) subject to market manipulations like any other.

This thread was never just an opportunity for you to bash Fiat currency, it was a space to discuss the shortcomings of the FED and explore other currency options - of which other Fiat forms are alternatives.

Br Cornelius

Br Cornelius

That's all the OP did was bash fiat currency. It wasn't a bashing of the Fed for any other reason.

I've explored other currency options and you never acknowledge any of them. There's the digital currencies. There's commodities-backed currencies which are far better than the US dollar. In my thread in which, excuse me for correcting, you were roundly routed on, I discussed how superior currencies moved in positive correlation to commodities rather than in the inverse. It's not an accident that currencies like the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and the Canadian dollar are more reverse correlated to the US dollar than not. And Australia is the wealthiest nation in the world, so any honest discussion about "reality" and what works can find a better money than the US dollar. As I've said for the past few years, I don't protect myself in the Renminbi because I can't find a better currency than the US's. Protecting myself in gold is the same thing. It's not "paranoia", it's just being able to see reality and how the US dollar has declined 95% since the advent of the Federal Reserve system.

[Yamato]

Yamato - the FED is a private bank so you have what you want already. Look where private banks have gotten you !!

Br Cornelius

Private banks don't have government appointees.

[Guest]

That's all the OP did was bash fiat currency. It wasn't a bashing of the Fed for any other reason.

I've explored other currency options and you never acknowledge any of them. There's the digital currencies. There's commodities-backed currencies which are far better than the US dollar. In my thread in which, excuse me for correcting, you were roundly routed on, I discussed how superior currencies moved in positive correlation to commodities rather than in the inverse. It's not an accident that currencies like the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and the Canadian dollar are more reverse correlated to the US dollar than not. And Australia is the wealthiest nation in the world, so any honest discussion about "reality" and what works can find a better money than the US dollar. As I've said for the past few years, I don't protect myself in the Renminbi because I can't find a better currency than the US's. Protecting myself in gold is the same thing. It's not "paranoia", it's just being able to see reality and how the US dollar has declined 95% since the advent of the Federal Reserve system.

Who has defended the US dollar ?? Certainly not me. Your tilting at windmills here.

Private banks don't have government appointees.

Do you deny the fact that the FED is a private bank ?

#1 The Federal Reserve System Is A Privately Owned Banking Cartel

The Federal Reserve is not a government agency.

The truth is that it is a privately owned central bank. It is owned by the banks that are members of the Federal Reserve system. We do not know how much of the system each bank owns, because that has never been disclosed to the American people.

The Federal Reserve openly admits that it is privately owned. When it was defending itself against a Bloomberg request for information under the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Reserve stated unequivocally in court that it was "not an agency" of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

In fact, if you want to find out that the Federal Reserve system is owned by the member banks, all you have to do is go to the Federal Reserve website....

The twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, which were established by Congress as the operating arms of the nation's central banking system, are organized much like private corporations--possibly leading to some confusion about "ownership." For example, the Reserve Banks issue shares of stock to member banks. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. The stock may not be sold, traded, or pledged as security for a loan; dividends are, by law, 6 percent per year.

Foreign governments and foreign banks do own significant ownership interests in the member banks that own the Federal Reserve system. So it would be accurate to say that the Federal Reserve is partially foreign-owned.

But until the exact ownership shares of the Federal Reserve are revealed, we will never know to what extent the Fed is foreign-owned.

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/10-things-that-every-american-should-know-about-the-federal-reserve

You didn't know this ? You trust private banks with such an appalling record ??

Br Cornelius

Edited July 26, 2013 by Guest

[Guest]

This is a fascinating article by RAW on why we should be careful about accepting Right-Left dichotomies when describing ourselves or accepting the descriptions of other. this is the first section - there is more at the link;

Robert Anton Wilson

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

Our esteemed editor, Bob Banner, has invited me to contribute an article on whether my politics are “left” or “right,” evidently because some flatlanders insist on classifying me as Leftist and others, equally Euclidean, argue that I am obviously some variety of Rightist.

Naturally, this debate intrigues me. The Poet prayed that some power “would the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us”; but every published writer has that dubious privilege. I have been called a “sexist” (by Arlene Meyers) and a “male feminist ... a simpering *****-whipped wimp” (by L.A. Rollins), “one of the major thinkers of the modern age” (by Barbara Marx Hubbard) and “stupid” (by Andrea Chaflin Antonoff), a “genius” (by SOUNDS, London) and “mentally deranged” (by Charles Platt), a “mystic” and “charlatan” (by the Bay Area Skeptics) and a “materialist” (by an anonymous gent in Seattle who also hit me with a pie); one of my books has even been called “the most scientific of all science-fiction novels” (by New Scientist physics editor John Gribbon) and “ranting and raving” (by Neal Wilgus). I am also frequently called a “Satanist” in some amusing, illiterate and usually anonymous crank letters from Protestant Fundamentalists.

