Excellent points, especially on all the vital information here on earth we are missing about ourselves and the universe. I agree. But I'm also interested in what we do know, specifically the basic cause and effect economic laws set in motion by human action. In other words, there's absolutely no reason we can't have both institutional re…
Excellent points, especially on all the vital information here on earth we are missing about ourselves and the universe. I agree. But I'm also interested in what we do know, specifically the basic cause and effect economic laws set in motion by human action. In other words, there's absolutely no reason we can't have both institutional reforms (which history and basic economics indicate would bring more peace, order, and prosperity for all), and greater self-knowledge. Why not have both? And after, should not the proper operation of our minds, and self-knowledge necessarily lead to institutional reform? Of course, they should.
Reform might or might not follow from a better level of knowledge. What those of us who are working more heavily in the knowledge department right now assert is that insufficient knowledge has led to bad choices when it came to reform. Recent "reform" has led to a lot of very centralized structures. Is that what we really need? Or does a less centralized approach work better? A central authority can enforce a certain level of consistency across a society. But when does this enforcement turn to tyranny? Those answers lie in the hearts and minds of people, and not in their structures.
Would one's ideas of ideal structures change if one were convinced that we have all existed for millions of years and could find ways to recover much of that lost experience? Would one's ideas for a better legal system change if one became aware of the true nature of psychopathy and how to handle it? These are questions we can't even ask until that knowledge is gained. Yet they seem pertinent if not fundamental to our current problems.
I agree there have been bad choices on reform, for well over a century. What I’m pointing to is radical decentralization. So, perhaps “reform” is not an apt word. What I’m talking of does speak to your questions of recovering lost experience and the true nature of psychopathy. That knowledge was gained millennia ago, and it couldn’t be more pertinent to our current problems. For context, I’ll paste for original comment: Outstanding essay, and urgently outstanding question: “did liberalism fail”? “Are we there yet?” No, but it’s poignantly clear that liberalism is in the process of failing. Cutting to the quick, the proximate cause is the Federal Reserve. The Fed is inherently rigged to destroy liberalism, and any notion of freedom and free people, because the Fed controls (and destroys) our money. It is the Fed, and the things that only the Fed can fund – things that could not exist without the Fed’s funding -- which destroys the economic mechanisms liberalism is necessarily dependent upon.
I think it’s absolutely, critically important that great leaders on medical and freedom issues, such as Dr. Malone, begin introducing the Fed and “sound money” into the conversation of not only “medical freedom,” but every conversation of Freedom. We will never have any meaningful, sustainable notion of Freedom or liberalism, as long as the Fed exists and operates as it has the last 110 years. We will never be free, as long as central banks like the Fed control our money. This issue may sound complicated, but it’s not. The concepts of money and the Fed are very simple concepts, once we begin wrapping our heads around them, and though certainly not easy, a transition to “honest” and “sound” money will not be nearly as difficult as one might think, if “the story” (to use Toby Rogers’ term) is simply and properly told. Rogers is correct. It's all about the story. "Those who tell the story rule society." This quote has attributed to Plato, but also, as a Native American proverb. Whatever the case, the quote couldn't be more true. This should be glaringly evident to every American, especially since 2020.
Toby Rogers begins by mentioning the “limitations and contradictions” in liberalism. He's correct. It's important to understand that in economic matters, there's rarely solutions, but rather tradeoffs. But the greater point is that true liberalism – Freedom -- is the only way toward at least the promise and pursuit of the greatest amount of meaning and happiness for the greatest amount of people. Freedom is the only way. And true liberalism must include sound money. We simply can’t have liberalism – freedom – without sound money.
