The Power of Gold...
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By Gegner
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May 13th, 2010
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Greetings good citizen,
Global markets are mixed with most of the Western Hemisphere currently trading in negative territory, which tells us what, precisely?
It tells us that ‘officially’ the phantom recovery is still ‘on track’ (even if there is nothing that positively confirms this. No matter how much they crow over data points that would ordinarily be ignored!)
We’re back to the old, ‘it’s not what you say but how you say it’ game, the point is to generate excitement thereby creating plausibility, which is almost believability.
Most realists openly admit we will never achieve anything approaching ‘ideal’ circumstances…but this fantasy bullshit is getting way out of hand!
Which is to ask at what point are you forced to admit that your ‘elected representatives’ are no longer in control of the situation? Does this realization come once it is apparent that no matter who you vote into office, nothing changes (a phenomenon that dates back to the Nixon administration!)
The very foundation of civilization is trust, once that trust has been broken, what passes for civilization collapses.
As the, er, ‘decrees’ of management become more and more dependant on the flimsiest of evidence, trust dissolves and civilization collapses.
But I digress. tonight’s offering isn’t a direct critique of the breakdown of trust…but it does focus your attention on what happens when the whole ball of wax becomes a game of ‘trust me’? (Without the question mark…your compliance is ‘assumed’ because your options are, er, ‘limited’)
Why There is Fear and Resentment of the Power of Gold to Discover Value in the Real Economy
There were a few questions raised about the note on the long term chart of the SP 500 deflated by gold which was posted last night, and which is reproduced here on the right, which read:
"This is why the financial engineers like Bernanke hate and fear gold; it defies their plans and powers."
The chart shows something that most investors have suspected. There has been no genuine recovery in the price of stocks since the decline that cannot be fully explained by the monetary inflation of the dollar, as can be discovered by the ultimate store of value, which is gold.
I thought that this was a fairly straightforward observation, but it apparently jarred a few people and their thinking. So perhaps we have some new readers who are not familiar with the long standing animosity towards gold that is uniformly expressed by all those who promote centralized command and control economies, from both the left and the right. [While I still, er, ‘object’ to ‘monetizing’ gold, there indeed has to be a standard somewhere if only to keep things honest. Otherwise you get what we have today, a bunch of morons pulling valuations out of their butts!]
Can any astute observer doubt the Fed's desire to act in secret and privacy? Their obsession with this is almost unbelievable and beyond comprehension, [Not if their ‘goal’ is to hoodwink the rest of us!] unless one understands that they are in a 'confidence game,' and use persuasion and even illusion to shape perceptions, especially at the extremes of their financial and monetary engineering of the real economy.
This animosity and desire for secrecy was described by Alan Greenspan in his famous essay, Gold and Economic Freedom, first published in 1966. In a fairly amusing exchange between Congressman Ron Paul and the former Chairman a couple of years ago, Mr. Paul asked Sir Alan about this essay, and if he had any corrections or misgivings about it after so many years. Would he change anything?
"Not one word." replied Greenspan.
It helps to understand the dynamics of the money world, which appear so mysterious to those who do not specialize in it, even economists, although they often feign ignorance to promote some cause or avoid unpleasant disclosure.
Money is power. Ownership of the means of production may provide for the control of groups of disorganized labor, but the power of the issuance of money allows for the control of whole peoples and governments, through the distribution and transference of wealth, by the most subtle of means. And this is why the US Constitution relegated this power to the Congress and by their explicit appropriation, and denied it to the States and private parties except in the form of specie, that is, gold and silver which have intrinsic value.
It might be useful to review a prior post in reaction to the self-named maverick economist Willem Buiter, who wrote a few attacks on gold, prior to his leaving academia and the Financial Times to take a position with Citibank. Willem Buiter Apparently Does Not Like Gold
It may seem a bit perverse, but I do not favor a return to a gold, or a bi-metallic gold and silver standard. Each nation can be free to devalue or deflate their own money supply as their needs require, with the consent and knowledge of the people and their representatives. What I do promote is for gold and silver to trade freely without restraint or manipulation as a refuge from monetary manipulation, and a secure store of value for private wealth. When nations adopt the gold standard, they invariably see to 'fix' and manipulate its price, and reserve the ownership to themselves, with the tendency to seize the wealth of their citizen under the rationale of such an ownership, or dominant privilege. Let those who have a mind to it have a place of security for their labor and efforts, and let the state do as it will, with the open knowledge and consent of the world. [As I have pointed out numerous times before, money ‘failed’ at it’s intended purpose, but that didn’t stop its subsequent ‘abuse’ as a social control measure.]
"Gold is not necessary. I have no interest in gold. We will build a solid state, without an ounce of gold behind it. Anyone who sells above the set prices, let him be marched off to a concentration camp. That's the bastion of money."
Adolf Hitler
A draconian approach no doubt. It is much more common for the ruling parties to debase the coinage secretively while advantaging their friends and supporters, thereby manipulating the value of gold and silver covertly. In modern times of non-specie currency one might choose to select a few cooperative banks and the central money authority to manipulate the price using paper and markets, and hope that this scheme will remain undiscovered. But it always comes out, the truth is always known in the end.
"With the exception only of the period of the gold standard, practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money to defraud and plunder the people." [And the current governments of the world are no exception!]