I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book “is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.” Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are always misleading. Science has also discovered that the Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of either/or choices. There are eight — count ‘em, eight — theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which use the same equations but have radically different philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the multi-model approach (or “model agnosticism”) for over 60 years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be found in my book, The New Inquisition. Two-valued Euclidean choices — left or right of an imaginary line — do not seem very “real” to me, in comparison to the versatility of modern science and mathematics.

Actually, it was once easy to classify me in simple Euclidean topology. To paraphrase a recent article by the brilliant Michael Hoy [Critique #19/ 20], I had a Correct Answer Machine installed in my brain when I was quite young. It was a right-wing Correct Answer Machine in general and Roman Catholic in particular. It was installed by nuns who were very good at creating such machines and implanting them in helpless children. By the time I got out of grammar school, in 1945, I had the Correct Answer for everything, and it was the Correct Answer that you will nowadays still hear from, say, William Buckley, Jr.

When I moved on to Brooklyn Technical High School, I encountered many bright, likable kids who were not Catholics and not at all right-wing in any respect. They naturally angered me at first. (That is the function of Correct Answer Machines: to make you have an adrenaline rush, instead of a new thought, when confronted with different opinions.) But these bright, non-Catholic kids — Protestants, Jews, agnostics, even atheists — fascinated me in some ways. The result was that I started reading all the authors the nuns had warned me against — especially Darwin, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Mencken and Nietzsche.

I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain. This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns.

(Why was I immune to Stalinism — an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystallized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)

After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.

Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class background. I came from a working class family and was the only genuine “proletarian” in the whole Marxist kaffeklatch.

At the age of 18, then, I returned to the void of incertitude. It began to seem almost comfortable there, and I began to rejoice in my agnosticism. It made me feel superior to the dogmatists of all types, and adolescents love to feel superior to everybody (especially their parents — or have you noticed that?). Around the same time as my Trotskyist period, I began to read the first Revisionist historians, whom I had been warned about by my high school social science teachers, in grave and awful tones, as if these men had killed a cat in the sacristy. My teachers were too Liberal to tell me I would go to Hell for reading such books (as the nuns had told me about Darwin, for instance), but they made it clear that the Revisionists were Evil, Awful, Unspeakable and probably some form of Pawns of the Devil.

I recognized the technique of thought control again, so I read all the Revisionists I could find. They convinced me that the New Deal Liberals had deliberately lied and manipulated the U.S. into World War II and were still lying about what they did after the war was over. (In fact, they are still lying about it today.)

The Revisionist who impressed me most was Harry Elmer Barnes, a classic Liberal who was a bit of a Marxist (in methodology) — i.e., in his way of looking for economic factors behind political actions. I was amused and disgusted by the attempt of the New Deal gang to smear Professor Barnes as a right-wing reactionary. Barnes, in fact, was an advocate of progressive ideas in education, economics, politics, criminology, sociology and anthropology all his life but the New Deal Party Line had smeared him so thoroughly that some people have heard of him only as some cranky critic of Roosevelt and assume he was a Taft Republican or even a pro-Nazi. In fact Barnes supported most of the New Deal’s domestic policies, and dissented from Liberal Dogma only in opposing the spread of American adventurism and militarism all over the world.

Charles Beard, another great historian of classic Liberal principles, agreed that Roosevelt deliberately lied to us in World War II and was smeared in the same way as Professor Barnes. This did not encourage me to have Faith in any Party Line, even if it called itself the modern, liberal, enlightened Party Line.

(I have never been convinced by the Holocaust Revisionists, however, simply because I have met a great many Holocaust eye-witnesses, or alleged eyewitnesses, in the past 40 years. Most of these people I seemingly met by accident, in both Europe and America. A conspiracy that has that many liars planted in that many places — or has always paid such special attention to me that it placed these liars where I would meet them — is a conspiracy too omnipotent and omnipresent, and therefore too metaphysical, for me to take seriously. A conspiracy so Godlike in its powers could, in principle, deceive us about anything and everything, and I wonder why the Holocaust Revisionists still believe that World War II occurred, or that any of past history ever happened.)

