virtues & vices of social security (pt.1)
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"In a few years, wage-earning contributors to SS may become aware that the Surplus Trust Funds were routinely spent as government's general revenue and were not needed to pay SS benefits to the Baby Boom and will neither be available to recompense wage-earner-contributors nor pay SS benefits. Will the evidence of this grand political theft then become a political issue?"TRANSCRIPT
PART I
VIRTUES (Teleology) and VICES (deontology)of
PART I assesses economic value provided by Social Security (SS) since its
inception in 1935 and paradoxical political values of opposition. This
politics is not uniquely American. Rather, it is indigenous to debate waged
in ancient Greece between the Sophists and Socrates, which was about physis
and nomos as maybe first defined by Hesiod in the 700's BC:
Affirming empirical materialist nomos, classical Sophists chose to ignore
logical antecedents of deliberate reasoning as represented in the accounts
and works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: Classical conservative values are
those of the Sophists’ empirical mechanist material sides of life: they are
stuck in an ideal orthodox nomos-based causal mechanism. Strangely,
however, these conservatives called themselves classical liberals. The
distinction between conservative and liberal was thereby confused. At least
until subtle paradoxical meanings of mechanists deontology is appreciated.
This anthology, section 250.1, represents THE CONCLUDED
PURPOSE, PART 1, of DeYoung’s research document:
Our Federal Savings Plan.
by
M. H. DeYoung
All rights reserved.
TOPICAL GUIDE: PART 1
FOREWORD 3PREFACE 5
Desiderata 5The Federalist Agenda 10Tautology (revisiting truth and reason’s veracity test) 12‘social usage,’ 14‘mercantilism’ 17Corporate mechanisms and the Whig scheme 21
Legal positivism 22The ‘real’ cultural war is only partly economic 30
Liar paradox 32Economic Paradox 34tautological applications 36
‘Rational Empiricism’ 38inflation’s main cause 40Categorical Imperative 43economic incentives are important and necessary 44
254 Politics of Social Security 48SS insurance comes of age 56Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 59
public apathy prevails 60255 ’teflon-coated mechanist lies’ (‘Duty sans Purpose’) 76256 Preserving mechanist Economic Baby 88
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 92
in a static economy there is no place for profit! 93
question of where profits come from. 93257 Sweet Business Deals: Government’s contracted mechanisms 100
the state lives at the expense of every one. 103-4
questions raised by Bastiat remained unanswered. 104Henry George’s basic criticism is moral, not mechanistic 106
The problem is of all unearned income 106
258 Population Changes 120
260 SS’s Economic Value 126
252 Comparative SS Applications 134
253 Pensions 181
FOREWORD 3
Only principle founded on logical necessity is temporally pure natural truth:1
necessary 3. Logic. a. that cannot be denied because denial would
entail contradiction of what already has been established: a necessary
truth. b. that cannot be avoided or escaped because based on a
premise known to be true: a necessary inference. Definition requires that ‘necessary’ principle has logically coherent
‘trueness’ with all other truth. Sans logical ‘coherence,’ asserted or affirmed
principles are of ‘fallacious predicate value’ and are, therefore, ‘false.’
Despite popular orthodox dogmatic belief, as in ‘Positivism’, ‘nihilism,’
‘mechanism,’ or unitary materialism, for instance, are invariably, partly
at least, pernicious forms of deceit, and lying. It follows, therefore, that
mechanism’s determinism (unitary materialist belief that the universe
behaves like a big machine), fails as logically necessary principle: cannot be
a ‘true’ principle! Logically, mechanism is an example of Martin
Heidegger’s irrationalism. 2
Here begins the contest between “rationalism and irrationalism” that
has been in progress to this day in every conceivable disguise and
under the most contradictory titles. Irrationalism is only the weakness
and failure of rationalism and hence itself a kind of rationalism.
Irrationalism is a way out of rationalism, an escape which does not
lead into the open but merely entangles us more in rationalism,
because it gives rise to the opinion that we can overcome rationalism
by merely saying no to it, whereas this makes its machinations the
more dangerous by hiding them from view. [depicting endemism]
Deontology often is irrationalism-based (is of temporal ideological nomos)
while teleology is naturally rational (is logical ideology, of physis). Nomos-
based duties and physis-based purposes, respectively, are (1) human affirmed
ideological deontology that is paradoxical, or (2) logically of natural
teleology that whether of physis or nomos is ideologically without paradox.
Deontological duties, like taxes, often are materialist irrationalism-based,
where paradoxical political interests constantly embroil the ideological
4 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
nomos. As, for instance, irrationally mechanized political duties mask
pernicious economic endemism, which inflation phenomena, G. P. Brockway
observed, was primarily caused by government’s mechanism-based economic
license, he called the Bankers’ COLA, which despite irrationalism,
government must ensure since political economy was officially asserted as
a principle: states grant licenses to banks to charge interest on loans they
make. This legally affirmed Bankers’ COLA is the consumer-cost of
borrowed money, which is largely made possible from bank deposits. Added
to this consumer-cost is the banks’ cost of using fiat money, which
government created to serve the economic utility of commerce.*
* Parrington observed that this deontological grant of license has resulted in
government’s irrational giving to ‘Peter’ by taking from ‘Paul.’ Also, state
government grants private businesses’ license to similarly mechanistically
profit from economic exploitation to the extent that political economy will
allow. Myriad personal misfortunes, which competitive economic
mechanism deterministically has caused, entrap equally deserving economic
losers: government’s paternalism, of mechanistic rewards to those who
personally gain from economic exploits, unconstitutionally denied to the
losers equal shares in the economic growth. However, government’s3
growing public debt is officially excused, or ignored, because the cost of
mechanized growth ultimately and inevitably, as was mechanistically
designed, sifts downward onto wages-earned: onto society’s ‘Pauls,’ of
Parrington’s above observation. Mechanistically, constitutional equal rights
are irrationally compromised by government’s paternalistic licensing and
grants [which economically are given precedence to citizenship].
Government creates ubiquitous fiat money for the exchange of goods
and services (a holistic teleological purpose). And it regulates political
economy, setting rules of conduct (deontological duties). Government,
therefore, ultimately, directly is responsible for causing inflation’s economic
endemism. When fairly used, money is the nation’s utility for exchanging
and distributing goods and services (which Adam Smith had defined as a
nation’s wealth). But when unfairly misused, it fundamentally,
PREFACE 5
mechanistically causes inflationary endemism: when the intended utility of
money fallaciously is deemed as nomos-defined personal property
(TREASURE rather than the NATION’S WEALTH), political economy’s
results as fallaciously, mechanistically (unnaturally) fit Parrington’s ‘Peter-
Paul’ paradox.
Unitary materialist Political Economy, which deliberately conflates
the human essence reality, is a nomos-based ‘consequent,’ that classically,
fallaciously became affirmed as the nation’s antecedent economic principle:
judiciously it was legalized to serve mechanized, deontological ‘duties’
rather than teleological ‘purposes.’ Political Economy’s privatized
paradoxical nomos-based mechanisms, of the official legal irrationalism,
consider that the Social Security system’s teleology threatens their paternal
mechanist grants. But, paradoxical incoherences, as inflation, display
mechanism’s irrationalism. Natural consequents irrationally asserted as
necessary principles became government’s vices that, politically were also
made SS’s vices.
PREFACE
When colonials demanded the Bill of Rights, they intended to curb
the clasical mercantilisms deprivations: tyrannous mechanistic duties that had
Desiderius effects, and to leave behind them, they immigrated to America.
Colonials rejected the proposed Constitution’s discreet political intent to
return American culture to conditions they had left.
Desiderata, is prose found where its unknown author had put it, in
an old church of Fifteenth Century America.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there
may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good
terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen
to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid
loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you
6 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for
always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy
your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own
career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing
fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the
world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there
is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of
heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be
cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it
is perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit
to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with
imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a
wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the
universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be
here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is
unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you
conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the
noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham,
drudgery and broken dreams it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
Still, in less than a century, Whigs culturally returned America to seventeenth
century conservatism. They classically, covertly, affirmed myriad irrational
tenets as the antecedent principles of privatized economic mechanisms that
transgressed natural human rights. Coeval of organic Constitutions, edicts
and law, human rights were only influential so far as they supported the
economic mechanisms. About mechanist philosophy, G. P. Brockway
wrote:4
We find mankind liberated from spooks and spirits, from lords and
priests, by becoming mechanized. Once the universe was running like
PREFACE 7
a clock, there was nothing for it but to fit us to a wheel in the works --
perhaps a greater thing than a cog, but mechanical nevertheless. For
us to be fit for this function, psychology had to subject us to
mechanical controls. Or, as J. W. Miller said, we had first to lose our
souls, then our minds; and finally, with the behaviorists,
consciousness. Economic man is a prime example of this remarkable
servomechanism.The covert fallacious official policies are thereby politically applied to
nomos-defined personal property of Brahmans’ [mechanisms, capital,
machinery, labor (slavery), . . . ], and they deliberately intended to transpose
constitutional teleological necessary purposes into nomos-based duties,
causing myriad Desiderius to adversely effect natural human sovereignties
and rights. Henry Clay had the economic mechanist vision, but men like
John C. Calhoun rhetorically (ideologically) provided irrational dogmatic
affirmations that appealed to society: Whigs designed the organic American
political economy to paternalistically, in legal accounting deontologies of
economy’s accumulation function, cater to business and corporate property
interests. Calhoun rationalized to affirm that US democracy was
patterned on Greek democracy, which justified slavery: considering
wage-earners the slaves of the American mechanized political economy.
Parrington gave this sample of Calhoun’s prolific and effective orations. 5
The true origin of government, he asserted in common with John
Adams, is to be found in practical necessity . . . It has always been
found necessary to lodge coercive powers in certain hands as a social
protection against individual aggression; and since all men are
impelled by self interest, political systems are determined in form and
scope by this universal instinct. Without government there is anarchy;
with government there is potential tyranny. [Reactive terrorism must
now be evaluated in the light of government-sponsored tyranny.]
Speaking of Jefferson Davis, who to northern conservatives was a terrorist,
Parrington, bares the underbelly of northern US irrationalism:6
8 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
The president of the Confederacy may have been an unfortunate civil
leader, but the slanders that so long clung to his name are only worthy
of the gutter. The sin that he was led into was not counted a sin in his
southern decalogue; it was the sin, not of secession, but of
imperialism--a sin common to all America in those drunken times
when the great West invited exploitation.--- Is American society still afflicted by division caused by private
economic interests in gold’s glitter, timber, grazing, recreation and such on
lands whose proprietor is the commonwealth, i.e., by the special interests of
private sector businesses to exploit the commonwealth’s resources?
--- What is the holistic commonweal interest?
In the year 1825 three streams of tendency were flowing through the
[American mind], rising from different sources, incompatible in spirt
and purpose, strong in their diverse appeals; and in the end the major
current was certain to engulf the lesser. The humanitarianism of
Virginia, the individualism of the new West, and the imperialism of the
Black Belt might seem to mingle their waters for a time, but there
would be confusions of thought and diversity of counsels until one or
another had worn a deeper channel through which the dominant
opinion might run. There could be no more fascinating study in the
economics of political theory than the changing mind of the South
during the critical decades from 1825 to 1850, as it followed the
course determined by its peculiar institution. . . . It is unintelligent to
charge upon southern politicians a lack of consistency---to point out
that after 1820 Calhoun reversed himself on every major political
principle. It was true of Calhoun, as it was true of Webster and true
of Clay. In a rapidly changing America, with economics in a state of
flux, men were no longer free political agents, guiding themselves by
the fixed stars of accepted theory: they were borne like corks on the
current of the times, and their inconsistency is the surest evidence that
PREFACE 9
they spoke for their constituents. The North and the South were at the
parting of the ways, and if southern imperialism created for its needs
a philosophy of particularism, it was met by a counter philosophy of
nationalism created for its needs by northern capitalism, which
likewise was following the path of its manifest destiny.R. L. Heilbroner wrote about economic fallacies with this comment: 7
. . . The notions of the great economists were world-shaking and
their mistakes nothing short of calamitous. ---- Are policies less calamitous when officially made by the
irrationalism of government authorities as prompted by economists?
---- Do issues confront America in 1996 (or now in 2002) that resulted
from errant American politics that influenced the official policies of
Imperialism and Manifest Destiny?
---- Are these politics perpetuated as our nation’s Foreign Policy?
--- Is the policy of Preemtive action (war) related to Imperialism and
Manifest Destiny?
The political debate about a patient’s right to sue, for instance, boils
down to whether this or that economic entity is given official immunity from
law suits (‘legal immunity’ as affirmed by federalist classical Justice is,
therefore, exposed as fallacious irrationalism): unequal sovereignties and
rights in this organic debate, are routinely politically nomosly decided? As
similarly, in affirmed mercantilism, the economic (accumulation) function
of business is granted license to exploit consumption, management to exploit
labor, bankers (insurers) to the exploit money’s (goods and services) utility,
. . .: Irrational fallacies! , All. By what right or sovereignty are
fallaciously affirmed vices of dogmatic biases justified? For instance, by
what equality of right or sovereignty can capitalists claim profits produced
by labor? (Schumpeter’s economic ‘circular flow’ analysis, provided later,
is about this.) The answer is this: politically irrational inequalities are legally
affirmed by a Federalist Supreme Court, fallaciously supplanting rationally
‘antecedent’ principles (which by affirming logical ‘consequents’ to replace
the ‘antecedent’ principles) make irrationalism (fallacious consequents) the
10 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
The study of mathematics is the study of clear logical reasoning. H. W."
Turnbull gave this account of the logical test for solving paradoxes: “How toface these paradoxes is an urgent problem,” he wrote. “[Brouwer traced] thepresence of paradoxes to the use of indirect proofs, or more precisely to whatis called in logic the law of the excluded middle.” And, he concluded, thatwhich is fallacious is false because it is illogically irrational.
principle of common law. Politically, what apes and is inculcated as science
(i.e., is Supposed to be Devoid of ideology), and legally then justifies the
ideology, is devoid of natural logical antecedence, robbing systemic
necessity and coherence. It cannot be ‘true!’: maybe art, not science.8
The Federalist Agenda, as Parrington noted, provides an example
of irrational sophistry, which St. John had said was a form of lying.
Logical tautology is commonly officially denied. Particularly, Federalist
Justice dogmatically fails to test for logical tautology: as only briefly
mentioned in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Federalists and Whigs,
particularly, might not have understood tautology’s veracity test of truth
and reason: which logically came afterward? And had research not
made mathematics language applicable, tautological veracity testing still
could not now be understood. If interested in truth, whenever paradoxes are
confronted, tautological testing is critically important. Belief-based"
opinions, sans tautological testing, represent sophistries of lying and politics
thrives on sophistry. 9
[Hamilton’s] notorious comment -- which the American democrat has
never forgiven him, “the people! -- the people is a great beast!” -- was
characteristically frank. . . . He was at pains, therefore, as a practical
statesman, to dress his views in a garb more seemly to plebeian
prejudices [irrationally, Hamilton affirmed consequents that politically
fit with dogmatic plebeian biases], and like earlier Tories he paraded
an ethical justification for his Toryism. The current Federalist
dogma of the divine right of justice -- ‘vox justiciae vox dei’ -- was at
hand to serve his purpose and he made free use of it. . . .
PREFACE 11
He was frankly a monarchist, and he urged the [fallacious]
monarchical principle with Hobbesian logic. “The principle chiefly
intended to be established is this -- that there must be a permanent
‘will’.” “There ought to be a principle in government capable of
resisting the popular current.” [In ‘Works, Vol. II, p 415] The only
effective way of keeping democratic factionalism within bounds,
Hamilton was convinced, lay in the erection of a powerful chief
magistrate, who “ought to be hereditary, and have so much power, .
. ..
“ He devoted himself to the business of providing all possible checks
upon the power of the democracy.”
This Federalist agenda, as Parrington noted, provides an example of this
sophistry that continues fallaciously to influence the U. S. Judiciary: St. John
called this sophist proclivity a form of lying.
Parrington cited the Federalist-Whig proclivity to irrationally,
fallaciously ‘deny antecedents’ and ‘affirm consequents’:10
Massachusetts . . . property interests were as secure as any old
Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of principle and property
were still in control of the state; and if less emphasis was laid on
principle [physis] and more on property [nomos] -- if less regard
seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and more
to assertive self-seeking -- business was no less secure than in the
good old days, and its profits were greater. . . . Provided of course
that the Constitution should follow population and safeguard
business interests against . . .the menace of particularism [Agrarian
political democratic particularism politically opposed the nomos based Whig
affirmed ‘business interests’ legal principle, which applied holistically as the
‘national interest’(which led to national policy that protects business interests
anywhere); this political particularism was called antinomy, i.e., anti nomos]. . .
. In the hour of peril, principles go by the board. The Whig party was
12 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
the lineal heir of the old Federalism, but it denied its philosophical
patrimony. It substituted expediency for the old economic realism, and
began and ended intellectually bankrupt.. . . aside from petty
antagonism to Jackson -- was the vague assumption that the well-
being of the American people was dependent on governmental
patronage; the belief that each economic group and section must
receive its special favor, and that through tariffs and bonuses and
internal improvements the country as a whole must prosper. Of this
principle of special favors -- a return to the seventeenth century from
which eighteenth century liberalism was a reaction -- the American
System of Henry Clay was the chief expression, and it remains the
most significant bequest of the Whig party to our political history.
Tautology 11
By a tautology we mean a statement, which has the truth value ‘true’
for all possible truth values of its components. . . .
Compound statements with all truth values ‘true’ are called
tautologies and represent valid argument forms. The implication
formed by the conjunction of all the premises as the antecedent and
the conclusion as the consequent that form a valid argument form, will
always result in a tautology. Testing compound statements to see
whether they are tautologies is thus equivalent to testing an
argument for validity.
John N. Fujii gave three classical valid arguments (a, b, and c) and two
invalid arguments (d, and e) in which P = compound premises, Q =
consequent, - = denial, � = therefore.
PREFACE 13
(a) Modus ponens (b) modus tollens (c) hypothetical syllogism
P 6 Q
P
� Q
P 6 Q
- Q
�- P
P 6 Q
Q 6 R
� P 6 R
(d): invalid classical argument
that ‘affirms the consequent.’
P 6 Q
Q
� P
(e): invalid classical argument
that ‘denies the antecedent.’
P 6 Q
- P
� - Q
(d) Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, and (e) Fallacy of Denying the
Antecedent, Fujii warned, are irrational argument forms. With all forms
of ‘hypothesizing a tautological argument,’ irrational argument form
(d), Affirming Consequents, is the most common form of fallacy. And,
‘Affirming natural Consequents,’ is a pseudo philosophic proclivity that
sophistry has made intrinsic of nomos-based dogmatic belief.
By definition, each P and Q is a statement that when written in the ‘if,’
‘then,’ compound statement format, the ‘if’ statement is the antecedent,
and the ‘then’ statement is the consequent.
‘Divine right’ dogma was imported with the colonization of
America. Along with it by fallacious irrationalism came a form of nihilism
that Auguste Comte had dubbed positivism that was then preached
religiously as ‘the gospel of reason.’ Particularly, Calvinist minds were
closed to reasoned thoughts about metaphysical noumena, and the supreme
noumenon (intelligence), the natural antecedent to all that is. This natural
God, which religiously the positivist ‘gospel of reason’ denies, therefore,
became the nomos denied natural supreme necessary principle of all that is.
14 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
When scripture recorded that God was a jealous God and would have no
other before him, scripture correctly warned of the irrationalism of asserting
natural consequents in replacement of the supreme and necessary noumenal
principle: for humans’ ‘good,’ God is inalterably jealous as the ultimate
logical noumenal principle.
. social usage
While officially the Constitutional Convention neither adopted nor
rejected nomos-based irrationalism, dogmatic deterministic unitary mechanist
materialism eventually was returned as the nation’s dominant influence of
legislation and administration: the nation’s Operating Plan: that Whigs
dubbed The American System of Political Economy. And, while our
Operating Plan is irrationally based on dogma, i.e., it is nomos-based, the
American political flux is dynamic and flexible, to at times polarize around
the physis-based human sovereignty, of ‘we the people.’ (Constitutional
suffrage is physis-based while gerrymandering and orchestrated initiative
and recall, as irrationally based on expedient legalities, as ‘property is a
dimension of free speech,’ for instance, are nomos-based.)
The physis-based will of temporal human nature is complex, if not
erratic: capable to affirm dogmatic doctrine and mechanism as based on
unitary materialism, which is determinism based, but can also reason to
mitigate effects by ‘social usage,’ as Roger Williams had observed.
Parrington wrote this:12
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience and
reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure of
freedom and well-being. . . . But if sovereignty inheres in the majority
will, what securities remain for individual and minority rights? What
fields lie apart from the inquisition of the majority, and by what
agencies shall the engrossing of power be thwarted? The replies to
such questions, so fundamental to every democratic program, he
discovers in a variety of principles; to the former in an adaptation of
the spirit of medieval society that restricted political functions by
social usage, and to the latter by the application of local home rule,
PREFACE 15
What irrationalism has done to democratic philosophy, it has also subverted the"
purpose of initiative and recall.
the initiative and the referendum, and the recall. His creative"
conception was an adaptation of . . . corporation, of a group of
persons voluntarily joining for specific purposes under the law. Mutual Insurance is a form of Williams’ ‘social usage.’ It is uniquely
American and it is democratic, i.e., is physis-based. Social Security is a
form of Mutual Insurance and is, therefore, also ‘social usage.’
The U. S. Operating Plan is politics about economics, which
fundamentally is about life’s substantial needs (the positivist argument is
particularly convincing as regards’ life’s substantial needs, if only it would
recognize the natural equality of human rights). It embroils the paradoxical
influences of mind with emotion, values with passions, will with substance
. . .. Irrationizing human reasoning, is temporally inevitable and Aristotle’s
spectrum of virtue applies to the resulting paradoxical effects: virtue is where
reasoned principle (axiomatic temporal truth is found). *
* Aristotle defined Virtue as the middle ground between the vices: i.e., the
mean of excess and deficiency.
At the extreme of excess, controlling by commanding materialities and their
deterministic values is the inevitable irrational cause of collective and
collusive economic rationalization that Adam Smith warned posed the
greatest threat to universal benefits of the nature-based, i.e., atomistic and
independently constituted ‘market system,’ he carefully explicated as the
foundation of the evolving natural economic revolution. While Smith’s
observations are universally evident, our Whig ‘conservatives’ (‘White
Rabbits’ of our wonderland) have not subscribed to his warning about
concentration and monopoly. Economic Determinism, as based on
Hobbesian deductive reasoning, fallaciously affirms ‘mechanism’ as its
antecedent causal principle. This empiricist mechanist view of causality, as
fallaciously affirmed, surely has caused economic monopoly and
concentration. And it also poses the ultimate cause of systemic economic
16 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
failure. This deductive reasoning from fallacious principles that
tautologically are ‘false’ is undoubtedly a form of amorality (Heidegger’s
irrationalism) as those who rationalize to engage it neither know truth (about
faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty toward God and humanity) nor virtue of ‘true’
mitigating axiomatic principle.
