The aim? To defend and even enhance the positive self-image

 People can hold good or bad opinions about themselves. These opinions relate to particular characteristics, competences and skills, or they can be of a more general nature. Psychologists are generally in agreement that such convictions are of importance, but controversy arises around the reasons why this is so. High levels of  self-esteem obviously result in an individual experiencing positive  emotions: it is pleasing to think of oneself as competent, humorous or physically attractive. This is why people try to find the good in themselves, applying an incredibly broad range of strategies and techniques that enable them to defend and even enhance their positive self-image. For example, they attribute success to themselves rather than others, while chalking failure up to others instead of themselves (e.g. Gilbert, 1995), they are eager to disclose any link they may have to famous people, which gives them pride and satisfaction (Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman & Sloan 1976), and they also exhibit tendencies towards bias in comparing themselves to others, maintaining their belief that they are better (Wills, 1981). It would, however, be an oversimplification to make the assumption that all of these efforts are based solely on the desire to experience pleasing emotions. Researchers emphasize that an affirmative view of oneself is a condition of effective task performance, as well as of making both short- and long-term plans (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Thus, striving to view oneself in even a slightly exaggerated positive light is adaptive. Yet another aspect is highlighted by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski (1991), authors of terror management theory. According to this notion, humans are the only entities on earth aware of their own mortality, this awareness being the source of fear and of threats. However, an individual can maintain the pretence of being immortal in both the literal and symbolic sense. Literal immortality is offered by the vast majority of religions, promising everlasting continuation of the soul and a second life after the one on earth. Symbolic immortality, on the other hand, is ensured by participation in broadly-taken culture, whose lifespan is far longer than that of an individual. High self-esteem allows individuals to feel they are valuable elements of culture (or a part of it, such as a nation or a group of a football club’s fans). Thus, maintaining positive beliefs about oneself is a means of reducing the terror that results from being aware that our life must, eventually, end. Roy Baumeister and Dianne Tice (1990) do not concur with these assumptions. They do not directly dispute the theory itself that awareness of mortality gives rise to fear, but they rather feel that the bulk of people’s daily anxieties are grounded in the threat of exclusion from the community in which we function. A strong majority of communities accepts competent, honest and valuable individuals. The conviction that one fulfils these requirements leads to a weakening of the aforementioned fear. So, while Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski on the one hand, and Baumeister and Tice on the other, posit completely different sources for the majority of human beings’ fears, they are in agreement that the antidote to them is positive self-assessment.

 Most people are concerned, not only with what they think of themselves, but also with how they are viewed by others. We try to manipulate the impression we make on others so that they think of us in a manner consistent with our own interests. Sometimes we desire for people to like us, other times we want them to fear us, or even to treat us as helpless and in need of immediate assistance (e.g. Leary & Allen, 2011). When others react in the way we desire, this also contributes to improving and maintaining our  self-esteem.

In recent decades, an increasing amount of empirical data has begun to indicate that processes associated with one’s feeling of self-worth are not necessarily conscious ones. Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji (1995) propose applying the term ‘implicit self-esteem’. People are not aware of their special relationship to things associated closely with the “I”, even while those things are totally unrelated to their attitudes, skills and level of competence.

While the effects associated with people’s tendency to care for their positive self-image and to make the desired impression on others are strong and undisputed, the question is rarely addressed in research of how mechanisms associated with this can be used in successfully exerting influence over others. It appears that such studies are focused primarily on four social influence techniques: using the  name of one’s interlocutor; emphasizing one’s incidental similarity to that person; drawing attention to discrepancies between publicly declared and actual behaviour; and exploiting the presence of a witness to the interaction. In this chapter I will discuss each of these techniques in turn.

  Using the name of one’s interlocutor  

When Napoleon’s army occupied the Netherlands in 1811, the emperor issued a decree ordering all residents of the country to officially register their surnames. Family names were not widespread at the time in the Netherlands but were the exclusive domain of people at the top of the social ladder. For many of those at the bottom of it, Napoleon’s decree must have seemed a needless extravagance. The Dutch thus began thinking up quite exotic surnames for themselves, such as: Naaktgeboren (Born Naked), Den Boef (Swindler) or Poepjes (Little Halfwit). While surnames may have seemed unnecessary in some countries and during some periods of history, since the dawn of human civilization no one has questioned the need to use first names. The status of an individual without a name can be compared to one stripped of honour, or even of humanity (Koole & Pelham, 2003). As a result, for many years a person’s name has borne exceptional significance.

 Jozef Nuttin (1984) described his impressions from a holiday he took with his wife. At one moment he observed that some of the licence plates on cars passing him were evoking warm feelings. After thinking about it, he concluded that this was probably from the plates that contained the letters of his name or digits corresponding to his date of birth. This constatation served as a starting point for a sterling series of empirical studies in which Nuttin demonstrated that people do, in fact, exhibit an unusual preference for the letters that compose their name.

Further studies conducted around the world demonstrated that the first letters of a name in particular seem to have impressive power. It turns out that individual letters are liked more by people whose names begin with just those letters (Kitayama & Karasawa, 1997; Koole, Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 2001). In our experiments (Dolinski, 2005), the first letters of names were described by participants as having a more pleasing shape (perhaps a surprising conclusion) than letters that did not form a part of their own names. This effect was also observed in respect of letters printed from the commonplace computer programme Word for Windows (the fonts Courier and Times New Roman were used), as well as decorative letters, such as can be found at the beginnings of chapters in older volumes.

Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg and John Jones (2002) demonstrated that the initial letters of first names have an influence on professional careers and on the places that people inhabit. For example, among American den 

tists there is a large number of people named Den nis (and vice versa, many people named Den nis are den tists), while a far greater number than chance would indicate of women named V irginia live in V irginia Beach. People with the first name or surname of S aint, more often than coincidence could explain, decide to take up residence in S aint Louis, S aint Paul or S aint Joseph. The special role of one’s first name is also attested to by the cocktail party effect.

During a cocktail party, people generally stand around in small groups, and in this intimate company discuss various things. The selectivity of top-down attention means that they can block out voices coming from other small groups, focusing on what someone in their immediate vicinity is saying. The din, often loud, bothers them a bit, but they are able to tune it out to such a degree that, in a sense, they don’t hear it. However, if their own name pops up in this ignored murmur, not only do they register it immediately, but they also begin listening to what the person who has just used their name is saying. People are thus both ignoring and not (completely) ignoring this din at the same time: one’s own name is a stimulus so strong that it has the fascinating power to divert others’ attention. In the context of this chapter, the cocktail party effect constitutes an outstanding example of the importance of one’s own name. From a purely practical perspective, it advises us to avoid speaking the name of the person we would like to gossip about. We mustn’t be deceived by the fact that Christine is standing some distance from us and seems to be completely absorbed in her own, private conversation.

TECHNIQUES OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE

The psychology of gaining compliance

Dariusz Dolinski

Money for Nothing

Everybody knows you need to work for your money. And if somebody just gives you money, that can only be by the expropriation of somebody else’s labor. Money just doesn’t grow on trees, after all.

But is this really true? Just because you work for your money, did the guy who paid you also work for it? What about the guy who paid him? If you follow the money trail long enough, you are going to find someone who did not work for his money. He simply got it for nothing. He did not even have to go to the trouble of picking it off trees. He just created it out of thin air by bookkeeping. We call this man a banker.

Unlike people who have to produce things of real value before they count them up and enter the number in a book, the banker creates his product simply by bookkeeping operations. The whole panoply of bank services—checking accounts, savings accounts, free toasters, checks with baby ducklings or golden retrievers printed on them—are, arguably, props to disguise the fact that the core of banking is the sheer creation of money out of nothing.

When I was a boy, one of the banks in my hometown gave out free piggy banks to children. Today, that seems a master-stroke of propaganda, fostering the impression that real banks, just like piggy banks, can only give out money that they take in. But banks are not required to keep your deposits on hand. They loan them out. Every dollar in your checking or savings account is loaned out ten times over. This is how bankers simply create money through bookkeeping. And that is just the beginning of how bankers create money. And bankers can do it even if they do not operate in buildings with Grecian columns out front and teller windows inside, even if they do not have checking and savings accounts and all the other props we associate with banking.

But even though the money you borrow was created for nothing, you still have to pay it back, with interest. And when you pay it back, you can’t just create the money. You have to work for it. You have to provide real goods and services. Thus bankers, by loaning out the money they create for nothing, gain a mortgage on future production of real world goods and services.

What is money anyway? Money is a medium of exchange that allows one to covert the fruits of one’s labor into easily portable tokens that one can exchange for the fruits of other people’s labor. What one chooses for tokens does not really matter. Money can be bits of shiny metal, colorful slips of paper, electronic data in computers, or cowrie shells, just as long as they are accepted by the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.

Money does not need to have any intrinsic value. In fact, it helps if its intrinsic value is next to nothing, otherwise people will hoard it rather than circulate it freely, which would cause an economic hardship known as deflation, in which money is a commodity whose value rises because its supply diminishes. (When money is a commodity whose supply rises and its value decreases, that is called inflation. It is worth asking: Can one avoid both evils if money has no value in itself, i.e., if it is not a commodity that can be bought and sold alongside bricks and butter?)

If the best money has no intrinsic value, then the worst sort of money would be precious metals. The best sort of money would be entirely intangible, just data in a computer. Even paper money can be hoarded, for instance, when the price of toilet paper gets too high. (Perhaps the best way to ensure that money is not hoarded is simply to print an expiration date on it.)

Ideally money should be a self-effacing servant of the real economy, which produces actual goods and services. But money has grown into a jealous tyrant that interferes with the real economy. The simplest example is your average economic crisis. In an economic depression, the land does not suddenly go sterile. The udders of cows do not go dry. Men do not suddenly become stupid and lazy. The sun keeps shining; the crops keep growing; the chickens keep laying; people keep working. Goods pile up in warehouses and stores. And on the demand side, people still need to eat. But silos are bursting and people are starving because, for some mysterious reason, there is suddenly “not enough money.”