I reached 20 and became an employee (i.e. a robot) in the McCarthy Era and the Eisenhower years; my agnosticism became more total and so did my suspicion that politics is a carnival or buncombe (as Mencken once said). It seemed obvious to me that, while Senator Joe was a liar of stellar magnitude, a lot of the Liberals were lying their heads off, too, in attempts to hide their previous fondness for Stalinism. That was something I, as a former Trotskyist, knew about by experience. In bon ton East Coast intellectual circles, before McCarthy, Stalinism was much more “permissible” than Trotskyism; it was almost chic. If I still regard the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s as abominable, I also remember that some of the victims had engaged in similar witch-hunts against the Trotskyists in the early 1940s.

It is probably impossible for a social mammal to be totally “apolitical.” Even if I was allergic to Correct Answer Machines, my mind kept searching for some general social ideas that I could take more or less seriously. For a while I dropped in and out of colleges and in and out of jobs and searched earnestly for some pragmatic mock-up of “truth” without a Correct Answer Machine attached. And yet both Left and Right continued to appear intellectually bankrupt to me.

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/robert-anton-wilson-left-and-right-a-non-euclidean-perspective

Br Cornelius

[Guest]

Some more musing from RAW highlighting what he really though about economics;

CRNLA — Your economic views still seem very much in the Benjamin Tucker tradition (especially on rent and interest.) Have you read any of the “Austrian” economists, such as Von Mises and Rothbard? What do you think of them?

RAW: Tucker is certainly a major influence. My economic ideas are a blend of Tucker, Spooner, Fuller, Pound, Henry George, Rothbard, Douglas, Korzybski, Proudhon and Marx. I always try to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. Read to see what I can learn from every school, rather than condemning any idea in its entirety. “Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time,” as Ez Pound once wrote. Rothbard is, like Marx and Pound, a brilliant closed mind: excellent for stimulation but anybody who gets dragged into a Rothbardian dogmatic trance should take LSD and try looking at the world through another grid. Von Mises is another who is excellent for stimulation, pernicious if erected into dogma. By and large, the Austrians remind me of a parable by Laurance Labadie, in which a certain tribe has the custom of allowing high-caste individuals to kick low-caste individuals in the butt whenever they pass them in the street. A philosophical school, much like the Austrians, naturally arises to prove rationally that the kicking is not only necessary but just, inevitable, beautiful and altogether glorious. If there were big profits in cancer, there’d undoubtedly be an Austrian school of medicine, proving that carcinoma is good for us.

CRNLA: Tucker is one of my favorite people — but one of his views with which I can’t agree is that in a free society interest rates and rent would disappear. I think the Austrians have advanced economic knowledge sufficiently since Tucker’s day to show why these things exist and how they would come about even in an economy consisting totally of free trade. Your reply?

RAW: You can “prove” anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning. Empirically, I don’t think they can produce a single case in history where a free people elected landlords to own the land; the land monopoly always starts with conquest. Shot and shell are the coins of purchase, as Herbert Spencer said. Except by force of arms, nobody “owns” the earth, anymore than the moon, the planets, the stars themselves. When did God disinherit the majority of humanity, and turn all space over to the “ownership” of the Rockefellers and their friends? Without armed power threatening us, why would anyone but a fool continue to pay these conquistadores the extortion they demand? And, even if the Austrians could convince me that rent is legitimate, I still wouldn’t voluntarily pay it to the present landlord class who remain receivers of stolen property. I would pay it to the nearest Indian tribe.

As for interest, I’m not aware of any case in which the credit monopoly has allowed a free currency to compete with them. In fact, every case I know of (e.g. Wörgl in the 1930s), ended when the Capitalists used the armed might of the State to stop the competition. The one laboratory experiment in this field, by Don Werkheiser at Central State University in Ohio, confirmed Tucker and refuted the Austrians. Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language — merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. The average primate cannot distinguish the symbol from the referent, the map from the territory, the menu from the meal. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can’t write more books because we don’t have enough words, the way they now say we can’t build starships, because we don’t have enough money. As Bucky Fuller says, you might as well argue we can’t build roads because we lack kilometers.

CRNLA: I think our differences in “rent” are basically in “land-rent” — you don’t see anything wrong if someone wants to rent out power tools and U-haul trailers — true? Your main argument with land-rent seems to be with the lack of legitimate owners. I’m assuming legitimate (i.e. non-conquistador) owners when I speak of legitimate rent. If two people went to Mars or the bottom of the ocean and one of them spent his time clearing rocks and fertilizing a section of land and the other spent his time assembling a tractor, and they reach an agreement to exchange the use of the land for one season for the use of the tractor for one season — has anyone been harmed or exploited or extorted? Should some third party come onto the scene and say, “Hey stop that, you’re committing rent?”