Americans told a great story in the late 18th century, leading to and through the American Revolution. They told their story of “liberty and justice for all” in the face of insurmountable odds. The story included all of the mechanisms for liberty Toby Rogers identifies in this essay posted by Dr. Malone. But as we can see, the story told by the founders during the American Revolution also included the economic mechanism of sound money. We must remember the arguments of the founders over the First and Second Banks of the United States. We must remember the warnings about central banks like the Fed, from men like Thomas Paine. Here’s Paine in “Common Sense”:
“As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment, it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom – and property no security – where this practice can be added.”
Thomas Paine was right. With the Fed, essentially, "the people have no freedom." The evidence is all around us. Fast forward from Paine’s warning, to another from the mid 20th century, by F.A. Hayek, best known for his “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek addresses the dangerous ills central banks like the Fed, which pump paper money (and now, digital money) created out of thin air, into the economy:
“I doubt it has ever done any good except to the rulers and their favorites… money is certainly too dangerous an instrument to leave to the fortuitous expediency of politicians.”
Our Road to Serfdom is indeed paved with the Fed’s dollars, printed out of thin air by scheming politicians and politicized bankers.
In short, the story and script to attain and sustain liberalism and Freedom is already written. We just have to keep re-telling it anywhere and everywhere, over and over, BUT, with the inclusion of the economic mechanism which is sound money. All of the other economic mechanisms Toby Rogers cites in his essay hinge on sound money – ALL of them: free speech. freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, rule of law, fair elections, free trade, markets, private property, and entrepreneurship. Again, the things which kill these economic mechanisms would not exist, or at least would not be as powerfully effective, if not for the Fed, which funds them. We would not have a $33 trillion-plus national debt, with some $100 trillion-plus in unfunded liabilities, without the Fed. We would not have had the Great Depression, nor the financial collapse of 2008. (It’s important to note that the article blames “economic liberalism” for boom busts. But it’s central banks like the Fed which cause boom/busts-- more on this shortly, and in the links at the end of this comment).
Now, by “honest” and “sound” money, I mean, in part, non-inflatable money backed by something of real value -- gold or silver, for example. Money which cannot be tampered with and inflated by politicians bent on scheming ways to fund all of the unsustainable bureaucracies and agencies which are used to destroy liberty as mechanisms of the unsustainable welfare/warfare state. If not for the Fed’s inflationary, debt-financing, monetary expansion and artificial rigging of interest rates, our politicians wouldn’t be able to fund the absolutely catastrophic wars of choice we’ve been engaged in for the past half-century, nor the millions sent around the globe by men like Anthony Fauci for coronavirus “research,” nor the bureaucracies and agencies like the FBI and NSA and the rest of the “technocratic state,” which are used to harass, spy-on, censor, and cancel American citizens, and destroy our civil liberties. Sound money would have largely prevented the federal government’s catastrophically destructive reaction to the 2020 covid outbreak. We would also not have the boom/bust economic cycles and recessions Rogers mentions in his essay, which destroy the poor and middle class while redistributing wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful (the Fed is responsible for all of the recessions over the last 110 years). Furthermore, we wouldn’t have the inflation of the money supply, which results in rising prices of goods and services across the economy, destroying the purchasing power of the dollar, which of course, hurts the poor, middle class, and the vulnerable like those with fixed incomes, the most.
"Those who tell the story rule society." The story above might be the most important story to tell today, for the cause of freedom, and so individual liberty can rule society -- liberalism. Below are some links to a handful of brief introductions speaking to the necessity of sound money.
Part 2, in addition to my last comment, here’s the links mentioned. These address your points on recovering lost knowledge and experience (the necessity and practical utility of sound money was understood millennia ago), and the true nature psychopathy (the mechanics of the effects of inflation on the brain, from ancient Egypt, to Weimar, to Keynes’ quote below. For example:
“If anyone is curious, here are the sources and links I mentioned in my first comment, below: The Mises Institute is perhaps the very best on the issue. These videos are short and very easy to understand: "Why Study Money?" https://youtu.be/qIQg6TdJsgo?si=0DhW72Ac8WCxgdqt
Whatever we feel about politics, or libertarianism, this book is perhaps the best, most concise introduction to why we need to End the Fed: End the Fed https://mises.org/library/end-fed-1
Lastly, it’s important to note that Karl Marx noted that central banks like the Fed are necessary for communism. Central banks are the 5th plank of communism in “The Communist Manifesto.” Read that again, and ask yourself: how many planks of communism already exist in the US’s federal government? These planks are the problem, not liberty or liberalism.