People have no money to spend, or they are afraid to part with the money they do have, because of a climate of uncertainty. After all, half way around the world, a massive swindle has been discovered; a bank has collapsed; a speculative bubble has burst. So, naturally, back in Hooterville, stores are filled with sour milk and rotting vegetables and children are going to bed hungry.

If an able-bodied man were shipwrecked on a fertile island, he would not starve for lack of money. But on this vast and fertile island we call Earth, people starve amidst plenty because we have accepted the dominion of a monetary economy that disrupts the real economy. That is no way to run a planet.

The obvious solution is simply to increase the money supply. One must make consumer demand effective so the market clears and life can go on. And the simplest way to do that is for the government to print money and give it to people. Remember George W. Bush’s 2008 “stimulus checks”? That was money for nothing, handed to people to stimulate economic activity. The effect, of course, was negligible. But it was morally and economically far preferable to the massive “bailouts” and the Obama stimulus plan that followed.

Whereas the Bush stimulus checks went directly to millions of consumers, who injected the money directly into the economy when they purchased goods and services, the bailouts and stimulus spending went to a relative handful of politically connected insiders. It turns out, furthermore, that very little of the money went to stimulate the US economy. Instead, a lot of it was invested overseas. Other recipients of bailouts held onto their cash, hoping that they could buy up real assets for cheap if the economy continued to slide deeper into depression. Moreover, whatever money did go into the US economy came with strings attached: the necessity to repay principal and interest. At least with the Bush stimulus checks, the money went directly into the economy with no strings attached in straight up purchases of goods and services.

But, as we have seen, money for nothing is not merely part of an occasional emergency stimulus measure. It is business as usual for banks.

But if money is being created out of nothing all the time, then we have to ask: Should this be left to the banks, or is there a better way of doing it?

Why not simply have the government create money and send each individual a monthly check, to be spent as he sees fit? This money would stimulate the economy directly, through the purchases of goods and services, whereas money created by banks in the form of loans must be paid back, with interest, creating a parasitic class of people who get a share of real production by loaning at interest a commodity they get for nothing.

Again, every industry that produces real goods and services has accounting and inventory costs, but actual production has to come first. You have to make toys before you can count them. With banks, money is by created simply by bookkeeping operations, e.g., making loans. Bankers “produce” merely by juggling numbers.

But if money for nothing is simply a feature of the modern economy, why not cut out the parasitic “private sector” middlemen and simply have the government create money and distribute it directly to consumers?

Why is the government preferable to the private sector as the creator of money? Because, unlike private businesses, the government is accountable to the public. Its purpose is to secure the common good. Moreover, when the private financial sector is in crisis, the bankers look to the government to bail them out—at the expense of the taxpayers. Time for the government to bail the people out—at the expense of the banks. Let’s repudiate all our debts and start fresh with a new financial system.

“But simply creating money and mailing out checks would be inflationary!” some would object. True. But it would be no more inflationary than allowing banks to create money.

Furthermore, there is a deeper issue here: Is inflation or deflation simply a product of the commodification of money? The commodification of money means that money is not merely a tool of exchange, but a commodity that is exchanged, a commodity with a cost of its own (interest). Would it be possible to decommodify money, i.e., to eliminate interest and a secondary market in money, either partially or altogether? Would the creation of money that expires after a while cut down on the commodification of money?

“But money for nothing would be socialism!” others would object. Yes, I am proposing socializing the creation and initial distribution of money. But what people do with the money at that point is their own business. The system I propose is completely consistent with private property and private enterprise. Indeed, it would strengthen and secure them, because it would eliminate a parasitic class of people who steadily mulct the real economy, and occasionally send it into crises, by creating and loaning out money that is free to them and should be free to all.

“But how would businesses capitalize themselves without bank loans?” That is a fair question. Perhaps the best answer is to say that that just as individual consumers could get money for nothing from the state, creditable producers could do so as well. But nothing about my proposal would prevent banks and credit unions from forming to capitalize businesses. But they would not be allowed to create money out of thin air. They would have to attract savings by paying interest, then loan out their deposits—and no more than their deposits—at interest to creditworthy businessmen. To do this, banks would have to offer serious interest for savings and charge serious interest on loans, but it could be done. It would definitely be “tight” money, though, which might be a good thing in the long run, since it would discourage speculative investments. Of course if money went bad after a while, it would make no sense to save it. But none of this might be necessary if interest-free state financing is a viable option. It is certainly a question worth exploring.

Nothing, moreover, would prevent businesses from capitalizing themselves by selling shares and paying dividends, either.

“But shouldn’t people work for their money?” Yes and no. Money needs to get into circulation. And the modern welfare state gives people money for nothing all the time in the form of unemployment insurance, old age pensions, welfare payments, food aid, healthcare, etc. Why not bundle all these benefits together into a single, flat monthly payment? These payments would be enough to ensure the basic social safety net we all have anyway. It would also be fairer than the present system, which expropriates the fruits of some people’s labor to redistribute them to others. It would, in effect, be welfare without redistribution.

But the basic payments I envision would not allow people to live opulently. Thus most people would choose to work. Some might choose to invest their monthly checks. Others might wish to defer them so they can enjoy better old age pensions. But the whole character of work would be changed, because people would not work because they have to. They would work because they want to. The socialist dream of the “de-commodification” of labor would be realized.

Sure, some people might choose to spend their time smoking dope and strumming guitars. But one of them might be the next Goethe or Wagner. And surely we would be better off extending the adolescences of a million bohemians than supporting a thousand scheming Wolfowitzes, Madoffs, and Shylocks along with all their warmonger and pornmonger cousins.

“But this system would create public debt!” some might object. But I am talking about creating money, not borrowing it. Why should the government allow banks to create money and then loan it, at interest, to the government, when the government can create money itself? The very existence of public debt goes back to the time when money was something of intrinsic value (like gold) that banks might possess and that the government could not just make up. A government that can simply create money has no need of public debt.

“But this system will create idleness!” is another objection. Yes, but there is nothing wrong with idleness. In fact, as I see it, the whole point of social and technological progress is to create a world in which machines put us all out of work. The goal of social policy should be to create conditions of ever-increasing productivity through scientific and technological progress.

But it would be ecologically irresponsible, indeed catastrophic, if people were to take the gains of increased productivity in the form of more consumer goods or burgeoning population growth. Thus the goal of social policy should be to keep consumption roughly stable and cash out productivity gains in terms of ever-shorter work weeks. As productivity increases, it might be possible to maintain a comfortable standard of living with 20 hours of work per week, then 10, then 5, then 1.

When the work week approaches zero hours, we would be living in a “Star Trek” economy in which scarcity of physical goods is abolished through the invention of unlimited cheap and clean energy sources and the “replicator” which can turn energy into any desired good, simply poofing it into existence. In such a world, the only scarcity would be ecological carrying capacity, which would have to be zealously guarded by keeping populations in check—or sending them out to colonize the stars, terraform dead planets, create galactic empires, etc.

But what to would people do with their leisure? Such a society would be the culmination (and, I would argue, following Hegel, the hidden inner purpose) of all human striving, from the moment man first differentiated himself from the animal and stepped into history. It would obviously be a farce if mankind struggled for millennia only to give birth to a world of indolent, empowered morons. Imagine Homer Simpson poofing donuts and Duff into existence while watching holoporn until he becomes one of the boneless blobs in hoverchairs depicted in Wall-E. Utopia would be wasted on such people. Thus along with scientific, technological, and social progress, we would also need to pursue cultural, spiritual, and genetic progress to create a race worthy of utopia.

A job is just something you do to make money so you can do the things you really enjoy. A job is just a means to doing things that are ends in themselves. Once machines put us out of work and the lollygaggers and lotus-eaters are bred out of the gene pool, people can busy themselves doing the things they find intrinsically rewarding: raising children, writing books, playing and composing music, writing software, inventing machines, playing sports, tending gardens, perfecting recipes, advancing science, fighting for justice, exploring the cosmos, etc.

It will be a realm of freedom in which the human potential to create beauty, do good, and experience joy will be unhampered by economic necessity.

This is the stuff of science fiction and other utopias, staples of the American imagination. Yet the dominant political paradigm in America and the rest of the white world is profoundly regressive and dysgenic. While whites dream of the Space Age, our system is headed toward to the Stone Age, worshiping Negroes as heroes and gods (Morgan Freeman has been typecast as God) and placing a product of dysgenic miscegenation in the highest office of the land.

If we are to resume the path to the stars, we will have to begin by addressing four principal evils: dysgenics, economic globalization, racial diversity (including non-white immigration), and finance capitalism.

What do we call this alternative economic paradigm? Ultimately, I would call it National Socialism. But the little florilegium of economic heresies I have assembled above is drawn primarily from the Social Credit ideas of Clifford Hugh Douglas (1859–1952) and Alfred Richard Orage (1873–1934), partly by way of Alan Watts, who was my first introduction to these ideas, and Ezra Pound, who is the most famous exponent of Social Credit.

It is my conviction that the North American New Right, if it is to provide a genuine alternative to the existing system, must break with all forms of “free market” economic orthodoxy and work to recover and develop the rich array of Third Way economic theories, including Social Credit, Distributism, Guild Socialism, Corporatism, and Populism. This essay and others, including ones to come, are my naïve attempts to start a conversation in the hope that it might draw in other writers who are more qualified to construct a critique of capitalist orthodoxy.

Creating an ideal world will cost us, and our enemies, a great deal in real terms. But the first step toward freedom, namely the act of imagining it, is free.

 Greg Johnson

 https://counter-currents.com/


21 comments
ErnstDecember 24, 2015 at 3:27 am
This has to be one of your greatest articles, i think it also ties in to the “masters of the universe” speech by Alex Kurtagic. A nuanced critique of the current system followed by a coherent vision for our people that includes a take on economy that goes beyond naive leftism and messianic libertarianism a la Ron Paul. Masterful piece, thank you Greg for your work and happy Yule!