RAW: Land-rent, or ground-rent, is the most illegitimate aspect of the rent con, of course, and the main target of Tucker’s criticisms. The whole concept of any rent, however, appears somewhat dubious to me, since it seems to presuppose “the accumulation of property in a few aristocratic heaps, at the expense of a great deal of democratic bare ground in between,” as Ezra Heywood said. (Heywood’s writings on this subject, and other aspects of libertarianism, are at least as important as Tucker’s and Spooner’s.) People rent, chiefly, when they cannot afford to purchase outright — when ground-rent, interest and other inequalities haver already created a master-class of aristocrat-owners and a servile class of peasants or proles. I would expect to see rent wither away as the democratization of credit abolishes poverty.

I fail to see how your hypothetical “legitimate (i.e. non-conquistador) owners” would achieve “ownership.” (I also don’t see the bearing of such hypothetical, or fictitious, cases on the real issues of the real world, where all the landlords are conquistadors, or are receivers of stolen property from the original conquistadors, but that is another question.)

Ownership, in the real world, is a social agreement, a social fiction almost, and is produced only by force or by fraud or by contract. In practice, land ownership is produced only by force or fraud.

This may sound polemic, but it is literally true. The Henry George Schools have a book, Land Title Origins: A Tale of Force and Fraud, in which you can look up, wherever you live in the United States, exactly the acts of force and fraud (murder and robbery) by which land “ownership” was transferred from the Indian tribes to the current receivers of the stolen property. Now, the third alternative, contract, has never been tried, to the best of my knowledge. The only land contracts which I, or any other Tuckerites or Sternerites, would sign in freedom, without force being used against us, would be to our own interest, not to the interest of the landlords. In other words, we simply would not sign a contract giving up ownership of this planet, or any other, to a small group of the Elite who claim they have some better title to ownership than the rest of us have. If you would sign such a contract, I can only hint gently that you are more easily defrauded than we are.

The barter arrangement in your paradigm has nothing to do with perpetual tribute, which is the essence of rent — indeed, the factor distinguishing barter from rent.

Of course, since Austrian ideas exist as factors in human behavior, I will admit that some people, hoodwinked by those ideas, will continue to pay rent even in freedom, for a while at least. But I think that, after a time, observing that their Tuckerite neighbors are not submitting to this imposture, they would come to their senses and cease paying tribute to the self-elected “owners” of limitless space, on this and other planets, and in interplanetary communities.

Of course, I myself would not pay rent one day beyond the point at which the police (“hired guns, on guard to see that property remains stolen” as Emma Goldman said) are at hand to collect it via “argument per blunt instrument.”

CRNLA: Regarding interest: again I assume a totally free market, where there are no legal tender laws and anyone is free to mint, mine, print or grow anything that they feel the market will accept for money. I think that under these conditions the interest rate would be dramatically lower than it presently is but that it would not tend toward zero. Money generally performs at least three interrelated functions: (1) indirect exchange media, (2) provides a common “measuring scale,” (3) stores wealth. In the first two money is definitely an “abstract artifact” — a “cashless” society could exist merely using bookkeeping entries. But when it’s used to store wealth it causes trouble as an “abstract” — bank-runs and the like. Wealth isn’t an abstract. It may be subjectively appraised, but it actually exists. When A wants to use B’s wealth for a period of time, B is generally compensated for his loss of its use for that period by A — interest. Among corporations (admittedly, a legal fiction) the issuing of “Tucker-money,” (i.e., stock) is a fairly unfettered means of obtaining credit — but the people who give it to them still expect a return and the corporations still expect to pay it. I’d be interested in seeing the Central State experiment. Usually because of the multiplicity of ever-changing factors involved in the market, it’s difficult if not impossible to ever prove anything empirically.

RAW: Of course, my position is based on the denial that money does store wealth. I think it’s a semantic hallucination, the verbal equivalent of an optical illusion, to speak at all of money containing or storing wealth. Such thinking should have gone out with phlogiston theory. The symbol is not the referent; the map is not the territory. Money symbolizes wealth, as words symbolize things, and that’s all. The delusions that money contains wealth is the mechanism by which the credit monopoly hof study. as gained a stranglehold on the entire economy. As Colonel Greene pointed out in Mutual Banking, all the money could disappear tomorrow morning and the wealth of the planet would remain the same. However, if the wealth disappeared — if squinks from the Pink Dimension dragged it off to null-space or something — the money would be worth nothing. You don’t need to plow through the dialects of the debate between the Austrians and the free credit people like Tucker and Gesell to see this; any textbook of semantics will make it clear in a few hours of study. Wealth is nature’s abundance, freely given, plus the exponential advance of technology via human intelligence, and as Korzybski and Fuller demonstrate, this can only increase an an accelerating rate. Money is just the tickets or symbols to arrange for the distribution — either equitably, in a free money system, or inequitably, as under the tyranny of the present money-cartel. As you realize, a cashless society could exist merely by keeping bookkeeping entries or computer tapes. Money is a primitive form of such computer tapes, serving a feedback function. If we are not to replace the present banking oligopoly with a programmer’s oligopoly, in which the interest will be paid to computer technicians, we must realize that this is all a matter of abstract symbolism — that it exists by social agreement and nobody owns it, anymore than Webster owns the language. Why is it, incidentally, that the Austrians don’t follow their logic to its natural conclusion and demand that we pay interest to the dictionary publishers every time we speak or write?

