Americans remember that their nation was "conceived in liberty" but tend to forget that liberty was based on morality. Morality is not the same thing as charity. A thief can donate his booty to charity, but he is not moral. Aristotle argued that there are moral as well as intellectual virtues. The moral virtues in Aristotle's view were justice, temperance, prudence and courage. Morality, then, depends on justice. Justice means that each producer receives a fair return, and that no producer receives an unearned return.
The Founding Fathers' morality was linked to the Aristotelian philosophy. Liberty in the sense that it once existed in America depended on justice. This was the underlying assumption of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government on which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based. Governments are formed for the just reason of protecting life, liberty and property from violence.
The morality of justice is in turn dependent upon truth. For without a willingness to examine the truth justice is not possible. One cannot receive a fair reward if one is not willing to truthfully examine the contribution one has made.
Ever since the beginning of the Republic a sizable contingent of Americans fought the idea of justice. These Americans wanted the public to subsidize them. The way that they were to be subsidized was through the power to create paper money.
Because of the inherent morality of the 19th century American public, the public rejected this attack on moral values. In 1836 President Andrew Jackson abolished the Second Bank of the United States, the precursor of today's Federal Reserve Bank. The American people of 1836 were too moral to tolerate the fraud associated with the central bank.
In the 1930s John Maynard Keynes proposed an economic system whose foundation is the commission of fraud. Employees would be fooled into accepting lower wages through inflation. The nation's universities would be called into service to perpetuate the fraud by claiming non-existent economic expertise that justified the fraud. The media, already controlled by banking and Wall Street interests, were also called into service of the fraud.
The American people could no longer call themselves moral. For the people did not oppose the fraudulent issuance of bank notes. They did not oppose the transfer of wealth from productive labor to speculator and banker because they were afraid. They were afraid of deprivation because the mass media told them to be afraid. They feared for their security. They trusted experts whose motives were corrupt and whose ideas were merely warmed over and elaborated versions of the same claims that banks had made previously.
America stopped being a moral nation. It could no longer claim justice as the foundation of its ideology. And where justice dies, freedom is sure to follow.
A little dishonesty and a small decline in morality are likely to be followed by ever greater lapses. A little cheating is observed, and then someone does a little more. America has become a nation governed by immoral people. Its economy no longer encourages productivity. Its ethical base has deteriorated. Instead of justice, its ideology is theft. Wal-Mart is excoriated for reducing costs. Goldman Sachs is subsidized for stealing and reducing Americans' standards of living.
A nation that has rejected morality and has rejected justice is sure to deteriorate into the kind of nation that favors charity and stealing. Such a society existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The socialist economy will see decline to the primitive backwardness of the Soviet Union and pre-Tudor England.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Panic of 1819
CJ Maloney has written an excellent article on the panic of 1819 for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Maloney points out that the panic of 1819 resulted from the same kind of central bank and banking incompetence as today's sub-prime crisis but that the policy decisions of 1819 were much smarter, more effective and more moral than Americans are capable of today. Maloney writes:
"It is the unusual that grabs the attention, and the ideas and beliefs of the majority of our ancestors on how best to clean up the mess of 1819 are vastly different from almost everything I see and hear today. From CNBC's cute little money honeys to newspaper op-eds to my coworkers on the trade desk, all cry that the government must do something. Many of the elite from 1819 believed the exact opposite — that government must do nothing.
"...In 1819 America, nobody blamed the effects for the Panic of 1819, they rightly blamed the cause; they blamed (in Caroline Baum's words) the 'friendly central bank.' As Professor John Dobson points out, 'the [central] bank's policies fueled inflation, and it was popularly viewed as a major contributor to the Panic of 1819.' After this encounter with central banks, 'hard money leadership was abundant and influential'.
"The urge to bail out debtors was fought against not only from a practical but from a moral level as well. Besides Tennessee state representative Robert Allen warning his colleagues that 'if people learn that debts can be paid with petitions and fair stories, you will soon have your table crowded' the pages of the influential Pennsylvania Aurora argued that any such bailouts would not only be economically unsound, but unjust, being a special privilege to the debtor.
"While the federal government was a heavy player in the housing speculation — having offered over $23 million in "affordable" but now mostly delinquent loans by 1819 — for the most part it was the state capitals, where much of political power still resided in America's pre-Lincoln days, that were the scenes of battle.
"And not all the states were clamoring for intervention. The Massachusetts legislature in 1820, referring to hastily passed monetary laws that forced people to accept worthless paper bank notes as if they weren't, stated 'the exchange value of notes must be regulated by the community itself, according to public wants and needs'...plus many thought that such monetary measures were pure hubris. Virginia state politician William Selden warned, 'Money itself is an article of transfer. Human legislation on the subject is worse than vain'..."
Read the whole thing here.
"It is the unusual that grabs the attention, and the ideas and beliefs of the majority of our ancestors on how best to clean up the mess of 1819 are vastly different from almost everything I see and hear today. From CNBC's cute little money honeys to newspaper op-eds to my coworkers on the trade desk, all cry that the government must do something. Many of the elite from 1819 believed the exact opposite — that government must do nothing.