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TheodoreDecember 24, 2015 at 5:01 am
Greg,
In general, I strongly agree with your economic views (and possibly may be further to your left economically), and I basically agree with your premises here. But, while I’m no economics expert, doesn’t money ultimately have to be backed up by some sort of productivity? My understanding of inflation (in crude terms) is when there is too money circulating compared to the available goods and services that can be purchased with that money; deflation being the opposite. If you are just going to print money to hand out to people without an accompanying increase in “economic growth” you will degrade the worth of that money via inflation. I don’t think that the “decommidification” of money can solve this problem, which is based on supply/demand fundamentals.

Maybe in part the money for distribution should come from the confiscated wealth of the plutocrats, who’ll be spending their time breaking rocks in a labor camp? And via a properly progressive income tax, and corporate tax (and no whatever remaining private corporations would not be allowed to flee overseas).

It’s possible by economic understanding of inflation/deflation is flawed and in that case I await edification.

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lpcDecember 24, 2015 at 1:53 pm
You are right about the evil nature of fractional reserve banking. However, this statement is the direct opposite of the truth: “Because, unlike private businesses, the government is accountable to the public.”

Your article ignores the actual history of how true money evolves in a society of free men, as a cultural phenomenon, not a bureaucratic one. Money is any “thing” (often a commodity, but not necessarily) which happens to be most widely in demand in any given circle of people freely trading value for value. I emphasize: “happens to be”. By that I mean that money arises from a culture of shared values. It is not defined or created by ghastly bureaucrats.

In point of historical fact, it was precisely the intervention of governments that led to the ruination of money. The fiat banking system you rightfully denounce would arise naturally or be sustainable in a free society — and even if it were, alternatives would abound so we could escape its nonsense. It is entirely the creature of government force.

Please look once again at the history. Money is the creation of free men exchanging their values in shared culture of production and integrity. It is not the creation of pathetic government functionaries.

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Greg JohnsonDecember 24, 2015 at 2:25 pm
There’s no argument here, just libertarian emotionalist disdain for government.

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lpcDecember 24, 2015 at 3:25 pm
The argument is historical, with two major points.

(1) Money in fact arose as the creation of free men exchanging their values in a shared culture of production and integrity. (This by the way is how all good things arise.)

(2) Money in fact was ruined by vicious parasites who forcibly eliminated the honest money and substituted their own dishonest banking money for the purpose of enslaving those free men forever.

I am astounded by how many people rightfully decry the current miserable state of affairs, while demonstrating no historical knowledge of how we arrived here.

I am also astounded by how often when I laud the freedoms we enjoyed before 1965, and still more freedoms we enjoyed before 1913, and still others before 1865, I am derided as a “individualist” and a “libertarian”. For all of you wondering why the current ecconomy, government, and culture are corrupt cesspools, please keep in mind that it might have something to do with scuttling those freedoms like so much garbage. In other words, ask yourself precisely what is different between now and any halcyon date in the past that you care to choose.

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Greg JohnsonDecember 24, 2015 at 3:48 pm
I completely disagree with “sound” money policies and broad-brush anti-government sentiments. Only a state can create a pure fiat currency, which would rid the world of the curses of inflation and deflation and fully unlock the utopia potential of technological progress.

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lpcDecember 24, 2015 at 4:17 pm
I agree that only a state can create a pure fiat currency, I simply regard the product as one of the principal causes of the economic and cultural decay we see today.

To fully unlock the utopia potential of technological progress, I suggest a regressive policy instead of the progressive one of fiat money. I say regress straight back to the models of America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and England in the late 17th through early 20th centuries. Those fine souls demonstrated how a real civilization can and should function: not perfectly, but with a vibrant and growing productive class and a notable lack of cultural degeneracy. For example, a man working at Ford Motor Company could pay for a year at Yale for his son with just one month’s wages.

You should note well that my statement is not anti-government, since America and England in those times did have governments. They were just far better than the ghastly examples we see today.


YohanDecember 24, 2015 at 2:13 pm
Very inspirational stuff about the Utopian goal of an ever shortening work week, and as you say once achieved with be a culmination of all human striving, and allow us to move onto purely intellectual pursuits.

But I want to point out a misunderstanding regarding interest and money that permeates your work, and no doubt its because you are a specialist in philosophy. Money is not the cause of interest. Interest has nothing to do with money. Interest is the difference between man’s propensity to satisfy his wants now or in the future.

We are not immortal gods, we live a finite lifetime, and because time is short, man prefers a want satisfied sooner rather than later. The time difference between present and future is the phenomenon of time preference, which leads to a personal interest rate for that individual. It could be high or low. But it’s got nothing to do with money. It’s a category of human action and human cognitive function.

The reason why I painstakingly explain this, is once understood you will see how all the ideas for ‘social credit’ and abolishing interest are built on unsound foundations. They are built on denying a basic category of human behavior, which is that man prefers a present good to a future good.

This is not to say the current banking system should not be abolished, of course the monetary system is ripping us off and impoverishing the poorest of us, but don’t conflate the issue by thinking the solution it to abolish interest and lending.

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Greg JohnsonDecember 24, 2015 at 2:44 pm
Time preference is a real phenomenon. And of course it is a foundation of interest. Abolishing interest does not, however, require abolishing time preference. An analogy: sexual desire is the foundation of prostitution. One can abolish prostitution without abolishing sexual desire.

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cryptocurrencyDecember 24, 2015 at 10:05 pm
Centralization will always attract the corrupt and the corruptible. Only decentralized currencies (such as Bitcoin and its anonymous cousin Monero) that are mathematically guaranteed to be secure and uncensorable and that require no trusted third parties can usher in the utopian age Greg invokes.

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LewDecember 25, 2015 at 12:01 pm
fwiw, I have a computer scientist acquaintance who has worked on projects of interest to the powerful from a software standpoint. Without sharing any details (because he can’t), he assures me their top priorities in the field of computer science have nothing to do with the NSA; he says they are working overtime to remove all anonymity and pseudo-anonymity from the internet and to abolish cash and make all currency transactions electronic.

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witty tongueDecember 27, 2015 at 12:59 am
This excerpt came from a little book, A Matter of LIFE or DEBT , page 97:

Between 1817 and 1820 in the island of Guernsey, they had been suffering the general depression and unemployment that followed the Napoleonic wars. Guernsey’s State debt stood at 19,137 pounds and bore an annual interest charge of 2,390 pounds when its annual revenue was only 3,000 pounds. The island badly needed a new market hall, and its harbor, dikes and roads were in urgent need of repair. An appeal to London was made for a loan but the Government said it had no money to spare. The island’s governor then called a meeting. Was the work urgently needed? he asked. Yes, was the unanimous reply. Had they enough materials on the island, had they plenty of unused labor? Again, the reply was an emphatic yes. All we need, then, is the money, declared the Governor, so we will print it. This was done in the form of special 1-pound State note secured by the revenue-raising capabilities of the new works in the future; the real credit behind the notes lay in the proposed new works, in particular the market hall. The contractors were paid with these notes, which in turn were paid to the workmen and others who supplied the materials, and they were accepted throughout the island by the shops and local banks as being sound money. As new building and repairs were completed, incoming rates, rents, and dock dues went to pay back the currency, which in time, was destroyed. No debts, arose and no long-term interest payments. The hungry unemployed found work and incomes, trade improved, and the entire island began to enjoy a new found prosperity. [end excerpt]

Note the part about currency being destroyed. That’s how inflation is controlled.

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Kerry BoltonDecember 27, 2015 at 2:59 am
Excellent article in every respect.

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ArindamDecember 27, 2015 at 11:52 am
This article brought back memories of what William Joyce wrote, in his classic ‘Twilight Over England.’

‘The notion that the level of production should be controlled by monetary considerations belongs to a very primitive and superstitious stage of social evolution. Indeed, there are few savage tribes that would accept it as it is accepted in Britain today. Suppose that in some very backward island, a shell standard of money prevailed. Assume also that some malicious or half-witted creature managed to acquire half the shells in the island and to drop them into the water beyond recovery. The chiefs and witch-doctors would have to hold a council of emergency. But if the rulers of that island decreed that because half the money of the community had been lost, hunting and fishing and tilling must now be reduced by fifty per cent, there’d be a hot time in the old town that night. In such a simple state of society, the criminal absurdity of the proposal would be obvious to the meanest and most untutored intellect. Yet a policy which the most undeveloped savage tribe would reject as nonsense has been accepted by the British people as a sacred ritual for many years. Thus, of course, international finance, by restricting supplies and causing shortage, can produce whatever conditions of marketing that may be most profitable to itself. If there is one truth against which the Old School of Finance is fighting today, it is the supreme verity that production of goods should be based on the needs of the people, the only limit being the limit of natural resources and raw materials. Since the dawn of human history, the great struggle of man has been to wrest from Nature by force and cunning the means of life and enjoyment. It was only when the blessings of modern democracy made their appearance one hundred and fifty years ago, that he was told, in an arbitrary manner, that his efforts must be slackened and regulated henceforth by the private interests of an infinitesimal proportion of the world’s population.’ (William Joyce, Twilight Over England, pages 53-54; emphasis mine).

Julius Evola, went further, noting that we have now reached the stage where instead of production serving to fulfil needs, needs are generated in order to facilitate production. As if that were not bad enough, much – perhaps the vast majority – of what is produced in the economy, constitutes waste in one form or another, (ex: resources used up for marketing, wasteful duplication, etc…) – as Thorstein Veblen outlined in his ‘The Engineers and the Price Mechanism, chapter V’.

Indeed, as a general rule, the more intelligent the individual, the more absurd he finds the current economic system.

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witty tongueDecember 27, 2015 at 4:59 pm
Robert Poteat did an excellent job in describing “What is Inflation”: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/the-american-monetary-institute/FB5ng-6yDN0


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VerlisDecember 28, 2015 at 9:32 am
Although I disagree entirely, both morally and factually, with almost every point the author makes in this essay (and two other recent related essays), his clearly and reasonably expressed views make for a very promising discussion. I’m hesitant, however, to put my thoughts into words in a post which, precisely because it disagrees so strongly, may never see the light of day.