You have to watch people playing Monopoly, and see them begin to “identify” the paper markers with real value, to understand how the mass hypnosis of Capitalism works. Fortunately, the Head Revolution is still proceeding and more and more people are waking up to the difference between our economic game-rules and the real existential situation of humanity.

Don Werkheiser might sell you a Xerox of his thesis on the Central State experiment if you write to him c/o General Delivery, Ponca, Arkansas. Similar experiments are recounted in Josiah Warren’s True Civilization, involving four communes in 19^th Century America. Let me conclude this answer by emphasizing that I do not blame the money-monopologists for any of their hoarding behavior. I am sure you will find similar absurdities in the primitive stages of anthropoid civilizations on most planets of G-type stars. Mammalian patterns persist in many other aspects of our society, especially in organized religions.

In my experience, I might add, virtually all adherents of the Austrian economic theories are academics who have never had any dealings with Capitalist corporations. The rosy view the Austrians have of these matters, I think, would collapse in two weeks if they had to deal with the damned corporate pirates as an ordinary worker does. When Joyce went into business briefly, he told Italo Svevo after a while, “You know, I think my partners are cheating me.” Svevo answered, “You only think your partners are cheating you! Joyce, you are an artist!” Nixon is the typical Capitalist mentality, entirely identical in all aspects with every businessman I have ever encountered; his only real distinction is that he got caught. Of course, I’m not complaining — part of the humor of living on this backward planet is listening to the hominids rationalize their predations.

CRNLA: I don’t think that the Austrians have a particularly “rosy” view of business. I know a lot of them (Mises and Rothbard for two) consider a total separation of the economy and the government to be the best means of keeping these clowns from becoming too powerful. Most consider a totally free market to be the ultimate in “consumerism” — not “capitalism” (at least as it’s come to be known.)

RAW: Well, there is certainly a kinship between the Austrians and myself on the level of ultimate goals. I merely feel that their views of Capitalism-as-practised-in-the-past-and-present could only be held by college professors. After more than 20 years of working for the corporations in every position from office boy to middle executive, I have not been shocked or surprised in the slightest by the Watergate or post-Watergate scandals.

Austrians believe what they write, they must be somewhat abashed, I should think. For instance, David Friedman has published views about the corporate elite that would be flattering if applied to Jesus and his angels. However, this is turning into a diatribe against the group I find least obnoxious in the whole politico-economic spectrum (because you keep asking me questions that harp on my differences with them.) The orthodox conservatives and liberals, not to mention nazis and marxists, are really pernicious, and the Austrian libertarians are basically okay.

CRNLA: Regarding our Rent Interest discussion: I think that our differences regarding money stem from a difference in definitions. I would include wealth that is used in certain ways under the heading “money,” while you limit the definition to just its transactional functions. OK, as long as we know where we are. Once we start dealing with this “wealth-money” as wealth (and forget the word “money”), the problem of interest becomes just a special case of rent. Which really brings us back to property and ownership. I’ve never attempted to tie the concept of ownership to the metaphysical framework of the universe. I realize that it’s merely a human invention — much like language (which is not to say that other inhabitants of the planet don’t use it also) that’s purpose is to make the allocation of resources go as smoothly and efficiently and with the least amount of head-cracking as possible. Like the use of language, the use of the concept of “property” doesn’t necessarily have to be enforced. When people discover it they use it because it’s in their long-range self-interest to do so. (This is not to say that particular instances don’t require enforcement — just that the concept is usually retained without it.) The whole system of ownership/division of labor/rent transactions etc. is merely designed to allocate resources so that they maximize the “vector sum” of everyone’s satisfaction — or more accurately, that this system has the potential to maximize. You don’t have to use it. Without this system some alternative method must be found to determine who gets the use of what. LeGuin faced this problem in The Dispossessed. She chose to do it collectively. Ultimately, this results in some system of voting or representatives or syndics which bear striking resemblance to governments (in addition to being very inefficient.) So the so-called “anarchy” in The Dispossessed is actually a widespread proliferation of governments and poverty. If the determination of the use of resources is placed in the hands of the individual who makes the resources useful (i.e., grows, finds, fertilizes, builds on, digs up, etc.) this provides him with a good deal of independence from the rest of the herd. Seems like a natural for any anarchistic society. This is basically the idea behind my concept of ownership. Could you give a summary of what you consider to be a good method of allocating resources and any concepts similar to ownership that might be contained therein?