While the U.S. Strategic Plan is based on the categorical imperative
of teleological ethics (giving of self in the sense of acting together to secure
common values and purposes), the Operating Plan is based on individually
taking and securing what we all want as our own property. The difference
between giving and taking is, of course, diabolical and paradoxical. While
strategy is each individual’s responsibility, about preserving every
individual’s self evident inalienable rights, operationally speaking, we expect
selfishness and we want ‘absolutism’ with ownership, contracts, and such.
Often we confuse inalienable strategic rights with our absolute wants
involving property ownership. In this, our wants often qualify as extreme
vices on the spectrum of virtue: they intend to legally nullify others’ physis-
based sovereignty. In this, our wants often abuse Natural Law while they
violate no manmade law of the land. Therefore, we need to be clear about
definition and purpose. Christ may have said it best: man doth not live by
bread only. About political economy, we especially need clear and balanced
reason when enacting laws that define the constitutional administrations of
government, with its licensed agents (which includes all individuals and
organizations), codifications and regulations. Particularly, as we officially
consider adopting or licensing forms of mercantilism, for instance, we should
consider the nature of our ‘fictitious legal person’ corporations, that official
agencies of state government licensed to act as humans. Nature’s God
neither authorized nor created them and according to Nature’s Law,
they have no inalienable rights, as right to free speech, which they often
buy. E. K. Hunt wrote about Veblen’s property rights,13
Private property had its origins in brute coercive force and was
perpetuated both by force and by institutional and ideological
legitimization. [irrationalism is never ‘true’ antecedent principle.]
PREFACE 17
Hunt, concluded the results of ‘internal improvement’ policies, 14
The passage of the Sherman Act and the establishment of various
government regulatory agencies were ostensibly aimed at controlling
these giant corporations. In practice, however, government tended to
aid these giants in consolidating and stabilizing their massive empires.With the lawful impunity of states’ rights, corporations engage in
competitive and collusive forms of neo-mercantilism. We should not only
recognize this, we should be concerned that large multinational corporations
are today, larger than our nation was and that as ‘fictitious legal individuals,’
they represent the greatest threat to nullifying individual sovereignty. They
represent Leviathan entities, nations that make their own rules, we might say,
with which human entities individually cannot compete. The following
describes mercantilism:15
Mercantilism was an economic policy pursued by almost all of the
trading nations in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth
centuries, which aimed at increasing a nation’s wealth and power by
encouraging the export of goods in return for gold.[gold and wealth are not identical values]
As part of the mercantilist program, individual governments
promoted large investments in export industries; built high tariff walls
to restrict imports, which could be produced domestically; restricted
exports of domestic raw materials, which could be used by the
domestic industry; interfered with the emigration of skilled workers;
encouraged immigration of skilled workers; and, in several cases,
prohibited sales of precious metals to foreigners. . . .
Adam Smith accused mercantilists of not being able to
distinguish between ‘wealth’ and what they called ‘treasure,’
pointing out that the accumulation of ‘treasure’ is merely
instrumental to the acquisition of ‘wealth.’[in Smith’s view, wealth was consumable and usable goods]
Not only, should licensing corporate involvement in ‘mercantilism’ concern
18 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
us, we should also be concerned about their organic political involvement,
speech, political contributions, and covert authorities. *
* Whether from foreign countries where they conduct corporate business or
in the sense that they represent something foreign to human sovereignty,
corporations’ political contributions to political parties are foreign, if not
alien (This reasoned sentiment applies to all organic entities, particularly
Political Action Committees and organic religion).
Exposing more about corporations, the following about human-like rights
licensed to them by mechanist paternalistic laws, are recalled: 16
Following the Civil war, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act.
The States then ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution. The sponsoring political flux of this action overtly
appealed to confer citizenship and equal rights on American blacks.
This Amendment also included the famous due process clause, which
prohibited any state government from depriving “any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The covert appeal favored corporate entities; despite the
Amendment, American blacks were thrust into situations worse than
slavery. Most court decisions based on the Amendment involved
corporations instead of American blacks. Corporations were persons,
the courts ruled. As persons, corporations were protected under the
due process clause.
The reality of the covert appeal was as follows: each time a
state government attempted to curb the extravagant excesses of
corporations by passing regulatory legislation, the federal courts
would invalidate the legislation because it violated the due process
clause. State governments became powerless before the growing
strength of large corporations. Knowing that they could go to almost
any length in pursuit of profits without fear of state government
controls, corporations thrived.
PREFACE 19
There is overt appeal and covert appeal in all legislation which
enables Economic Determinism. Government paternalism, in
sophistries, placates human needs but mostly favors the covert
corporate appeals.---- Do laws, which enable corporate Economic Determinism, sponsor
economic justice or injustice? Attempts to find answers conceived such as
these results: 17
Professor Edwin H. Sutherland, once known as the dean of American
criminologists and former president of the American Sociological
Association, conducted a thorough and scholarly investigation of the
extent to which corporate executives were involved in criminal
behavior. He took the 70 largest nonfinancial corporations, with only
a few additions and deletions (due to special circumstances), and
traced their criminal histories through official histories and official
records. One corporation had 50 decisions against it, and the
average per corporation was 14. Sixty of the corporations had been
found guilty of restraining trade, 53 of infringements, 44 of unfair
labor practices, 28 of misrepresentation in advertising, 26 of giving
illegal rebates, and 43 of a variety of other offences. There were a
total of 307 individual cases of illegal restraint of trade, 97 of illegal
misrepresentation, 22 of infringement, 158 of unfair labor practices,
66 of illegal rebates, and 130 of other offenses (Lundberg, pp. 131-
132).
A U. S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in
Interstate Commerce, under the chairmanship of Senator Estes
Kefauver, probed the connections of business and organized crime.
Senator Kefauver, . . . later wrote a book based on those hearings.
Although he emphasized that there was no evidence to link most big
corporations with organized crime, he was nevertheless greatly
alarmed at the extent of such connections. [Kefauver wrote] “I cannot
20 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
overemphasize the danger that can lie in the muscling into legitimate
fields by hoodlums . . . There was too much evidence before us of
unreformed hoodlums gaining control of a legitimate business; then
utilizing all his old mob tricks . . .”
In 1960 Robert Kennedy . . . published “The Enemy Within”.
He wrote: “We found that with the present-day emphasis on money
and material goods many businessmen were willing to make corrupt
‘deals’ with dishonest union officials in order to gain competitive
advantage or to make a few extra dollars . . . We came across more
than fifty companies and corporations that had acted improperly --
and in many cased illegally -- in dealings with labor unions . . .”
Disturbing as it may sound, more often the business people with whom
we come in contact -- and this includes some representatives of our
largest corporations -- were uncooperative. (Kennedy, p. 216)
Ferdinand Lundberg has described the extent to which
corporate leaders and management receive either very light
punishment or no punishment at all when they become involved in
improprieties or illegalities. Among the many cases he cites is that of
“the bribe of $750,000 by four insurance companies that sent Boss
Pendergast of Missouri to jail, later to be pardoned by President
Truman . . . It was almost ten years before the insurance executives
went to jail. There was, too, the case of Martin Manton who was
convicted of accepting a bribe of $250,000 from agents of the
defendant when he presided over a case charging exorbitant salaries
were improperly paid to officers of the American Tobacco Company.
While the attorney for the company was disbarred from federal courts,
the assistant to the company president (who made the arrangements)
was soon thereafter promoted to vice president: a good boy [sereving
well his corporate deontolotical duties] .” (Lundberg, p. 135)
Empirical evidence fails to justify claims that corporations (acting as legal
PREFACE 21
persons) are ethical or moral. This evidence justifies Parrington’s analysis,
however, that the ultimate utility of accumulating corporate capital is the
privatization of hoards of capital converted into privately owned money
hoards. Corporate mechanisms and the Whig scheme: Parrington called
it “an ingenious scheme to ‘milk the cow’ and distribute the ‘milk’ to those
who superintended the ‘milking.’” Kurt Vonnegut observed the same but
in these words: 18
What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic
personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without
senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of
our government and corporations, and made it all their own?A perpetual existence maybe affords to ‘fictitious person’ corporate entities
and with commensurate debts to society the greatest economic paternalism:
the usurpation of natural birthrights and sovereignties.
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no
new truth because we take some venerable but questionable
proposition as the indubitable starting point, and never think about
putting this assumption itself to a test of observation or experiment.Will Durant
In our politically economic world, of modernized Hobbesian Leviathan
design, economic security depends on the human mass, for wages earned,
selling their services to fictitious person corporations. Increasingly, for the
average worker, corporate life is more tenuous and insecure. Orthodox truth
is dogma-based ‘positive’ empiricism (experience-based rationalization
befitting acquisitive wage-based duties, as assigned, i.e., mechanist
‘contingent’ acquisitive values in logos), which Plato’s Opinion Form
depicted: believed orthodoxy rather than antecedently rational necessity,
Corporate organs are legally created to accumulate property, make19
contracts and file law suits as legally acting fictitious persons, sans natural
human faculties, corporations often sponsor, and law has sanctioned, erosions
of truth, justice, and morality. For instance, about suborning perjury,
consider the impossibility of a corporation, sans human representation,
22 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
testifying to ‘tell the truth.’ Then, in this context, consider the amoral
corporate duty-based influence on, for instance the assistant to the company
president cited above. Prosecuting corporations for crime is impractical if
possible; the strictest penalty, which seems never to happen, is disbandment.
This tautologically ‘false,’ court determined legal creation, however, which
maybe is nihilistically ‘true,’ is ‘positively’ paradoxical: 20
Corporations were persons, the courts ruled. As persons,
corporations were protected under the due process clause.About conservative dogmatic belief in positivism, however, this legal fiction
has no ‘positive’ reality: its essence or gist (sum) having only legal
justification. And, Parrington’s analysis is again on point: 21
The Whig party was the lineal heir of the old Federalism, but it denied
its philosophical patrimony. It substituted expediency for the old
economic realism, and began and ended intellectually bankrupt.‘Legal positivism’ confirms the Whig’ applied dogmatic ‘Positivism’ to
mechanist acquisitiveness, as it expediently served mechanist ideology: 22
Legal positivism, intending to oppose natural law theory, denies any
‘necessary connection between law and morality’. Central theses
among a loose cluster: (1) law is definable and explainable without
evaluative predicates or presuppositions; (2) the law (e.g. of England
now) is identifiable from exclusively factual sources (e.g. legislation,
judicial precedents). Some versions deny that there is knowable
moral truth. Most understand positive law as products of will, some
as imperatives. John Finnis
Irrational value predicate transmutations in Congressperson’s logos,
aggregated, had preceded an authoritative transmutation away from moral
values of government’s constitutional logos: when their official actions
accorded with ‘positive laws,’ the official practice of ‘positivism’ (Western
form of nihilism) resulted. Their Ethics and morality were standards
expected, but for self were the simple nihilist nothingness of self denial.
Results, positively lacked the predicate truth value, ‘true.’ Morality and
PREFACE 23
Also naturally diabolical, however, is that human life has an inevitable"
natural end while a corporate life is licensed to be perpetual.
patriotism were feigned. But, as pawns of deliberate positive rationalization
called ad hominem, they quite unconsciously discounted their own temporal
human proclivities, which for reasons intrinsic of temporal humanity’s
nature, all humans invariably can never satisfy the expected ‘positivist’
morality, as the oft repeated evidence of orthodox prideful actions show.
Still, corporations are granted legal rights to own property, execute
business contracts, influence legislation, infringe upon natural human
consented sovereignty. And because corporations are legally granted a
perpetual existence, they are destined mechanistically eventually to literally
‘own’ the world: but only in the fallacious sense that ‘owning’ property
necessarily hinges on legality and not on human’s natural rights. And,
therefore, corporate ownership is not coeval of nature, it is only contingent
temporal legality. With the legal imposition of the conflated materialist
unitary duality (as Hegel’s dialectical materialism) onto democratic-
sovereignty, Courts have imposed on society by legal affirmations of the
mechanist paradoxical confusion, conflict, and tyranny.
By essential sum’s characteristics, intangible responsibility
(metaphysical and eternal) denied as unitary material acquisitiveness
(tangible, or real, and temporal) was made legal, the conflated duality, as
legally imposed, might be distinguished, as physis denied, and nomos
emphasized: Humans naturally endowed with this duality are frustrated.
And, while fictional corporate entities are legally designed, with only nomos-
based characteristics, it was patent legal fallacy, which granted physis-based
human rights to the legal fiction. And this corporate legal advantage is both"
recognized and abused: corporations are legally accountable only for tangible
characteristics. When the courts consider that corporations are persons,
and as persons they are protected under the due process clause, all aspect
of sum, as ethics and morality, are compromised and thereby confusion,
conflict, and strife among humans are made inevitable. By legalized due
24 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
process, corporations are mechanistically irrationally licensed to dominate
the intangible aspects and property of employed human’s. And then we
pause to wonder: why humans, with natural aping proclivities, then act so
irresponsibly in life with others? C ons ider , f o r ins t ance, t he
institution of marriage. Vows taken in pure love are physis-based, the
responsible aspects of which, to each other and those procreated, are
supposed to be understood, but mostly because of diversities in age,
maturity, communication, education, and legality cannot be understood
beyond a constant Desiderius (fictions have no such natural feelings). The
tangible realities and laws of marriage are nomos-based and the temporal
edicts and legalities must be kept. When society formally legally acts to
standardize the fused rights in marriage by the conflated duality of legal
practice -- as to liberties, license, powers, prerogatives and privileges --
humans inevitably must discriminate. However argued and despite
honorable and ethical intents, society appears to violate the individual
sovereignty of some with favor to others. When society sanctions marriage
expressly to foster physis-based vows and responsibilities, particularly
involving procreation (which is the primary physis-based natural
responsibility laden purpose of marriage), then singles of the same sex cannot
naturally qualify for society’s sanction. However clearly responsibilities
inherent of procreation are defined to avoid all nomos-based favoritism that
embroils the argument for same sex unions,’ there can be no valid analogy
to the marriage vow’s procreation.
One might note that the partnership inherent of physis-based
marriage involves three principal entities: (1) a particular male, (2) a
particular female, and (3) the whole of society. Each natural entity has
implied natural antecedent principle interests and responsibilities, particularly
as regards each new sovereign entity of procreation. With these naturally
implied responsibilities understood, and society’s sanction of the natural
antecedent principles, human entities become recognized for being
categorical imperatively love-based, rather than as prejudice or favoritism-
based, which capitalism sponsors. In democracy, favoritism and prejudice
sans natural love-based responsibility is unwarranted: paradoxical, it
PREFACE 25
damages leveled-sovereignty. Favoritism is unworthy of democracy.
LOVE is emotional discriminating preference for objects of one’s affection:
When preference is passion and the object a person, a natural exchange of
visceral emotion entails. But a child’s love for its parent is more pure. Pure
since neither reason nor opinion, has affected it. In this purer sense of
naturally inherent cosmic noumenon, love is the natural catalyst of human
emotion and cogito: where falsehoods are of truth, as hate is of love. While,
love commonly discriminates emotionally (is not rational), pure love is a
consistent, ‘necessary’ Sinderesis aspect of the supreme LOGOS, therefore,23
an integral of pure truth’s nature: in this pureness, love is rational and
probity describes it. Pure Truth (about Plato’s Divided Line, which C. H.
Monson, Jr. suggests is ‘intelligible reality’ ) is found in the cognitive24
realms of reason. Politics, however, is found in Plato’s material-related
‘visible’ realms of emotion. Love, therefore, embraces all Plato’s reality
forms. However, Monson reminds that to Plato, ‘intelligible reality’ was
most important.
The prose, Desiderata, portrays nicely emotion’s spectrum in the
temporal state of life. And fiction has no part in the reality of it.
The contemporary concern with same sex marriage clearly results
from paradoxes of nomos-based mechanist laws that reward some by
compromising others. Still, natural responsibilities mitigate the sanctioning
of rights and privileges of marriages that procreate! Anyway, marriages do
not always get the advantages: tax laws often discriminate with favor to
single individuals. And, society has no specially implied responsibilities in
same sex unions.
Still, we might ponder answers to the question: ---- without
procreation, what natural value does marriage provide to society?
If marriage is become temporally conveniently based in a conflated
unitary materialist form, making it essentially a contractual
arrangement without natural responsibilities, same-sex-unions are
then its equivalent. As Pogo observed while seeing himself in the
mirror, “I have seen the enemy, it is me!”
26 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
To the extent that births are occurring outside of marriage, then society’s
natural responsibilities are shifted onto only two natural entities: mothers and
society. Constitutional exemptions specified in the Bill of Rights intend to
guarantee that human individuals have an equal sovereign importance and
influence in their individual situations and circumstances.
---- To what extent should the Bill of Rights apply to ‘fictitious legal
person’ corporate entities? To organizations generally?
---- To what extent should goals of an Operating Plan nullify
purposes of a necessary Strategic Plan?
---- Do political economy’s privately owned mechanisms’ organically
set by affirmation, the deontological ‘duties’ of their employees in
compromise to the strategic antecedent principles of constitutional
society, thereby, aborting strategic constitutionally specified purposes?
By exercising free speech, assembly and suffrage, all mature
humans in citizenship constitutionally have equal rights to actualize the
commonwealth’s sovereign intent for government and the law in all its
mechanisms. Still, in matters embroiling the duality of sovereignty,
where mechanist materialism reigns supreme, nomos-based laws, i.e.,
laws that representatives base in classical custom or tradition, as
sponsored by those of ‘treasure’ and dogmatic positivism or determinism,
rather than what is ‘good,’ ‘natural’ or ‘right,’ must inevitably
discriminate and thereby violate the Constitution’s intent. For instance,
‘property’ ownership, without mutual consent of all owners, a multiple
ownership contract is difficult if possible, and those, to whom laws
governing contracts deny ownership, will always desire another’s
property. And, those of ‘treasure’ will always desire the prime parcels.
Public held corporations bridge the contractual multiple ownership’ legal
problems by nullifying constitutional human rights.
---- However, should fictitious legal person corporate entities that
are perpetual and allowed greater access to capitalization from the
nation’s central banking system, be allowed to control society by
controlling property?
---- What government’s constitutional paternalism rationally can
PREFACE 27
The spiritual part of which is of natural noumenon: with no beginning or"
end.
license corporate property to legal forms of free speech?
Did the Supreme Court rationally consider corporations’ legally
granted advantages when they decided that propertied corporate treasure
spent to deliver a message or influence an action represents a form of
constitutional free speech? Was the Supreme Court’s award of legal
human status to corporations irrational as necessarily regards natural
responsibilities and Law? In his most recent book, Carl Sagan referred to
the meta-mind -- undoubtedly referring to the cosmic side of man’s
spiritual origin. Is there a meta-ego side to corporate origins?
Churches and public works, required land and facilities when a
noumenal ‘corporate soul’ provided the legal means for not-for profit
organs to own property in the name of the ‘corporate soul.’ Roger
Williams spoke about ‘social usage’ with this medieval corporate notion
in mind. Eventually on this legal basis, nomos-based organic enterprise,
at the state level of government, gained licencing of private ‘for-profit’
corporate enterprise: the public ‘good’ was affirmed as the complement
of corporate profits: noumenon was legally conflated!
The concern about preserving democratic-sovereignty is a constant
concern, the physis-based answers to which empirically are always
naturally founded in the temporal phenomena of life , as the natural span"
of human life, for instance, that begins and ends with human individuals
independently breathing. Rights and justice of future generations depend
on temporal life’s ‘necessary’ aspects: ‘true’ knowledge and temporally
usufruct material opportunities. Dogmatic ‘positivist’ fallacious
affirmations that yield consequent-based laws logically abort ‘principle
necessities,’ as usufruct and sovereignty.
What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his
own soul? Mt. 16: 26
28 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
---- Do corporations, legally granted perpetuity, pose the greatest
threat to human unalienable rights and justice, which sovereign are
the US constitutional reparation of future generations? 25
Locke deliberately employs the idea of the 'state of Nature' rather
than the 'law of Nature.' He insists not upon uncovering any 'laws'
of nature (i.e., human nature) but rather upon the capacity of
human 'reason' to [logically] promulgate a code of civil law that is
the 'constitution' of a just political society. . . .
Human reason alone was 'universal' among human
beings, and by its application would men be able to develop a
concept of equivalence linked to necessary justice . . .
The 'State of Nature' is that which is governed by a 'natural'
law or 'right Rule of Reason' (i.e., the admission of the equivalence
of others). [While] not out to prove the existence of any law of
nature . . . ' [Locke radically] assert[s categorically imperative
natural law] in the contemporary,' to 'claim' that it is true by the
admission of any individual that his or her requirements of liberty
and freedom must be admitted to others, 'unless' the form of
political society under which they live is unjust.Craig Thomas
Thomas then commented to explain Locke’s reasoning: 26
The right to property is defined as an essential or basic right for the
purpose of defining the sovereignty of the individual and the
necessity to guarantee his rights and property 'against' others, 'not'
so as to allow him to acquire, to control, to achieve domination
through [accumulated treasures of] landed property.
Every Man has a 'Property' in his own 'Person.' Men living
together 'according to reason' are properly in the 'State of
Nature.' No individual has a right or power over the life of
another. . . . Force without Right, upon a man's person,
PREFACE 29
makes a State of War. . . . It is a 'right,' a possession of
each individual which must be protected together with his
other freedoms, protected from others who are in a 'State of
War' against the individual . . .
He that in the State of Nature, 'would take away the Freedom,'
that belongs to anyone in that State, must necessarily be supposed
to have a design to take away everything else, that 'Freedom'
being the foundation of all the rest.V. L. Parrington called Locke’s philosophy of individual sovereignty ‘The
Glorious Revolution.’ Locke’s philosophy influenced Adam Smith’s
postulations for economy in time that antedated its definition: 27
One would think that in a world torn by economic problems, a
world that constantly worries about economic affairs and talks of
economic issues, the great economists would be as familiar as the
great philosophers or statesmen. Instead they are only shadowy
figures of the past, and the matters they so passionately debated are
regarded with a kind of distant awe. Economics, it is said, is
undeniably important, but it is cold and difficult, and best left to
those who are at home in abstruse realms of thought.
. . . The notions of the great economists were world-
shaking and their mistakes nothing short of calamitous.
More important, Locke’s philosophy influenced the individual
sovereignty endowed by the American Constitution.