Lastly, speaking of communism, we must remember the warnings from the architect of Western economies, J.M. Keynes. Keynes is responsible for much of the economic ills we suffer through today. But he was correct when he wrote the following. The Fed’s inflation not only impoverishes us and destroys our money and liberty, but it also negatively alters our micro, individual choices and behavior. Let this quote sink-in, and think through the implications. Keynes is describing what we see all around us, today:
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practiced, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design. Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as "profiteers" the popular indignation against the more obvious consequences of their vicious methods.
These "profiteers" are, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they wish it or desire it or not. If prices are continually rising, every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant inevitably makes profits. By directing hatred against this class, therefore, the European governments are carrying a step further the fatal process which the subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived. The profiteers are a consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the 19th century. But they have no plan for replacing it....”
Excellent points, especially on all the vital information here on earth we are missing about ourselves and the universe. I agree. But I'm also interested in what we do know, specifically the basic cause and effect economic laws set in motion by human action. In other words, there's absolutely no reason we can't have both institutional reforms (which history and basic economics indicate would bring more peace, order, and prosperity for all), and greater self-knowledge. Why not have both? And after, should not the proper operation of our minds, and self-knowledge necessarily lead to institutional reform? Of course, they should.
Reform might or might not follow from a better level of knowledge. What those of us who are working more heavily in the knowledge department right now assert is that insufficient knowledge has led to bad choices when it came to reform. Recent "reform" has led to a lot of very centralized structures. Is that what we really need? Or does a less centralized approach work better? A central authority can enforce a certain level of consistency across a society. But when does this enforcement turn to tyranny? Those answers lie in the hearts and minds of people, and not in their structures.
Would one's ideas of ideal structures change if one were convinced that we have all existed for millions of years and could find ways to recover much of that lost experience? Would one's ideas for a better legal system change if one became aware of the true nature of psychopathy and how to handle it? These are questions we can't even ask until that knowledge is gained. Yet they seem pertinent if not fundamental to our current problems.
I agree there have been bad choices on reform, for well over a century. What I’m pointing to is radical decentralization. So, perhaps “reform” is not an apt word. What I’m talking of does speak to your questions of recovering lost experience and the true nature of psychopathy. That knowledge was gained millennia ago, and it couldn’t be more pertinent to our current problems. For context, I’ll paste for original comment: Outstanding essay, and urgently outstanding question: “did liberalism fail”? “Are we there yet?” No, but it’s poignantly clear that liberalism is in the process of failing. Cutting to the quick, the proximate cause is the Federal Reserve. The Fed is inherently rigged to destroy liberalism, and any notion of freedom and free people, because the Fed controls (and destroys) our money. It is the Fed, and the things that only the Fed can fund – things that could not exist without the Fed’s funding -- which destroys the economic mechanisms liberalism is necessarily dependent upon.
I think it’s absolutely, critically important that great leaders on medical and freedom issues, such as Dr. Malone, begin introducing the Fed and “sound money” into the conversation of not only “medical freedom,” but every conversation of Freedom. We will never have any meaningful, sustainable notion of Freedom or liberalism, as long as the Fed exists and operates as it has the last 110 years. We will never be free, as long as central banks like the Fed control our money. This issue may sound complicated, but it’s not. The concepts of money and the Fed are very simple concepts, once we begin wrapping our heads around them, and though certainly not easy, a transition to “honest” and “sound” money will not be nearly as difficult as one might think, if “the story” (to use Toby Rogers’ term) is simply and properly told. Rogers is correct. It's all about the story. "Those who tell the story rule society." This quote has attributed to Plato, but also, as a Native American proverb. Whatever the case, the quote couldn't be more true. This should be glaringly evident to every American, especially since 2020.