RAW: Since ownership is a social fiction, it should obviously be fluid and sensitive to decentralized feedback, to match the evolving needs of the persons involved in whatever social game is being played. In other words, I do not propose one “right way” of doing it; that has to be found pragmatically in each new situation. The traditional feudal-Capitalist system in which one hereditary group of Great Pirates “owns” everything is not acceptable to me, and obviously would not be acceptable to any band of Stirnerite egoists; and, of course, the altruistic forms of socialism and communism are equally unacceptable to me, and I predict they would be equally unacceptable to a band of self-owners in the Stirnite, Tucker or Crowley sense. What would emerge in such a rationalistic-egoistic context would, in a general way, probably follow the guidelines suggested by Stirner, Spooner, Proudhon and Tucker — except that this would only be in a general way, as all of those writers realized. The specific individuals in each situation would define their own demands according to the specific situation always. The only contracts that would be acceptable to them, as Tucker indicated, would be those that require no enforcement — that is, those that are so obviously in the enlightened self-interest of each member that their wording would be accepted with the satisfaction the scientific world feels when a hard question is finally answered. If the proposed contract did not have that self-evident feeling character about it — if it didn’t provoke the general feeling, “This is the answer to our disagreements” — it would not be accepted. I speak with some experience here, being part of an occult order who do indeed govern themselves that way. My only general rules are Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” and Leary’s Three Commandments for the Neurological Age, to wit: “Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy neighbor, 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his or her own consciousness, 3. Thou shalt make no more commandments.” The so-called “resources” problem is a terracentric delusion. The Universe is a Big Mother.

http://theanarchistl...rt-anton-wilson

Three central concepts are;

-Money is an abstract concept and has no intrinsic store of wealth

-non interest baring money

-a lack of respect for inherited title - since it always ultimately rests on the back of forced displacement of someone elses rights to ownership.

Br Cornelius

Edited July 27, 2013 by Guest

[Yamato]

Who has defended the US dollar ?? Certainly not me. Your tilting at windmills here.

Do you deny the fact that the FED is a private bank ?

http://theeconomicco...federal-reserve

You didn't know this ? You trust private banks with such an appalling record ??

Br Cornelius

I support people making mistakes and paying for their mistakes. We don't need a handful of socialist band aids for when they do. Believing in freedom is going out and getting messy and making mistakes, and thinking of the the next big thing and the next big score. Freedom helps the world age better. We get better results from being free because we benefit from the opportunity people have to experiment with their freedom.

All banks should be private and all banks should be accountable. If they go bankrupt to the point they can't survive they should be replaced, not resurrected. The Fed has so much power because it has almost universal support in this country from politicians. They might say a few things about it when they're campaigning as if suddenly they agree with Ron Paul about something, but when they're in power they are more than happy to drink from the honeycomb.

[Guest]

The FED is a private bank and it didn't work out so great did it ?

How you can make such an arbitrary distinction between the good private banks and the bad is beyond me. Also it is the act of charging interest on the currency in circulation which is the main cause of the crisis of money - the only possible way of having non-interest baring money is to have public or cooperative money.

Your position is riddled with contradictions. To live by a mantra "The Market can do no wrong" is just as crazy as to live by the mantra "Allah can do no wrong". Its an article of faith without foundation. Fantasy economics, until you can point me to the perfect market economy in the present or in history - you are talking faith and faith is no basis to run a country.

Br Cornelius

Edited July 28, 2013 by Guest

[Yamato]

The FED is a private bank and it didn't work out so great did it ?

I totally agree. It didn't work out, and so we have to cut the cords growing between it and the government and end the existence of the lender of last resort. Money creation is better left in the hands of our representatives, who are directly accountable to us their voters, not to unelected yes-men leaving the Keynesian flood gates open with no end in sight.

Your position is riddled with contradictions. To live by a mantra "The Market can do no wrong" is just as crazy as to live by the mantra "Allah can do no wrong". Its an article of faith without foundation. Fantasy economics, until you can point me to the perfect market economy in the present or in history - you are talking faith and faith is no basis to run an country.