Locke’s philosophy founded the Declaration of Independence and
it united Colonial Americans to demand their independence from
England. ‘Classical (meaning traditional or orthodox) Liberals’ (Who
were ‘economic conservatives’) believed both Locke and Adam Smith.
With this paradox, the tranquility called for in the Constitution’s
Preamble can only be found in a balance of reason in which Roger
William’s thoughts are deliberately considered: 28
30 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience
and reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure
of freedom and well-being. . . . But if sovereignty inheres in the
majority will, what securities remain for individual and minority
rights? What fields lie apart from the inquisition of the majority,
and by what agencies shall the engrossing of power be thwarted?
The replies to such questions, so fundamental to every democratic
program, he discovers in a variety of principles; to the former in an
adaptation of the spirit of medieval society that restricted political
functions by social usage, and to the latter by the application of
local home rule, the initiative and the referendum, and the recall.
His creative conception was an adaptation of . . . corporation, of a
group of persons voluntarily joining for specific purposes under the
law. And we should avert rushes to throw out the ‘the American economic
baby’ along with its fallacious economic ‘bath water.’
The ‘real’ cultural war is only partly economic.
Because it exclusively is about prescriptive values. And philosophic
‘Rational Empiricism’ provides the only available forum to elevate human
nature’s noumenal spiritual part, to balance with temporal life’s
substantial part. Temporal life’s paradoxical situation has economic
parallels. And, as well, was recognized in most philosophies about truth,
Confucius (550-479 B.C.), for instance, gave us this maxim: 29
What is God given is what we call human nature. To fulfill the law
of our human nature is what we call the moral law. The cultivation
of the moral law is what we call culture.
The moral law is a law from whose operation we cannot for
one instant in our existence escape. A law from which we may
escape [simply by nihilistically saying no to it] is not the moral law.
Wherefore it is that the moral man (or the superior man) watches
diligently over what his eyes cannot see and is in fear and awe of
The ‘real’ cultural war is only partly economic 31
what his ears cannot hear.
There is nothing more evident than that which cannot be
seen by the eyes and nothing more palpable than that which cannot
be perceived by the senses. Wherefore the moral man watches
diligently over his secret thoughts.
When passions, such as joy, anger, grief, and pleasure
[concupiscence] have not awakened, that is our ‘central self’, or
moral being. When these passions awaken and each and all attain
due measure and degree, that is ‘harmony’, or the moral order.
Our central self or moral being is the great basis of
existence, and ‘harmony’, or moral order is the universal law in the
world. . . .
‘Truth does not depart from human nature, if what is
regarded as truth departs from human nature, it may not be
regarded as truth. . . .Humans cannot fulfill the law of our human nature by affirming as
principle ‘positively,’ as mechanist politics has done with unitary
materiality, or denying by such conflation the human spirituality.
Human’s must contemplate rationally to find temporal harmony and truth.
Asserting that material objects’ represent truth is like saying ‘fact is truth,’
that without cognizance, is impossible. And, adjudging which of
‘contingent’ truth’s paradoxical opposites is ‘true’ (neither purely are)
defines the irrational political quandary for society to solve or abide.
Orthodox untruth of dogmatically conflated ‘unitary materialism, is a
greater ‘social ill. 30
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may
be called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in
which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact,
truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence
a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or
32 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.Bertrand Russell
By logical definition, each P and Q is a statement that when written
in the ‘if,’ ‘then,’ compound statement format, the ‘if statement’ is
the antecedent, and the ‘then statement’ is the consequent.
The validity of truth depends on whether, or not, truth’s predicate value
is ‘true.’ ‘Pure Truth’ is a reality-something, only found in logically
reasoned truth, the antecedent predicate value of which necessarily is
always ‘true.’ Deciding tautological validity requires careful analysis of
truth’s antecedent and its consequent to independently determine the
predicate value is ‘true’: if truth’s antecedent is ‘true’ and its predicate
value corresponds (correlates) with nature’s necessary predicate value,
the antecedent truth value is then rationally ‘true.’ A similar analysis
must be made of the consequent. When comparatively the predicate
value is not ‘true’, the facts prescribed are cause of ‘social paradox.’
The problematic Liar paradox includes all truth forms in
which the predicate values diverge from those of nature. ‘Telling a lie’
(for liars) is as easy as ‘telling the truth,’ and knowingly reasoning
deductively from unproved dogma is akin to lying: The crafty nihilist
Brahminist conscience that rationalizes from diabolic values to gain an
advantage is as clear in nefarious intent as those who intend to gain from
‘telling lies’: The ‘liar paradox’ is clearly about values in human logos
which diverge from those of nature.31
Liar paradox. Semantic paradox, known in antiquity, focus of
much recent work. Jack says ‘I am now speaking falsely’, referring
to the words he is then uttering. If Jack speaks truly when he says
he is speaking falsely, he is speaking falsely. If he is speaking
falsely when this is what he says is going on, he is speaking truly.
So what he says is true if, and only if, it is false: which seems
absurd. One response claims that Jack says nothing true and
nothing false. But a variant makes trouble: Jill says ‘I am now not
The ‘real’ cultural war is only partly economic 33
The simplicity of Cicero’s statement is particularly strong when considering the""
necessary aspects of definitions intrinsic of reason and natural.
speaking truly’. If Jill is not speaking truly when this is what she
says she is up to, she is speaking truly. If she is speaking truly, then
she must be doing what she says, that is, not speaking truly. So, it
seems, what she says is true if, and only if, it is not true.M. Sainsbury
Cicero, in 51 B. C., declared his maxim of true law:32
True law is right reason in accord with nature; it is of universal
application, unchanged and everlasting. ""
‘The song of Moses’ is about pure metaphysical truth, i.e.,
noumena, as inferred by myriad phenomenal evidence, which is available
to all who critically deliberate inferentially.33
Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak;
and hear, O earth, the words of my mouth.
My doctrine shall drop as the rain,
my speech shall distill as the dew,
as the small rain upon the tender herb,
and as the showers upon the grass:
Because I will publish the name of the Lord,
ascribe ye greatness unto our God.
He is the Rock, his work is perfect:
For all his ways are judgement:
A God of truth and without iniquity,
Just and right is he.Truth, morality, justice, . . . , is exclusively spiritual, i.e., of human
noumena rather than phenomena. And ‘true’ antecedent principle is
exclusively, naturally noumenal. Dogma deduced from phenomena,
however popular, appears to cause a paradox. And humans can mitigate
paradoxical effects by implementing measures of justice, which
34 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
universally accords with reasoned necessary Categorical Imperative.
Economic Paradox: supply v.s. demand.
Extremes of the price spectrum, of the mechanist economic paradigm, are
paradoxical: Price is low when supply exceeds demand (suppliers then
need price supports of one sort or another). However, when demand
exceeds supply, consumer-subsidies are then required. Smith’s
competition paradigm intends that competition will regulate this paradox.
When the paradigm fails, the extremes of price embroil distribution
disputes that are paradigm-related more than competition related. J. S.
Mill undoubtedly reasoned from this paradox to state this economic
axiom about the distribution of privately owned goods and services.34
Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, unaided by
anyone, he cannot keep, unless by the permission of society. Not
only can society take it from him, but individuals could and would
take it from him, if society . . . did not . . . employ and pay people
for the purpose of preventing him from being disturbed in [his]
possession. The distribution of wealth [goods and services],
therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society. [What is noteworthy is that Mill deliberately reasoned
this conclusion based on natural antecedences instead of the popularly
conflated mechanist (‘unitary materialists) ‘property’ definition]
When prices artificially, mechanistically, rose for electricity in California
(Governor Davis’s deficit problem) and gasoline prices arose nationwide,
‘supply’ and ‘demand’ issues politically divided the state? (And politics
is ideological, i.e., sans logical necessity) Mechanism based political
issues, which embroiled the price paradox had failed to mitigate the
fundamental issues of Smith’s competition paradigm?35
And now comes (Adolph) Lowe’s most serious contention, if
modern, ‘organized’ capitalism cannot any longer depend on
spontaneous forces of the market to assure its orderly operation,
Economic Paradox: supply v.s. demand. 35
economics itself also changes its relationship to society. As long
as the laws of behavior could be discerned at work within the
system, economics could be a passive pursuit, a detached
contemplation of the workings of society. . . ..
But the change in the social setting of modern capitalism
[now] rules out [Smith’s competition paradigm]. To be effective,
economics is now forced to become an instrument of active
interference with the course of things. Its function is no longer to
predict or prognosticate, ‘because that is no longer possible.’ The
new function of economics--the only function left open to it by the
increasing indeterminacy of behavior--is to control the economy.
Lowe does not mean authoritarian central planning. Rather, he
sees the task of economic control as guiding the system to a
socially desired goal through appropriate market behavior.
Behavior may be made appropriate by very mild policies, such as
tax inducements, or it may be steered by bolder government actions
that directly affect supply and demand. Mild policies or not, the
task of economics can no longer be what it once was. The old
economics was, so to speak, philosophical economics. The new
economics will have to be ‘political economics’ -- discipline that
must discover the economic means to achieve politically chosen
ends.Setting utility standards is a constitutional function that requires
centralized regulation. Unfortunately, Congress has failed its
constitutional duty [as specified in Section 8 (3) & (5)].
‘to regulate commerce and fix the value of money, and standards.’
Roger Sherman influenced this constitutional provision: Congressional
inaction disappointed him. With the Whig-installed American System36
of Political Economy the given reality, Lowe’s guiding ‘political
economics’ confronts materialism-based politics that granted deterministic
controlling advantages to fictitious corporate entities, thereby, supplanting
36 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
constitutional purposes. And the legal perpetual corporate existence gave
license to corporate leviathan combines that now control the utilities they
serve. They can charge whatever the utility publics can pay and otherwise
can deny the utility. This question remains: Will ‘ballot initiatives’ spur
Congress to do their constitutional duty?
tautological applications
English Professor, Historian, V. L. Parrington’s Main Currents in
American thought, which won a Pulitzer prize in history, provides a great
historical perspective of what is now critically important in America, and
the world. Of Jefferson Davis that northern Whigs vilified, in what we
now call ‘terrorism,’ Parrington exposes the mechanist political
irrationality roots of our politics today:37
The president of the Confederacy may have been an unfortunate
civil leader, but the slanders that so long clung to his name are only
worthy of the gutter. The sin that he was led into was not counted
a sin in his southern decalogue; it was the sin, not of secession, but
of imperialism--a sin common to all America in those drunken times
when the great West invited exploitation.--- Is American society still afflicted by despoilment, the root cause
of which are private exploits of gold, oil, timber, grazing, recreation and
such on lands whose proprietor is the commonwealth, i.e., by paternalism
granted to private sector exploitations of the commonwealth and the
world’s natural resources?
--- Parrington explained the diverse commonweal interest trends? 38
In the year 1825 three streams of tendency were flowing through the
[American mind], rising from different sources, incompatible in spirt and
purpose, strong in their diverse appeals; and in the end the major current
was certain to engulf the lesser. The humanitarianism of Virginia, the
individualism of the new West, and the imperialism of the Black Belt
might seem to mingle their waters for a time, but there would be
tautological applications 37
confusions of thought and diversity of counsels until one or another had
worn a deeper channel through which the dominant opinion might run.
There could be no more fascinating study in the economics of political
theory than the changing mind of the South during the critical decades
from 1825 to 1850, as it followed the course determined by its peculiar
institution. . . . It is unintelligent to charge upon southern politicians a
lack of consistency---to point out that after 1820 Calhoun reversed
himself on every major political principle. It was true of Calhoun, as
it was true of Webster and true of Clay. In a rapidly changing America,
with economics in a state of flux, men were no longer free political
agents, guiding themselves by the fixed stars of accepted theory: they
were borne like corks on the current of the times, and their inconsistency
is the surest evidence that they spoke for their constituents. The North
and the South were at the parting of the ways, and if southern
imperialism created for its needs a philosophy of particularism, it was
met by a counter philosophy of nationalism created for its needs by
northern capitalism, which likewise was following the path of its
manifest destiny. [ N oa m Choms ky’ s
HEGEMONY or SURVIVAL, documents the contemporary political
thoughts and trends, of the American mechanist political doctrine.]
---- Do issues confront America in 1996 (now in 2006) that resulted
from irrational politics that influenced official policy as Imperialism and
Manifest Destiny? Is our foreign policy, therefore, irrational?
--- Do we still tolerate irrational politics, as the foundation of our
nation’s Foreign Policy? Is the nation’s policy of Preemptive Action
(war) akin to policies of Imperialism and Manifest Destiny? In this
conflated unitary-materialism-based national policy scenario, is political
irrationalism practiced more than rationalism?
--- Which political part of philosophical democracy, spiritual essence
or materiality, represents irrationalism as the controlling official political
influence? Does the social conflation of essence by materiality have to
do with this sad scenario?
Absent civility, the sponsor of which is human essence, as
38 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Our ‘American System,‘ political economy, as legally upheld by"
Federalism’s belief-based materialism, and legally practiced by our SupremeCourt.
effectively, if not absolutely, dispensed by effects of conflation, by a
pervasive dogmatic belief-based ‘positivism’, is it no longer appropriate,"
therefore, to call our nation democratic? And because of this politically
conflated unitary materialism, is our philosophical democracy’s
‘materialism,’ therefore by practicing political irrationalim, as made
compatibly with the ‘unitary materialism’ of communism and fascism?
The human temporal state under democracy, however, requires a healthy
balanced natural embrace of materialism with essence. However, when
Rational Empiricism’s essence is politically conflated to being
consequential to dogmatic materialist belief, when all that is allowed is
materialism-based determinism, democracy’s rationality is harnessed. 39
‘Rational Empiricism,’ the philosophic basis of democracy,
believes that the world is both material and spiritual. It holds that
change and progress occur by applying reason to experience, and
human nature can be changed and improved by experience. On the
basis of these principles, democracy stresses discussion and the use
of reason as a way of arriving at conclusions. It emphasizes the
importance of tolerance and freedom in developing intelligent,
loyal citizens.
Regarding truth, which is of human essence, we should respect the
material part of democracy (‘Rational Empiricism’) for naturally
imposed limitations: didn’t B. Russell logically prove that matter and
truth are incompatible? 40
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may
be called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in
which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact,
tautological applications 39
truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence
a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or
statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.Bertrand Russell
Considering the necessary poles of democracy (essence and
materiality), which 20th century American Presidents made the greatest
achievements? J. T., Middlebury, Vt, gave this analysis: 41
(1) T. Roosevelt (national parks system), (2) W. Wilson (Women’s
suffrage), (3) F. D. Roosevelt (World War II), (4) H. Truman (Marshall
Plan), (5) D. Eisenhower (interstate highway system), (6) J. Kennedy
(Cuban Missile Crisis), (7) L. Johnson (civil rights laws), (8) R. Nixon
(relations with China), (9) R. Regan (winning the Cold War), And (10) W.
Clinton (budget surplus).
T. Roosevelt was the century’s Progressive Republican President
[antitrust laws, food and drug administration, railroad fares regulation
(rebates favoring some shippers had caused business failure), and he had
labor’s vote]. George Will’s conservative commentary has often cited W.
Wilson’s liberal policies as core Democratic politics (anti-mercantilism,
free-trade advocacy), Wilson reorganized banking and currency, and
installed the Federal Reserve Banking system (that in 1935 F. D. R.
improved and provided FDIC insurance to secure bank deposits), and he
reduced tariffs. Maybe ironic, Wilson was elected because Republicans
were divided between candidates for president. However, F. D.
Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935 (SS) is the most distinguishing
legislation, which directly embraces democracy’s philosophical spiritual
essence. This act particularly distinguished the Democratic Party’s
politics for its sponsorship of human essence in balance with its
physicality (and the mechanist Whig opposition, of GOP politics, dubbed
this liberal influence ‘the politics of bleeding hearts’). SS introduced the
main issue of political contention between the conservative ‘right’s’
unitary materialism and the liberal ‘left’s’ reactive emphasis on essence:
rational politics recognizes, however, that the reactive ‘left’ is not only
40 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
about human essence (human material needs are also necessarily critical).
Essence is conflated by absolute dogmatic belief in unitary materialism,
and because it fails to recognize the conflation, it is therefore irrational.
Again, didn’t Russell prove that unitary belief in matter decimates truth
by conflating the essence of thought so to conform to materiality? 42
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may
be called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in
which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact,
truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence
a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or
statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.Bertrand Russell
Inflation is economic endemism caused by government grants to
private sector businesses: legal entitlements to economic advantages
(which necessarily derive from the economic taking from others).
Inflation’s endemism is the natural result of taking profits from the static
economic flow, which Adam Smith’s economic paradigm had defined.
Inflation’s effects, over time, are measured by the unnaturally necessary
increased prices for consumer purchases. Systemically, mechanistically
legal profit taking has made low end wage-earners the economic slaves
because natural human material requirements force them to expend their
meager earnings to subsist. This natural fact when fitted to the economic
mechanism leaves wage-earners without means to benefit from the
economic effects of inflation. G. P. Brockway indicts the banker’s COLA
as inflation’s main cause, J. Schumperter’s static circular flow model
pinpoints non entrepreneurial profit taking as inflation’s main source.
And while, public projects paid for by public debt that taxpayers repay,
over time, is also inflation’s causal culprit. However, Inflation has taken
a new twist in the aftermath of our 2003 War with Iraq. We have
unemployment while the rate of inflation has been managed to remain
low: we seem to have learned how to manage vastly increasing federal
tautological applications 41
deficits while containing the appearance of inflation? Chris Matthews
asked: “By pumping up the supply of fiat money, have we monetized our
war debt?” What is the long term effects of containing appearances of
inflation by monetizing debt? Time will tell! (Now years later, as 2008
ended, US economy confronted eminent failure: was this the sort of
failure that Ricardo, Mill, and Marx had fore told?)
Although the mechanist unitary material valued capitalist system
exploits wage-earning humans, its logical antecedent clearly is labor
created production, i.e., this labor is the mechanist systemic slave of the
capitalist owners as the Whig Senator J. C. Calhoun had rationalized
(Schumperter’s entrepreneurs included). So, what natural principles relate
to high end (owners) and low end (wage-earners) economic value? The
unitary materialism-based capitalism, fallaciously has affirmed as its
antecedent principle of political economy, the sole ownership of ‘profits’
as mechanistically prescribed and delivered: i.e., only to the mechanisms’
superintendents. Earned and unearned incomes cannot escape the fact that
labor (including entrepreneurial organic accomplishments) is the ‘true’
capitalistic antecedent principle value.
How capitalists have seemingly escaped the mechanist determined
plights of their idealized creation, of the ‘iron cage,’ which wage-earners
must endure, Parrington called “an ingenious scheme to milk the cow
and distribute the ‘milk’ to those who superintended the milking.”
And, while wage-earners provide the static antecedent economic value to
capitalists, they naturally must spend their earned income simply to
subsist. The systemic paradox unnaturally caused by systemic granting
of profit, as laden with inflation which is consumed, exclusively to
capitalists, also allow capitalists to own most inflation sensitive property,
which mechanistically heap additional unearned rewards of endemically
determined inflation: unearned economic rewards that endemically, and
immorally, covertly is worse than all overt stealing? Keynes wrote this:43
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,
secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their
42 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process
engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million
is able to diagnose. Keynes
Businesses are licensed to acquit themselves by cost accounting
for inflation (by LIFO or FIFO codifications) to the goods and services,
which consumers buy. Deliberate or just convenient, inflation’s causes
and costs remain covertly accounted for consumers never to see: only
identifiable, after the fact, as ‘inflation’s endemism’: measurable only by
monitoring price changes of selected goods and services: of the CPI.
Causes of inflation’s endemism include tax-based costs intrinsic of bonds
and insurance paid over time, Real Estate Commissions with purchasing
or selling mortgaged properties, mortgage points, agency commissions
bundled in insurance premiums, premium taxes paid by insurance
companies to states, bonded amortization for debts incurred to pay for
public real property improvements, . . .. And, they include perks and
profit sharing for superintending private business (so called and legally
fictionally justified by dogma: the king can do no wrong). All are
political economy’s entitlements that stealthily, unapparently cause
inflation. Then add the illegal side of economy to inflation’s woe:
counterfeiting, money laundering, fraud and theft. The total is
staggering. And all of it ‘trickles down’ mechanistically, accounting44
wise, to finally rest on the prices that wage-earning consumers must pay.
Because low end consumer wage-earners have no means to profit-
based benefits from either wages or inflation, they bear the full brunt of
political economies unapparent cost; yielding such sentiments as Henry
Ward Beecher’s “you cannot sift out the poor from the community. The
poor are indispensable to the rich.” When inflation is considered, the
rich, whose income is mostly unearned, in any sense of principle wage-
earned economic value, morally owe a great economic debt to the ‘poor.’
High end incomes, should systemically provide aid to the poor: therefore,
tautological applications 43
my thoughts about the essential mitigating need of Roger Williams ‘social
usage’ insurance included applications to all above political economy’s
inflation effects.
About which President did more to ‘level sovereignty,’ which
Jefferson ‘truly’ and ‘categorically’ concluded was democracy’s essence,
and to soften political economy’s bite, on the ‘poor,’ the Clinton
administration was the first post American System of Political Economy
administration to achieve the lowering poverty to 16 percent of the
population. For this, Clinton is also first among presidents to address
Jefferson’s democratic essence. And for withstanding the aggressive
irrational politics that similarly deliberately was visited upon Jefferson.
To discredit and impeach him, Clinton is second only to Thomas
Jefferson, his name sake, for ‘leveling’ cardinal sovereignty’s suffrage,
thereby preserving democracy.
In all parts of the world, reason has concluded what Emmanuel
Kant called Categorical Imperative. Democratic reason has called this
imperative ‘equal rights-based distributive justice,’ others’ concluded this
imperative as Christ’s Golden Rule, or Kant’s ‘do as you would expect
other’s to do in similar circumstances,’ or Lao Tse’s ‘Sinderesis’ (to the
unjust we must be just as we expect others to be just . . .).
The recent argument for returning revenue taxes paid (to those
who paid then), for to stimulate the economy, denied this paternalism to
those that had not earned enough ‘to pay taxes’: irrationally inferring that
low income earners do not consume, from which earned income and
unearned profits ultimately derive. This inferred argument is as irrational
(thoughtless), as the justifying of unearned income as a rationally
deserved economic fact: is surely irrational until Adam Smith’s postulate
that labor is the ‘true’ antecedent of economic value, is disproved (or that
inflation is proved as an antecedent to economic value, for instance).
And, because, when identifying inflation’s causes will also identify the
great cause of divide between incomes resulting from government’s
paternalistic grants, entitlements and privileges, and earned wages of labor
in productions of goods and services, Brahmanist classical economists
44 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
decided that the income analysis of each side of this divide was so
different that ‘Standard of Living’ became the basis used for wages-
earned: that income unequalness of the sides is never justified.