F. A. Von Hayek
There are any number of amateur economists and investing pundits around these days who betray an almost irrational opposition to gold, becoming jubilant in every decline, and despondent at every rally. And some of them even take the label of 'Austrianism' in their thoughts. Most often this can simply explained as the envy of those who have not prepared for a crisis, and wish ill upon those who have, regretting and hoping for another chance to provide for their own security. And yet they will fail to take advantage of every opportunity to do so, as they are creatures betrayed alternatively by their own fear and greed. [Jesse’s buttering his own bread here, or ‘talking his book’ as many investment advisors will when given the chance.]
And regrettably, there are always those who will say almost anything for money, and the profession of economist seems to be particularly infested with that sort, given the nascent nature of the discipline, and its lack of scientific rigor, being based on principles which do not easily lend themselves to objectification with serious damage to the data being made by the assumptions in their equations and proofs. [Can’t fault his critique here, economists are worse than pollsters or ‘ratings agencies’ who both produce the results they are paid to report!]
But most of all, the financial engineers, politicians, and Wall Street Banks fear gold because it is the antidote to their frauds, and the informant to their confiscation of wealth. [Ironically, it is the people who hold large stores of gold in their possession that provide us with this fiscal ‘bellwether’, otherwise we would have nothing to ‘compare’…]
Do not expect them to capitulate once and for all, but only slowly and grudgingly, as it becomes more difficult for them to sustain their illusions and persuasion. Protecting wealth against official adventurism is never easy.
Understand good citizen that gold is no more money than paper is…and push come to shove ‘civilization’ can’t be sacrificed on a ‘cross of gold’ (because those who ‘control gold now are the same people who brought the current mess to us!)
The only way (don’t you love that phrase, wars have been fought over such assertions!) to correct the longstanding problem associated with money is to ‘legally’ redefine and ‘re-purpose’ it.
Nobody should EVER be used as someone else’s ‘income stream’ because that is the essence of slavery. Erasing that wrong leaves us with a different ‘truth’; that money is only useful to the individual. It serves society as a ‘regulator’ because it regulates the individuals ‘access’ to goods/services that are in short supply.
If we recognize that money is only useful to the individual, we need to also acknowledge that money need not be ‘transferable’ between individuals, and no facility should be made to do the same.
Too bad people don’t like to think because it is here that people lose their appreciation for the beauty of ‘A Simple Plan’.
They start worrying about what would happen if the computers crashed or if criminals decided to use something else as money (like the ‘shadow banks and their derivatives!)
And the answer to both is simple…the rules of work are so rigid that calculating what you should have in the, er, ‘bank’ is a simple mathematical equation (that will likely give you more than you actually had…although ‘hard crashes’ would be rare.) And if criminals ‘invented’ their own money, they’d be ‘exiled’, a rather nasty punishment reserved for those unwilling to play by the rules.
Well, now I’m ‘talking my book’, see, we’re all ‘shameless’ if given a chance.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner
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But most of all, the financial engineers, politicians, and Wall Street Banks fear gold because it is the antidote to their frauds, and the informant to their confiscation of wealth. [Ironically, it is the people who hold large stores of gold in their possession that provide us with this fiscal ‘bellwether’, otherwise we would have nothing to ‘compare’…]
I was thinking the same thing. The "solution" appears to be just another trap.
Yes, money needs to be 're-defined and re-purposed' if we are to build a 'sustainable society'.
Which is to agree that gold, while providing an interesting window with which to view our current disaster, answers nothing.
It is this fundamental issue I keep failing to 'clearly' communicate! (Mostly because it defies simplification.)
"Yes, money needs to be 're-defined and re-purposed' if we are to build a 'sustainable society'"
And of course the next question becomes....................BY WHOM ? Whoever gets that task will no doubt redefine money in a way that is favorable to them.
As you know I have spent a lot of time pondering this very question as well and my thoughts on gold are that it is no different than fiat money, in fact whenever I argue with a gold bug, they always get stuck when I ask them to tell me how much gold is worth without referring to a currency. A currency is only "that thing which we all agree to use as assigning value to something"
If you cant value gold without using a currency then there is no difference between them. In fact most everyone that seeks gold now eventually wants access to a currency, they just want to make sure they get a positive return (nothing wrong with that, I want a positive return on my investments too) but they make the mistake of claiming that gold is different than other commodities.
You are 110% correct, perhaps the 'standard' we need is more 'universal' (and easily understood by the consuming public) than 'gold', which isn't particularly 'useful' (commercially.)
The Bible uses wheat and oil but this would only result in the 'manipulation' of those markets by those who could/would.
Bizarrely, the inclusion of these passages in the, er, Greatest 'story' ever told has led the, er, faithful to believe that God condones and approves of the way capitalists 'use' money and treat their customers/employees!
I'll have to give the matter more thought but the first thing to 'pop' into my head is that 'most precious' of all resources...water.
One of the 'failures' of modern 'currency equivocation' is found in the most fundamental questions like 'how many chickens equal a pig?'
This was the specific task money was 'invented' to solve but it failed...miserably.
Maybe we're going about the job from the wrong direction.
Um, to add a little more to this I'll explain in more detail how the 'cashless' 'A Simple Plan' handles the money...problem.
Basically...commerce , under ASP, exists to satisfy the needs of society...simply put, it is that 'managed' economy most capitalists despise (because prices are set by availability rather than by 'gullibility')
But wait, we aren't talking a 'perfect' world were everything goes according to 'plan', you have your targets and yields are what they are...you MAY be able to offset shortfalls by trading for another region's surplus but there are some 'restrictions' to trade that shouldn't be ignored.