Just this observation for now: this series of essays makes for a significant departure from the metapolitical project the site, it was my understanding, had committed itself to. Greg, it seems, has settled on precisely the kind of ‘package deal’ WNism he once opposed (when enunciated by conservatives). (‘Package deal’ here refers to WN arising out of more fundamental moral or philosophical commitments — WN comes ‘packaged’ as part of the deal, although contemporary society, it is held, unnaturally overlooks this.)

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Luke AragonDecember 28, 2015 at 7:53 pm
I agree with most everything in this article. Of course, I’m assuming a homogenous high-trust society. There is, however, one important tweak that I would make:

The freshly printed money should only be given to households and not individuals. This would encourage marriage, and prevent women from using the state to finance the dysgenic promiscuous lifestyle that is currently filling our societies with sociopathic bastards (there’s a reason “bastard” was an insult). Perhaps it should also be a flat-amount per household to manage population size.

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anonJanuary 2, 2016 at 3:20 pm
good stuff. I think I agree, some thoughts (wider than the precise topic)

1. Metapolitics: I think this area is or at least potentially could be ultra metapolitics because there’s very few things that could reshape the ground more totally. The problem is it is hard to break down into meme sized chunks.

2. Stated Aim: What’s the aim of the economic platform? I’d say something like maximizing the middle class to create stability and freedom i.e. not an economic aim. This gives a clear demarcation: socialism focuses on the poor, capitalism focuses on the rich, third way focuses on the middle.

3. Capitalism: Capitalism has a tendency to create plantation economies with excessively concentrated wealth. The problem with this is not a moral egalitarian one but a practical one. If you have excessive concentration of wealth then the lack of disposable income among the majority poor leads the economy to stagnate through low demand. No demand, no innovation.

4. Socialism: In theory if wealth is shared equally then the economy ought to thrive from the maximized disposable income and maybe it does for a while but the lack of incentives leads to stagnation also and thus relative poverty over time. No incentive, no innovation.

5. Third Way: By maximizing the middle class there is a large amount of disposable income to drive the economy and by allowing the incentive of joining the rich there is also a drive to innovate and increase productivity. Demand plus personal incentives -> innovation.

6. Time Preference & Usury: It’s true that people have a time preference and thus are prepared to pay more to have a shiny object sooner and interest is a fair price for that preference however there are negative public consequences to consider. By choosing to pay the price of an object plus interest the person is reducing their future demand for real goods and services by the amount of interest paid. In terms of the effect on their demand it’s equivalent to someone getting their wages and burning a percentage of it.

And it’s not just a simple transfer of one person’s demand to the money lender’s demand because of the relative numbers. With debt-based consumption you end up with very large numbers of people seduced by time preference into surrendering some of their disposable income to a few who then hoard it. The effect is to siphon demand out of the economy. It’s probably the worst way capitalism can concentrate excessive wealth as it’s completely non-productive.

So as usury for consumption is harmful then no fractional reserve banking and either no borrowing for consumption at all or at least always require a deposit – saving up is good and provides the fuel for borrowing for investment.

7. Central Bank: Replace with a state bank that creates as much money as is needed for the economy to run at full capacity and inject it through public works or social credit removing any excess via taxation. Getting rid of the private central banks immediately removes their 2% yearly inflation target which is simply legalized counterfeiting.

8. Banks: There is still a role for private banks as regulators of investment borrowing. Successful investment loans are defined as those where increased productivity as a result of the investment puts into the economy more than is taken out by the interest payments. People specializing in judging those loans maximize the effectiveness of savings used as capital.

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AlexandraMay 31, 2020 at 12:52 pm
Any individual with any financial education can borrow money from a bank for a certain amount of interest, and then invest in a stock or a bond that pays more interest than the bank is asking. Yes, these deals may be hard to find, but when you do, you make a ‘profit’ on your money. Is that so ‘wrong’? I attempt to do it right along and I do not see myself as immoral or criminal. It’s the basis of capitalism, to which I subscribe. I ‘produce’ money to pay my other bills and buy food for myself (I am retired, and too old not to be retired), by cleverly using the capitalist system. I do make mistakes occasionally and lose money instead, so that balances the system, I suppose. Money always circulates, no matter how it is originated.

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Michael BroutinSeptember 28, 2020 at 2:46 am
The idea that the people in times of economic collapse should receive the bailout over Wall St. reminds me of a quote by the “founder of the modern welfare state”, Lester Frank Ward:

“The charge of paternalism is chiefly made by the class that enjoys the largest share of government protection. Those who denounce it are those who most frequently and successfully invoke it. Nothing is more obvious today than the single inability of capital and private enterprise to take care of themselves unaided by the state; and while they are incessantly denouncing “paternalism,” by which they mean the claim of the defenseless laborer and artisan to a share in this lavish state protection, they are all the while besieging legislatures for relief from their own incompetency, and “pleading the baby act” through a trained body of lawyers and lobbyists. The dispensing of national pap to this class should rather be called “maternalism,” to which a square, open, and dignified paternalism would be infinitely preferable.”

Internalizing Self-Presentations: Saying Is (or Can Be) Believing

 

The actor’s public self-presentations, which may initially have been intended largely to create a desired impact on others, may come to influence the actor’s subsequent private self-assessments. Early social theorists like Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) proposed that the self is constructed through social interaction, as people come to view themselves partly in terms of the roles they publicly enact and other people’s reactions to them. Consistent with this view, research shows that people’s strategic self-presentations will produce changes in their subsequent self-appraisals, as people change their global self- evaluations (Gergen, 1965; Jones et al., 1981; Rhodewalt & Agustsdottir, 1986) and the corresponding contents of their self-beliefs (McKillop, Berzonsky, & Schlenker, 1992; Schlenker, Dlugolecki, & Doherty, 1994; Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990; Tice, 1992) to become more like the public roles they played.

People are more likely to internalize their self-presentations when their actions appear to be representative of self. The appearance of representativeness is created when people freely chose to play the role or are asked to draw on their own prior personal experiences when enacting the role rather than on experiences that are obviously taken from the life of someone else (Jones et al., 1981; Rhodewalt & Agustsdottir, 1986; Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990; Tice, 1992). There are limits to how extreme role-playing can be before the actor rejects it as unrepresentative. Roles that are greatly discrepant from clear prior self-beliefs are not internalized; people reject them as “not me” (Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990). However, if the role is only somewhat discrepant from clear prior self-beliefs, or if self-beliefs are less clearly formed on the dimension, people will shift their private self-beliefs in the direction of the role (Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990). Furthermore, social validation is important in perceiving representativeness. People are more likely to internalize public portrayals that are met with approval and acceptance from others (Gergen, 1965). Thus, to the extent that people label their own public actions as self-representative or have the label applied by others, they become more likely to see themselves in corresponding ways.

Role or identity enactments have a more powerful impact on private self-beliefs when they carry with them a public commitment, as compared to when they are privately performed with few or no public repercussions. Tice (1992) found that self-characterizations produced more change in self- conceptions if they were enacted publicly rather than privately. Furthermore, public behavior produced more change if it was freely selected, drew on episodes of one’s own past rather than on the obvious pasts of others, and involved expected future interactions with the audience. Schlenker et al. (1994) found that having people think about past experiences that were consistent with specific roles did not affect later self-beliefs, but having people play the role publicly produced shifts in self-appraisals. In another study, Schlenker et al. (1994) had participants role play a desirable identity. Those whose characterizations were made during an actual interview or who made a public commitment to portray that identity in an upcoming interview later shifted their self-beliefs to become more like the person they portrayed.

In contrast, those who learned that they would not have to portray that identity because the interview was canceled, and those whose portrayals were private, did not change their self-beliefs. These findings indicate that public commitment has a powerful shaping effect on private self-beliefs.

Public self-presentations can not only produce corresponding changes in self-beliefs, they can also produce changes in behavior in new situations with different audiences (Tice, 1992; Schlenker et al., 1994). Participants who presented themselves as more extraverted rather than introverted (Tice, 1992) or who portrayed themselves as more sociable (Schlenker et al., 1994), acted in a more extraverted, sociable way when later meeting a new person. Thus, self-presentations can produce carry-over effects that linger beyond the initial interaction. If one wants to become a certain type of person, one should try to publicly act like that type of person. Eventually, if the portrayal is unmarred by out-of-character incidents and audience feedback appears to be accepting, one is likely to become it.

As this research suggests, authenticity is not a static concept. Self-presentations that once may have been tentatively proffered and tenuously documented can become true as the actor gains confidence playing the role and receives feedback suggesting that others accept the portrayal. Thus, the somewhat shy student who wants to become more outgoing can, through hard work, perseverance, and public commitment to new self-presentations, gradually become, in his or her own mind and in social reality, more extraverted.

Truth in Packaging

The theme of this section is that packaging information to achieve goals is independent of truthfulness or sincerity. Packaging can be guided by the goal of aiding the audience by imparting truth, as in the case of the teacher who wants to impart useful information to students, or by the goal of selfishly manipulating the audience, as in the caricature of the deceptive used-car salesperson. Stories or narratives can be true or false in their major themes as well as in the factual detail that is communicated to support them.

Sometimes true stories contain unintended errors of factual detail, and lies contain just enough true facts to make them appear credible. To determine deceit, one must look to the motives of the actor and the extent to which the message corresponds with information that can be independently assessed, not to whether information is packaged for consumption by audiences.

Information may be packaged in nearly unlimited ways to make desired points. This is not to suggest, however, that all is appearance without substance or that any and all interpretations of reality are equally valid. Reality imposes constraints on what can be credibly claimed. There are rules for de¬ termining the truthfulness of an assertion and comparing claims to accomplishments and characteristics. Goffman (1959, p. 13) noted that society is organized on the principle that people who have certain social characteristics have a “moral right” to expect that others will “value and treat” them in the appropriate fashion and, correspondingly, that people have a duty to be what they claim to be. People are socialized to match their words and their deeds and to tell the truth. Society cannot function if deceit on substantive matters is tolerated.