Because, economic incentives are critically important and,
therefore, possess ‘a great necessity’, government’s paternalism is not
faulted for being unnecessary! What is faulted is political
‘positivism,’ which denies the categorical imperative of brotherhood
as a constitutional tenet: or where is found the logical equality
coherence in capitalist orthodoxy that embraces categorical imperatives
(mutual respect, love, and charity) to paternally redress the pernicious
economic needs of poverty, which absolutely cannot logically be faulted
simply because of the political bias of those claiming their unearned
income is equally deserved, politically inferring that the impoverished are
lazy and deserve their unequal holistic status. The politically successful
but irrational contemporary argument, for returning taxes ‘to those
that paid them,’ is categorically imperatively indicted for being
unconstitutional! Society is now stuck with arguing for and against
natural rights of all patrons of suffrage. Paine and Burke’s debate might
never be settled. And, only in freedom, will this debate surely be
revisited by all generations. And the political contest must protect equally
inalienable human rights, which naturally enjoy the logical status of
antecedence (‘principle’): ‘positivism’ threatens to conflate to unitary
materialism this spiritual necessity of democracy. When government is
paternalist (as the politics asserts), then constitutionally government
is obligated to tax unequally for to economically mitigate the unequal
results: constitutionally, it must preserve rational categorical
imperatives.
The veracity test of truth is as well the veracity test of reason.
And truth, which lacks fiducial anchors to natural noumenal principles,
inevitably fuels controversy as whose subjective perception coheres with
this noumenal reality (has coherent ‘is true’ predicate values with nature’s
predicate values)? And in situations of paradox, logical tautology
provides this veracity test. Tautological fallacies always show as
tautological applications 45
irrationalism, in which truth’s predicate values are ‘false.’
Maybe, because of dogmatic ‘positivism,’ logical tautology is
commonly officially rejected. The mention of tautology is brief in
dictionaries and encyclopedias.’ Therefore, maybe the willful dogmatic
denial of reason by Federalists and Whigs has made it difficult if not
impossible to understand the truth and reason’s for this veracity test. Had
mathematical research not persisted to make science language applicable,
tautological veracity testing wouldn’t now be available: 45
By a tautology we mean a statement, which has the truth value ‘true’ for
all possible truth values of its components. . . .
Compound statements with all truth values ‘true’ are called
tautologies and represent valid argument forms. The implication formed
by the conjunction of all the premises as the antecedent and the
conclusion as the consequent that form a valid argument form, will
always result in a tautology. Testing compound statements to see
whether they are tautologies is thus equivalent to testing an argument
for validity.
By definition, each of P and Q is a statement that when written in
the ‘if,’ ‘then,’ compound statement format, the ‘if’ statement is the
antecedent, and the ‘then’ statement the consequent.
John Fujii gave three classical valid arguments in which P = premises, Q
= consequent, - = denial, � = therefore. They are:
(a) Modus ponens (b) Modus tollens (c) Hypothetical syllogism
P 6 Q P 6 Q P 6 Q
P - Q Q 6 R
� Q �- P
� P 6 R
(d) and (e) are the logical fallacies:
46 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
(d) ‘Affirming the Consequent,’ and (e) ‘Denying the Antecedent.’
P 6 Q P 6 Q
Q - P
� P � - Q
(d) Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, and (e) Fallacy of Denying the
Antecedent, Fujii warned, are invalid argument forms. With all forms
of ‘hypothesizing a tautological argument,’ the invalid argument form
(d) Affirming the Consequent is mostly applied. Fallacies of ‘Affirming
Consequents’ of nomos, is a particular Sophist pseudo philosophic
proclivity intrinsic of nomos-based dogmatic belief. The Federalist
Agenda, as Parrington noted provides an example of this sophistry, 46
which St. John said was a form of lying.
[Hamilton’s] notorious comment -- which the American democrat
has never forgiven him, “the people! -- the people is a great beast!
-- was characteristically frank. . . . He was at pains, therefore, as
a practical statesman, to dress his views in a garb more seemly to
plebeian prejudices, and like earlier Tories he paraded an ethical
justification for his Toryism. The current Federalist dogma of the
divine right of justice -- ‘vox justiciae vox dei’ -- was at hand to
serve his purpose and he made free use of it. . . .
He was frankly a monarchist, and he urged the [fallacious]
monarchical principle with Hobbesian logic. “The principle chiefly
intended to be established is this -- [the fascist notion] that there
must be a permanent ‘will.” “There ought to be a principle in
government capable of resisting the popular current.” [In ‘Works,
Vol. II, p 415] The only effective way of keeping democratic
factionalism within bounds, Hamilton was convinced, lay in the
erection of a powerful chief magistrate, who “ought to be
hereditary, and have so much power, ..
tautological applications 47
“ He devoted himself to the business of providing all possible
checks upon the power of the democracy.”
This Federalist agenda continues. Parrington also cited the Federalist-
Whig proclivity to ‘deny antecedents’ and ‘affirm consequents’:47
Massachusetts . . . property interests were as secure as any old
Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of principle and property
were still in control of the state; and if less emphasis was laid on
principle [physis] and more on property [nomos] -- if less regard
seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and
more to assertive self-seeking -- business was no less secure than
in the good old days, and its profits were greater. . . . Provided of
course that the Constitution should follow population and
safeguard business interests against . . .the menace of particularism
[i.e., antinomy, i.e., Greek anti + nomos]. . . . In the hour of peril,
principles go by the board. The Whig party was the lineal heir of
the old Federalism, but it denied its philosophical patrimony. It
substituted expediency for the old economic realism, and began and
ended intellectually bankrupt.. . . aside from petty antagonism to
Jackson -- was the vague assumption that the well-being of the
American people was dependent on governmental patronage; the
belief that each economic group and section must receive its
special favor, and that through tariffs and bonuses and internal
improvements the country as a whole must prosper. Of this
principle of special favors -- a return to the seventeenth century
from which eighteenth century liberalism was a reaction -- the
American System (economy) of Henry Clay was the chief
expression, and it remains the most significant bequest of the Whig
party to our political history.
Classical mechanist unitary materialist dogma clearly usurps rational
sovereignty (which is human essence, i.e., spiritual rather than material
48 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
quality). The renewal of unitary materialist mechanist dogma has not only
tweaked economic American democratic Categorical Imperative so to
appear as fascist, the privatized unitary materialist capitalism’s politics
as a fundamental aspect of the U.S. government administered democracy,
threatens to make fascism dominate democracy. And the unitary
materialist dogma-based, economy has similarly affected Islam’s
Categorical Imperative, and globally other societies as well.
To remain the world’s democratic leader, our nation must be first
redressed of ill effects from its own fundamental irrationalism: what Noam
Chomsky has documented as our Imperial Grand Strategy. Mitigating48
effects of US rationalism is the only answer and SS provides an example
of this mitigating ‘social-usage-based’ redress. For this purpose, political
economy’s mechanism-based profit motive holistically represents the
greatest irrational culprit, which parcel’s democracy by granting
mechanism-based economic paternalism to ‘Peter,’ which holistically must
be taken from ‘Paul’: this economic disparity must be redressed for to
achieve our constitutionally rational holistic national purposes.
254 Politics of Social Security
More controversial than the SS contribution-tax issue, is the politics of SS.
About which, Herman B. Leonard wrote this: 49
Social security is the subject of one of the longest-running and
hottest debates in modern American politics. As the centerpiece of
the New Deal legislation, and as the prime surviving New Deal
enterprise, it has been under nearly constant attack from those for
whom the New Deal represents taking the wrong fork in the road to
progress. And because of its extraordinary growth and scale, few
debates about the federal budget can ignore it.[SS, the New Deal, introduced some economic fairness.]
Henry Clay’s Whig-based mechanist deontological mechanism,
like a big machine, delivers the economic preemptions and exploitations.
254 Politics of Social Security 49
For things that naturally are holistic, as economy for instance, mechanist
special privilege to some, necessarily implicates the taking from others.
Henry Clay’s mentors have a long list which includes unitary materialist
views of Hobbes, Burke, and Hamilton. Clay’s attributes are these: 50 51
He became a leader of the National Republican party, later called
the Whig party. . . . With John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, he
formed a ‘great triumvirate’ of United States Senators. Their
opinions largely controlled Congress during the second quarter of
the 1800's. . . . Clay returned to the House in 1815, where he
sponsored a program for national economic development known
as the ‘American System.’
Parrington, bared the underbelly of this American irrationality:52
. . . point[ing] out that after 1820 Calhoun reversed himself on
every major political principle. It was true of Calhoun, as it was
true of Webster and true of Clay. In a rapidly changing America,
with economics in a state of flux, men were no longer free political
agents, guiding themselves by the fixed stars of accepted theory:
they were borne like corks on the current of the times, and their
inconsistency is the surest evidence that they spoke for their
constituents. [Doesn’t this now in 2009 describe the position
of republicans in the Obama administration?]
In acquisitive aggrandizements humans subscribe irrationalism as in the
glorious Epicurean Paradox:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes
Befitting the Epicurean Paradox, Whig irrationalism increases relatively
with inflation. Issuing from Political Economy’s license and privilege, the
economic owner class, commonly called the ‘haves of society,’ was
created. And, most in society now aspire to take equal parts in it. *
* Henry Clay’s full blown American System was installed by the GOP
50 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
following the death of Abraham Lincoln. The deontology of this private
unitary materialist mechanist system is to politically grant federal assets
to influential productive entities with faith that all in society will benefit
economically. And this fallacy, fundamental to mercantilism, Clay
sponsored and his Whig following affirmed it as the pseudo principle of
the American System of Political Economy: Determinism of mercantilism
contends many things that subliminally are orthodox dogma: for instance,
money, which utility is as an exchange medium, is now considered as
owned wealth, and as Adam Smith observed, 53
‘in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost
constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.’
Irrational fallaciousness, as systemic incoherences (Desiderius) perpetrated
on the inviolate human free will, only appears covertly. And, as J.
Schumpeter said, it bubbles forth as complaints, or worse, as terrorism.
Most class actions are about constitutional human rights that political
economy licenses mechanisms to compromise. In this sense, our
American System of political economy is anti Constitution: At least as
regards Bill of Rights equality. More fundamental, natural reality decrees
holistic consequences to unequal aberrations of the parts. Population, by
age groups, demonstrates this holistic natural reality.
Percentages and indices often mislead common perspectives, my employer,
an actuary of note, infrequently would reminded us: “Which would you
rather have,” he would ask, “1 percent of a million dollars or 5 percent of
a hundred thousand dollars?” When common perceptions are led to
consider trends of inordinate growth, in the 65-4 population for instance,
and assumes that the ‘trend’ suggested in the retired population is
independent of the total population, both perception and suggestion are
fallacious: unfortunately, this fallacy officially occurred in the 1980's when
a trend based conclusion became published, stating as fact that the ratio
(workers to retirees) would, in 2025, have two workers per retiree. 54
Also, this 1978 research projected group populations for the ages’
254 Politics of Social Security 51
18-64, for years 1985 and later, including estimated births occurring
following 1976: therefore, the research was not based on population facts!
ESTIMATED AND PROJECTED POPULATIONS
(millions)
YEAR AGES: 18 TO 64 65-4 RESPECTIVE INDICES
1950 92.6 12.4 --- base = 1.00 ---
1960 99.5 16.7 1.07 1.34
1985* 123.7 27.3 1.34 2.2
2000* 159.6 31.8 1.72 2.56
2025* 154.5 48.6 1.67 3.92
4 : to life's end ( that estimated trends are not facts is critically important.)
* these projections made in the late 1970's were only anticipated trends.
What is critically important, however, is that BabyBoom’s births were
all factual: only mortality is estimated, like life insurance science estimates,
to conservatively project the size of each retiring age group 65-4. And with
SS eligibility shifted to age 67, upwards of seven million persons are
delayed from entering eligible retirement. The population of eligible
retired, over age 67, will peak, for a short period, at about 42 million. For
comparison, the 1990 Census counted 31 million seniors of age 65-4 55
and 35 million in 2000. 56
The following published caption erroneously led to the common
perceptive fallacy that more than 80 million octogenarians will exist when
the BabyBoom retires (I personally attended seminars in Las Vegas, about
‘long term care insurance,’ where this fallacy was stated as a firm
prospective fact). Afterward, I found this caption published in The 1993
Information Please Almanac, on page 455:
Almost seventy million Americans are 80 or over:
[And this will not be so!]
In fact, in 1990, the census had counted 3.9 million Americans 80 or over.Was the published error because a researcher or publisher had simply
52 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
‘slipped a digit?’ My analysis of actual birth facts (the actual counts forthe BabyBoom included) suggest that total count of retirees, during theyears of the BabyBoom’s retirement, can not exceed 55 million (35million were census counted in 2000). Because those aged eighty and overfactually dwindle to one percent of total: the expected census count of retiredBabyBoom octogenarians is less than 6 million, instead of 80 million.
An important aspect of the 1978 demographic research is that themedian age of birth dynamics was theorized to stabilize in what thenwas called ‘zero growth population’: median ages in this theoreticalscenario are: 30.2 in 1950, 29 in 1976, 38.4 in 2025, and 38.9 in 2050.But, ‘zero growth’ fertility never happened! And while fertility remainshigh, ‘zero growth’ will not occur! And the population of workers, ages18-64, ensure that the median age will remain lower than the ‘zero growth’projection of 38.4 in 2025 (it was 35.3 in 2000 ). Fertility, as reality now57
proves, debunks the ‘zero growth-based’ notion that in 2025 there will betwo individuals of working age for each retired individual over age 65.Far more important. The ‘78 study shows how population age groups relateto the total (holistically, when a group’s population changes, anoffsetting holistic change also occurs).
‘78 study Population age groups as a percentage of the Total:
Yr 0-4 5-17 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-64 65-4
1950 10.8 20.2 10.6 15.8 14.2 20.3 8.1
1976 7.1 23.2 13.1 14.9 10.7 20.3 10.7
2050 6.5 16.9 9 12.7 12.5 23.4 19
In 1950, four earliest birth years of the BabyBoom were in the 0-4age range. In 1976, the BabyBoom’s births had shifted into the other ages.Its peak (4.26 million births of ‘57) was in the 18-24 range. And in 2050,all survivors of the BabyBoom are in the 65-4 range, the youngest age groupof which is 85 years old (less than I percent of range total). Mortality willhave claimed most all of them. Percent of population is like percent ofeconomy: a greater percentage in one age range determines an offset in theothers. Mortality creeps most greatly in the 65-4 range.
With ‘zero growth’ results in mind, the percentages are rearrangedto represent children (0-17), workers (18-64), and retirees (65-4).
254 Politics of Social Security 53
Yr 0-17 18-64 65-4 Total Population (All in millions)
1950 31 60.9 8.1 152.3
1976 30.3 59 10.7 215.1
2050 23.4 57.6 19 269.4
However, official projections for total population in 2050 exceed380 million. ‘On August 1, 1999, the official estimate was 273 millionand in 1990, 249 million.’ In 1990, the Census Bureau’s natural born58
population distribution was this:
Yr 0-17 18-64 65-4 Total Population
1990 25.8 62.1 12.1 238.6
And my more recent model’s refined estimate suggests this:
Yr 0-17 18-64 65-4 Total Population
2050 25.2 63.1 11.6 299.7
(The worker to retiree ratio in 2050 is 5.4 to 1)
And with the shift in retirement to age 67:
Yr 0-17 18-64 65-4 Total Population
2050 25.2 65.1 8.1 299.7
(The worker to retiree ratio is 8 to1)
And while this refined estimate of future reality might be moreaccurate, 2050's total population, as most recently officially projected, willswell by 80 million more: and while emigres might affect this analysis,fertility still depends more on the relative population of child bearing adultfemales than on any empirical measures of total population?
This income distribution far more shows’ government’s unevenpattern of political economy’s granted privileges and rights than it showsworker productivity, dedication, talent, or education qualifications.
Economy’s mechanism-based determinism shows most prominentlyin the extreme quintiles: graphically showing offsetting holisticdeterminism. The most stable middle quintile is mechanism’s economicfulcrum. It commands 15 percent of total income instead of an equal fifthshare of the total. Combined, the lowest two quintiles of income do notequal the middle quintile income. Therefore, from 1968 through 1996more than 70 percent of the total went to the top two quintiles: in 1996, the
54 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
increase at the top was twice the total bottom quintiles income.
Increases in the highest quintile are mostly offset (taken mechanistically)by decreases in the lowest quintile where impoverished individuals’command of property-based political significance, or a lack of social-political standing, fails to command a more equal share of the total. And,because this distribution is wage-earned, income, unearned income, whichmechanistically legally enures to the capital side of accountings,representing business ownership; is not included in this graph? Only partof the economic picture shows up here.
E. K. Hunt said this about all capitalist society’s classes: 59
The destitute class must depend on the somewhat “less thanrespectable” sources of income, such as welfare, charity, or the fruitsof quasi legal or illegal activities in order to get by. The stigma thatattaches to members of this class motivates all propertyless individualsto try very hard to secure employment even if working conditions andwages are poor.
[Capitalists are mechanist deontologists, whose ideology while in
254 Politics of Social Security 55
command of government, affirmed this top end mechanist growth scenarioin dogmatic belief that unitary materialist causality was economic necessity]
Resulting incarcerations and class actions are destined, but, notlikely from members of the destitute economic class. Class actions probablywill arise in the middle and fourth quintile where democratic expectationsof rights and privileges’ have more substantiation. Hunt also wrote this:
The working class has no significant access to or ownership ofproductive resources. Individuals in this class must sell control oftheir power to labor (i.e., get a job) as their only means to escapesinking to the destitute class. . . .
[T. R. Malthus and Max Weber observed the mechanist‘iron cage of wages,’ as befitting this determined caste of capitalism]
Income from ownership and the wages of workers areconsidered to be the only socially respectable sources of income.
[The U.S. Political Economy considers incomefrom ownership as a separate economy, apart from economy of wage-earning. Some years ago, corporate owners decided that awardingsubstantial ownership shares to corporate executives were in their interest:thereby awarding substantial owner-based unearned income, as well aswage-earned income, to these executives, which resulted in unbelievableincomes: increasingly exceeding 500 times lowest quintile incomes.]
Class actions will happen unless,---- (a) government’s granted rights and privileges’ are more evenly
distributed holistically across the population, which, because ofeconomic mechanisms, will require social usage-based redressactions, as SS, to counter the economic mechanist determinism, or,
---- (b) political economy officially denies rights to sue (as President G.W. Bush called for when signing the Patients’ Bill of Rights).
[Under the above scenario (b), Hesiod’s ‘tyrannies ofnomos’ will surely increase and in reaction to government’seconomic tyrannies, domestic terrorism will increase also.]
---- (c) ‘social usage’-based insurance as Social Security, is applieduniversally to mitigate the capitalist sponsored political economicsystem’s determined impoverishment. In which case SS will nolonger be needed.
56 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Most in society need SS in retirement, but persuasivemechanist rhetoric, rather than rational arguments, as ‘thesystem will not deliver benefits when the time forretirement arrives’ are prominent among each newgeneration’s popular orthodoxies. These, substitutes forreason constantly need thorough inspection and criticalexamination. Cogent factual explanations are an ongoingnecessity. And, maybe the most significant economicconsideration for most individuals is a secure Retirement:which for one reason or another, in the capitalist system,too often suddenly is imposed prematurely. Rationally andresponsibly, the lowest quintile of society requires societyto develop an education curriculum that neutralizes theeffects of capitalistic acquisitive politics’ opposition to‘social usage’ programs, as SS. Philosophically, rationalempiricism (democracy) supports rational economicincentives but disdains rhetorical rationalizations such asthe unnecessary negative incentives, which mechanisticallydetermine impoverishment. The rhetoric of Hesiod’snomos, Heidegger’s irrationalism, . . . as distinguished byPlato’s vision of good and reason, which Kant’s rationaldilemma is about, should be mandatory education specifics?After all, understanding and enjoyments as based onexercised reason rather than an orthodoxy of assertedopinions as dogmatically believed, is temporal life’s naturalteleological purpose, is it not?
SS insurance comes of age
It was revealing and appalling to listen to the 1988 presidential candidatesin debate. Only one seemed to understand SS. Most didn’t know how SSfit with the government, were unconcerned, or they wouldn’t talk about it.And, maybe this isn’t surprising since few are aware or interested in thedetails. But before we can reasonably take part in improving SS, commonlyaccurate understanding is essential.
Published U.S. GNP, revenues, expenses, and SS surplus
SS comes of age 57
($ in the common denominations accounted )
GNP Rev. Exp Exp/GNP SS Tax SS Exp SS Surp.
‘80 2632 520 580 0.22
‘84 3663 666 842 0.229
‘92 5962 1092 1382 0.232 385 281 104
‘97 8103 1453 1560 0.193 539 393 146
‘98 8511 1721 1652 0.194 572 408 164
The SS Trust Funds shown as SS Surp. represents funds that only onepresidential candidate acknowledged an awareness of: ‘It’s an IOUsituation’ this candidate correctly said but then did not elaborate. It is not a secret that SS surplus tax collection is routinely spentas government’s general revenue.
SS contributions spent as the government’s general revenue, maybespuriously, has been accounted as a loan from the SS Trust to thegovernment, i.e., by default of having been spent, became accountedas an IOU to the SS Trust, as an investment in the federal deficit.
SS contributions’ tax revenue, which included SS surplus,has remained an ‘on budget’ government account. The 1984 SSTax law stipulated that SS benefit expenditures would be taken ‘offbudget’: SS surplus in Federal deficits accounting, therefore, is notindependently apparent by the government’s revenue accounts (forinstance, in 1997 the (539) SS tax, as highlighted in the table above,was accounted as government’s revenue, while SS benefits paidwere from ‘off budget’ accounting: (393) highlighted in the table.*
* For years I wondered what part of SS surplus had politically been buriedin the confused government accounting. Then the 2002 Almanac finallydisclosed that in 1996 a $575,096 million adjustment had been made to theSS Trust fund Surprised, but I still could not factually reconcile from thepublished government’s on budget, and off budget, accounting.
Revenues and outlays of government, as shown in the table, weregraphically displayed as a percent of GNP in the graph. For government’s
58 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
budgetary teleology to exist, missing strategic economic essentials requiredisclosure for to fit with government’s necessary constitutional purposes forachieving and maintaining economic integrity between government’srevenues and its outlays. Anyway, as of 2001, IOUs existed but nofunded government SS surplus existed: reductions of the huge federaldeficit did not occur, because transferred debt to SS Trust, was accounted.
In 1998 government’s receipts exceeded its outlays, which fiscalresponsibility had not been achieved in three previous decades.