Toby Rogers begins by mentioning the “limitations and contradictions” in liberalism. He's correct. It's important to understand that in economic matters, there's rarely solutions, but rather tradeoffs. But the greater point is that true liberalism – Freedom -- is the only way toward at least the promise and pursuit of the greatest amount of meaning and happiness for the greatest amount of people. Freedom is the only way. And true liberalism must include sound money. We simply can’t have liberalism – freedom – without sound money.
Americans told a great story in the late 18th century, leading to and through the American Revolution. They told their story of “liberty and justice for all” in the face of insurmountable odds. The story included all of the mechanisms for liberty Toby Rogers identifies in this essay posted by Dr. Malone. But as we can see, the story told by the founders during the American Revolution also included the economic mechanism of sound money. We must remember the arguments of the founders over the First and Second Banks of the United States. We must remember the warnings about central banks like the Fed, from men like Thomas Paine. Here’s Paine in “Common Sense”:
“As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment, it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom – and property no security – where this practice can be added.”
Thomas Paine was right. With the Fed, essentially, "the people have no freedom." The evidence is all around us. Fast forward from Paine’s warning, to another from the mid 20th century, by F.A. Hayek, best known for his “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek addresses the dangerous ills central banks like the Fed, which pump paper money (and now, digital money) created out of thin air, into the economy:
“I doubt it has ever done any good except to the rulers and their favorites… money is certainly too dangerous an instrument to leave to the fortuitous expediency of politicians.”
Our Road to Serfdom is indeed paved with the Fed’s dollars, printed out of thin air by scheming politicians and politicized bankers.
In short, the story and script to attain and sustain liberalism and Freedom is already written. We just have to keep re-telling it anywhere and everywhere, over and over, BUT, with the inclusion of the economic mechanism which is sound money. All of the other economic mechanisms Toby Rogers cites in his essay hinge on sound money – ALL of them: free speech. freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, rule of law, fair elections, free trade, markets, private property, and entrepreneurship. Again, the things which kill these economic mechanisms would not exist, or at least would not be as powerfully effective, if not for the Fed, which funds them. We would not have a $33 trillion-plus national debt, with some $100 trillion-plus in unfunded liabilities, without the Fed. We would not have had the Great Depression, nor the financial collapse of 2008. (It’s important to note that the article blames “economic liberalism” for boom busts. But it’s central banks like the Fed which cause boom/busts-- more on this shortly, and in the links at the end of this comment).
Now, by “honest” and “sound” money, I mean, in part, non-inflatable money backed by something of real value -- gold or silver, for example. Money which cannot be tampered with and inflated by politicians bent on scheming ways to fund all of the unsustainable bureaucracies and agencies which are used to destroy liberty as mechanisms of the unsustainable welfare/warfare state. If not for the Fed’s inflationary, debt-financing, monetary expansion and artificial rigging of interest rates, our politicians wouldn’t be able to fund the absolutely catastrophic wars of choice we’ve been engaged in for the past half-century, nor the millions sent around the globe by men like Anthony Fauci for coronavirus “research,” nor the bureaucracies and agencies like the FBI and NSA and the rest of the “technocratic state,” which are used to harass, spy-on, censor, and cancel American citizens, and destroy our civil liberties. Sound money would have largely prevented the federal government’s catastrophically destructive reaction to the 2020 covid outbreak. We would also not have the boom/bust economic cycles and recessions Rogers mentions in his essay, which destroy the poor and middle class while redistributing wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful (the Fed is responsible for all of the recessions over the last 110 years). Furthermore, we wouldn’t have the inflation of the money supply, which results in rising prices of goods and services across the economy, destroying the purchasing power of the dollar, which of course, hurts the poor, middle class, and the vulnerable like those with fixed incomes, the most.