A reputation for honesty is an important interpersonal asset. People react negatively to those whose words and deeds deviate (Schlenker & Leary, 1982a). Furthermore, when presenting themselves to others, people demonstrate an appreciation of the importance of consistency between words and deeds. People present themselves consistently with publicly known information about them, even though they may exaggerate their claims when potentially contradictory information can be hidden from public view (Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Schlenker, 1975). Reality, in the form of publicly known information and independently verifiable facts, provides constraints on what people can credibly claim.

People do not have free reign to package information in any and all ways that serve their self-interests. People are accountable to others for being what they claim to be, and they risk social censure and sometimes legal peril for deceit. However, deceit is determined by judgments of the actor’s motives and whether independently verifiable information supports or refutes the claims. The packaging of information for consumption by audiences, in and of itself, tells us nothing about the actor’s truthfulness.

THE STRATEGIC CONTROL OF INFORMATION: IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT AND SELF-PRESENTATION IN DAILY LIFE BARRY R. SCHLENKER BETH A. PONTARI

In PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SELF AND IDENTITY

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur

 

Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.

This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy.

The book is dedicated to two of these acolytes and “graduates” of the Ezra-versity: the British poet Basil Bunting (1900–1985), author of Briggflatts; and the American Jewish poet Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978) whose monumental long poem “A” is the only work comparable in scope and complexity to Pound’s own Cantos.

Guide to Kulchur is unique in both its structure and style. Written in Pound’s folksy demotic English that at times seems more akin to Mark Twain or Joel Chandler Harris, the book is arranged in a series of very short chapters that seem to unfold in a haphazard fashion. The book’s form only becomes manifest the longer one reads, and by the end of the book one is amazed at how Pound has managed to weave seamlessly the many strands of Western and ancient Chinese thought.

For Pound, philosophy and ethics begin with Confucius, particularly the Confucian idea that a well-ordered and moral society is based upon the imperative to call things by their correct names. This may seem like a minor point upon which to build a civilizational edifice, but it is, in reality, nothing less than a commitment to truth telling, a commitment that is sorely at odds with our own postmodern age that has abandoned the search for truth as a sine qua non. For Pound, the commitment to truth telling extends not only to philosophy and the arts but also to economics. His unique and highly critical take on the ancient Greek philosophers (especially Aristotle) stems in no little part, as he sees it, from their inability to conceive of money as other than a means of measurement without a basis in morality. Pound viewed the ancient Greeks as “happy men with no moral fervor”[1] who represented a decline from the seriousness of their Homeric era ancestors.

While Pound’s embrace of Social Credit economics and strong denunciation of usury are well known, the Guide to Kulchur reveals how closely Pound linked together economics and aesthetics. In the very remarkable Chapter 50, entitled “Chaucer Was Framed,” Pound states:

Usury is contra naturam. It is not merely opposition to nature’s increase, it is antithetic to discrimination by the senses. Discrimination by the senses is dangerous to avarice. It is dangerous because any perception or any high development of the perceptive faculties may lead to knowledge. The moneychanger only thrives on ignorance.
He thrives on all sorts of insensitivity and non-perception.
An instant sense of proportion imperils financiers.[2]

Pound’s insights are as remarkable as they are prescient. An imperiled aesthetic sense that is incapable of discerning differences of quality and meaning and that cannot sense subtleties of emotion is necessary for a complacent body of fungible consumers who, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Pound, who viewed the Medieval Church as the highest expression of Western Civilization, likewise saw Calvinist Protestantism as its lowest expression, one that permitted, indeed glorified, usury and the inability to make aesthetic and moral distinctions:

You can, by contrast, always get financial backing for
debauchery. Any form of “entertainment” that debases perception, that profanes the mysteries or tends to obscure discrimination, goes hand in hand with drives toward money profit. It might not be too much to say that the whole of protestant morals, intertwined with usury-tolerance, has for centuries tended to obscure perception of degrees, to debase the word moral to a single groove, to degrade all moral perceptions outside the relation of the sexes, and to vulgarize the sex relation itself.[3]

What is remarkable here is that Pound was able to see through the practices and goals of the leftist globalists at precisely the time that the right-wing nationalists were at the zenith of their power. These two paragraphs of Pound’s explain why the globalists use pornography as a means to normalize sexual perversions in order to subvert white family formation. They also explain the bread-and-circus nature of the global financiers to keep consumers satiated with cheap toys and gadgets. And finally, Pound was able to ascertain that Calvinist morality has led to an inability of our enemies to be able to make moral distinctions, wherein any disagreement with a leftist, however minor, becomes an example of “hate speech” in which the speaker literally becomes Adolf Hitler. It is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries, especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.

Pound is a demanding author. He does not suffer fools gladly and he expects his readers to do their homework, but the rewards are many for those readers who are up to the challenge. Guide to Kulchur should be an essential book in the library of every white nationalist. Although written 80 years ago, the book is even more relevant today than it was when it was written, for in the words of its author:

Liberalism is a running sore, and its surviving proponents
are vile beyond printable descriptions. They have betrayed the “Droits de l’homme”, they are more dastardly than Judas . . . . In our time the liberal has asked for almost no freedom save the freedom to commit acts contrary to the general good.[4]

I rest my case.

Quintilian

Notes

[1] Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970 [1938]), p. 330.

[2] Ibid., p. 281.

[3] Ibid., pp. 281–82.

[4] Ibid., p. 254.

1 comment
ThreestarsJanuary 16, 2019 at 2:22 am
“is also amazing that Pound saw the origin of leftist ideology in Calvinism, and as such, antedates by more than half a century the same conclusion brought by the Neoreactionaries,”

I wouldn’t call Pound “prescient”, or at least especially so, since he seems to draw pretty heavily from Max Weber’s theory on the origins of capitalism in Protestant morals. Although the latter doesn’t articulate it as clearly, he does decry that material worth came to displace higher, more abstract values in his contemporary, turn of the century society.

“especially Curtis Yarvin a/k/a Mencius Moldbug.”

While I do understand that Moldbug is especially fixated on this, he is far from being the first Reactionary writer (I pause to call him “thinker”) to place the roots of modern American liberalism in the Calvinist ethos. Paul Gottfried comes readily to mind, who did so some 20 years in advance.

I admit, I haven’t read all of Yarvin’s work, but what I did seemed to me derivative, with only an appearance of originality due mostly to his habit of not crediting any of his modern influences (assuming he didn’t re-invent the wheel…). This is a huge no-no for any serious humanities grad student and above, as it can deceitfully give the aura of a “thinker” to a mere popularizer. It’s little surprise his influence almost exclusively extends to poorly read computer programmers…

Again, I have only cursory knowledge of Yarvin’s writings, I’d appreciate a defense of the guy from someone more familiar with him.

https://counter-currents.com/

Ezra Pound Gold & Work

As for monopolizability: no one is such a fool as to let someone else have the run of his own private bank account; yet nations, individuals, industrialists, and businessmen have all been quite prepared—almost eager—to leave the control of their national currencies, and of international money, in the hands of the most stinking dregs of humanity.
*
As for the validity of primitive forms of money such as a promissory note written on leather, we have C. H. Douglas’s memorable comment that it was valid enough as long as the man who promised to pay an ox had an ox.
××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××××

At 5:30 p.m. on Monday, 30 January 1933 (Year XI), the author of the following notes submitted a list of eighteen points to a personage of the Italian Government. Ten years later these points were published in the Meridiano di Roma with the result that that newspaper was banned by the United States postal authorities. There are certain ideas that are not welcome in liberal circles.

The Way of Utopia

On the 10th of September last, I walked down the Via Salaria and into the Republic of Utopia, a quiet country lying eighty years east of Fara Sabina. Noticing the cheerful disposition of the inhabitants, I enquired the cause of their contentment, and I was told that it was due both to their laws and to the teaching they received from their earliest school days.

They maintain (and in this they are in agreement with Aristotle and other ancient sages of East and West) that our knowledge of universals derives from our knowledge of particulars, and that thought hinges on the definitions of words.

In order to teach small children to observe particulars they practise a kind of game, in which a number of small objects, e.g., three grains of barley, a small coin, a blue button, a coffee bean, or, say, one grain of barley, three different kinds of buttons, etc., are concealed in the hand. The hand is opened for an instant, then quickly closed again, and the child is asked to say what it has seen. For older children the game is gradually made more elaborate, until finally they all know how their hats and shoes are made. I was also informed that by learning how to define words these people have succeeded in defining their economic terms, with the result that various iniquities of the stock market and financial world have entirely disappeared from their country, for no one allows himself to be fooled any longer.

And they attribute their prosperity to a simple method they have of collecting taxes or, rather, their one tax, which falls on the currency itself. For on every note of 100 monetary units they are obliged, on the first of every month, to affix a stamp worth one unit. And as the government pays its expenses by the issue of new currency, it never needs to impose other taxes. And no one can hoard this currency because after 100 months it would have lost all its value. And this solves the problem of circulation. And because the currency is no more durable than commodities such as potatoes, crops, or fabrics, the people have acquired a much healthier sense of values. They do not worship money as a god, they do not lick the boots of bloated financiers or syphilitics of the market-place. And, of course, they are not menaced by inflation, and they are not compelled to make wars to please the usurers. In fact, this profession—or criminal activity—is extinct in the country of Utopia, where no one is obliged to work more than five hours a day, because their mode of life makes a great deal of bureaucratic activity unnecessary. Trade has few restraints. They exchange their woollen and silk fabrics against coffee and groundnuts from their African possessions, while their cattle are so numerous that the fertilizer problem almost solves itself. But they have a very strict law which excludes every kind of surrogate from the whole of their republic.

Education for these people is almost a joy, and there are no redundant professors. They say that it is impossible to eliminate idiotic books, but that it is easy to distribute the antidote, and they do this by means of a very simple system. Every bookseller is obliged to stock the best books; some of outstanding merit must be displayed in his window for a certain number of months each year. As they become familiar with the very best books, the disgusting messes served up periodically by The Times or the Nouvelle Revue Française gradually disappear from the drawing-rooms of the more empty-headed young ladies–of both sexes.