The market certainly can do wrong and does wrong, and there are laws against fraud in this country.

How you can make such an arbitrary distinction between the good private banks and the bad is beyond me.

Because there will be good and bad banks, and all banks should be private. When private, the bad ones will suffer and die and the good ones will flourish. Bankruptcy laws should be enforced upon all creditors in this country. If they fail they should pay their own price for failing.

[Guest]

I totally agree. It didn't work out, and so we have to cut the cords growing between it and the government and end the existence of the lender of last resort. Money creation is better left in the hands of our representatives, who are directly accountable to us their voters, not to unelected yes-men leaving the Keynesian flood gates open with no end in sight.

The market certainly can do wrong and does wrong, and there are laws against fraud in this country.

Because there will be good and bad banks, and all banks should be private. When private, the bad ones will suffer and die and the good ones will flourish. Bankruptcy laws should be enforced upon all creditors in this country. If they fail they should pay their own price for failing.

Fraud is profitable otherwise it wouldn't happen. So committing Fraud is intrinsic to free markets - and it will make a company more successful. A lightly regulated market will always favour fraud against the customer and will always eventually reward the most fraudulant by making them a virtual monopoly.

You should read what RAW had to say about free marketers, I have provided plenty of quotes, he saw them as equally as dangerous and fanatical as Marxists. I tend to agree.

I do not accept your religion !!!

Br Cornelius

Edited July 28, 2013 by Guest

[Yamato]

Fraud is profitable otherwise it wouldn't happen. So committing Fraud is intrinsic to free markets - and it will make a company more successful. A lightly regulated market will always favour fraud against the customer and will always eventually reward the most fraudulant by making them a virtual monopoly.

You should read what RAW had to say about free marketers, I have provided plenty of quotes, he saw them as equally as dangerous and fanatical as Marxists. I tend to agree.

I do not accept your religion !!!

Br Cornelius

He sounds like a protectionist who's not willing to take risks. We can have a risk averse market too and if everyone drives with their seat belts on in first gear, then not much will get done. Every research project is a risk. A gamble that nothing good will come of it. And it's expensive. But the risk takers change the world, not the safe.

My religion only has one rule: Let's err on the side of too much liberty rather than not enough of it. Does that make me sound extremist?

[Guest]

He sounds like a protectionist who's not willing to take risks. We can have a risk averse market too and if everyone drives with their seat belts on in first gear, then not much will get done. Every research project is a risk. A gamble that nothing good will come of it. And it's expensive. But the risk takers change the world, not the safe.

My religion only has one rule: Let's err on the side of too much liberty rather than not enough of it. Does that make me sound extremist?

Your extremism is based on the fact that you prefer an intellectual ideal to reality. Any time that has prevailed it has always caused big trouble in the real world.

Liberty for the majority is not automatically guaranteed by reducing the rules governing social conduct.

Br Cornelius

[Yamato]

Your extremism is based on the fact that you prefer an intellectual ideal to reality. Any time that has prevailed it has always caused big trouble in the real world.

Liberty for the majority is not automatically guaranteed by reducing the rules governing social conduct.

Br Cornelius

I prefer reality to some intellectual ideal, actually. For example, the rule of law is reality.

Liberty for all is automatically revoked by eliminating the rules governing government conduct.

[Guest]

You are a free market fundamentalist - that is a belief without supporting evidence. That is your fantasy solution to everything.

Br Cornelius

[Yamato]

You are a free market fundamentalist - that is a belief without supporting evidence. That is your fantasy solution to everything.

Br Cornelius

Power should be decentralized, markets should be free. The US did quite well in the 19th century when it had relatively free markets. Communism on the other hand is a near universal failure.

[Guest]

Power should be decentralized, markets should be free. The US did quite well in the 19th century when it had relatively free markets. Communism on the other hand is a near universal failure.

Markets were never relatively free, thats just more fantasy. The period you talk of, when regulation was relatively light, went through many boom bust cycles cumulating in the great depression.

As if I should care about the failure of Communism, Who's a Communist ? I am a social democrat - a very successful form of Government.

Br Cornelius

Edited July 29, 2013 by Guest

[Yamato]

Markets were never relatively free, thats just more fantasy. The period you talk of, when regulation was relatively light, went through many boom bust cycles cumulating in the great depression.

As if I should care about the failure of Communism, Who's a Communist ? I am a social democrat - a very successful form of Government.

Br Cornelius

Culminating?

Nothing personal. It's an objective frame of reference between communist vs free markets. Do you believe that slackers should partake in the spoils of the economy? That's a communist trait.

[Guest]

Culminating?