Then in 2001 government was returned to the faith-based mechanistexploitative deontology (excusing rising deficits because as a percentage of
G N P , t h edef icit wa sdecreasing) asthe explainedrational forcutting highend revenuet a x es s a nsbudgeting oftax revenuesf o rgovernment’sexpenditures.T h e t h r e etrillion federaldef ic i t ha donce aga inbeen put on
government’s deficit’s pace, as set in the 1980's: As the new century’s earlyyears show, the increasing deficit has in 2006 reached past $ six trillion! *
* This managed economics has some new wrinkles. Inflation, as creativelyunmeasured, is said to be low while unemployment, also clearly deficient ofaccuracy, is based on the 1970's near 6% unemployment, as the fullemployment definition. Interest rates are lower and utility rates are higherthan remembered. Surely, the economic indicators are being creatively
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 59
managed! In early September 2003, Chris Matthews, on his daily TV show,Hardball, questioned the high deficits that had produced low inflation:
--- How did the Bush administration manage this, he asked? , Thenbefore his guest could respond, as his inclination is, he prognosticated thisanswer: The supply of fiat money was pumped up. So, did we ‘monetize’ 60
our war debt (as indicated in the above footnote reference, in the same sensethat, when on the gold standard, we monetized gold at a fixed value set bylaw) and with creative internal government accounting effectively topurchase the war debt? Didn’t Lincoln do this when during the Civil War,he printed Greenbacks?
And, who wonders about the ‘true’ inflation, particularly in light of thereported truck loads of US money (as reported to be $ trillions’, in value)confiscated at Iraqi borders? Anyway, inflation is an endemic economicproblem in all capitalist market system economies, which accountings wisegets passed into consumption, where, whenever goods and services are sold:where wages-earned, of economic necessity, primarily constitute ‘theconsuming’, which represents about 70 percent of total economy? Inflation’s cost, is artfully shown, over time, only by selected items’ pricemonitoring, that is called the CPI index.
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed
The national debt’s cumulative interest credited as paid to SS Trust funds is$67.2 million for the years ‘37-‘84. Interest credited for ‘92 alone is 22.6million. SS reported that the accumulated SS Trust Fund (mostly61
government’s IOUs) would reach $110 billion in ‘88. In ‘92 the Trust Fundwas reported at $306.3 billion. And without explanation, in 1996, anunusual $575,096 million was added to the Trust Fund. *
* Was this adjustment shown in the 2002 Almanac, and not in the 2000Almanac, a politically mandated adjustment to show unaccounted SS surpluscontributions, in government’s budget, spent as government’s revenue,which only following political pressure, was acknowledged as government’sIOU to SS? Because I have long suspected that expended SS surpluscontributions were buried in budget details, this adjustment gratified me!
60 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
However, the $589,121 million fund, at 1996 year end, raised concernregarding, for instance, the $300 million SS surplus reported in 1992? 62
Anyway, total SS Trust Fund at fiscal year end 2000, was $930,986 million.And, since SS is not (cannot be) a cause of inflation, any tax put onto the SScontributions by periodic law, which effectively indexes SS contributions’tax rates in order to offset the inflation intensive benefits paid by SS, theCPI-based benefits’ cost also must be separated from SS’s contributionstaxation. Inflation’s cost put onto SS, in total, should be reimbursed fromgeneral tax revenues levied on unearned incomes, which causally areimplicated in inflation -based income: high end, which when beyond the SStaxation caps, and owner-based incomes, not only do not pay for theinflation, which they cause, as an economic class, they are implicated asinflation’s main cause. And economically, inflation particularly benefitsthem: Graduated general revenue taxation should completely pay for allinflation effects in the SS benefits that are paid by SS.
public apathy prevails
Public apathy shuns responsibility as regards’ rights and purposes.Political interests, however, with far greater dispatch, affirm deontologicalduties with mechanist ideology to maximize government’s economic grantsto exploit, simply because mechanist orthodoxy prevails: while the publicdemurs, special interests will always misuse the SS accounted surplus thathas accumulated in offset to the nation’s debt. Franklin wrote this:63
Manufactures are founded in poverty. It is the number of poor withoutland in a country, and who must work for others at low wages orstarve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and affordit cheap enough to prevent the importation of the same kind fromabroad, and to bear the expense of its own exportation. . . .
In 1769, in his Positions to be Examined concerning National Wealth,Franklin also wrote this:
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. Thefirst is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conqueredneighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which isgenerally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way,
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 61
wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into theground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God inhis favor.
Parrington’s comments on Franklin continued:
“As a colonial, long familiar with the injustice of Navigation Laws,Boards of Trade, and other restrictions in favor of British tradesmen,Franklin agreed with Adam Smith on the principle of free trade; butwith later developments of the laissez-faire school -- its fetish of theeconomic man and its iron law of wages -- he would not have64
agreed. . . . In his later speculations he was rather the socialphilosopher than the economist, puzzled at the irrationality of societythat chooses to make a pigsty of the world, instead of the garden thatit might be if men would but use the sense that God has given them.‘The happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of politicalsociety,’ he believed, and a starvation wage-system was the surestway of destroying that happiness. In one of the most delightful lettershe ever wrote, Franklin commented on the ways of men thus: ”It iswonderful how preposterously the affairs of the world are managed.Naturally one would imagine, that the interests of a few individualsshould give way to general interest; but individuals manage theiraffairs with so much more application, industry, and address, thanthe public do theirs, that general interest most commonly gives wayto particular. We assemble parliaments and councils, to have thebenefit of their collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at thesame time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices,and private interests. By the help of these, artful men over powertheir wisdom and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by theacts, arrets, and edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce,an assembly of great men is the greatest fool upon earth?“ Parrington also wrote this:65
The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for thepublic affairs or the public good; any government that does not make[these] its whole and sole object, is not a good government. . . . It is
62 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
the injustice of government that creates armies to defend theearnings of injustice. But every wise government will respect itslimitations. As a child of the eighteenth century, Paine hated[Hobbes’] leviathan state as a monster created by a minority to servethe ends of tyranny. The political state he accepted as a presentnecessity, but he would not have its prestige magnified and thetemptation to tyranny increased by the cult of nationalism. . . .
The maturest elaboration of Pain’s political philosophy isfound in “The Rights of Man.” This extraordinary work, the mostinfluential English contribution to the revolutionary movement, wasan examination of the English constitution in the light of what Paineheld were the true source and ends of government. It is a brilliantreply to [Edmund] Burke, who rested his interpretation of the Englishconstitution on the legal ground of the common law of contract.Following the revolution in 1688, Burke had argued, the Englishpeople through their legal representatives, entered into a solemncontract, binding “themselves, their heirs, and posterities forever,” tocertain express terms; and neither in law nor in equity were they, ofwhatever generation, free to change those terms except by the consentof both parties to the contract. This was an elaboration of the theoryof the Old Whigs, which derived government from a perpetual civilcontract as opposed the radical doctrine of a revocable socialcontract; and in attacking it Paine allied himself with such thinkersas Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau. He pointed out theabsurdity of carrying over the law of private property into the highrealm of political principle--to seek to impose the dead past upon theliving sovereignty. If sovereignty inhered in the English people in1688, it must inhere in the English people in 1793, unless it had beenviolently wrested from them; no parchment terms of another age canbind that sovereignty other than voluntarily. Over against Burke’stheory of a single, static contract, Paine set the doctrine of thereaffirmation of natural rights. Any generation--as the generation of1866--is competent to deal with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 63
This same politics, in the U.S., has done this: inflation’s cost is put onto"
consumption, which returns to business capital, including inflations cost as itsexclusive reward.
barter away the rights of those unborn; such a contract on the face ofit is null and void. . . . Burke’s defense fares even worse whenthe argument is examined in the light of expediency. Illogical as theEnglish system must appear to the political philosopher, can it pleadthe justification that it works; that it does well the things it is paid todo; that it makes the [public affairs or the public good, holistically] itsmain concern? The reply to such questions Paine believed, should besought in the condition of the national economy; more particularly byan examination of the account books of the exchequer [i.e., the treasury
of the nation]. The English people paid annually seventeen millionssterling for the maintenance of government, and what did they get inreturn? Nine millions of the total went to pay interest on old wars,which in the budget was known as the funded debt; of the remainingeight millions the larger part was spent in new wars and sinecurepensions; whereas the real needs of England--the true [public affairs or
public good]--were shamelessly neglected. The English people gotlittle for their money except new debt to justify new taxes. The poorwere even taxed for the benefit of the great. Thus my Lord Onslow,"
who was particularly zealous in the business of proscribing Paine as“the common enemy of us all,” drew four thousand pounds from theroyal chest in sinecures, which made him “the principal pauper ofthe neighborhood, and occasioning a greater expense than the poor,the aged, and the infirm, for ten miles around.” Government on thehereditary principle of Burke did not appear to advantage in the lightof such facts.
Orthodoxy is a recidivist in that economic duty relapses,preserving orthodoxy! This deontology, fallaciously affirmed as principle,deliberately blames the SS system on the basis of its perceived budgetarynecessity, in which inflation’s endemism, mechanized as a tax, determines
64 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
to starve SS. Does this fallacy, affirmed as political principle, represent a“right wing” conspiracy: even as Parrington had cited a Federalist-Whigproclivity to either fallaciously ‘deny antecedents’ or ‘affirm consequents’:66
Massachusetts . . . property interests were as secure as any oldFederalist could have wished. Gentlemen of principle and propertywere still in control of the state; and if less emphasis was laid onprinciple [physis] and more on property [nomos] -- if less regardseemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and moreto assertive self-seeking -- business was no less secure than in thegood old days, and its profits were greater. . . . Provided of coursethat the Constitution should follow population and safeguardbusiness interests against . . .the menace of particularism. In the hourof peril, principles go by the board. The Whig party was the linealheir of the old Federalism, but it denied its philosophical patrimony.It substituted expediency for the old economic realism, and began andended intellectually bankrupt.. . . aside from petty antagonism to[democratic principles] of Jackson -- was the vague assumption that thewell-being of the American people was dependent on governmentalpatronage; the belief that each economic group and section mustreceive its special favor, and that through tariffs and bonuses andinternal improvements the country as a whole must prosper. Of thisprinciple of special favors -- a return to the seventeenth centuryfrom which eighteenth century liberalism was a reaction -- theAmerican System of Henry Clay was the chief expression, and itremains the most significant bequest of the Whig party to ourpolitical history.
Expecting politics of mechanists to be rational is akin to expecting beliefthat eggs are the natural antecedents of chickens (where each temporalreality paradoxically is the antecedent of the other: that the logically ‘true’antecedent to both natural consequents, which has principle necessity, isdogmatically illogically denied by mechanist orthodox unitary materialistbelief?) Mechanist orthodoxy is dogmatic and hedonistic, particularly asregards ‘true’ necessary antecedence: And when in administrative control of
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 65
government, is an irrational cause of cultural havoc and devastation!Cultural change from orthodoxy is reactive and therefore ‘radical’, despiteirrationally affirmed principle antecedences, that is paradoxical.
G. P. Brockway points to the orthodox affirmed antecedent notionof rights, as illogically mechanistically applying unequally to wage-earnedlabor. And to this, he declares: there is no right that capitalists claim, thatcannot equally be claimed by labor. Labor’s unequal rights, is theeconomic result of capitalist orthodoxy, which officially affirmed economicadvantage to the capitalists’ as their exclusive right, for to serve theorthodox ‘cultural good’: one example is wage-earned pay delayed until eachwage-earned work period is completed (capitalists thereby are officiallygranted capital free loans from wage-earners that allow a continual businessadvantage to capitalists [This continuing ‘free capital,’ can be put intoproduct advertizing and lobbying (official free-speech-based awards), thatprospers business while workers, denied their earned pay, aredisadvantaged]: mechanist orthodoxy asserts that capital accumulation’s isthe exclusively owned ‘business equity’ of capitalists.
Orthodoxy, like Hesiod’s nomos are deontological ‘duty’ rather thanteleological ‘purpose.’ Teleology’s beneficial purpose is distinctlynecessary. Crises caused by duty-based deontology, can and eventuallyenergize a politics of beneficial purpose (teleology), and a huge duty-basedeconomic crisis has been building for years: the crisis embroilingconsumers’ debt, for instance. Another, involving SS surplus taxes, gave theillusion of budget surpluses that orthodox mechanists’ politically, byrhetorical fallacy, affirmed that the accumulating government surplus wastheir property since they had paid the highest revenue taxes ($2 Trillion inreduced taxes over a ten-year period was assured by the law).
The 2001 tax Bill effectively returned $1.3 billion (SS surplus taxes)that government had routinely spent as general revenue: SS contributionshad been legally allowed under revenue taxation authorities of government,and mechanist government administration had determined to return theprojected surplus, (which surplus was only because SS contribution’s taxeshad determined the projection) to those that paid the highest revenue taxes,(to prime the economy). Little if any was returned to wage-earners whomostly had paid the surplus contribution taxes. This converging politics
66 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Federal Chairman Greenspan’s actions to lower interest rates have acted positively"
to address the personal debt problem. It has allowed homeowners to increasemortgaged debt to pay off personal debt.
eventually will erupt in change.67
New York -- The bills are coming due for the shopping spree of the1990s, and Americans are having trouble paying. "
Personal debt is at an all-time high, and the amount of incomeAmericans are dedicating to making payment is at levels unseen in 15years. Mortgage delinquencies and write-offs by credit cardcompanies are rising, and personal bankruptcy filings could hit arecord.
That translates to serious financial pain for families that areoverextended at a time when unemployment is rising, experts say. Italso means that just when the cooling U.S. economy needs spendingby consumers to sustain growth, they’re hard-pressed to do so. . . .
Conservative mechanist orthodoxy has persuaded that profits from debt-based-consumer-spending during the 90s were exclusively capital ‘owned’by business while the debt was exclusively accountable to individualconsumers. Orthodoxy holds that capitalist owners are not culpable for thisproblem: which denial has no overlapping responsibility when consumer-wage-earners are laid off and have no means of repaying the debt (Aren’tpersonal bankruptcies always legally laid onto the individual?). As in thisinstance, mechanist politics privatizes profit and leaves individuals tosurvive in tyrannously turbulent debt. (George Will has often observedthis: We privatize profit and socialize debt.)
Mechanist determinist deontological ‘duty’ propels society into direconditions from which the SS social usage insurance system was born. Suchradical teleological solutions, as SS, occur, at times, to mitigate thedeontological causes of tyranny: so when will we redress problems aspersonal debt, health care, inflation?
During the mid 1980s, the SS surplus accumulation and the nationaldebt each was projected to reach $12 trillion. Accounts fail to track withthese projections, but still the SS accumulation is huge, and the federal
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 67
deficit is also large. Leonard’s advice is timely: 68
Because of [Social Security’s] extraordinary growth and scale, fewdebates about the federal budget can ignore it.The World Almanac reported these added Trust accounts and balances, atend of 1998: Disability Insurance Trust Fund, $77,087 million,Supplementary Medical Insurance, $40,889 million, and Hospital InsuranceTrust Fund, $117,113 million, Total Trust Fund balance, $888,197 million.
The following table of SS Contributions taxes and interest paid in,less Benefits paid from the Old-Age and Survivors Trust Fund, yielded thesepeeriodic factual Fund balances:
1940-98 (in millions)
year SS taxes Net Int. Benefits paid Fund balance
1940 $550 $42 $16 $1745
1950 2106 257 727 12893
1960 9843 517 10270 20829
1970 29955 1350 26268 32616
1980 97608 1886 100626 24566
1990 261506 14143 218948 203445
1995 289529 31417 288607 447946
1996 317157 34026 299968 499479
1997 342312 37689 312862 567395
1998 364871 42198 324256 653108
Facts and reason-based knowledge is an effective armament againstorthodox political deontology that will, because of dogmatic mechanistideology, if allowed, misuses the SS’s Funds. Reasoned knowledge is theonly teleological foundation for knowledge-based understanding ofbeneficent purposes intended officially to be applied, which improve, i.e.,offset specific mechanist influenced deficiencies in the mechanist delivered
68 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
SS System. This physis-based reality must become commonly understoodin order for knowledge to politically coexist within the mechanist ideology’spolitical intent, which dogmatically, legally has considered SS surpluscontributions as the government’s revenue, to be used as government wills.An orthodox irrationalism employs demagoguery to skew statisticalprojections which generally are based on consequential realities affirmed asprinciple: yielding ideal projections affirmed as ‘intended reality,’ in whichparadoxical mechanist ‘duty’ rather than teleological ‘purpose’ prevails:69
post hoc, ergo propter hoc. ‘After this, therefore because of this.’Strictly, the fallacy of inferring that one event is caused by anothermerely because it comes after it. More loosely, the fallacy(characteristic of superstitious beliefs) of assuming too readily that anevent that follows another is caused by it without considering factorssuch as counter-evidence or the possibility of a common cause.(Causality.) The name appears to derive from Aristotle’s Rhetoric(1401 29-34). Dr Penelope Mackie‘Necessary’ realities of SS cannot logically be concluded from demagogedidealized projections and trends. For instance, mechanist officials constantlyassert fallacies, as the following, as fact:
‘When the BabyBoom retires, there will not be enough workers tosupport them in retirement.’ [mechanist opposition to SS, sing as achorus, this ‘false’ conclusion, which only has opinion-based proof ]SS’s political opposition asserted this fallacy when SS was first adopted,reasserted it during the 1980s, and now, often reasserts it despite factualevidences that categorically, it is false. And, in 1983-84, this fallaciousassertion embroiled the official retirement discussion, which involved a minidemographic birth boom: the “notch babies.” This aberrant evidencecertifies this political fallacy. *
* SS had reached maturity coincidently with the problem of retiring a higherthan usual population (the notch babies born between 1918-1926), whichfact had put a heavier than ususal cost burden on the pay-as-you-go SS
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 69
But it was the notch babies that drew the mechanist political short straw of"
this scenario: their SS benefits were lower than usual and corrective actionnever occurred.
system. The mechanist persuaded Congress had changed the fiscal year,"
adding months of SS expenses, without adding months of contribution taxrevenues to the fiscal 1984 accounting period: with the federal governmentfiscally running huge yearly deficits, this mechanist politics shiftedblame onto the SS system for facing eminent Bankruptcy.
Then, upon this mechanist scenario, the SS contribution taxes were revisedto also collect SS surpluses (with expressed intent to convert SS to a pay-for-yourself system. However, none of this collected SS surplus (firstcollected in 1984) became distributed to pay equal SS benefits to the ‘notchbabies’. And, on this mechanist conservative result, the above mentionedinfamous assertion was made: in 2030, only two workers per beneficiarywill exist to support surviving beneficiaries of the BabyBooms’ 77million persons. The mollifying facts and circumstances are these:70
--- First, this about the Census Bureau’s infamous 1983 projection: 71
The ratio of the working age population . . . to the retirement agepopulation will begin an unprecedented decline. The nation had 5.3people of working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older. The ratiois projected to drop to 4.7 in 2000 and to 2.4 in 2080.The only fact of this hypothesized statistical scenario is this: ‘The nationhad 5.3 people of working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older.’ Allelse is believed and asserted fiction based demagoguery of a trend that hadjust ended with the SS system’s maturity: in fact, however, the SS system’sworker to retiree ratio had settled due to the SS system’s maturity. With thenow mature SS system, facts show clearly that the ratio did not drop in2000. Instead, it improved! And by shifting retirement eligibility to agesixty-seven, keeps the ratio at or above 4.39:1, close to (5.3:1), the factualratio recorded in 1982. --- Second, examining the ‘whys’ of the trend’s projected failurerevealed ‘true’ reasons and coherence of the now mature SS System.
SS did not reach its relative maturity until the late ‘70s. It began
70 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
in 1935, and gradually matured as an increasing count of beneficiariesreached age 65: until a full beneficiary complement became qualified forretirement benefits, the system was not mature. Workers qualifying forSS benefits in 1940 were born sixty five years earlier. With each passingyear, a fresh complement of qualified beneficiaries came on line and the SSsystem approached maturity (With a full complement of eligible retirees) inthe late1970s coincident with the mini-boom reality of ‘notch babies’eligible to retire. Before 1980, statistics are not and cannot be made typicalof the mature SS system, i.e., systemic coherence, fails as necessarysystemic reality. For instance, back when the average age of mortality was50, the number of workers, when compared to those 65 and older, was large(And as our young nation began, the ratio probably could have exceeded200:1), but this declining trend has no logical nexus to SS in the twenty firstcentury. To assume or assert that requirements for SS now has to do withcomparative demographics in 1945 (42 workers existed for every qualifiedretiree) or any year since, also has no relative significance to the now matureSS system. And while the ratio in 1982 (5.3:1), might, for various reasons,be a little high, in reality, it is a benchmark (a standard) of the nowmature SS system. Recent demographic facts prove the ratio did not dropin 2000 as, in ‘82, was officially and fallaciously projected. Then, with theshift to age 67 (other circumstances of change were not considered), itremains above 4.39. My model, shows these ratios:
YearAges
1990 2000 2010 2015 2025 2050
18-64 5.15 5.88 6.06 5.29 4.22 5.43
18-66 5.23 6.13 6.29 5.49 4.39 5.59
(the shaded ratios apply and the applicable ratio for 2015 is between 5.29and 5.49 depending the system’s conversion to age 67)--- Thirdly, to infer a standard of circumstantial mortality, thefollowing graph of mortality rates for 1992 (with the CSO table for agesbeyond age 80) is as close to future reality as was then possible. And on thisbasis, the retired population standard, of my model, is based on empirical1990's census mortality demographics.
The U.S. Department of Commerce furnished the information about
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 71
the 1990's population, ages 65 years and older: They distributed72
31,078,895 individual by age, as shown by the graph (the age range, of thispopulation, is greater than the BabyBoom’s twenty year age range).
For those truly interested in the SS System’s viability, this empirical-factualinformation provides a critical benchmark: those, who in 1990 were sixtyfive years and older, were born before 1926. The graph’s retired birthcomplement in 1990, spans the birth years’ 1890 (100 years old) to 1925(65years old): Thirty five birth years, compared to the BabyBoom’s 20 yearage span, will only slightly increase the count of living over age sixty fivepopulation during the retirement years of the BabyBoom: maybe the realityof adding ten years to both the front and back end of the BabyBoom,represents comparability to inferring the BabyBoom’s special financialretirement needs: comparatively then, the BabyBoom is like 1990'sretirements. From this empirical information, a theoretical standard forcounting retirees in 2025, say, should be close to the modified ratio, BabyBoom: John-Mary’s twenty year population, i.e, (77:55) times 31.08 million(factual retirees in 1990), or, 43.5 million retirees in the peak year of the
72 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
BabyBoom’s retirement (without considering the reduction due to shiftingeligibility to age 67): peak retirement load is of short duration.