They attach the importance to skill in agricultural tasks that I attached in my youth to skill at tennis or football. In fact, they have ploughing contests to see who can drive the straightest furrow. As for myself, I felt I was too old for such activities, and recalled the case of a young friend who had also been seized this archaic passion: he wrote that his first acre “looked as if a pig had been rooting about all over it.”

After I had heard these very simple explanations of the happiness of these people, I went to sleep under the Sabine stars, pondering over the astonishing effects of these reforms, apparently so trifling, and marvelling at the great distance separating the twentieth-century world from the world of contentment.

Inscribed over the entrance to their Capitol are the words:

THE TREASURE OF A NATION IS ITS HONESTY.

Particulars of the Crime

It is no use assembling a machine if a part is missing or defective. One must first have all the essential parts. Fully to understand the origins of the present war it will be useful to know that:

The Bank of England, a felonious combination or, more precisely, a gang of usurers taking sixty per cent. interest, was founded in 1694. Paterson, the founder of the bank, clearly stated the advantages of his scheme: “the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”[1] In 1750 the paper currency of the Colony of Pennsylvania was suppressed. This meant that this confederacy of gombeen-men, not content with their sixty per cent., namely, the interest on the moneys they created out of nothing, had, in the fifty-six intervening years, become powerful enough to induce the British Government to suppress, illegally, a form of competition which had, through a sane monetary system, brought prosperity to the colony.

Twenty-six years later, in 1776, the American colonies rebelled against England. They were thirteen independent organs, divided among themselves, but favoured by geographical factors and European discords. They conquered their perennial enemy, England, but their revolution was betrayed by internal enemies among them. Their difficulties might serve to stimulate Italians today, and the problems of that time might suggest solutions in Italy now.

The imperfections of the American electoral system were at once demonstrated by the scandal of the Congressmen who speculated in the “certificates of owed pay” that had been issued by the various Colonies to the soldiers of the Revolution.

It was an old trick, and a simple one: a question of altering the value of the monetary unit. Twenty-nine Congressmen conspired with their associates and bought up the certificates from veterans and others at twenty per cent. of their face value. The nation, having now established itself as an administrative unit, then “assumed” responsibility for redeeming the certificates at their full face value.

The struggle between the financial interests and the people was continued in the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton, and still more openly when the people were led by Jackson and Van Buren. The decade between 1830 and 1840 has practically disappeared from the school-books. The economic facts behind the American “Civil” War are extremely interesting. After the Napoleonic wars, after the “Civil” one, after Versailles, the same phenomena may be observed.

Usurocracy makes wars in succession. It makes them according to a preestablished plan for the purpose of creating debts.

For every debt incurred when a bushel of grain is worth a certain sum of money, repayment is demanded when it requires five bushels or more to raise the same sum. This is accompanied by much talk of devaluation, inflation, revaluation, deflation, and a return to gold. By returning to gold, Mr. Churchill forced the Indian peasant to pay two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short time before he had been able to pay with one only.

C. H. Douglas, Arthur Kitson, Sir Montagu Webb give the details. The United States were sold to the Rothschilds in 1863. The Americans have taken eighty years to discover the facts that are still unknown in Europe. Some of them were made known in Congress by Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator’s father, and later included by Willis A. Overholser in his History of Money in the United States.

A letter from the London banking firm of Rothschild Bros, dated 25 June, 1863, addressed to the New York bank Ikleheimer, Morton & Vander Gould, contains the following words of fire:

Very few people
will understand this. Those who do will be occupied
getting profits. The general public will probably not
see it’s against their interest.[2]

The favourite tricks of the usurocracy are simple, and the word “money” is not defined in the clerks’ manual issued by the Rothschilds, nor in the official vocabulary “Synonyms and Homonyms of Banking Terminology.” The tricks are simple: taking usury at sixty per cent. and upwards, and altering the value of the integer of account at moments advantageous to themselves.

Ignorance

Ignorance of these tricks is not a natural phenomenon; it is brought about artificially. It has been fostered by the silence of the press, in Italy as much as anywhere else. What is more, it has been patiently and carefully built up. The true basis of credit was already known to the founders of the Monte dei Paschi of Siena at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

This basis was, and is, the abundance, or productivity, of nature together with the responsibility of the whole people.

There are useful and potentially honest functions for banks and bankers. One who provides a measure of prices in the market and at the same time a means of exchange is useful to the nation. But one who falsifies this measure and this means is a criminal.

A sound banking policy aims, and in the past has aimed, as Lord Overstone (Samuel Loyd) has said, “to meet the real wants of commerce, and to discount all commercial bills arising out of legitimate transactions.”[3]

Nevertheless, at a certain moment at about the beginning of the century, Brooks Adams was moved to write:

Perhaps no financier has ever lived abler than Samuel Loyd. Certainly he understood as few men, even of later generations, have understood, the mighty engine of the single Standard. He comprehended that, with expanding trade, an inelastic currency must rise in value; he saw that, with sufficient resources at command, his class might be able to establish such a rise, almost at pleasure; certainly that they could manipulate it when it came, by taking advantage of foreign exchange. He perceived moreover that, once established, a contraction of the currency might be forced to an extreme, and that when money rose beyond price, as in 1825, debtors would have to surrender their property on such terms as creditors might dictate.[4]

So now you understand why the B.B.C., proclaiming the liberation of Europe, and of Italy in particular, never replies to the question: And the liberty of not getting into debt–how about that?

And you will understand why Brooks Adams wrote that after Waterloo no power had been able to resist the force of the usurers.[5]

And you will understand why Mussolini was condemned twenty years ago by the central commitee of the usurocracy. And why wars are made, i.e., in order to create debts which must be paid in appreciated money, or not paid at all, according to circumstances.

War is the highest form of sabotage, the most atrocious form of sabotage. Usurers provoke wars to impose monopolies in their own interests, so that they can get the world by the throat. Usurers provoke wars to create debts, so that they can extort the interest and rake in the profits resulting from changes in the values of monetary units.

If this is not clear to the novice, let him read and meditate the following sentences from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862:

The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will see to it is made out of the war must he used to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate . . . for we cannot control them (i.e., their issue, etc.).[6]

In fact, after the assassination of President Lincoln no serious measures against the usurocracy were attempted until the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis. Italy’s ambition to achieve economic liberty—the liberty of not getting into debt—provoked the unleashing of the ever-accursed sanctions.

But the great Italian publishing houses, more or less open accomplices of the perfidious Italian press, have not published the works of Brooks Adams and Arthur Kitson in which these facts are given. The press has been perfidious, and the great publishing houses have been more or less conscious accomplices according to their opacity. One cannot hope to prevail against bad faith by making known the facts, but one might against ignorance. The publishers have received their information through certain channels; they have taken their tone from the Times Literary Supplement and from books distributed through Hachette and W. H. Smith & Son, or approved by the Nouvelle Revue Française.

Nothing, or practically nothing, has arrived in Italy that has not been picked over by the international usurers and their blind or shifty-eyed servitors. And the result is to be seen in an artificially created ignorance and snobbery. Neomalthusianism needs looking into. In Italy, as elsewhere, crime fiction has served to distract attention from the great underlying crime, the crime of the usurocratic system itself. If this may seem of no importance to politicians and men of action, it has nonetheless created a vast blockage of passive inertia in the very so-called “literary” or “cultured” circles which set the tone of printed matter. They read, they write, and the public gets the sweepings. And from this dishwashing process derives the CREDULITY that has contaminated a great part of the public with the “English disease,” namely, a pathological disposition to believe the fantastic tales put out from London and disseminated gratis by indigenous simpletons.

Of the liberals (who are not always usurers) we would ask, Why are usurers always liberals?

Of those who demand the dictatorship of the proletariat we would ask, Must the proletariat of one country impose dictatorship on the proletariat of another?

To those who inveigh against the concept of autarchy, saying it costs too much; that grain should be bought in the cheapest market—we would recall that it was precisely the importing of cheap grain from Egypt that ruined Italian agriculture under the Roman Empire. And if this fact appears too remote from our own times, it may be noted that those who speak of this kind of trade usually end up by talking about the export of labour, that is, the export of workers, the export of human beings, in exchange for commodities.

Many are beginning to understand that England, in her sadistic attempt destroy Italy, is destroying herself, though the public still fails to understand the origin of this mania for destruction. Deny, if you like, that the purely and exclusively economic man exists, yet the analysis of economic motives is useful for an understanding of avarice. The greed for monopoly is a fundamental evil. It may be seen in the transgression of the unjust price, condemned by the economic doctrine of the Church throughout the period of its greatest splendour.

It must be understood that the whole of the current taste in literature and entire journalistic system are controlled by the international usurocracy, which aims at preserving intact the public’s ignorance of the usurocratic system and its workings. The details of the military betrayal are known, but the intellectual betrayal has not yet been understood. Ignorance of this system and its mechanisms is not a natural phenomenon; it has been created.

Liberalism and Bolshevism are in intimate agreement in their fundamental contempt for the human personality. Stalin “disposes” of forty truckloads human “material” for work on a canal. We find d1e liberals talking about export of “labour.”

Liberalism conceals its baneful economics under two pretexts: the freedom of the spoken and written word, and the freedom of the individual, protected in theory, by trial in open court, guaranteed by the formula of habeas corpus. Enquire in India, or in England, to what extent these pretexts are respectec. Ask any American journalist what freedom of expression is left him by the advertisers.

Some further items of useful knowledge:
(1) We need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but it does follow that the means must be the same in each case.
(2) The state can LEND. The fleet that was victorious at Salamis was built with money lent to the shipbuilders by the Athenian state.
(3) To simplify both government and private management, a system which can operate at the counter, whether of a government or private office, is preferable.