Nothing personal. It's an objective frame of reference between communist vs free markets. Do you believe that slackers should partake in the spoils of the economy? That's a communist trait.

I don't believe its in any way that simple. Do you believe that in a capitalist economy it is possible to have full employment. All the evidence says that people have become more and more redundant in the capitalist economy and unemployment has become a chronic fault. Who is to blame for this - is it the people who have been made redundant by the march of the economy - or is it the people who created an economy which fails to value people.

Do you think that the millions of unemployed people all spongers, that they intentionally made themselves unemployed because its fun to be unemployed in America.

If you are able to admit that the unemployed are victims of the economy - what would you do with them - let them starve, round them up and put them to work in slave camps ??

None of these issues are simple, and don't try to lay on me the line that says a free market would create full employment cos it doesn't fit with the reality.

Br Cornelius

[Yamato]

I don't believe its in any way that simple. Do you believe that in a capitalist economy it is possible to have full employment. All the evidence says that people have become more and more redundant in the capitalist economy and unemployment has become a chronic fault. Who is to blame for this - is it the people who have been made redundant by the march of the economy - or is it the people who created an economy which fails to value people.

Do you think that the millions of unemployed people all spongers, that they intentionally made themselves unemployed because its fun to be unemployed in America.

If you are able to admit that the unemployed are victims of the economy - what would you do with them - let them starve, round them up and put them to work in slave camps ??

None of these issues are simple, and don't try to lay on me the line that says a free market would create full employment cos it doesn't fit with the reality.

Br Cornelius

I think markets have their problems and I'd much rather deal with the problems of too much freedom than not enough of it.

[Guest]

I think markets have their problems and I'd much rather deal with the problems of too much freedom than not enough of it.

Not really addressing the issue at hand there are you

If you don't think about these issues you can never really honestly say that you have thought your ideas through to their logical conclusion.

Br Cornelius

[Yamato]

Not really addressing the issue at hand there are you

If you don't think about these issues you can never really honestly say that you have thought your ideas through to their logical conclusion.

Br Cornelius

If they create new issues unprecedented in human history, I'm still not going to stop defending freedom. The role of a constrained constitutional government should be in dealing with the problems resulting from a society that is too free. That guy was free, and look what he did! When authoritarian rule forcing people to behave becomes the order of the day, it becomes corrupted. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to divide this great power up and make sure that people are responsible when using it. Don't you even see how corrupt government force control is? Don't you see how deadly? Democide is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths; To actually believe that freedom is more deadly than government is to believe that people are inherently evil and need rich powerful masters to control them like slaves. Even I believe that people need a moral compass but I don't have such a black view of humanity that I think people are inherently bad. People largely just want to be left alone and live harmonious lives in peace and love. Governments and squabbling over political differences between them are the reason for all the wars in the world.

[Guest]

If they create new issues unprecedented in human history, I'm still not going to stop defending freedom. The role of a constrained constitutional government should be in dealing with the problems resulting from a society that is too free. That guy was free, and look what he did! When authoritarian rule forcing people to behave becomes the order of the day, it becomes corrupted. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We need to divide this great power up and make sure that people are responsible when using it. Don't you even see how corrupt government force control is? Don't you see how deadly? Democide is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths; To actually believe that freedom is more deadly than government is to believe that people are inherently evil and need rich powerful masters to control them like slaves. Even I believe that people need a moral compass but I don't have such a black view of humanity that I think people are inherently bad. People largely just want to be left alone and live harmonious lives in peace and love. Governments and squabbling over political differences between them are the reason for all the wars in the world.

Again - you are not addressing the specific issue raised. you are not prepared to confront the logical inconsistencies of your position.

You are great at repeating your favourite mantra but very poor at engaging in critical thinking about where your mantra lead you.

Until you can address the issue of who will protect us from corporations when they have shown themselves more than willing to abuse citizens - you have not solved the problem of what represents progress from the situation we are in.

It really is tedious to watch you avoid addressing these fundamentals - as I said before you prefer the idea of freedom to the reality of achieving it.

Br Cornelius

[Yamato]

Again - you are not addressing the specific issue raised. you are not prepared to confront the logical inconsistencies of your position.

You are great at repeating your favourite mantra but very poor at engaging in critical thinking about where your mantra lead you.

Until you can address the issue of who will protect us from corporations when they have shown themselves more than willing to abuse citizens - you have not solved the problem of what represents progress from the situation we are in.

It really is tedious to watch you avoid addressing these fundamentals - as I said before you prefer the idea of freedom to the reality of achieving it.

Br Cornelius

The courts protect us from corporations abusing citizens. <-- Addressing a fundamental.