Since both Production AND Distribution are not 'privately held' (and do not need 'profit' to operate) price is determined solely by availability...you don't get to 'pocket' the 'difference' between the buy price (because there isn't one...even now, the capitalist's get theirs 'for nothing', Mother Nature doesn't have a cash register) and what the 'market will bear'.
The payroll distribution is set up to benefit experience. The more you know (about what you do) the more you are compensated...naturally, like today, there are 'plateaus' where the next step involves winning a competition rather than 'simple longevity', a roadblock that used to vex workers everywhere.
There was no point in investing in yourself or your career because the opportunity 'wasn't there'...the owner's kids were going to get the top slots regardless of how 'good' you were. The best you could do was to be assigned to babysit the bosses progeny, if needed.
So here we have how you 'get' money and how prices are set. Left from this puzzle is what happens to the money you spend...that's the 'beauty' of the whole thing...you spend your money and nobody gets it, it simply disappears!
This is what I mean when I say money only has value to the individual.
If, as you suggest, you/anyone would hack into the system and give yourself a big raise/lump of money...you'd set off alarm bells from here to Kingdom come... the 'banking system' would be 'self-policing'. The 'sudden surge' in unexplained funds would bring the 'Uh-Oh' squad down on your head quicker than you can say 'crap!'
Suppose you were really ruthless and decided to kidnap a banker's child, forcing them to, er, 'inflate' your account...do you honestly think the money would stay there?
Suppose you 'tied up loose ends', murdered the banker's kid AND the banker and made a run for it...now remember, the only way you can spend money is through your ID card, there IS NO CASH.
How far do you think you will get? Let's suppose you're really clever and you have the funds deposited to a 'fake account'...and you get someone high enough in the foodchain to create it for you because 'babies' don't start off with millions in their accounts.
You don’t become an experienced plumber by not spending years getting paid to do plumbing work. Experience is gained on the job. Years of being paid to do plumbing makes you an experienced plumber. So pay for experience isn’t pay for work, it’s extra pay on top of the pay you already got paid while you were gaining experience all through the years of sacrificing your time and energies to doing plumbing work.
It isn't physically possible so you didn’t go back in time and sacrifice harder and longer thereby putting more into the pool of wealth to justify paying for your experience, you’re just collecting a bonus wage now, for work you did and got paid for back then – and you’re claiming you deserve higher pay henceforward simply because you worked in the past – just like everybody else did who worked at something besides being a plumber. Therefore pay for experience is overpay and unjust and injury to others which is injury to yourself because it has to be coming from underpay for someone else – it has no other place to come from. Only work creates wealth. The pool of wealth is finite. Individual contribution is limited by nature. You are forgetting all these things when you endorse pay for experience.
Somebody has to do work for no pay or for underpay in order for somebody else to get pay for experience, so now give me the justification for forcing someone to take *less* from the pool of wealth than he contributed by his own sacrifice of time and energies to working in order to allow the experienced person to take out *more* than he individually contributed.
And no, I’m not actually waiting for you to present this justification. Because none exists.
Humans siding with pay for experience is another dopey failure to see anything beyond the supposed upside when in fact and practice the downside of siding with pay for experience is greater than the upside, the cost is bigger than the dividend. Side with pay for experience and right there you have opened the door to you being robbed, to ever-escalating inequality tyranny/slavery. Siding with pay for experience is siding with yet another of the false, illogical, nonsense rationalizations for keeping the lethality called overpayunderpay. It’s a way to slit your own throat in exactly the same manner as tea-partiers are blindly slitting their own throats siding with the very ideas that are killing what they say they wish to preserve.
People support pay for experience - but cold, hard sense says that experience is gained at no extra sacrifice of time and effort beyond that made in doing the paid work that provided the experience. Again, people support and defend it although for 99%, the costs of funding this exceed the financial benefit to them! They con themselves out of their full rightful pay by mis-thinking that pay for experience gives them more money, and they thus open the floodgates to unlimited uncontrollable growth of overpay-underpay [and consequent unlimited uncontrollable violence, war, crime, weaponry ever-growing].
People don't want to look at justice because they fear it will mean less money - they never suspect that justice will mean more money and the destruction of violence.
How could stopping myself from getting pay for things like natural gifts and experience give me *more* money? It doesn't make sense to people - it doesn't make sense to people because they are looking at a tiny part of the picture – themselves only. Not being paid yourself for non-work things gives you more money because it stops others being paid for these things at your expense. Read that sentence again. Internalize its very convenient truth. Overpay, pay for nonwork, is funded by work for no pay, underpay, by others. The overpay buys things other people have worked to make. Your participation in this injustice prevents you stopping others benefiting from this leak at your expense - the line is crossed, erased, and there are no principles of justice left to limit pay, to prevent unlimited pay/hr, hence we have pay per hour, after 3000 years' growth of inequality, from $10,000,000 to 1cent - an inequality violence misery war crime weaponry tyranny slavery undemocracy unliberty unfraternity corruption brutality torture state-terrorism private-terrorism warmongering cannonfoddering disinformation rights-trampling planet-trampling factor of one billion, and rising - to extinction soon, thanks to e=mc2. Happy people have no history. We have heaps of history - and history is now accelerating exponentially.
Get the idea of pay justice, and we get a history-free golden age. Keep faith with pay injustice, and we get oblivion. The bombs are global. Global means every house. Culture is based on ideas. Our idea for 3000 years has been wrong - it has produced underpay misery for 99%, overpay misery for 1%, and violence for everyone.
"...they just want to make sure they get a positive return (nothing wrong with that, I want a positive return on my investments too)..."