"Those who tell the story rule society." The story above might be the most important story to tell today, for the cause of freedom, and so individual liberty can rule society -- liberalism. Below are some links to a handful of brief introductions speaking to the necessity of sound money.
Part 2, in addition to my last comment, here’s the links mentioned. These address your points on recovering lost knowledge and experience (the necessity and practical utility of sound money was understood millennia ago), and the true nature psychopathy (the mechanics of the effects of inflation on the brain, from ancient Egypt, to Weimar, to Keynes’ quote below. For example:
“If anyone is curious, here are the sources and links I mentioned in my first comment, below: The Mises Institute is perhaps the very best on the issue. These videos are short and very easy to understand: "Why Study Money?" https://youtu.be/qIQg6TdJsgo?si=0DhW72Ac8WCxgdqt
This is another outstanding introduction: "What has government done to our money?" https://mises.org/library/what-has-government-done-our-money
Whatever we feel about politics, or libertarianism, this book is perhaps the best, most concise introduction to why we need to End the Fed: End the Fed https://mises.org/library/end-fed-1
or https://www.amazon.com/End-Fed-Ron-Paul/dp/0446549177/ref=sr_1_1?crid=GU0CI5UEEHPM&keywords=end+the+fed&qid=1699190644&sprefix=end+the+%2Caps%2C214&sr=8-1
Now, for CHRISTIANS, it’s vital to note that there is a Biblical mandate for sound money. Think of the possibilities, if Christians across the US understood and internalized what the Bible says about sound money. Here are two excellent books on the subject: "The Ethics of Money Production" https://mises.org/library/ethics-money-production (here's podcast on the book: https://mises.org/library/guido-hulsmann-ethics-money-production )
"Honest Money": https://mises.org/library/honest-money
Here’s an excellent, entertaining and humorous approach, in a 7 minute rap video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk
Lastly, it’s important to note that Karl Marx noted that central banks like the Fed are necessary for communism. Central banks are the 5th plank of communism in “The Communist Manifesto.” Read that again, and ask yourself: how many planks of communism already exist in the US’s federal government? These planks are the problem, not liberty or liberalism.
Lastly, speaking of communism, we must remember the warnings from the architect of Western economies, J.M. Keynes. Keynes is responsible for much of the economic ills we suffer through today. But he was correct when he wrote the following. The Fed’s inflation not only impoverishes us and destroys our money and liberty, but it also negatively alters our micro, individual choices and behavior. Let this quote sink-in, and think through the implications. Keynes is describing what we see all around us, today:
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security but [also] at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.
Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers," who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.
Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.
In the latter stages of the war all the belligerent governments practiced, from necessity or incompetence, what a Bolshevist might have done from design. Even now, when the war is over, most of them continue out of weakness the same malpractices. But further, the governments of Europe, being many of them at this moment reckless in their methods as well as weak, seek to direct on to a class known as "profiteers" the popular indignation against the more obvious consequences of their vicious methods.
These "profiteers" are, broadly speaking, the entrepreneur class of capitalists, that is to say, the active and constructive element in the whole capitalist society, who in a period of rapidly rising prices cannot but get rich quick whether they wish it or desire it or not. If prices are continually rising, every trader who has purchased for stock or owns property and plant inevitably makes profits. By directing hatred against this class, therefore, the European governments are carrying a step further the fatal process which the subtle mind of Lenin had consciously conceived. The profiteers are a consequence and not a cause of rising prices. By combining a popular hatred of the class of entrepreneurs with the blow already given to social security by the violent and arbitrary disturbance of contract and of the established equilibrium of wealth which is the inevitable result of inflation, these governments are fast rendering impossible a continuance of the social and economic order of the 19th century. But they have no plan for replacing it....”
Read the rest: Commanding Heights : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_inflation.html