A NATION
THAT WILL NOT
GET ITSELF INTO DEBT
DRIVES THE USURERS
TO FURY

The Pivot

All trade hinges on money. All industry hinges on money. Money is the pivot. It is the middle term. It stands midway between industry and workers. The pure economic man may not exist, but the economic factor, in the problem of living, exists. If you live on clichés and lose your respect for words, you will lose your “ben dell’ intelletto.”[7]

Trade brought prosperity to Liguria; usury lost it Corsica. But in losing the ability to distinguish between trade and usury one loses all sense of the historical process. There has been some vague talk in recent months about an international power, described as financial, but it would be better to call it “usurocracy,” or the rule of the big usurers combined in conspiracy. Not the gun merchants, but the traffickers in money itself have made this war; they have made wars in succession, for centuries, at their own pleasure, to create debts so that they can enjoy the interest on them, to create debts when money is cheap in order to demand repayment when money is dear.

But as long as the word “money” is not clearly defined, and as long as its definition is not known to all the peoples of the world, they will go blindly to war with each other, never knowing the reason why.

This war was no whim of Mussolini’s, nor of Hitler’s. This war is a chapter in the long and bloody tragedy which began with the foundation of the Bank of England in far-away 1694, with the openly declared intention of Paterson’s now famous prospectus, which contains the words already quoted: “the bank hath benefit of the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing.”

To understand what this means it is necessary to understand what money is. Money is not a simple instrument like a spade. It is made up of two elements: one which measures the prices on the market, one which bestows the power to purchase the goods. It is this twofold aspect that the usurers have taken advantage of. You know well enough that a watch contains two principles, a mainspring and a hair-spring, with a train of wheels between the two. But if someone asks you what money is, you don’t know what the ten lire notes and the twenty centesimi pieces, which you have in your pockets, are.

Until the seventh century after Christ, when an Emperor of the T’ang Dynasty issued state notes (state notes, not bank notes, mind you), the world was practically compelled to use as money a determined quantity of some commonly used commodity, such as salt or gold according to the degree of local sophistication. But since A.D. 654, at least, this metal has no longer been necessary for trading between civilized people. The state note of the T’ang Dynasty, of the year 856, which is still in existence, has an inscription almost identical with the one you read on your ten lire notes.

The note measures the price, not the value; or in other words, prices are calculated in monetary units. But who supplies these notes? And, before the present war, who controlled the issue of international money? If you want to discover the causes of the present war, try and find out who controlled international money, and how it came under such control.

For the moment I will give you only one hint from the history of the United States of America:

The great debt that (our friends the) capitalists (of Europe) will see to it is made out of the war must be used to control the volume of money. . . . It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate . . . for we cannot control them.[8]

This is from the Hazard Circular of the year 1862. It seems to me that a similar situation existed in 1939. I would say that Italy, not wanting to get herself into debt, drove the great usurers to fury. Think it over! And think of the nature of money itself, and of the economists’ invariable irresponsibility when we ask them to define such words as money, credit, interest, and usury.

If we are going to talk about monetary policy, monetary reform, or a monetary revolution, we must know first of all exactly what money is.

The Enemy

The enemy is ignorance (our own). At the beginning of the nineteenth century John Adams (Pater Patriae) saw that the defects and errors of the American government derived not so much from the corruption of government officials as from ignorance of coin, credit, and circulation.

The situation is the same today. The subject is considered too dry by those who do not understand its significance. For example, at about the end of last December a banker boasted to me that at a certain period he could remember Italian paper money was worth more than gold. One concludes that in that particular “golden age” the Rothschilds were wanting to purchase gold cheap, in order to send its price rocketing later.

In the same way the Sassoons and their accomplices profited from the slump in silver. At one period, in fact, silver fell to 23 cents per ounce, and was later bought by certain American idiots at 75 cents per ounce, in order to please their masters and to “save India,” where, with the return to gold, Mr. Churchill, as we have remarked, forced the peasants to pay two bushels of grain in taxes and interest which a short time before could have been paid with only one.

To combat this rigging of the gold and silver markets we must know what money is. Today money is a disk of metal or a slip of paper which serves to measure prices and which confers, on its possessor, the right to receive in exchange any goods on sale in the market up to a price equal to the figure indicated on me disk or slip of paper, without any formality other than the transfer of the money from hand to hand. Thus money differs from a special coupon, such as a railway or theatre ticket. This universal quality confers special privileges on money which the special coupon does not possess. Of these I will speak another time.

Besides this tangible money, there is also intangible money, called “money on account,” which is used in accounting and banking transactions. This intangibility belongs to a discussion of credit rather than a treatise on money. Our immediate need is to clarify current conceptions with regard to the so-called “work-money,” and to make clear that money cannot be a “symbol of work” without any other qualification. It could be a “certificate of work done” on condition that the work is done within a system. The validity of the certificate would depend on the honesty of the system, and on the authority of the certifier. And the certificate would have to refer to some work useful—or at least pleasurable—to the community.

An item of work not yet completed would serve as an element of credit rather than as a basis for money properly understood. Speaking metaphorically, one might call credit the “future tense of money.”

The elaborate assay procedure of mints has been developed to guarantee the quality and quantity of the metal in coined money; no less elaborate precautions would be necessary to guarantee the quality, quantity, and appropriateness of me work which will serve as the basis for what is to be called “work money” (meaning “certificate-of-work-done-money”).

The same frauds of accounting practised by the gombeen-men of the past in order to swindle the public under a metallic monetary system will, of course, be attempted by the gombeen-men of the future in their attacks on social justice, irrespective of the kind of monetary system that may be established. And they will be just as likely to succeed unless the nature and workings of these practices have been fully understood by the public—or at least by an alert and efficient minority.

It is only one plague-spot that the creation of work-money would eliminate. I mean that the advantages of the gold-standard system lauded by the bankers are advantages for the bankers only—for some bankers only, in fact. Social justice demands equal advantages for all.

The advantage of work-money mainly derives from one fact alone: work cannot be monopolized. And this is the very reason for the bitter opposition, for the uproar of protest, natural and artificial, which issues from me ranks of the gombeen-men, whether they be exotic or indigenous.

The idea that work might serve as a measure of prices was already current in me eighteenth century, and was clearly expounded by Benjamin Franklin.

As for monopolizability: no one is such a fool as to let someone else have the run of his own private bank account; yet nations, individuals, industrialists, and businessmen have all been quite prepared—almost eager—to leave the control of their national currencies, and of international money, in the hands of the most stinking dregs of humanity.

Work cannot be monopolized. The function of work as a measure is beginning to be understood. The principle has been clearly put before the Italian public as, for example, when me Regime Fascista reports mat the Russian worker must pay 380 working hours for an overcoat which a German worker can procure with only 80.

An article by Fernando Ritter in the Fascio of Milan, 7 January, 1944, refers to money not in generic words and abstract terms such as “capital” and “finance,” but in terms of grain and fertilizers.

As for the validity of primitive forms of money such as a promissory note written on leather, we have C. H. Douglas’s memorable comment that it was valid enough as long as the man who promised to pay an ox had an ox.

In the same way the certificates of work done will be valid provided that the utility of the work done is honestly estimated by some proper authority. It should be remembered that the soil does not require monetary compensation for the wealth extracted from it. With her wonderful efficiency nature sees to it that the circulation of material capital and its fruits is maintained, and that what comes out of the soil goes back into the soil with majestic rhythm, despite human interference.

The Toxicology of Money

Money is not a product of nature but an invention of man. And man has made it into a pernicious instrument through lack of foresight. The nations have forgotten the differences between animal, vegetable, and mineral; or rather, finance has chosen to represent all three of the natural categories by a single means of exchange, and failed to take account of the consequences. Metal is durable, but it does not reproduce itself. If you sow gold you will not be able to reap a harvest many times greater than the gold you sowed. The vegetable leads a more or less autonomous existence, but its natural reproductiveness can be increased by cultivation. The animal gives to and takes from the vegetable world: manure in exchange for food.

Fascinated by the lustre of a metal, men made it into chains. Then he invented something against nature, a false representation in the mineral world of laws which apply only to animals and vegetables.

The nineteenth century, the infamous century of usury, went even further, creating a species of monetary Black Mass. Marx and Mill, in spite of their superficial differences, agreed in endowing money with properties of a quasi-religious nature. There was even the concept of energy being “concentrated in money,” as if one were speaking of the divine quality of consecrated bread. But a half-lira piece has never created the cigarette or the piece of chocolate that used, in pre-war days, to issue from the slot-machine.

The durability of metal gives it certain advantages not possessed by potatoes or tomatoes. Anyone who has a stock of metal can keep it until conditions are most favourable for exchanging it against less durable goods. Hence the earliest forms of speculation on the part of those in possession of metals—especially those metals which arc comparatively rare and do not rust.

But in addition to this potentiality for unjust manipulation inherent in metallic money by virtue of its being metallic, man has invented a document provided with coupons to serve as a more visible representation of usury. And usury is a vice, or a crime, condemned by all religions and by every ancient moralist. For example, in Cato’s De Re Rustica we find the following piece of dialogue:

“And what do you think of usury?”
“What do you think of murder?”

And Shakespeare: “Or is your gold . . . ewes and rams?”

No! it is not money that is the root of the evil. The root is greed, the lust for monopoly. ‘CAPTANS ANNONAM, MALEDICTUS IN PLEBE SIT!’ thundered St Ambrose—“Hoggers of harvest, cursed among the people!”

The opportunity of dishonest dealing was already offered to the possessors of gold at the dawn of history. But what man has made he can unmake. All that is needed is to devise a kind of money that cannot be kept waiting in the safe until such time as it may be most advantageous for its owner to bring it out. The power to swindle the people by means of coined or printed money would thus disappear almost automatically.

The idea is not new. Bishops in the Middle Ages were already issuing money that was recalled to the mint for recoining after a definite period. The German, Gesell, and the Italian, Avigliano, almost contemporaneously, devised a still more interesting means of achieving a greater economic justice. They proposed a paper-money system by which everyone was obliged, on the first of the month, to affix a stamp on every note he possessed equal to one per cent. of the note’s face value.

This system has given such praiseworthy results in certain restricted areas where it has been put into operation, that it is the duty of any far-sighted nation to give it serious consideration. The means is simple. It is not beyond the mental capacity of a peasant. Anyone is capable of sticking a stamp on an envelope, or on a receipted hotel bill.