'positive return on my investment' = profit, profit by money Taking and Raking money - not by sacrifice creating wealth therefore work Making money
profit is an absurdly innacurate word. profit is actually always profitloss - because profit by definition has nowhere to come from but from somebody else losing part of their own labor to you. profit is legal theft.
You seriously see nothing wrong with everybody going after all they can get their hands on instead of going after what they put into the pool of wealth, no less and no more? you want more than world average fairpay for yourself and to make others take less so you can have profit?
you should already well know that i do not argue for getting rid of the profit motive. my position is let it work for us instead of against us by installing simple perpetual correcting mechanisms that constantly clip profits above a certain cap on size of personal fortunes and give the profits back to those most robbed by the loss side of profitloss.
but it all starts with understanding clearly what profitloss IS.
keep profit without installing corrective measures to re-adjustice the workproducts/wealth, and you have inequality growing to infinity
kaboom: that's what wanting money for no work done will get you.
I think what you work for and what you buy and sell for on a market are a little different. When I buy a house today, the agreed upon price is a win win. I get the house I want the seller gets the money they want. If down the road I can sell to someone else for more money than I paid OK. That would be fine and is certainly what I hope happens, but the profit on my investment takes nothing from someone else. Someone else "wants" my house and our new agreement is a win win. Even if I end up selling for less, I prefer the money to the house at that time.
I agree with you about pay justice. I've never really thought about it the way you present it but I now see it differently. It is certainly true in a zero sum world. I'm not entirely sure though that there is a limit to wealth. There will always be something new we can "value" due to our creativity. We have the ability to rework things. We make oil into plastic and trees into paper all which change the value of the original substance and add wealth. I think we are capable of creating unlimited numbers of things to value and therefore will never run out of wealth. Thats all wealth is, its a store of value.
The pool of wealth is finite. this is not my opinion, it is an inarguable fact of our reality. those who think the pool of wealth is not finite are confusing the actual with the potential for it to grow, which it can, up to the limits of physical resources - - but the pool of wealth is always at any point in time finite. all the wealth = all the workproducts = all the sacrifice of time and energies...which sacrifice is inescapably limited.
i am never going to understand why this primary profound reality is not self-evident to everyone, but i'm not sure it matters anymore, what with a potential earth extinction event underway in the gulf of mexico right now.
At any given time,yes you are correct, the pool of wealth is finite, but its also true that the next day the pool is of a different size than the day before (hopefully larger). So the pool of wealth is finite but not static. Its finite because it can be measured but it is a dynamic thing.
Not sure exactly the implications of this except that we can always make ourselves wealthier next week/month/year. The question is how.
This debate could go off in a thousand different directions but I tend to think the key lies in the deliberate 'obscurity' surrounding key economic principles like 'benefit' and 'value', these mean different things to different people and something else entirely when your telling it to the Judge!
While it is impossible to agree on absolutes, it is possible to agree on 'principles'. XO is right, overpay may not state the case as clearly as some would like but yes, this issue has it's foundations in the 'usefulness' of money, where the simple accumulation of 'legal tender' has trumped the socially beneficial ethic of 'work/reward'.
Too many 'abusers' and you get 'social collapse'.
A good example of people not seeing the forest for the trees. We do not have to and should not waste time trying to fight our way thru all these concepts like value and worth which are irrelevant -
my position is that people should be paid for work - why - because that is what they lose. People should share the substantial wealth (which is produced only by work) in the same proportions they would without trade, when each person consumes what she produces, which is natural automatic justice: bear go fishee, bear eat fish, bird no catchee worm, bird no eatee worm – the insertion of money between work and eat does nothing to change the fundamental situation humans are in
once again, this species does not realize the nasty can of worms we opened when we began to specialize in our labor and trade the workproducts of our sacrifice
the fatal flaw inherent in unlimited personal fortunes capitalism that has to be corrected for is rooted in the very nature of transaction itself and occurs with or without human agency helping it along – and what that never-before-noticed thing means is still being ignored – here, where I’d a thunk people really would be grokking this by now, and on every continent
we give pay for a lot of things that are not work by the person - which causes evergrowing inequality, which causes evergrowing violence, which causes evergrowing misery, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest, and is in no one's interest. we pay for natural gifts (work done free by nature not the person) risk (not work, not measured or measurable) experience (gained in paid work with no extra work) skill (natural gifts or experience), having studied (not work - study is work and should be paid for but having studied is not work) and so on
but this common sense is very very far from people and they automatically switch off from any thought that implies that they are far from common sense
my method gives a sound logical way to arrive at exactly what is pay justice and what should and shouldn’t be paid for, and it agrees with common sense - obviously bill gates does no more work per hour than anyone else - obviously if you set gates and others to do work creating substantial wealth with same tools materials info etc their production would be equal within about 20% - obviously natural gift should not be paid for as it involves no work by the person – obviously no one chooses to get poorer gifts in the birth lottery, obviously there is no work in having studied (is work in studying) - etc
theories of/about value … don’t even pretend to give a way out of the extreme overpayunderpay overpowerunderpower madness - they just try to make progress thru the murk, leaving us no wiser at the end and a lot more doubtful of success
please see my ‘libertarian blunder’ stuff in the forum that exposes the fallacy of “the voluntary argument” that you’re making above, gbgasser. How we make ourselves wealthier in money, in safety, in happy quality of life is by turning to justice - pay justice.