"...In 1819 America, nobody blamed the effects for the Panic of 1819, they rightly blamed the cause; they blamed (in Caroline Baum's words) the 'friendly central bank.' As Professor John Dobson points out, 'the [central] bank's policies fueled inflation, and it was popularly viewed as a major contributor to the Panic of 1819.' After this encounter with central banks, 'hard money leadership was abundant and influential'.
"The urge to bail out debtors was fought against not only from a practical but from a moral level as well. Besides Tennessee state representative Robert Allen warning his colleagues that 'if people learn that debts can be paid with petitions and fair stories, you will soon have your table crowded' the pages of the influential Pennsylvania Aurora argued that any such bailouts would not only be economically unsound, but unjust, being a special privilege to the debtor.
"While the federal government was a heavy player in the housing speculation — having offered over $23 million in "affordable" but now mostly delinquent loans by 1819 — for the most part it was the state capitals, where much of political power still resided in America's pre-Lincoln days, that were the scenes of battle.
"And not all the states were clamoring for intervention. The Massachusetts legislature in 1820, referring to hastily passed monetary laws that forced people to accept worthless paper bank notes as if they weren't, stated 'the exchange value of notes must be regulated by the community itself, according to public wants and needs'...plus many thought that such monetary measures were pure hubris. Virginia state politician William Selden warned, 'Money itself is an article of transfer. Human legislation on the subject is worse than vain'..."
Read the whole thing here.
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Letter to Congressman Maurice Hinchey Re Congressional Dress Code
Dear Congressman Hinchey:
I urge you to propose a bill that would require all members of Congress to wear the clown nose pictured above. This will fit Congress's competence and intellectual level of development.
Please consider proposing this dress code. It would be the most intelligent legislation you ever proposed.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Bill O'Reilly: Socialist
Newsmax recently reported that Bill O'Reilly says that he despises the way that the media treats President Barack H. Obama with kid gloves but that conservatives are wrong to call President Obama a socialist.
It may surprise Mr. O'Reilly to learn that by 1912 previouly Republican but by then Progressive Theodore Roosevelt's platform had become socialist. Roosevelt favored federal government price setting. Legislation authorizing the federal government's setting of railroad rates had been passed in 1906, during Roosevelt's Republican administration.
Similarly, President Obama has been busily bossing around automobile companies and providing trillions in subsidies to his cronies in investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The American approach to socialism of TR and BO has always been socialism of the rich.
Dictionary.com defines socialism is defined as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole". Would not firing the president of General Motors qualify as outright socialism?
Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson would have been shocked at the lumbering Leviathan government that Mr. O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox favor. Jackson in particular would have been disturbed at Mr. O'Reilly's silence about the role of the socialist Federal Reserve Bank in bleeding and wrecking the American economy. As in Jackson's day, today's Fed is emblematic of American socialism for the rich.
In a recent discussion of libertarianism Mr. O'Reilly claimed that the government must focus on the "public good". But President Jefferson would not have agreed that bailouts, social security or welfare programs contribute to the public good. Not much has changed since. Today, the economic contribution of the majority of contributors to social security is less than the economic value of the benefits they will receive. Social security was a pyramid scheme that transferred wealth from the 21st to the 20th century. And the chief function of Mr. Obama's socialist government, as would have been in Jefferson's day had the Federalists and the Whigs had their way, is to steal from the public in the interest of subsidizing bankers, a policy that the socialist Obama administration and Mr. O'Reilly support.
It may surprise Mr. O'Reilly to learn that by 1912 previouly Republican but by then Progressive Theodore Roosevelt's platform had become socialist. Roosevelt favored federal government price setting. Legislation authorizing the federal government's setting of railroad rates had been passed in 1906, during Roosevelt's Republican administration.
Similarly, President Obama has been busily bossing around automobile companies and providing trillions in subsidies to his cronies in investment banks like Goldman Sachs. The American approach to socialism of TR and BO has always been socialism of the rich.
Dictionary.com defines socialism is defined as "a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole". Would not firing the president of General Motors qualify as outright socialism?
Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson would have been shocked at the lumbering Leviathan government that Mr. O'Reilly and his colleagues at Fox favor. Jackson in particular would have been disturbed at Mr. O'Reilly's silence about the role of the socialist Federal Reserve Bank in bleeding and wrecking the American economy. As in Jackson's day, today's Fed is emblematic of American socialism for the rich.
In a recent discussion of libertarianism Mr. O'Reilly claimed that the government must focus on the "public good". But President Jefferson would not have agreed that bailouts, social security or welfare programs contribute to the public good. Not much has changed since. Today, the economic contribution of the majority of contributors to social security is less than the economic value of the benefits they will receive. Social security was a pyramid scheme that transferred wealth from the 21st to the 20th century. And the chief function of Mr. Obama's socialist government, as would have been in Jefferson's day had the Federalists and the Whigs had their way, is to steal from the public in the interest of subsidizing bankers, a policy that the socialist Obama administration and Mr. O'Reilly support.
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