From the humanitarian point of view, the advantage of this form of taxation over all others is that it can only fall on persons who have, at the moment the tax falls due, money in their pockets worth 100 times the tax itself.

Another advantage is that it doesn’t interfere with trade or discourage building activity; it falls only on superfluous money, namely on the money mat the holder has not been obliged to spend in the course of the preceding month. As a remedy for inflation its advantages will be seen immediately. Inflation consists in a superfluity of money. Under Gesell’s system each issue of notes consumes itself in 100 months—eight years and four months—thus bringing to the treasury a sum equal to the original issue.

(To make this still clearer, imagine a note left in the safe for 100 months. It will be a note on strike which, for 100 months, fails to function as a means of exchange and does not serve its purpose. Well then, the tax on this laziness will equal its face value. On the other hand, a note that passes from hand to hand can play its part in hundreds of transactions each month before it has to be taxed at all.)

The expense of numerous departments whose present function is to squeeze taxes out of the public would be reduced to a minimum and practically vanish. Office workers don’t go to the office to amuse themselves. They could be given the chance of spending their time as they liked, or of raising the cultural level of their social circle, while still receiving their present salaries without the need of diminishing the material wealth of Italy by a single bushel of grain, or by a litre of wine. Those who are not studiously inclined would have time to produce something useful.

A cardinal error of so-called liberal economics has been to forget the difference between food and stuff you can neither cat nor clothe yourself with. A republican[9] realism should call the public’s attention to certain fundamental realities. Philip Gibbs, writing of Italy for Anglo-American readers, cannot see that anything can be done with a product except sell it. The idea of using it does not penetrate the Bolshevik-Liberal psychology.

The Error

The error has been pecuniolatry, or the making of money into a god. This was due to a process of denaturalization, by which our money has been given false attributes and powers that it should never have possessed. Gold is durable, but does not reproduce itself—not even if you put two bits of it together, one shaped like a cock, the other like a hen. It is absurd to speak of it as bearing fruit or yielding interest. Gold does not germinate like grain. To represent gold as doing this is to represent it falsely. It is a falsification. And the term “falsificazione della moneta” (counterfeiting or false-coining) may perhaps be derived from this.

To repeat: we need a means of exchange and a means of saving, but it does not follow that the means must be the same in each case. We are not forced to use a hammer for an awl.

The stamp affixed to the note acts as the hair-spring in the watch. Under the usurocratic system the world has suffered from alternate waves of inflation and deflation, of too much money and too little. Everyone can understand the function of a pendulum or hair-spring. A similar mental grasp should be brought to bear in the field of money.

A sound economic system will be attained when money has neither too much nor too little potential. The distinction between trade and usury has been lost. The distinction between debt and interest-bearing debt has been lost. As long ago as 1878 the idea of non-interest-bearing debt was current—even of non-interest-bearing national debt. The interest that you have received in the past has been largely an illusion: it has functioned on a short-term basis leaving you with a sum of money arithmetically somewhat greater than that which you had “saved,” but expressed in a currency whose units have lost a part of their value in the meantime.

Dexter Kimball collected statistics of American rail bonds issued over a period of half a century, and made interesting discoveries as to the proportion of these obligations that had simply been annulled for one reason or another. If my memory doesn’t betray me, the figure was as high as seventy per cent.

That industrial concerns and plants should pay interest on their borrowed capital is just, because they serve to increase production. But the world has lost the distinction between production and corrosion. Unpardonable imbecility! For this distinction was known in the earliest years of recorded history. To represent something corrosive as something productive is a falsification—a forgery. Only fools believe in false representations. Give money its correct potential; make it last as long as things last in the material world; give it, above all, its due advantage (i.e., that of being exchangeable for any goods at any moment, provided the goods in question exist)—but do not give money, beyond this advantage, powers that correspond neither to justice nor to the nature of the goods it is issued against or used to purchase. This is the way that leads to social justice and economic sanity.

Military Valour

There can be no military valour in a climate of intellectual cowardice.

No individual should get angry if the community refuses to accept his proposals, but it is intellectual cowardice if one is afraid to formulate one’s own concept of society. This is all the more so at a time full of possibilities, at a time when the formulation of a new system of government is announced. Everyone who has some competence as an historian, and is in possession of certain historical facts, should formulate his concepts in relation to that part of the social organism in which his studies have given him authority to act as a judge.

To cultivate this competence in future generations one must begin, in the schools, with the observation of particular objects, as an introduction to the apprehension of particular facts in history. The individual does not need to know everything on an encyclopaedic scale, but everyone with any kind of public responsibility must have knowledge of the essential facts of the problem he has to deal with. It begins with the game of the objects shown to the child for an instant in the hand that is then quickly closed again.

Thought hinges on the definition of words. Aristotle and Confucius bear witness. I would conclude the compulsory studies of every university student with a comparison—even a brief one—between the two major works of Aristotle (the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics), on the one hand, and, on the other, the Four Books of China (i.e., the three classics of the Confucian tradition—the Ta Hsüeh or “Great Learning,”[10] The Unwobbling Axis,[11] and the Analects—together with the Works of Mencius).

Extra-university education and that of the public in general could be taken care of by means of a simple ordinance relating to bookshops: every bookseller should be obliged to stock and, in the case of certain more important works, display in the window for a determined number of weeks per year certain books of capital importance.

Anyone who is familiar with the masterpieces, especially those of Aristotle, Confucius, Demosthenes, together with Davanati’s “Tacitus,”[12] will not be taken in by the nasty messes now offered to the public. As for money, it will be enough if everyone thinks for himself of the principle of the hair-spring, of the national and social effects, in other words, that would result from the mere application of a stamp in the most appropriate place. Better on the currency note tl1an on the receipted hotel bill.

One used to speak of “Cavalieri di San Giorgio,”[13] never identifying them with due precision. Money can cause injury, and economic knowledge is today about as crude as was medical science when it was realized that a broken leg was damaging but when the effects of germs were unknown. It is not so much the money that buys a Badoglio, but the hidden work of interest that is everywhere gnawing away, corroding. This is not the interest paid to the private individual on his bank account, but interest on money that does not exist, on a mirage of money; interest equivalent to sixty per cent. and over as opposed to money that represents honest work or goods useful to mankind.

To repeat: the distinction between production and corrosion has been lost; and so has the distinction between the sharing-out of the fruits of work done in collaboration (a true and just dividend, called partaggio in the Middle Ages) and the corrosive interest that represents no increase in useful and material production of any sort.

It is, of course, useless to indulge in anti-Semitism, leaving intact the Hebraic monetary system which is their most tremendous instrument of usury. And we would ask the Mazzinians why they never read those pages of the Duties of Man which deal with banks.

Bulletin of Civic Discipline

Arguments are caused by the ignorance of ALL the disputants.

Until you have clarified your own thought within yourself you cannot communicate it to others.

Until you have brought order within yourself you cannot become an element of order in the party.

The fortune of war depends on the honesty of the régime.

Notes

1. Quoted by Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations, chap. III. See also Pound’s Canto XLVI.—Trans.

2. The Italian text follows the author’s own paraphrase in Canto XLVI, which is therefore used here. These particular words are quoted (enthusiastically) from a letter received by the Rothschild firm from “a certain Mr John Sherman,” presumably to be identified with the American statesman who was then Senator for Ohio and later Secretary of the Treasury. Overholser gives the full text in the fourth chapter of his book.—Trans.

3. Quoted by Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (new edition), Knopf, New York, 1943, pp. 307-8.—Trans.

4. Brooks Adams, p. 315.—Trans.

5. Ibid. pp. 306, 310, 326-7, and chap. XI generally.—Trans.

6. Quoted by Overholser, op. cit, chap. IV. Also by H. Jerry Voorhis: Extension of Remarks in the House of Representatives, 6 June, 1938, Congressional Record, Appendix, Vol. 83, Part II, p. 2363.—Trans.

7. Dante, Inferno III, 18. “Homely english wd. get that down to ‘USE OF YOUR WITS’ but I reckon Dante meant something nearer to Mencius’ meaning: . . . sense of EQUITY.”—E. P. in a radio speech, see If This Be Treason, p. 32.—Tr.

8. See note p. 6, above.—Trans.

9. At the time of writing the Fascist Social Republic was established in northern Italy, while “liberated” Italy was still a monarchy.—Trans.

10. “Studio Maturo” in the text.—Trans.

11. i.e., the Chung Yung, or “Doctrine of the Just Mean,” rendered in the text as “L’Asseche non Vacilla” at a time when a more notorious Axis was anything but unwobbling. The author’s latest rendering of this title is “The Unwobbling Pivot.”—Trans.

12. Bernardo Davanzati (1529-1606), celebrated translator of Tacitus.—Trans.

13. Italian nickname for gold sovereigns.—Trans.

3 comments
SandyNovember 6, 2013 at 3:09 am
I wonder if The United States were sold to the Rothschilds in 1863 is the explanation for the queen knighting, from time to time, American citizens, such as Sir Alan Greenspan?


Daniele PaceJune 26, 2015 at 12:05 pm
Prof Giacinto Auriti gave the answer to the 5 question of Ezra Pound theorising the Popular Ownwership of Money. He has a great reputation in Italy. You can find more here or ask for the books !

http://danielepacebloguk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/the-importance-of-auriti-and-of-legal.html


SRPNovember 24, 2020 at 8:36 am
As for the strategy of devaluing money in order to encourage spending and discourage hoarding: It seems to me that inflation itself serves this purpose. The stamp-system as described above by Pound, is obviously unworkable as 99% of money today and tomorrow is both earned and spent electronically.

I think that originating money only upon performance of labor is key. And discouraging hoarding by some means (such as by deliberate controlled inflation). But where is big capital obtained if no hoarding allowed? And how is the lending of capital incentivized if interest is prohibited? Would the State be the only lender?

And where does the State get money except by taxation? Does the State own certain profitable industries and obtain revenue from these rather than taxation?

https://counter-currents.com/