My piece on collapse and my book chapters present crucial understandings, too. (I don’t know how to do front page, so I write in the forum.)
btw, if youse guys wanna discuss the crucial importance of pay justice principles in an actual conversation, send me an email to payjustice at fastmail dot fm and i'll respond and you can decide (or not) to give me your phone number. i have free long distance in the US and am happy to move this along much more quickly via talking rather than typing.
It is incredible that we humans do not have the concept of overpay. People look at me like I just spoke Martian to them when I use a term or phrase like “finite pool of wealth” or “overpay has nowhere to come from but from underpay” or “the principles of pay-justice”. It has simply never occurred to us that there could even BE such principles. We have no concept of it, nothing within our thinkbank to tie it to. “Principles of pay-justice” – do they exist? Is there an ethics for paying people? Who says? Based on what? Work? What is work?
We are commercial creatures (commerce means interchange, intercourse; trade) who, in order to reap the efficiency benefit of it, began to specialize in their work and trade the products of their work. We live our lives awash in commerce, yet we have simply never thought about it; Why should people be paid? What should they be paid for doing? It is because we have swallowed the idea that the market is, by definition, fair pay. This is snake-oil. We buy into it because we haven’t thought of any other way to determine pay justice, and because we have lost our common sense, and we can’t re-connect. Gertrude Stein: People these days get so much information, they lose their common sense. How very much truer that is today than in Gertrude’s time!
We are so far from pay justice, it is utterly out of sight for us. In addition, we are all looking to the pay injustices to make things better. The underpaid, understandably but myopically, since it never works out that way and never will, hope to reduce their underpay by them, and the overpaid make mega-heaps out of the pay injustices, and the overpaid need unlimited amounts to self-defend and to spend plundering. So everyone thinks they have reason to edit out any thought of justice. Are we too far away from sense to get back to it? Quite possibly, but one must try.
Pay justice is pay only for work, no pay for no work, equal pay for equal work, equal pay for equal sacrifice to working. Pay only for work, because only work creates wealth (work-products, goods and services). A dollar will never even make you a cup of tea.
We pay for many things that are not work. These customs have become second nature to us, and we think that something that has been done ‘forever’ just has to be right. We think that we can’t have been lacking in sense for ‘forever’. Hah. How long were we positive that the only thing to do with fire was to run like hell away from it? How long was it before we finally figured out that the planets were going round the sun? We figured that out just a few hundred years ago. And what a comedy of human unintelligence, of resistance, surrounded our getting that the earth is going round and round the sun! About the same time, we figured out that the blood was going round and round. We had fisheye lenses for ‘forever’ without ‘getting’ the microscope. Plato didn’t ‘get’ the microscope. Our technological brilliance makes it very hard for us to grasp and accept our ethical ‘infancy’. And it is only the very brightest among us who actually got these things. The beginning of wisdom is not endless self-congratulation for our brilliance. It’s the other thing. ‘You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time’. And we took this as a compliment. ‘It is said that man is a rational animal. I have been looking for evidence of this all my life’ ‘Only the universe and [limited wits] are infinite, and I’m not sure about the universe’. ‘Even the gods are stumped by [limited wits]’. But it’s okay. It’s not our shame or fault. No need to take limited wits personally. We have a perfect excuse. We didn’t make ourselves. Phew. But that didn’t stop us falling for feeling bad about being what we are. ‘[Life] makes us and then has the cheek to blame us for us’. And we fell for that, for millennia.
Seek. Test everything. Investigate. Doubt every hypothesis. The railway engineer checks the wheels regularly. It is a good thing to do. Either find the wheels are sound or find they're not - that's a win either way. We have limited wits. We can always be wrong.
All progress - and now our very survival chances - hangs on going beyond our certainties towards reality.
We have pay up to 100,000 times the average! We have pay down to 10,000th of average! And we don’t yet have the suspicion that there is overpay and underpay! If pay was a swimming pool, one metre deep at rest, 90% of the pool is less than 1cm deep and 98% is up in a thin, thinning needle going up 100 kilometres. And we don’t yet have the suspicion that something is wrong with this picture. If the pay was the oceans, 90% of the oceans would be less than 4 metres deep, and the crests (leaping and crashing with far greater than ‘perfect storm’ force) would be literally wetting the moon (400,000 kilometres). Bill Gates gets $18 billion for one year’s work. Translated into work-products, that is 18,000 $1 million homes. Puts in one year’s work, and takes out 180,000 year’s work. And we are so smart, we can justify this. We can even defend this passionately.
Some magician has cast over our wits a tremendous spell. We recognise the sayings, Can’t see the forest for the trees, Strain at gnats and swallow camels, Small things are easier for people, Only those who see the big picture are awake, There are 1000 [1,000,000,000] hacking [ineffectively] at the branches for every one who is striking [effectively] at the root of the tree of problems... but we don’t realise that these sayings are true. ‘If they knew they were blind, they wouldn’t be blind’. The greatest dignity is ability to grant that we have limited wits.
We pay for natural gifts, brains, beauty, brawn. You want logic? There is no work by the person in natural gifts. Nature, who doesn’t require to be paid, thank goodness, has done the work. We take our natural gifts personally. We want to be paid for them. Others have to pay for them. We don’t notice that it is we who have to pay for them. Tell me the logic in making the ungifted pay for the natural gifts of others. Bet you can’t. Work done with the gifts is, in justice, in sense, paid for. Not the gifts. But we pay Paul McCartney, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, half a billion. And love it. We know Bill Gates is a genius, because he ‘made’ so much money. Why does he deserve so much money? Because he is a genius. How do we know he is a genius? Because he made so much money. Circular argument (false). Has anyone measured his genius? No. Has anyone worked out how much is in justice to be paid per unit of genius? No. We are so perfectly crazy, and so happy with it, that it is crazy to talk to it. Bill Gates ‘made’ ‘his’ money by the scarcity built in to new technology. New technology is high demand, low supply, until the industry gears up to demand, which it is still doing. Naturally, he sells the relatively few PCs he has to the highest bidders, just by setting the price high. If costs were as high as price, there would have been no IT billionaires. He only needed a 36% per anum personal return to turn ‘his’ $5 million start-up money into $50 billion in 30-odd years. (1.36 to the power 30 is around 10,000.)