About mortality tables, which statistically are stable, we can say that in1990, mortality claimed 21.8 % of the population born 65 years earlier. Wecan also say that as worker longevity increases, the natural pattern ofmortality will shift but not change materially. And we can say that, in 1990,life’s mean duration following age 65 was a little more than ten years. Also,if, the average duration of wage-earning years (paying SS contributionstaxes) was 40 years, then by deduction, one worker’s contributions duringthose 40 years, apportions to nearly 4 SS beneficiaries [However, not allthose over age 65 qualify to receive SS benefits (mid-1960's, about 62million persons held jobs covered by Social Security on an average day.They worked for about 4.3 million employers. More than 19 millionpersons were receiving monthly benefits. Retired workers totaled 10.3million ) Effectively, then, the ratio of workers to retirees in 1982 was not73
the one on one situation, which had yielded the ratio 5.3:1, as asserted, but,instead, the real ratio was closer to 20:1. And with the shift in retirementeligibility from age 65 to 67, this age shift will offset some of the naturalshift occurring in longevities. Probably, therefore, another age shift will notbe needed during the BabyBooms’ retirement. The workers to retirementratios are sure to improve due to the shift in age eligibility to age 67.--- Fourthly, the system’s maturity, regarding expanding benefits’eligibility, must be evaluated. In 1990, retirees comprised those bornbetween 1925 (age 65) and 1890 (100). Only one spouse, generallyqualified for full SS benefits. More women now, are working, making themalso eligible for retirement benefits?
SS continues to mature. The mid 1960's account described the thirty-year-old SS System. Often, and appropriately, we call SS a ‘revenue machine.’SS began in 1935 and old age security (OAS) payments began in 1940: 74
By the mid-1960's, about 62 million persons held jobs covered bySocial Security on an average day. They worked for about 4.3 millionemployers. More than 19 million persons were receiving monthlybenefits. Retired workers totaled 10.3 million and had three millioneligible dependents receiving benefits. Disability beneficiaries totaled
Inflation’s cost, put onto SS, must be recompensed 73
820,000 and had 620,000 eligible dependents. Survivor beneficiariestotaled 4.3 million including 2.0 million aged widows, 1.8 millionorphaned children, and 460,000 mothers of such children. Benefitpayments for 1963 totaled $15.4 billion and total contributionsamounted to $15.6 billion. Assets of the trust fund amounted to$20.7 billion. [Retired workers (10.3 million) ÷ (total population over age65), represents a measure of SS’s maturity]
Note the ratio: 62 million potential worker-contributors to 19 millionbeneficiaries; one on one, 3.26 workers existed per beneficiary (and thelower SS contribution tax rates in ‘65 were adequate to pay SS benefits tothe 19 million beneficiaries. The total population, 65 and over (whichincluded some spouses, which had survived expired wage-earners), was in1962 less than 18 million. The proliferation of nonworker SSbeneficiaries is a great social problem that, equitably, should receivebroader financial support than the SS contribution taxes. And for thispolitics had made SS an integral part of welfare. However, when the welfareprograms were changed, politics failed to redress the welfare portions of SS.
---- With the welfare reforms of the ‘90s, was the welfare put onto SSredressed? (However, welfare put onto SS, is not related to the fallacy,which expects 80 million octogenarians to receive SS checks in 2025! ; thisfallacious expectation simply resulted from a published error!) 75
After operating thirty years and considering that the count of retiredworker-beneficiaries was 10.3 million (while the total retired population wasabout 18 million), the system’s maturity had reached only .57. By 1978, SShad realized its reasonable maturity plateau. And while maturation of the SSsystem was expected, explaining to workers that contribution taxes had tobe increased to pay the increasing benefits of system’s maturity was maybeimpossible. Political opposition -- conservative political flux that hadcaused the system to be pay-as you-go (no accumulation of reserves) -- nowrationalized to indict systemic failure. And this active orthodox flux can besuspected of complicities embroiling the SS Law of 1983.
While it is true that eligibility expansions (particularly the increase inworking women) might push the count of SS eligible retirees upwards, 80million simply is factually impossible. The BabyBoom’s birth counts are
74 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
recorded. We know quite accurately what they are. And we have goodreason to rely on mortality. Seventy seven-million births of the BabyBoomare spread over twenty years. And the peak ten birth years, aged to SSretirement benefits’ eligibility, represent a fertility aberration that theaftermath of war and depression had caused.
Between 2022 and 2025 the greatest benefits’ drain on SS funds willconfront SS: workers per retiree ratios, however, remains comparable to themature standard cited for 1982. So, mortality will have claimed one ofeach five births, at age 65 (The mortality effect on BabyBoom’s seventy-seven million birth count will at least be reduced to sixty million, as ifall were born in the same year, which they were not). If at age 70, fifty-two million; age 80, twenty-two million and 85, less than three million. Wecan say, therefore, that the BirthBoom will essentially pass from temporalreality within twenty years of retirement. Say, the mean occurs within tenyears of retirement. Therefore, the mortality mean, at age seventy five,reduces the BabyBoom’s SS retirement benefit effects, to a population ofabout forty million. In the five years’ following age sixty five, mortalityclaims more than 10 percent of remaining population. Research shows that
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 75
incomes that effectively were either above the cap for SS"
contributions or were from sources other than wages, and therefore, didnot contribute to the SS contribution taxes surpluses
shifting to age sixty-seven will reduce the retirement population by nearlysix million. At most, therefore, the retirement population during theBabyBoom’s retirement years might not exceed thirty-five million. 1990'scensus count of thirty-one million is close.--- And ultimately, while my analysis anteceded the general revenueTax Bill of 2001, my reaction to it is now added:
The Tax Bill of 2001 was a general revenue tax reduction act that returned$1.3 trillion, as President Bush said, ‘to those that paid the revenue taxes’(only upper income tax payers got tax repayment checks). Nothing was"
done to redress SS surplus contribution taxes. And, therefore, additional taxadjustments are required to provide equity to low income wage-earners thatsince 1984 contributed more than $3 trillion to fund government’soperations. As of 2000, $2 trillion is inflation’s cost that mechanistpolitics assigned to SS contribution taxes (This politics infers that SScaused inflation): besides the $1 trillion in SS surplus contributions thatgovernment spent as general revenue (SS contribution tax is an “onbudget” item), Congress has routinely, fallaciously adjusted the SS taxrates to include inflation’s anticipated benefits’ cost. Wage-earnerscontributed to SS surplus, which government routinely spends. And theygot nothing from the 2001-08 tax rebates. This mechanist deontologicalpolitical idealism first began with the presidential election of 1980: SupplySide politics (voodoo economics) achieved high end tax rate reductions,which government granted in 1981 The Clinton Administration reversed thisaction in 1993). Then, again in 2001 $1.3 trillion of anticipated surplus(there was no actual revenue surplus) was ‘returned’ to the high endtaxpayers. Since 2001, the reduced tax rates were again applied to the selectgroup (mechanist ideology, even in the face of high annual deficitscontinued to assert that reduced high end taxes are proper’). And, Congresscontinued to routinely spend, as government’s revenue, the SS contributionsurplus. Tax law made these high end tax reductions apply through 2010.
76 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
255 ’Teflon-coated mechanist lies’ (deontological ‘Duty sans Purpose’)[Ideology (mechanist duties), sans teleology (principle-basedpurposes), i.e., myriad consequential organic paradoxes]
Ideology-based explanations, i.e., pernicious untruths about unprecedentedfederal deficits, Social Security’s causal culpability, and supply sideeconomics, were endemic to political exploits conducted from the USPresident’s office. I wondered, was a ‘smoking gun’ of deception lurkingin the obtrusive political rhetoric? My research asked this: “what economiccausal problems lie ahead?” : this answer became factually confirmed whenin 1987 David Stockman, President Reagan’s budget director, wrote this ofa time shortly following the huge high end Reagan tax cut of 1981:76
So there we sat looking at a fiscal shambles, heading for a monstrousdeficit in excess of $300 billion by the middle of the decade. And inmarched Donald T. Regan, Paul Craig Roberts, Jack Kemp, JudeWanniski, Art Laffer, and Irving Kristol [“gurus” of Supply-side
Economics], saying, “We're still not wrong. Stand pat. It will goaway.”
Mechanists’ supply-side Economics and the Laffer Curve wereextolled with promises to improve the nation’s economy, as had happenedin the early ‘60s under President Kennedy. Conservatives, notably GeorgeBush (Senior), Reagan’s vice president, had called the unproved supply sidetheory ‘Voodoo Economics.’ But, then pressing economic concerns, asburdened by unprecedented inflation, pressed for political expedience?Hyping the new economic theory became sophistry of the expediencerequired to sustain public support for 1981's grand general-revenue-tax-cut(and dismal failure did not daunt this mechanist dogmatic theoreticalsophistry, as repeated in 2001 and on, until it is repealed, maybe sometimeduring the Obama administration). Time was then needed to allow the 1981tax-cut to work its ‘Laffer Curve’ magic. Instead of magic, however,mounting federal deficits began to accumulate (tripling Reagan’s inheriteddeficit, to $3 trillion in 1988).
Politically, an offsetting grand revenue tax increase became law in1984: the SS Contributions Tax Law that political rhetoric had emphaticallydenied was a revenue tax increase, became tax law. Reagan’s administration
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 77
Shortfalls in SS were more directly related to Congress’ administrative shift"
in the fiscal accounting year for Social Security operations.
suppressed appurtenant information about this SS surplus revenue tax. Bythis deliberate ‘act of omission,’ had Reagan lied? : the wage-earning publicwas never informed that the surplus SS Contribution Taxes were designedto fill a federal revenues budgetary deficiency. And, nothing in PresidentReagan’s campaigning for president aligned him as SS’s friend. His interestwas political, which also led to the unenlightened public strategy. That SSsurplus tax contributions, used as general revenue, were cruciallyneeded to replace general revenues lost by the income tax cut of 1981,was never officially acknowledged. But instead, public disclosuresfocused on fateful forecasts of the SS system’s financial crises. And this"
sophistry diverted public attention, from the federal deficits, to the frivolousconcern of SS’s eminent failure, even bankruptcy. This assertedauthoritative pseudo fact, has persisted as detrimental paradoxical politics,from the early '80s, now reaching beyond 2006.
Ironically, neo con. political assertions also distorted factual truth: i.e., sansconcern for individual constitutional rights, as evident in the indicting andimpeachment of President Clinton over a personal consensual affair: TheBill of Rights clearly had amended the Constitution to protect individualsfrom such abusive prosecution by government (as if John Adams hadn’treasoned, human rights as coeval of laws and government): only humanrights (sovereignty), properly consented, are the antecedent principle ofConstitutions and governments. Despite the plethora of pseudo laws, edicts,and authorities (particularly legal), acting contrarily, without administrativecompliance to the constitutionally antecedent principle of public consent, allorganic coercion is unjust. As contemporary neo cons’ did, Whigs had alsoignored Jefferson and Lincoln’s principle-based admonitions, however, nowlogical tautology is available to reasonable persons’ truth testing ofparadoxical matters. No longer is there a logical excuse for dogmaticallydenying the only constitutionally antecedent principle of our nation’sdemocracy, or to affirm expedient consequents, however legal theideological authoritative assertion may be: only, political adherents ofJeffersonian philosophy-based democracy (as Lincoln, a staunch free soil
78 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
democrat *) have preserved this constitutional antecedent principle ofgovernment which clearly makes the human spiritual faculties of reason thelogical antecedent axiom to all human materialities. This axiomaticprinciple must be respected organically for to represent ‘true’ distributivejustice sans paradox.
* In a letter to H. L. Prince, Lincoln cited Jefferson’s logical fidelity, hisdedication to naturally antecedent first principles.77
“Remembering . . . that the Jefferson party was formed upon itssupposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding therights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior . . . it willbe . . . interesting to note how completely the two [parties] havechanged hands as to the principles upon which they were originallysupposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold the liberty ofone man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another’sright to property [as Democrats’ politics of slavery had done];Republicans on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar, butin case of conflict the man before the dollar [is Lincoln’s ‘true’ appraisal
of Jeffersonian democracy]. . . . But, soberly, it is now no child’s playto save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.. . . The principles of Jefferson are the principles and axioms of freesociety and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show ofsuccess. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Anotherbluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies!’ And others insidiously arguethat they apply to ‘superior races.’ These expressions, differing inform, are identical in object and effect -- the supplanting theprinciples of free government, and restoring those of classification,caste, and legitimacy. . . . They are the vanguard, the miners andsappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them or they willsubjugate us.” [By returning our nation to Sixteenth century dogmatism]
---- ‘What the King says, or does, is just!’ This dogmatic authoritativefallacy represents what Historian Will Durant wrote this about:
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 79
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find nonew truth because we take some venerable but questionableproposition as the indubitable starting point (the affirmed principle),and never think about putting this assumption itself to a test ofobservation or experiment. Will Durant
Critically reasoned principles of liberty and justice were fallaciouslysupplanted by dogma as, for instance, “the divine right of justice -- ‘voxjusticiae vox dei’”-- that Tory-Federalist-Whigs sponsored for importationto America. Neither is this dogmatic belief-based justice, based on truthfitted for knowledge and morality, nor for democracy. Pure beneficentjustice rests as a Desiderius of those tyrannized by the Tory-Federalist-Whigdogmatic retributive justice practiced in the U.S. (This does not mean thatU.S. justice is bad when compared to all others, but it can and must becomebetter, with implementations of distributive justice.’)
However, when justice comports to dogma-based ‘positive’ laws,the tenets of dogmas are made the master of reasoned principles. Withjustice not reasonable, the stress of great frustration and paradoxicalmechanist tyrannies are authoritatively spread onto humanity. Whenrationalization is the basis of laws, forms of ‘divine right,’ which conflatesreason to forms of unitary materialism, quiets (conflates) the naturalprinciples of reason. Injustice describes the result! And, in cultures ofdogma-based mind conditioning, for instance, culture restrains theinculcation of reason-based understanding of truth, and morality. Wasn’tChrist martyred because of this cultural condition?
Pseudo truths sans systemic coherent ‘trueness’ are endemic of politicallyasserted ideological prescriptions: particularly, this criticism applies to thepolitical prescriptions that deliberately misled public perceptions to believethat SS’s failure was eminent. What was ‘true,’ however, was that theHumphrey-Hawkins law had failed under Carter and was summarily ignoredunder Reagan: inflation pillages SS similarly, but doubly, as it pillages alleconomic consumption under the paternalistic mechanisms of politicaleconomy as licensed by the states of the federal government. And, thosesystemically granted unequal political economy privileges, are the pillagersthat inflation covertly rewards. Government’s greatest fault under President
80 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
By this sophistry, politics succeeded in escaping perceptions of the huge tax"
increase put onto wages earned while high incomes received great tax relief.
Carter was having failed to solve the systemic mechanist inflation problem.President Reagan’s deontological neo con theory-based Administrationfallaciously affirmed inflation’s endemism as a rightful propertied advantageof affluence, while doubly rewarding high end taxpayers with revenue taxrelief. Anyway, truthfully, SS cannot be blamed for causing inflation!General revenues, as collected from those that gain financially frominflation’s endemism, as licensed by government, should be made torepay the inflation costs that irrationally were put onto the SScontribution taxes. The following statement, as quoted farther on,quantifies inflations devastating effect: The CPI shows that the cost of goodsand services rose from .539 in 1945 to 5.291 in 2001 (about ten fold).
By 1985, the first full year of SS ‘surplus’ contribution tax revenue,taxes flowing to the federal government had equaled the revenue flow in1980, erasing the shortfall caused by 1981 tax cuts. Revenue shortfalls ofthis tax cut were offset and eventually would be reversed by thecontributions’ tax revenue surpluses, paid by wage-earners. But expendituresfor armaments had sharply increased: making the 1980's deficits largely ifnot primarily caused by the armaments buildup (political spin then claimedthis huge contingent government expenditure had won the Cold War; morecandidly, however, David Stockman, allowed that the USSR had, asirrationally, reached financial ruin before the U.S. did). A research taxfoundation showed that SS contribution tax surplus since 1984, in 1985completely offset revenue lost by the 1981 tax cut: first-dollar SS wage-earned income taxation had completely offset revenue lost by the 1981 highend revenue tax reductions: taxes collected in 1985 equaled taxes collectedin 1980: political sophistries irrationally, emphatically had distinguished SScontribution taxes from general-revenue taxes."
Tax Freedom Day1980 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx1984 xxxxxxxxxx1985 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
All tax revenues are collected by the US treasury and noted by their source.
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 81
(1967 = 1.00), what cost $ .41 in 1935, cost $ 5.29 in 2001, i.e., what"
cost $1.00 in 1935, cost $12.90 in 2001.
In 1993, SS was taken ‘Off Budget,’ however, SS contribution taxescontinued as federal budget’ revenue. SS ‘Off Budget’ distinction came inresponse to intents of the ‘84 SS law, ordering that SS expenditures were tobe taken ‘Off Budget.’ In 1993, SS became a separate independentlyaccounted department of government with surplus contribution tax revenuecontinuing as budgeted revenue.
Neo con. politics had instilled, as public ‘expectation,’ that the SS surpluscontribution-taxes were not a form of general-revenue taxes (however, whenSS was legally ratified as a form of government’s taxation authority, theSupreme Court had decided that SS taxation was legal, only as a general-revenue tax). Cut the economic dogma, and the class privileges, which arebased on the dogma, and the 1984 SS contribution-tax law is the greatestgeneral revenue tax increase ever made: this most regressive, firstdollar, taxation system ever devised, applies only to low end wage-earners. And thereby, government conscripts wage-earners to paydoubly for inflation that government has failed to control. Wage-earnerspay for inflation when they consume to subsist, and again when paying SScontribution taxes to cover inflation affected SS retirement benefits.
What causes Inflation?
The CPI shows that the cost of goods and services rose from .539 in 1945to 5.291 in 2001: for every dollar contributed to SS in 1945, $9.82 is78 "
required in 2002. Productive efficiencies that affected wages earned,resulted in profits to capitalists while inflation (the insidious and perniciouseconomic effect that causally was effected by rich mens political economy’spaternalism of granted rights and privileges), is dogmatically an endemiceconomic disease for which the poor economic class mechanistically is dupe,made to suffer. SS taxation of first dollar wages is mostly now a tax oninflation over which wage-earners neither caused nor have control: and,therefore, logically shouldn’t be made to pay. Those who are the cause ofinflation should be made to pay for it! And government should fulfill theHumphrey-Hawkins law’s requirements: as the Constitution instructs,
82 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Congress ‘to set the standards of trade.’
Whatever causes prices to increase inordinately in the static ‘circularflow’ of wages and profits, goods and services, causes inflation. AdamSmith indicted business monopoly of any sort as a prime source. PresidentEisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. Forbes’ list ofthe nation’s richest, points to a select few whose primary income is not fromwages earned and therefore pay nothing to offset inflation’s endemictaxation that fallaciously government put onto wages earned, while incomethat is non earned benefits directly from inflation. Surely President Bushand Vice President Cheney are not listed on Forbes’ list of the rich andpowerful, however, their 2003 assets were declared at $21 and $38 millionrespectively. Therefore, they also represent inflation’s prime causal source:corporate stock, when initiated is nominally priced, then as publiclytraded mysticly grows to the level as set by willing buyers.
Fiat money is printed to serve the utility of exchanging goods andservices. But when investment bankers misuse their license to loan fiatmoney to effect leveraged buy-outs of corporations, they misuse their licenseand as well money that is the economy’s utility, which also is the nation’seconomic utility: the corporate buy-out process achieves to convertaccumulated corporate capital into private money hoards of far greater valueequivalence than the fiat money borrowed to effect the buy-outs, the newstock owners thereby reap great profits after paying off their short term
borrowing: this ideological use of legalized economic causal mechanismgreatly feeds inflation. Illegal money laundering and counterfeiting alsoare great causes of inflation.79
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of theircitizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning theexisting basis of society than to debauch the currency. The processengages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side ofdestruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a millionis able to diagnose. Keynes
Politically, wage-earners must assert their constitutional rights to fair
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 83
taxation: inflation must be paid for by those who profit from it.
The inflation cost put onto SS is easily calculated by the CPI. In2001, for instance, the CPI was at 9.82: meaning that goods that once cost$1.00 (in 1935) now (in 2001) cost $9.82. The proportion of wage earnerscontributions’ cost, caused by inflation’s endemism, can be calculated by theratio 1 to 9.82, meaning that for each dollar of “true” SS systemic cost,$9.82 is inflation’s endemism related that not causally but expediently andassertively was put onto SS. All inflation’s endemism belongs to generalrevenue taxation and not to SS contribution taxes. For 1980, the inflation’sendemism ratio was 1 to 4.62, 1985, 1 to 5.98, 1990, 1 to 7.26, 1995, 1 to8.47.
OAS Contributions (in millions) 80
YEAR CONTRIB RATIO INFLATION
1970 $30,256 est. $22,692
1980 103,456 1: 4.62 80,903
1990 267,530 1: 7.26 230,680
1996 321,557 1: 8.47 283,863
1997 349,946 est. 308,360
1998 371,207 est. 327,381
1999 396,352 est. 349,558
2000 421,391 1: 9.82 378,480
SS contribution taxes due to inflation constitute the greatest portion of theSS cost that is irrationally put onto wage-earners’ SS contribution taxes.The government’s total debt to SS, for failing to control inflation, exceeds$1.5 trillion for the decade of the ‘80s, $3 trillion for the decade of the ‘90s
84 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
And similar sophist duplicity contends that inflation’s cost, the"
causality of which relates to licenses granted by government as
and will far exceed $4 trillion for the first decade of the Twenty Firstcentury. When added to the accumulating surplus, which will not be neededfor reasonable purposes of SS, that if a property of those that paid, then isowed to wage-earners, government’s total debt owed by 2010 will exceed$10 trillion. Paying for this erroneous tax burden belongs exclusively tothose that benefitted from inflation: those to whom the tax returns of 1981,2001 through 2006 and beyond, were irrationally returned.
The Reagan administration emphatically, dogmatically held to theopinion that SS contribution-taxes were completely separate from revenuetaxes: all accounts of discussions of the general tax cuts in 1981 and 1985were emphatically distinct from the 1984 increase in SS contribution-taxes.In stark contrast, while campaigning for the presidency, a deontologicalpolitical priority had focused on cutting Entitlements (meaning SS anMedicare). Reagan campaigned hard for this. But, when faced withinsufficient money in the federal till, he reversed his politics and vowed topreserve the SS System. If this was not a political flip flop from ‘cuttingentitlements’ -- and with impending legacies of unprecedented federaldeficits -- it surely is an example of the irrationalism, which Immanuel Kantexposed regarding popular ideologically dogmatic mechanist determinism:because determinism was contingent upon experience, therefore, is notnaturally necessary (principle), it ideologically is irrationally asserted asnecessary reality. Kant called this, synthetic a priori: an irrationalism basedon experience that happened before any possible human experience.Kierkegard would say it is irrationalism that never gets beyond dogmaticfaith. Anyway, no official orthodoxy has considered reducing SScontributions-tax rates. And this shows that deontological ethics is akin todeterminism, which is ‘duty’ bound without teleological ‘probity’ of‘purpose.’