Overpay-underpay is built in to trade itself. The two things traded cannot be exactly equal in work-input value. One person has to walk away with something less, the other with something more. (Transaction can’t be voluntary when you don’t know the facts.) Over trillions of transactions, this has to produce an ever-widening bell curve of net gains and losses. There is nothing in our systems to prevent prices being above costs (which include fairpay for work by principals, owners). Everyone gets paid in a non-profit company without volunteers, so what are profits? Companies are wealth concentrators. There are many customers, few principals. 10% profit, in a company which pays fairpay or overpay salaries to principals, has to belong to overcharged customers and underpaid workers. Has to. By definition. By logic. A million customers, paying $11 dollars for $10 of work in the product, is $1 million for the few principals. They pay the bills, take their salaries, there is money left over: Hey, I’ll have that for myself! And, as far as I have seen (correct me if I’m wrong), no one has seen this phenomenon before. (I suspect very few can see it even after it is explained. There is a dark force blinding people in these things. There is an automatic delete virus in our heads regarding these things.)
No one wants to see pay justice, because they are convinced it is bad for them. Pay justice is good for overpaid and underpaid. Extremely good. Unimaginably good. Golden age good. But we think the virtues, like justice, are bores, are sacrifices. I think the wealth-power giants over the ages convinced us of this, so we would let go our earnings. They were convinced overpay was good for them, so they convinced everyone that the virtues, which are the causes of happiness, were bores, were sacrifice, were bad. Pursuit of pay justice is historically rare. All revolutions were immediately followed by wealth concentration. Everyone thinks that more money is always better: Money is good, so more money has to be better. But more money gets into overpay, causing underpay, which grows endlessly, causing violence (war and crime), which grows endlessly. And overpay: Honey attracts bears. And the bigger the overpay, the hungrier the bears are. And that is history. Or, rather, that is history since wealth became non-perishable and storable, since wealth stopped being mostly food and perishable. And since division of labour necessitated trade, with its in-built pay injustice, its invisible iota of inequality of work-input value, its drop that became our far-greater-than-perfect-storm ocean of gigantic, unnecessary suffering. Which we can’t see the cause of. Which makes us flee to money-making to protect us. Which drives the pay injustice. Which drives the violence.
And we could all have $40 an hour including housewives and students. $100,000 per working person including housewives and students. $200,000 per family. That is the world average. Plenty. Super-abundance. And smooth sailing on a flat or gently wavy sea. No super-overpaid perpetually falling like water from a needle fountain (Caesar, Ceausescu, Hitler, Richard III, Marie Antoinette, people jumping out of skyscraper windows in Crashes and 9/11s, the fierce poverty of wealth, affluenza).
You’d think that America would from the beginning have had very good statistics of wealth concentration. You’d think that people would have known that wealth concentration was tyranny. You’d think they would have been very vigilant, fierce and proud in defence of pay justice, of prevention of wealth concentration, of ending the long human history of tyranny. You’d think the stats would have been on the front page of every newspaper, the universally acknowledged key to happiness, the sine qua non, the without-which-nothing, the without-which, total failure. ‘The state built on injustice cannot stand.’ That is, no pursuit of justice means no patriotism.
Instead, people thought: I couldn’t get rich under tyranny, now I can get rich under freedom. Look at those rich guys, woohee, that’s how good it can get for me.
The gods are very cruel. They gave us very limited wits, so they could laugh at us and feel superior. And, so that we didn’t work to learn, they made us fierce about admitting our wits were limited, they made us feel abashed to admit our limitations and seek and test everything, perpetual students, learning, looking, checking, correcting, finding, growing. So that we are not even as smart as a snail, feeling its way with its horns. The gods didn’t want us growing and making them look less superior. (No, I don’t believe in gods, it’s just a way of expressing. For gods, substitute the word life, or nature, or existence. But, for some reason, it’s more fun saying gods. I guess we are a bit lonely, stuck here on this planet by ourselves.)
It is terribly true that when you push a person down you have to stay down with them. The richest person in the world is as poor in quality of life as the poorest. We are all living in this near perfect hell of nuclear extinction looming, of concentration camps, genocide, bombs, bullets, isolation, crises, danger, disorder, lack of social trust, hope-fatigue, fear, paucity of admirables. We are all huddled in ourselves, like moles in burrows, trembling hard. Watching the news daily, hourly, checking the distance of terrors and horrors, trials and troubles.
and it's all so completely unnecessary.
You say true XO! If we're all in this together then who the hell is the 'opposition'?
Bizarrely, the 'opposition' are the conservatives, people who identify with the 'John Jay's' of the, er, world.
"I have all that I want and want no more...BUT I want to protect what's mine!" What the greedy fucks don't mention is they own the frigging nation, they divvied it up among themselves after the war! 'They' won it so it was all theirs and screw anybody who came after!
Not that they 'admit' this, it's just how things 'turned out'.
But I digress. The 'problem' isn't 'awareness' of the epic unfairness of the current set-up, the problem is organizing those willing to fight for a more equitable arrangement.
Few are those who are 'satisfied' with the way things are...we just don't have a way to organize that huge majority into something that can bring 'pressure to bear' where it will do us some good!
United we stand, divided we suck!
It's too soon to speak of organizing. Seriously. Part of our problem is people are organizing to pull leaves, which drains away the time they need to devote to digging all the major problems confronting us out by their common root. It has done and will do us no good to organize before we re-educate ourselves.
Organized activists hate me for saying this, but what if protesting actually works against us in a way no one is seeing? What if organized protest inadvertently sends the exact wrong message to everyone?
If you're not coming from a position of power, isn't it true that you can't make demands, you can only make requests? Will the next and the next and the next wealthpower gi-ants be kinder to the ants and feel compelled to grant us our requests if we just persist in begging them for our rights long enough?
I sincerely think this deserves serious consideration: Protesting sends the message that it is good to beg wealthpower giants for our rights, that it is right to beg wealthpower giants for our rights, that it is necessary to beg wealthpower giants for our rights, and that it will always be good, right, and necessary to be begging wealthpower giants for our rights.
I think this thinking is all wrong, is self-harming, and it actually helps hide the simple fatal fact that we can't get our rights nor fix ANYthing while the diabolically stupid idea to allow wealthpower giants to have to beg our rights from survives. The idea to allow unlimited withdrawals from the finite pool of wealth MUST be murdered!
Somebody please remind me of the very good reason this species ever had for allowing unlimited personal fortunes? Is it wealthpower giants who are killing us all and this planet, or is it our very bad idea to allow wealthpower giants that we should be attacking?
Organization, within our current socioeconomic, political, cultural and environmental reality, and by its very nature, too, has a big downside we might be choosing to ignore or consciously or unconsciously underestimate while we look at only the upside it is easier for us to see. I think there are many sound reasons to say it might actually be true that dis-organization has the better chance to succeed – indeed it may be true that ONLY disorganized resistance can succeed now. Shall we discuss it a bit further? If organization is really the best idea, then we cannot denigrate it by probing it fearlessly, we can only reinforce its goodness, right?
I read an essay about the advantages of dis-organized resistance I found valuable (despite the article being severely flawed imo in some respects), and saved the following snips from it:
Organizations can be (and are) infiltrated. Organizations can be taxed. Organizations have legal responsibility. Organizations have membership lists and lists are wonderful tools for the oppressor. Organizations take on a life of their own. They struggle to exist and their continued existence takes priority over their mission. Organizations attract opportunists, power mongers, and attention seekers. Organizations tend to exploit their rank and file for the benefit of their inner circle.
Disorganizations share none of these defects.
Bureaucracy cannot comprehend disorganization. Disorganization is invisible. The asymmetry of the relationship between organization and disorganization favors disorganization. Organization depends upon planning. Planning requires predictability. Disorganization cannot be predicted. This leaves organization at a disadvantage.
Organization requires a supply chain. Supply chains can be disrupted. Disorganization depends only upon the resources of its members. Supply chains that do not exist cannot be eliminated.
Disorganization breeds. Organization grows. The many and dispersed are a more difficult target than the large and concentrated.
Organizations take their steps by design. If the design is flawed, the organization fails. Disorganization relies not upon design but upon evolution. The motivating notions of disorganization are memes. Memes evolve and memes compete. This process improves the motivating notions of disorganization.
The important thing to remember is that it is easier to destroy than to create that which is designed. Thus, the cost to those who lose the manifestation of their design outweighs by leaps and bounds the cost it takes to destroy it. That which evolves is cheap and when an effort is created to destroy the evolved entity, it merely mutates and evolves again, adjusting to the new conditions. As a process that fosters evolution, a movement based on disorganization will continue to survive, evolve, and expand without cost. The resource constraints placed upon the designed (e.g. government and corporate) and those absent from the evolved (a decentralized and disorganized opposition movement), favor the later.
end of snips
So history shows organized successes, yes, (and don’t you sometimes secretly wish you could force every American to read Zinn’s A People’s History for their own good?) but history also holds out to us myriad examples of the downside, too. If we counted the successes and failures of organized resistance going back a long time, would we find more success or more failure? I've never attempted such a listing, but considering the state of things today I have to suspect far more failing than succeeding. And it matters a lot that things have changed since we let the E=mc2 genie out of the bottle. It’s a whole different ball game now with a nuclear bombs clock ticking down. Our age is unique, made so by highspeed transportation and communication. Terrorists, bombs, and diseases fly on airplanes now. As Goldman Sacks-us has proven, computers allow wealthpowerful insiders to control the totally rigged game called the global economy second by second, technology is being used to play the FIRE economy against our real goods-and-services economy, these people have clearly used the power we give them to play out their supremacy whims as if our lives were nothing more than a video game.
I argue we simply do not have the time left to dribble in a few successes here and there anymore. The successes so far have not even put a dent in the ever-escalating wealthpower inequality factor that is the injustice factor, the war crime violence pollution factor that is killing us.
Truly, freedom is an illusion while the idea to allow wealthpower giants survives. We are the ones we've been waiting for, but we still haven't prioritized correctly what it is we need us to do. That's why I don't advocate action yet. First must come an under the radar word-of-mouth campaign where the bellwethers of the human herd learn and teach each other the principles of fairpay justice - which are NOT being discussed. People don't even realize there ARE such principles.