Excepting orthodox political sophistry’s duplicity that at oncecontends that SS contributions are not a tax, while also contending thatsurplus SS contributions are required to cover government’s expenditures,no reasonable connection between SS and the federal Budget exists! And"
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 85
influenced by political economy, and the settlement of which is born bywage-earned production and consumption, must not be settled by taxingthe causal sources. After all, this would subordinate the irrationallicenses.
as Medicare’s tax is piggybacked onto the SS contribution’s tax, the samedisconnect applies. However, general revenue supports Medicaid, Part B ofMedicare, and possibly “welfare” that was added to the SS System (Thewelfare additions to SS presented fundamental deontological flaws to theteleological SS system and therefore diminish SS’s rationally quintessentialbrilliance).
As 1998 ended, SS disclosed these facts: (1) 48 million benefit checks arepaid each month, and (2) 145 million wage-earners pay contribution taxes.Population facts for 1998 show 26 million natural born, of ages 65-93,eligible to receive ‘full’ benefits. Therefore, checks paid to another 22million must be for early retirees (those of ages 62-64), spouses or minors,or disabled dependents, or to immigrants that participated. The systemicproblems for SS reach far beyond preparing for the demographics of theBabyBoom. The political question of factual pertinence is this: should‘welfare’ costs be put onto the broader base of general revenue taxes insteadof as at present only onto SS contribution taxes? All questions aboutwelfare and ancillary SS insurance should be separated from the retirement-benefit consideration: if they cannot be removed or shifted to other morecompatibly management forums in which the public’s need for clear andconcise information is less critical, reasonably, they each should beconsidered separately, on their own merits, and publicly disclosed.
Substantial and blatantly sophists’ political doubletalk embroils theSS issues. The public must be aware of and concerned with the politicalideological sophistries’ irrationalism. Unless, of course, contribution-taxpaying wage-earner-consumers remain acquiescent: stand apart from theissues, to allow the SS System again to be the acquisitive hunter’s political‘pigeon,’ of deontological and exploitative politics. As, after all, thelegislation for the Social Security contribution-tax increases, initiatedand rejected during Carter's administration, had become conveniently,supposedly neutral of partisan politics, society should, therefore, not
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hang blame for this sophistry only onto Reagan-neo conservatives. D.A. Stockman wrote about President Reagan and prominent Congressmen:
Social Security, the centerpiece of the American welfare state, wasoverwhelmingly affirmed in the white heat of political confrontation.Claude Pepper: Eighty year-old folk hero of the radical senior activistgroups. Bob Michel: He tried to keep the Republicans on board butcouldn’t. Tip O’Neil: He helped the intimidated politicians stop theReagan Revolution dead in its tracks. Senator Moynihan: My formerrabbi led the charge in defense of SS status quo. This was truly thetriumph of politics.And about Stockman leaving Reagan’s Administration,
When I finally left the White House, in August 1985, the President hadaccepted but never understood the revolution I had brought to him onthe eve of his election. And he had no idea of the failure I was leavingbehind.Reagan’s Vice President, Bush (senior) called this revolution voodooeconomics. Its first ‘chapter,’ accomplished in 1981, the deficitprojection ($1.9 trillion through 1990 ) was discerned.81 82
To convince it really was as bad as I was saying, I invented amultiple-choice budget quiz. The regular briefings weren’t doing thejob. . . . The quiz allowed him systematically to look at the whole$900 billion budget, to see it brick-by brick. . . . He sat there day afterday with his pencil. . . . After making all his cuts, the deficit remained. . . staggering . . .. [At a following meeting] When the discussionturned to taxes, his fist came squarely on the table. “I don’t want tohear any more talk about taxes,” he insisted. “The problem is‘deficit spending!”
It is difficult politely to correct the President of the UnitedStates when he has blatantly contradicted himself. The . . . deficitswere the result of the spending he didn’t want to cut. . . . The spendingbar was at 24.5 percent of GNP and the revenue bar with existingtaxes was at 18.9 percent of GNP. The deficit bar for 1986 absorbed72 percent of net private savings, ‘crowding out investment and
255 the teflon-coated mechanist lie 87
economic growth.’With the political change in 1992, the teleological applications are
evident in the more consistent level of government’s expenditures. Reaganand Bush’s deontology went only so far as their dogmatically fantasist faith.In this faith, their dogma had fallaciously supplanted necessary economicprinciple, while bereft of constitutionally teleological purposes to the wholeof society. The faith-based political deontology was burdened withconflated unitary materialist, mechanist bias, therefore, was fallacy, the truthvalue of which was firmly ‘false.’ Their policies were, as Christ suggested,in darkness and lying. Clinton reintroduced fiscal teleology that had the endpurpose of holding expenses in line with revenues, to allow economicgrowth to wipe out the deficits.
President George W. Bush has returned us to the materialist Faith-based deontology: dutifully asserting private systemic affluence as thefallacious antecedent principle of funding government’s end purposes:cutting tax-based revenue from society’s affluent without concern for naturalteleology requiring strict balance between government’s revenues andexpenses. Again, huge deficits are accumulating for as long as themechanist deontological politics prevails.
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During the ‘80's, the bogie of the ‘Cold War,’ then became the bogieof terrorism, then as the bogie of preemptive war with Iraq, has politicallydistracted society’s attention away from teleology. This political bogiecontinues to make fear more politically popular than any reality of threat ofdanger to Americans’ lives..
256 Preserving Economic Baby(Coping with political mechanisms’ economic paradoxes)
To mitigate the legally licensed mechanist exploitative deontologicalresult of government’s fiction-based American System mechanisms,’ socialusage programs are required. However, infusing mitigating teleologies isalways vigorously met with mechanist politics of those directly benefittingfrom the mechanist deontology, which is ‘in the graph’s pudding.’ Thereality is, however, that this deontology has a foundation that whiletemporal, is real and pertinent to the temporal state of life. And thisfoundation must be preserved, not destroyed! Materiality has an equallogical place in this temporal setting.
We have deontological workers’ compensation, pensions, insurance,and teleological Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. We have aConstitution which specifies a Bill of Rights and equal protection under law.
256 Preserving Economic Baby 89
However, we lack common philosophical opinions (politics is oftenirrational) to support the original American teleology of ‘equal protection’under law (as Categorical Imperative that it is supposed to be). And, to beeffective, is an essential for democratic teleology. But, while casting out thedirty bath water (irrational materialist-mechanist dogma endemic of thefallacious belief that axiomatically was supplanted for constitutionalteleology, with the effect that it was then made the antecedent of teleology),we must still preserve this materialist deontological ‘economic baby’:The American System of Political Economy. And this is why centristpolitics, with rationally antecedent principles instilled, are of necessityto temporal philosophical democracy: only democracy offers rationallybalanced philosophy that regards the spiritual and the material aspects ofhuman life. Irrationally, socialism, fascism and capitalism aggrandizeunitary materialism, which conflates life’s sum (spiritual essence), therebydenying, belittling, or equivocating it. Look again at the income distribution graph above. Particularlylook at the 1996 results. The highest quintile’s increase was almost equalto the 2nd quintile’s total share. Holistically, increases in this highestquintile must result from offsetting decreases in the other quintiles:systemically, suppressing low end salaries and wages resulted in increasesfreely given at the top. This phenomenon shows top salaries increasedgreatly during the decade ending in 1996 (In 2002 Congress gave tothemselves a 5 percent increase while the SS benefits COLA was held to 1.2percent). The grand 1981 tax rate reduction allowed the higher quintiles tokeep far more of their grand income shares. Higher end incomes not onlybenefitted from tax rate reductions, they had income increases that nearlyequaled the second quintiles total income. The 1984 SS contribution taxincrease, reclaimed the government’s revenue lost by the ‘81 tax ratereduction. In 2001 tax relief was again given to top end income withoutconcern for the holistic effect of it.
Our systemic culprits are deontological in nature. And solutionsmust give way to teleological balancing purposes. Still, in the way, vastlyincreased expenditures for armaments are the federal deficit’s main culprits.And with the 2001 (and again in 2003-2007-?) deontological rationalizedirrationalism of refunded taxes to high end incomes: refunded only to thosein the middle to highest income quintiles, represents a grand political heist
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from economy that only SS surpluses had sustained. Should SS‘sregressive taxation now apply to all income? And, if so, with inflation’scost mechanistically put onto SS benefits then paid by general revenue taxes,a much lower SS contributions tax rate would be required! Thecontributions’ tax bite on wages could be cut by more than 80 percent. Andthis reduced SS system’s true cost then isolates the inflation endemism,which mechanistically is put onto consumption and thereby effects SSbenefits’ cost, while also rewarding capital returns to unearned income.With this economic justice accomplished, retiring the BabyBoom is then a‘cake walk.’
When compared with the 77 million youngsters in the birth-boom,55 million youngsters, who lived 45 years earlier, surprised me. Somehow,I imagined that fewer individuals existed then. The greater perceptivedifference, however, is the mechanized industrial shift to life’s dependenceon wages earned and the urbanization, which has resulted from thiseconomic transformation: three of every four in the BabyBoom lived inurban-suburban environs.
The population at the turn of the century was growing at rates exceeding1.5% annually. Such annual growth, about the five year intervals that Ireviewed, resulted in a five year 7.5% rate of growth. John-Mary's groupof 55 million individuals, when conservatively projected (mapping 1 percentannual population increase instead of the experience-based indication of 1.5percent) to the mid point of the birth-boom yields an expectation in 1957 of86 million youngsters. In fact, 77 million natural births are not abnormalat all. Instead, the low birth rates, as depressed by the effects ofdepression and war, are what is abnormal! Only depression and warcaused the birth abnormalities that made 77 million births appear as ababyBoom. Why should a rational society then reassign responsibility forthe fertility effects to depression and war? Surely, human nature cannot beblamed. And mechanistically making the SS System responsible representsan irrational political deontological economic affirmation that, just asirrationally, then infers that SS had caused the Great Depression and WorldWar II. Deontological unitary material acquisitiveness, which irrationallypolitically affirmed this blame to SS, also are predominant accomplices inWars and Depression.
91
Why then, should wage-earners mechanistically bear inflationendemism’s costs, particularly as related to SS benefits paid to theBabyBoom in retirement? The reasoned answer is, they should not.
Why then, should wage-earners mechanistically bear inflationendemism’s costs, particularly as related to SS benefits paid to theBabyBoom in retirement? The reasoned answer is, they should not.
Tax rebates in 2001-- 2006 (?) were not given to lower income taxpayers (particularly was not related to SS contribution taxes). Yet, SSsurplus contribution taxes are routinely spent to support economy: giving anappearance to a coming Budget surplus. Clearly, the political mechanistdeontology either consistently blames SS for war and depression or itconveniently denies any responsibility concerning these events.Teleologically, however, those that benefit most from the mechanisteconomy, as sustained by SS contribution’s surpluses, should nowreciprocate by contributing fairly to the SS cost (a half century of back taxesrelated to inflation endemism’s cost put onto the SS contributions tax inaddition to $ trillions of SS contributions surplus that government routinelyspent is now primarily owed and repayable by those of unearned income that
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benefitted from the mechanist deontology). This repayment is huge!
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 83
‘The Theory of Economic Development’ sounds like an analysis ofwhat we have come to call the underdeveloped world. But in 1912 thespecial economic status and problems of that “world” had not yetcome into existence -- this was still the unabashed colonialism [Whigsin charge of the government’s Gilded Age officially had installed theAmerican System of Political economy’s administrations along withits pork barrel of ‘internal improvement’ paternalism]. Schumperter’sbook was about another kind of development -- the way in whichcapitalism develops its propensities for growth. Scholarly in tone andtedious in style (a lite from time to time with lightning flashes), thebook would not strike the casual reader as being of much politicalimportance. Yet this academic treatise was destined to become thebasis for one of the most influential interpretations of capitalismever written.
The exposition begins in Schumpeter’s contradictory way. Itis a book about capitalist growth and dynamics, but it opens with adepiction of a capitalist economy in which growth is totally absent.Schumpeter’s initial portrait describes a capitalism that lacks the veryingredient that brought growth into the worlds of Smith and Mill andMarx and Keynes -- namely, the accumulation of capital. Schumpeterdescribes instead a capitalism sans accumulation -- a capitalismwhose flow of production is perfectly static and changeless,reproducing itself in a “circular flow” that never alters or expands itscreation of wealth.
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged byRicardo and Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemedthe end of capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeterit was the beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine thecharacteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. Because
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 93
the system has no momentum, inertia is the rule of its economic life:“All knowledge and habit, once acquired,” writes Schumpeter,“becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment inthe earth.” Thus having found by trial and error the economic coursethat is most advantageous for ourselves, we repeat it by routine.Economic life may have originally been a challenge; it becomes ahabit.
More important, in this changeless flow competition will haveremoved all earnings that exceed the value of anyone’s contributionto output. This means that competition among employers will forcethem to pay their workers the full value of the product they create, andthat owners of land or other natural wealth will likewise receive asrents whatever value their resources contribute. So workers andlandowners will get their shares in the circular flow. And capitalists?Another surprise. Capitalists will receive nothing, except their wagesas management. That is because any contribution to the value ofoutput that was derived from capital goods they owned would beentirely absorbed by the value of labor that went into making thosegoods plus the value of resources they contained. Thus, exactly asRicardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there is no place forprofit!
Why does Schumpeter present us with such a strange -- not tosay strained -- image of the system? Perhaps we have already divinedthe purpose behind his method: the model of a static capitalism is anattempt to answer the question of where profits come from.
The source of profits is a question that has been gingerlyhandled by most economists. Smith wavered between viewing profitas a deduction from the value created by labor and as a kind ofindependent return located in capital itself. If profits were adeduction, of course, the explanation implied that labor wasshortchanged; and if they were a contribution of capital, one wouldhave to explain why the profits went to the owner of the machine, notto its inventor or user. Mill suggested that profits were the reward for
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the “abstinence” of capitalists, but he did not explain why capitalistswere entitled to a reward for an activity that was clearly in their owninterest. Still other economists described profits as the earnings of“capital,” speaking as if the shovel itself were paid for its contributionto output. Marx, of course, said that Smith was right in the first placethough he didn’t know it -- that profits were a deduction from theactual value created by the working man. But that was part of thelabor theory of value which everyone knew to be wrong and thereforedid not have to be reckoned with.
Schumpeter now came forward with a brilliant answer to thisvexing question. Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation oflabor or from the earnings of capital. They were the result of quiteanother process. ‘Profits appeared in a static economy when thecircular flow failed to follow its routinized course.’ [And profitsroutinely taken, despite entrepreneurial activity, as now is commonlya classical political economy sanctioned business rightful paternalism,causes the static circular flow fail to respect labor’s contribution.]
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is sobrilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions inroutine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological ororganizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaperways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘Asa result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot betraced either to the contribution of labor or of resource owners.’ Anew process enables an innovating capitalist to produce the samegoods as his competitors, but at a cheaper cost, exactly as a favorablylocated piece of land enables its owner to produce crops more cheaplythan less well situated fellow landlords. Again, exactly like thefortunate landlord, the innovating capitalist now receives a “rent”from the differential in his cost. But this rent is not derived from God-given advantages in location or fertility. It springs from the will andintelligence of the innovator, and it will disappear as soon as othercapitalists learn the tricks of the pioneer. The new flow is not
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 95
therefore a more or less permanent rent. It is a wholly transientprofit.
An innovation implies an innovator -- someone who isresponsible for combining the factors of production in new ways. Thisis obviously not a “normal” businessman, following establishedroutines. The person who introduces change into economic life is arepresentative of another class -- or more accurately, another group,because innovators do not necessarily come from any social class.Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and used itto describe these revolutionists of production. He called them‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity werethus the source of profit in the capitalist system. [Sansentrepreneurial activity, inflations’ endemism is introduced, asparadoxically also is ‘the iron cage of wages.’]
About, where profits come from, this cartoon portrays corporateperspectives as compared to workers without “golden parachutes.”
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R. L. Heibroner’s comment about the nature of Smiths marketsystem is now better understood as a static circular flowing system. AndHeilbroner’s analysis of Adam Smith’s economic system applies also tonatural classical conservative tenets (mechanist propensities were notincluded): 84
In a sense his system presupposes that eighteenth-century Englandwill remain unchanged forever. Only in quantity will it grow: morepeople, more goods, more wealth; its quality will remain unchanged.His are the dynamics of a static community; it grows but it nevermatures.Schumpeter’s Static economic circular flow presents the core holisticview of economy. And, important is that to take profits from the staticflowing system, will cause trade offs, of taking from other parts of thesystem. Parrington had noted this as taking from Paul to give to Peter:which is the fly in Whig honey. Parrington also described how politicalphilosophy was adapted to sponsor business interests. As Hoffer observed,making politics into a profitable enterprise:85
Citizens had saved the government in the trying days that were past;it was only fair in return that government should aid the patrioticcitizen in the necessary work of developing national resources. It waspaternalism as understood by speculators and subsidy-hunters, butwas it not a part of the great American System that was to make thecountry rich and self-sufficient? The American System had beentalked of for forty years; it had slowly got on its feet in pre-war daysdespite the stubborn planter opposition; now at last it had fairly comeinto it own. The time was ripe for the Republican party to becomea fairy godmother to the millions of Beriah Sellerses throughout theNorth and the West. [Whigs’ political pork barrel was installed]
Despite the evolution which gave our nation deterministic paternalism via‘The American System of Economy,’ ideological truth about ‘shadowsinstead of reality’ remain, as Parrington reported:
However attractive the disguises it may assume, it is in essence the
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 97
However, if Schumpeter’s analysis is ‘true’ (others, as Ricardo and Malthus verified"
that it is) taking profits without providing valued entrepreneurial advantages thatdirectly justify the profits, irrationally robs value from the production of goods andservices.
logical creed of the profit philosophy. It is the expression in"
politics of the acquisitive instinct and it assumes as the greatest goodthe shaping of public policy to promote private interests. It assertsthat it is a duty of the state to help its citizens to make money, and itconceives of the political state as a useful instrument for effectiveexploitation. How otherwise? The public good cannot be servedapart from business interests for business interests are the public goodand in serving business the state is serving society. Every bodies’eggs are in the basket and they must not be broken. For a capitalisticsociety Whiggery is the only rational [but, in fact, is irrational] politics,for it exalts the profit-motive as the sole object of parliamentaryconcern. Government has only to wave its wand and fairy giftsdescend upon business like the golden sands of Pactolus. Itgraciously bestows its tariffs and subsidies, and streams of wealth
flow into private wells. [To introduce this thought, Parrington wrote:
Whiggery springs up as naturally as pigweed in a garden.]
[a fly in the Whig honey]
But unhappily there is a fly in the Whig honey. In acompetitive order, government is forced to make its choices. Itcannot serve both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it musttake away with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalismin the common interest degenerates in practice into legalizedfavoritism. Governmental gifts go to the largest investments. Lesserinterests are sacrificed to greater interests and Whiggery comesfinally to serve the lords of the earth without whose good will thewheels of business will not turn. To him that hath shall be given. Ifthe few do not prosper the many will starve, and if the many have
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bread who would begrudge the few their abundance? In Whiggery[now only in its origins is now on the GOP side of politics] is thefulfillment of the Scriptures. [In what Chomsski documented 86
as U. S. Hegemony, or is it an Armageddon?]
Schumpeter’s ‘static circular flow’ analysis was made to answereconomic concerns about profit: He showed that neither profit nor inflationwas statically endemic to mechanisms of economy. After describing thenew rented value that entrepreneurs gave to ‘circular flow,’ his conclusionwas emphatic: The new flow is not therefore a more or less permanentrent. It is a wholly transient profit. So, when profits are taken regularly,without adding entrepreneurial value, the profit takers surely benefit.However, without adding entrepreneurial rented value to the ‘circular flow,’profit-taking acts like Brockway’s ‘bankers’ COLA,’granting economicbenefits to ‘Peter that holistically are taken from Paul.’ Regularly takingprofits without adding directly compensatory entrepreneurial activity causesparadoxical phenomenal endemic companions,’ as inflation, to oppositelyholistically balance the economic ‘circular flow.’ And, despite officiallegalities that grant rights and privileges to those who superintend politicaleconomy’s privatized mechanisms, uncannily those who directly benefitfrom the paradoxical phenomenal‘inflation endemism’ and the ‘profittaking,’ as legally granted, still are causally responsible for the economicdeterminism that mechanistically endemically rapes and pillages wage-earners. Critical economic observers -- notably Franklin, Ricardo, Malthus,Weber -- have called this economic determinism ‘the iron cage of wages.’Causally, therefore, graduated general revenue taxation is both justified andnecessary. Putting inflation’s cost onto general revenue taxes is the onlyrational causal place from which to recover the economic endemism thatmechanistically benefit only the superintendents of privatized mechanisteconomy. And, ethically as well rationally, this should be doneforthwith.
And, by taking inflation’s cost out of SS contribution taxes,vastly reduced contribution rates (as much as 95 percent), would thensatisfy SS’s benefits ‘social usage’ requirements. SS’s systemicregressiveness would then be mitigated. And if applied to all income,SS benefits, when appropriate, could then increase.
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 99
Another aspect on Shumperter’s ‘static circular flow’ analysis showsthat our mechanist materialist economy, because of profit-taking, isdeontological and not teleological. Profit-taking is not a valid economicprinciple. And affirming it as principle, as federalist-Whigs have done, isfallacious still. Shumperter, also confirms that the SS system, as mutualinsurance generally, is teleological, even while materialist economicmechanisms are deontological. Mitigating the paradoxical phenomena ofour mechanist political economy, by ‘social usage’ (mutual insurance forms)is not only rational, it is necessary to achieve equality.