I hope I’m not making myself misunderstood here. It’s most definitely NOT my intention to throw the organization baby out with the dirty bathwater. Please don’t think I’m as simple-minded in my views or thinking as that, ok? Nothing could be further from the truth.
But I believe we humans suffer a universal epic failure to apprehend just how wealthy we have allowed the wealthy to become and we’re vastly underestimating the true ability of wealthpower giants to in fact and practice make history be what they say it will be. Money is power and no one disputes that. So have a look at this link below, and then tell me why the 99% underpaid are continuously surprised by how much evil the richest get away with using the uber-power we hand them on a platter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woIkIph5xcU (that’s the L curve animated. Watch it, People, and get yourself an economics PHD in 3 minutes. Then pass it along!)
Don’t get me wrong – I am in perfect strongest agreement on the crucial fact that wealthpower, no matter how extreme, is still only the second-greatest power and fully subordinate to people-power once the majority general human consciousness is in agreement on something. I’ve been yelling it from the rooftops forever. For an obvious example, no matter how rich, a wealthpower giant cannot walk around naked in public, because the public “just knows” it’s “wrong”. Which ought to tell us clearly that the only reason we have wealthpower giants is because the majority general human idea is still in agreement to allow them. From this, we should be easily, accurately concluding that, like I keep saying, the enemy is not a who, it’s a what. The rich are not the enemy or the problem. The enemy and the problem is an idea – the very stupid, worst-ever, unnatural and ultimately pan-species-fatal idea to allow unlimited personal fortunes. No-thing of consequence can or will change until the human species rids itself of that worst of all ideas. That idea, not the rich, is what is driving everything that is going on. That's why my campaign is against that terrible idea.
Long ago, the majority general human consciousness came to agreement on giving up the “right” to commit murder in order to be protected from murder, and today there are laws against murder everywhere. In just the same way, humans can agree to give up the “right” to have an overfortune in order to be protected against overfortunes, and laws against overfortunes can be passed everywhere. Easily...as soon as humans learn and teach each other economic clarity.
If you have 4 billion candles unlit, and only one lit, and everyone with a lit candle only ever lights two candles from their candle, all 4 billion candles will be lit in just 32 times the time it takes to light two candles. So everyone can be reached very easily, in short time, just by word of mouth, as soon as we figure out how to get clear ideas into our heads, as soon as we figure out how to get these strange nonsensical ideas out of our way to seeing clearly. There are 4 billion people that have to be reached, but there are 4 billion people to reach them. It seems a giant job to reach and teach 4 billion people, but many hands make light work. Strange it is, but true, that if everyone lights only one candle, it takes 4 billion times the time it takes to light one candle for the 4 billion candles to be lit. But if everyone lights just two candles, it takes just 32 times the time. Amazing but true.
Educate the people first, under the wealthpower giants' radar, and the organization to pass a few simple necessary laws to restore justice will happen organically, naturally, without much effort at all. Once the bellwethers of the human herd get it that we are simply not acting in accord with what everyone really already believes, the herd instinct begins to work for us, rather than against us.
the problem is ... people don't fight for a more equitable distribution because they have been purposefully confused about how money works, what an economy IS. People are functioning blindly based on many ginormous fundamental misconceptions our economic dystems all were erected upon. This is why principles of pay justice are vital to clarify - so people can blow away the chaff with a breath and keep the wheat...finally escaping the theoretical bullshit and nonsense excuses for overpayunderpay the economists fling at everything.
we have to go to the root and thereby prevent anyone in future having the power to keep creating new legal thefts...
Um, okay...it's a 'chicken or the egg' conundrum redux.
Would that it were a simple matter of 'education'...as you adeptly point out, the 'beneficiaries' of the current 'fuckaroo' have spared no expense in maintaining the 'smokescreen' surrounding the paramount failure of money.
It's really ironic that this could happen considering the 'worthlessness' of money itself! Worse, it would take a mountain of (again worthless) money to combat this 'dis-information'!
Murkier still is the fact that the, er, 'criminals' who benefit from this situation have their pockets filled by the same 'ignorance' they promote!
I'd personally love to see this situation, er, 'corrected' but I believe the deceivers won't let that happen, they'd rather destroy civilization than let it escape their iron grasp.
And that's sad.
not sure what yr saying there, G.
we may not like it, but education alone can do what needs done. it is imperitive more bellwhether people become learners and teachers of pay justice.
one very strategic beauty of my plan is the deceivers can't stop a word of mouth educational campaign where people spread the campaign for fairpay justice to their friends and families, fellow congregants, acquaintances, etc. how can the moneypowers possibly stop such a perfectly disorganized grassroots campaign?
other advantages of my plan:
nothing to join, no meetings to attend, no leader to follow (this is about following your own good sense for a switch), nothing to buy or sell, no dues to pay, the only cost is your time to read and think with care, no religion in it and no anti-religion, no new isms nor ologies to learn, it's the capitalism everyone loves just married to justice at last is all, no political parties, the solution accomplishes justice without shocks to the economies --- it's the only thing that is NOT subversive of democracy and democratic principles, of freedom, of liberty, of prosperity, of safety, security, peace, social order, good government, fraternity, sustainability, peace, justice, equality. it solves 99% of unnecessary human suffering at the macro-macro level, it's quicker and easier than any partial solutions which are not going to take the root of the problems away which means they will regrow like always before.
once people read the whole explanation (and indeed as things get worser and worser as we know they will), it should be the easiest thing in the world to get people to strongly support a plan that requires only that they get greedier and lazier if they want to save the earth and get back our children's chance to have a future...
please read my chapter 8 when you've a chance?