Anyway, teleological analysis is convincing. The birth counts ofany large existing group do not pose a threatening problem for the SSSystem. Instead, the threat to SS is from fallacious sophistries of mechanistdeontological politics: of The American System of Political Economy thatfail to follow Adam Smith’s ethical creed regarding wage-earned production.The political, mechanist deontology design is to entrap consumers intopaying the full cost of economic endemism (political economy’s inflationendemism, for instance). This deontological duty was systemically andcovertly accomplished, as, John Maynard Keynes had portrayed:87
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of theircitizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning theexisting basis of society than to debauch the currency. The processengages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side ofdestruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a millionis able to diagnose. Keynes
Parrington documented Federalist designs ‘to devise legal springs’ (legalentrapments) of (constitutional teleologies).88
Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarlyfigure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlierage. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning weredevoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principlesof law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
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days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodelingseventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about theunsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exactmetes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like JohnMarshall and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springsto catch unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians wereshouting over their victories at the polls, he was engaged in thestrategic work of placing the Constitution under the narrowcustodianship of the English law. An ardent Federalist and later anequally ardent Whig, he reveals in his precise thinking the intimaterelations that everywhere exist between economics, politics, and[affirmed] legal principles. [Irrationalism fallaciously affirmed asprinciples should be identified, untied and separated, mechanistically]
257 Sweet Business Deals:Government’s contracted mechanisms
As Benjamin Franklin demonstrated, interest on capital investments,when compounded, magically grows: interest, like profit-taking, isendemism, which government’s contracted mechanisms are licensed tocapitalize on. Shumperter’s analysis of a ‘static circular flowing’ economy,found profit-taking, whether directly from licensed privately ownedproduction or as invested private capital, Adam Smith did not hypothesize.In the sense Smith had conceived what was natural, endemism, as profit,interest, and the like, was not natural (His comments on corporations andbanks were scant if not dismal) therefore, economic endemism wasconceptually mechanist added and Whig perfected. Interest and profit founddefinition in classical mechanist capitalism, which designed propertyownership, all of which were covertly added-onto Smith’s economic‘circular flowing’ concept.
This excerpt is form section 205. Robert Heilbroner’s economic
research about an underworld, which in America featured Henry George(1839-1897): Heilbroner wrote this:
257 Sweet Business Deals 101
The [underworld’s] newcomer was Henry George. . . . George beganto write about matters of more than routine interest: about the Chinesecoolies and their indenture, and about the land grabbing of therailroads, and the machinations of the local trusts. He wrote a longletter to J. S. Mill in France on the immigration question and wasgraced with a long affirmative reply.
Robert Heilbroner’s underworld exposed what custodians ofpolitical economy must recognize when society acts directly to impose thisrecognition by installing necessary macro economic reforms. Heilbronerdocumented the following from the underworld of economics: fromMandeville to Bastiat, then the incisive American, Henry George.: 89
The irrepressible Mandeville shocked the eighteenth century with awitty demonstration that virtue was vice and vice virtue. Mandevillemerely pointed out that the profligate expenditure of the sinful richgave work to the poor, while the stingy rectitude of the virtuous pennypincher did not; hence, said Mandeville, private immorality mayredound to the public welfare, whereas private uprightness may be asocial burden. The sophisticated lesson of his "Fable of the Bees" wastoo much for the eighteenth century to swallow; Mandeville's bookwas convicted as a public nuisance by a grand jury in Middlesex in1723, and Mandeville himself was roundly castigated by Adam Smithand everyone else.
But whereas the earlier eccentrics and charlatans were largelybanished by the opinions of sturdy thinkers like Smith and Ricardo,now the underworld claimed its recruits for another reason. Therewas simply no longer any room in the official world of economicsfor those who wanted to take the whole gamut of human behaviorfor their forum, and there was little tolerance in the stuffy world ofVictorian correctness for those whose diagnosis of society left roomfor moral doubtings or seemed to indicate the need for radical reform.. .
It was a far more interesting place, this underworld, than the
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serene realms above. It abounded with wonderful personalities, andin it sprouted a weird and luxuriant tangle of ideas. There was, forexample, a man who has been almost forgotten in the march ofeconomic ideas. He is Frederic Bastiat, an eccentric Frenchman, wholived from 1801 to 1850, and who in that short space of time and aneven shorter space of literary life -- six years -- brought to bear oneconomics that most devastating of all weapons, ridicule. Look at thismadhouse of a world, says Bastiat. It goes to enormous efforts totunnel underneath a mountain in order to connect two countries.And then what does it do? Having labored mightily to facilitate theinterchange of goods, it sets up customs guards on both sides of themountain and makes it as difficult as possible for merchandise totravel through the tunnel!
Bastiat had a gift for pointing out our absurdities; his littlebook "Economic Sophisms" is as close to humor as economics hasever come. When, for example, the Paris-Madrid railroad was beingdebated in the French assembly, one M. Simiot argued that it shouldhave a gap at Bordeaux, because a break in the line there wouldredound greatly to the wealth of the Bordeaux porters,commissionaires, hotel-keepers, bargemen, and the like, and thus, byenriching Bordeaux, would enrich France. Bestiat seized on the ideawith avidity. Fine, he said, but let's not stop at Bordeaux alone. "IfBordeaux has a right to profit by a gap . . . then Angouleme, Poitiers,Tours, Orleans . . . should also demand gaps as being for the generalinterest. . . In this way we shall succeed in having a railwaycomposed of successive gaps, and which may be denominated a"Negative Railway." . . .
When the Chamber of Deputies in the 1840s legislated higherduties on all foreign goods in order to benefit French industry, Bastiatturned out this masterpiece of economic satire:
PETITION OF THE MANUFACTURERS OF CANDLES, WAXLIGHTS,LAMPS, CANDLESTICKS, STREET LAMPS, SNUFFERS,EXTINGUISHERS, AND OF THE PRODUCERS OF OIL, TALLOW,
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RESIN, ALCOHOL, AND GENERALLY EVERY-THING CONNECTEDWITH LIGHTING
To Messieurs The Members of the Chamber of Deputies
Gentlemen,
We are suffering from the intolerable competition of a foreignrival, placed, it would seem, in a condition so far superior to our ownfor the production of light, that he absolutely inundates our nationalmarket with it at a price fabulously reduced. . . . This rival . . . is noother than the sun.
What we pray for, is, that it may please you to pass a lawordering the shutting up of all windows, skylights, dormer-windows,outside and inside shutters, curtains, blinds, bull's-eyes; in a word ofall openings, holes, chinks, and fissures.
. . . If you shut up as much as possible all access to naturallight and create a demand for artificial light, which of our Frenchmanufacturers will not benefit by it?
. . . If more tallow is consumed, then there must be more oxenand sheep . . . if more oil is consumed, then we shall have extendedcultivation of the poppy, of the olive . . . our heaths will be coveredwith resinous trees.
Make your choice, but be logical; for as long as you exclude,as you do, iron, corn, foreign fabrics, in proportion as their pricesapproximate to zero, what inconsistency it would be to admit the lightof the sun, the price of which is already zero during the entire day!
A more dramatic -- if fantastic -- defense of free trade has never beenwritten. But it was not only against protective tariffs that Bastiatprotested: this man laughed at every form of economic double-thinking. In 1848, when the Socialists began to propound their ideasfor the salvation for society with more regard for passion thanpracticability, Bastiat turned against them the same weapons that hehad used against the "ancien regime." "Everyone wants to live at theexpense of the state," he wrote. "They forget that the state lives at
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the expense of every one.". .How he loved to demolish the specious thinking that argued for
barriers to trade under the guise of liberal economics. . . His function, it seems, was to prick the pomposities of his time;
but beneath the raillery and the wit lies the more disturbing question:does the system always make sense? Are there paradoxes where thepublic and private weals collide?
Can we trust the automatic mechanism of private interestwhen it is perverted at every turn by the far from automaticmechanism of the political structure it erects?
And the questions raised by Bastiat remained unanswered.The underworld continued to prosper. In 1879 it gained an
American recruit, a bearded, gentle, fiercely self-sure man, who saidthat "Political Economy . . . as currently taught is hopeless anddespairing. But this is because she has been degraded and shackled;her truths dislocated; her harmonies ignored; the word she wouldutter gagged in her mouth, and her protest against wrong turnedinto an indorsement of injustice." And that was not all. For thisheretic maintained not only that economics had failed to see theanswer to the riddle of poverty although it was clearly laid out beforeher eyes, but that with his remedy, a new world stood ready tounfold. . . .
The newcomer was Henry George . . . George began to writeabout matters of more than routine interest: about the Chinese cooliesand their indenture, and about the land grabbing of the railroads, andthe machinations of the local trusts. He wrote a long letter to J. S.Mill in France on the immigration question and was graced with along affirmative reply. . .
When the University of California established a chair ofpolitical economy, he was widely considered as a strong candidatefor the post. But to qualify he had to deliver a lecture before facultyand students, and George was rash enough to voice such sentiments
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as this: "The name of political economy has been constantly invokedagainst every effort of the working classes to increase their wages."
And then to compound the shock he added: "For the study ofpolitical economy, you need no special knowledge, no extensivelibrary, no costly laboratory. You do not even need textbooks norteachers, if you will but think for yourselves."
That was the beginning and the end of his academic career.With his passion mixed with little professional circumspection, George wenton to write Progress and Poverty, about which Heilbroner wrote:
no wonder the guardians of economics could not seriously consider anargument that was couched in such a style as this:
Take now . . . some hard-headed business man, who has notheories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: "Hereis a little village; in ten years it will be a great city -- in tenyears the railroad will have taken the place of the stagecoach, the electric light of the candle; it will abound with allthe machinery and improvements that so enormouslymultiply the effective power of labor.
Will, in ten years, interest be any higher?" He willtell you, "NO!"
"Will the wages of common labor be any higher?"He will tell you, "No, the wages of common labor will not beany higher. .."
"What then will be higher?" "Rent, the value ofland. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and holdpossession."
Heilbroner then extracted this rational conclusion that bothered not onlyHenry George but most mechanized lifestyles, of hard-pressed productivewage earners, which The American System of Political Economy’smechanism-based treadmill puts them on:
We need not spell out the emotionally charged argument. . . HenryGeorge is outraged at the spectacle of men whose incomes -- some
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times fabulous incomes -- derive not from the services they haverendered to the community, but merely from the fact that they havehad the good fortune to hold advantageously situated soil. . . Whenwe come to the central body of the thesis we must pause. . .
His basic criticism of society is moral and not a mechanistic one.
Why should a man benefit merely from the fact ofownership, when he may render no services to thecommunity in exchange?
We may justify the rewards of an industrialist by describing his profitsas the prize for his foresight and ingenuity, but where is the foresightof a man whose grandfather owned a pasture on which, twogenerations later, society saw fit to erect a skyscraper? . . .
The problem is not just one of land rents, but of all unearnedincome; and . . . is a serious problem that cannot be adequatelyapproached through land ownership alone.
Now, how has orthodox economics reacted to these realities that bear soheavily on the underclass? The answer seems always to rest in meaningsthat have become described as conservative mechanist politics: as forinstance, in the sense of the following Robert Hughes’ observation:90
In the '80s, one of the features of the electoral scene was a publicrecoil from formal politics, from the active reasoned exercise ofcitizenship. This trend is no longer affordable. It came becauseAmericans didn't trust anyone. It was part of the cafard [overwhelming
fatigue and indifference to duties and surroundings] the 80s induced.
In effect, the Republican and Democratic Parties since 1968 havepracticed two forms of conservative policy, one episodically liberaland the other aggressively not. [And, isn’ t this wha t Noa mChomsky documented in his recent book, Hegemony or Survival? : the moreaggressive, conservative mechanist, we consider as orthodox, stable, thenational security protector; the non aggressor, the liberal, we distrust forbeing contemplative, therefore, incapable to protect national security]
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Now in late 2007, the U.S. political situation is analogous to our warin Iraq: regardless of why, we are where we are: neither form ofmechanist politics can be expected to change. Therefore, while thenon mechanist politics has sovereign endorsement, it should prioritizethe most urgent social usage-based insurance for adjusting themechanism-based economy with intent to grant distributive justice tothose who have only political economy’s treadmill to depend on foremployment and subsistence.
The argument, which Henry George made should convince allwho reason that unearned income (all that is not wage-earned) isgovernment’s paternal gift which unconstitutionally was granted bymechanist political economy without requiring services to thecommunity in exchange (this income should be taxable to any extent).
Robert Hughes’ observation continues:Both are parties of upper-middle-class interests . . .The whole apparatus of influence in Washington is geared to lobbyingby big business, not to input from small citizen groups. As E. J. Dioneeloquently argued in his book "Why Americans Hate Politics," thereis no bloc in Congress or the Senate that truly represents the needs oropinions of people in the enormous central band of American lifewhere workers and the middle class overlap.
Because we are more interested in profit than ethics, our PoliticalEconomy is bereft of ethical morality. We do this without intent. We do itanyway. These utterances of Cicero and Confucius make the point:91
He only employs his passion who can make no use of his reason.Cicero
Our headstrong passions shut the door of our souls against God [the source of ethical morality]. ConfuciusPassionate influences of wealth are the driving force behind “AmericanSystem” politics. Our headstrong passions to gain wealth (measured inhoards of money) shut the door of ethical morality. Without conscience orprobity, political economy is now primarily a matter of whose “ox getsgored.” Orthodox economists are partly to blame as they chose to focus on
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accumulation where the passions of wealth are most active and the forces ofpolitics are extreme. With too little regard for the wage-earners’ role with“spending” on the side of consumption, they have compromised theeconomic equation. In this they rationalized the character of “man” asAdam Smith, with Thomas Hobbes and many others, had done (However,Smith’s uncompromising view about the need for probity, in theadministrations of economy, distinguishes Smith from the orthodoxy of hiseconomics following). While the rationalization of “man’s” characterdemeans “man’s” infinite sophistication in matters of ethics and morality,The American System of Political Economy authenticates the base qualitiesthat in cultural settings are considered as vain and immoral. Thisauthentication legitimizes “man’s” passion-based qualities and it makes theiracts appropriate. Franklin’s view of “cheating” became acceptable duringweekdays and therefore compatible with Sunday’s preaching. In this, TheAmerican System of Political Economy outfits the passionate politics of self-interest with legitimacy -- a sort of “economic sainthood” -- even while it“shuts the door” to increasing systemic devastation to the economic functionof consumption!
The passions of self-interest always tear at the values and moralityin all of us and at the extremes -- now aided systemically by politicaleconomy -- leaves some desperately forlorn. Then as Cicero propheticallywarned: with no avenues or room for reason, ugly passions arise and apredictable result is increasing instances of mayhem. William Wordsworthmay have had this in mind when he wrote Sonnet:
Sonnet“The World is too Much With Us”
The World is too much with us; late and soon, Gettting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.---Great God! I’d rather be
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A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Heilbroner noted Henry George's reasoned contributions to the unpopular,unorthodox underworld of economy. In light of political disaster producedby conservative mechanists, this underworld’s truth springs forth: 92
"Progress and Poverty" sold more copies than all the economic textspreviously published in the country; in England his name became ahousehold word. Not only that, but the import of his ideas -- albeitusually in watered form -- became part of the heritage of men likeWoodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Louis Brandeis. Indeed there is adevoted following of Henry George still active
Before leaving this thought, it is religiously pertinent to review St. John’sFirst Epistle: mechanist temporal concupiscence is St John’s central concern,which preceded his final revelation and predicted Armageddon.
(end of excerpt from section 205)
Endemism is paradoxical and contradicting to constitutionalteleology, which Roger Sherman had argued for:93
So long as we part with our most valuable Commodities for such Billsof Credit as are no Profit; but rather a Cheat, Vexation and Snare tous, and become a Medium whereby we are continually cheating andwronging one another in our Dealings and Commerce, and so long aswe import so much more foreign Goods than are necessary, and keepso many Merchants and Traders employed to procure and deal themout to us . . . I say so long as these Things are so we shall spend greatPart of our labour and Substance for that which will not profit us.Whereas if these Things were reformed, the Provisions and otherCommodities which we might have to export yearly, and which otherGovernments are dependant [sic] upon us for, would procure us Gold
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and Silver abundantly sufficient for a Medium of Trade. And wemight be as independent, flourishing and happy a Colony as any in theBritish Dominions.Sherman achieved ‘an exquisitely simple piece of legislative machinery’: theConstitution’s Article I Section 8. And he was greatly disappointed thatCongress failed to act, as this had empowered Congress with authority,power, and responsibility,. . . to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fixthe standards of weights and measures.Congress was given this constitutional assignment to forestall Bills of Creditdevaluating specie, and to forestall money’s devaluation (Today’s dollar isnow worth pennies of years past): this endemic currency devaluation, iscalled inflation. And if alive, Sherman would add ‘fluctuating mediums ofexchange’ to his indictments of endemic inflation. Irrationally, monarchicalpolitics, which is mechanist, dogmatically asserts ‘the king can do nowrong.’ And because this asserted antecedent dogma is deemed asprinciple, consistently Sherman’s ‘standards.’ have been ignored. Dogmatic‘divine-right-based’ politics has also deductively asserted that ‘law’ is the‘American king.’ Parrington credited Hamilton for the errant belief: 94
It is sufficiently clear that in tastes and convictions Hamilton was ahigh Tory. The past to which he appealed was a Tory past, thepsychology which he accepted was a Tory psychology, the law andorder which he desired was a Tory law and order. His philosophywas not liked by republican America, and he knew that it was notliked. Practical business men accepted both his premises andconclusions, but republicans under the spell of revolutionary idealism,and agrarians suffering in their pocketbooks, would oppose themvigorously. He was at pains, therefore, as a practical statesman, todress his views in a garb more seemly to plebeian prejudices, and likeearlier Tories he paraded an ethical justification for his Toryism. Thecurrent Federalist dogma of the ‘divine right’ of justice -- ‘voxjusticiae vox dei’ -- was at hand to serve his purpose and he made freeuse of it. But no ethical gilding could quite conceal a certainruthlessness of purpose; in practice justice became synonymous with
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expediency, and expediency was curiously like sheer Tory will topower.
In certain of his principles Hamilton was a follower of Hobbes.His philosophy conducted logically to the leviathan state, highlycentralized, coercive, efficient. But he was no idealist to exalt thestate as the divine repository of authority, an enduring entity apartfrom the individual citizen and above him. He regarded the state asa highly useful instrument, which in the name of law and orderwould serve the interests of the powerful, and restrain the turbulenceof the disinherited. For in every government founded on coercionrather than good will, the perennial unrest of those who are coercedis a grave menace; in the end the exploited will turn fiercely uponthe exploiters. In such governments, therefore, self interest requiresthat social unrest shall be covered with approbium and put down bythe police power; and the sufficient test of a strong state lies in itsability to protect the privileges of the minority against the anarchy ofthe majority. . . . In his plan of government presented to theConvention, the principle of centralized power was carried furtherthan most would go, and his supporting speeches expressed doctrinesthat startled certain of his hearers. He was frankly a monarchist,and he urged the monarchical principle of Hobbesian logic. “Theprinciple chiefly intended to be established is this -- that there mustbe a permanent ‘will’.” “There ought to be a principle ingovernment capable of resisting the popular current.”
The predicate, those who may so easily be characterized as radical only inreligion, and religious in their opinions of the sublunary sphere ofgovernment, represent the dogma-based, self-serving philosophical nature95
of the conventional predicate values common to classical Hobbesianmechanist oligarchical logos: Visceral values in logos that would changereligious tenets -- to perpetuate feudalism, hierarchy and enslavement onthe one hand and aggrandizement of property on the other -- whilefeigning religion in matters of government abides as covertly predicatedvalue that is endemic of the dogmatic prejudice, expressed by these
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‘Positive’ value added to affluence, ‘negatively’ taken from non affluence."
The originating source of meaning ‘to enure’ is found in law. """
Approbium is not listed in the dictionary. The context, ‘covered by""""
approbium,’ might imply ideology, i.e., seeming appropriateness?’
adjectives: ‘classical,’ ‘orthodox,’ ‘conservative.’
Capitalism and mercantilism were imported to America by the politics of‘classical,’ Federalism. Tagging on Federalism’s political coattails, Whigsgave us ‘fictitious person’ corporations along with fluctuating stock, bondand money markets, which are mediums of exchange. Inflation’s endemism,the veiled paradoxical value, as Roger Sherman recognized in ‘Bills ofCredit’, became codified, without accounting specification, so to serveaffluence only. While fluctuating value mediums are supposed to work"
their ‘positive’ magic, i.e, contractually distribute ‘positive’ endemicmonetary value, as distributed by ownership promises (stocks, accounts,etc.) which in fact share in the risk of fluctuation, as legally has enured."""
Selling shares of stock provided rewards for inflation’s endemism promisedby licensed corporate charter to accumulate as the corporate capital of theprivatized political economy corporate mechanisms. However, alsoimportant, hyped portrayals of business gains, which under emphasized thenegative paradoxical nature of corporate business. And while thesenegatives were shared by holders of stock, regulating this monarchical-basedhierarchical organic deontology was similarly abstract, maybe as abstract,as regulating inflation’s endemism is: which is regulated by artificiallyadjusting rates of interest to slow economic demand and unfortunately, hasthe mechanistic effect of increasing unemployment. Parrington wrote this:
For in every government founded on coercion rather than good will,the perennial unrest of those who are coerced is a grave menace; inthe end the exploited will turn fiercely upon the exploiters. In suchgovernments, therefore, self interest requires that social unrest shallbe covered with approbium and put down by the police power;""""
and the sufficient test of a strong state lies in its ability to protect the
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As reported in the September 28, 2003 news, the economy was growing at"
greater than 3 percent, as fueled by unprecedented auto and home sales (dueto Fed managed low interest rates) and government’s deficit fueledexpenditures due to war in Iraq. Unemployment devastation is not accounted:three years of jobs lost without replacement represent Parrington’s appraisal:law and order, [that serve] the interests of the powerful, and [restrains] theturbulence of the disinherited.
Neither inflation’s endemism nor unemployment is accounted.""
[paternal] privileges of the [business] minority against the [terrorism
inclined] anarchy of the majority. The mechanist deontology of the 2001 Revenue Tax Bill is related. It iscompatible with the mechanist deontology about inflation’s endemism: inthe end, the least influential proletariat is mechanistically determined to bear,at points of natural consuming necessity, inflation endemism’s cost, they arescapegoats of the official mechanist adjustments to counter inflation’sendemism: to cure inflation’s endemism, the mechanist economic paradoxeffects, by raising rates of interest, which raised investment returns, makethe GNP rise, falsely indicating a healthy holistic economy, while the"
determined ‘negative’ economic effects, related to the ‘iron cage of wages’mechanistically puts wage-earners who, more frequently now, areunemployed: like inflation’s ‘negative’ endemism, unemployment wascovertly made a principle necessity.*
* Individual proletariat wages (income ranging from $300 to $1,800, whichcomprised 22 percent of wages earned in 1944 , when considering96
Inflation’s endemism should have caused this earnings range to rise ten fold,i.e., the income range $3,000 to $18,000 should be expected in 2000. And,while the median wage for white males in 1998 was $37,000 , it is also a97
fact that the American System’s ‘iron cage of wages’ has mechanisticallylocked 16-20 percent (35-50 million of the population) into poverty. Thisparadoxically determined mechanist fact, of American System’s politicaleconomy’s myriad economic grants and privileges, which caused inflation’sendemism, and the artful ‘positive’ accounting of GDP, also determined""
that high end incomes now far exceed 500 times’ what low incomes are.
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And, mechanistically, the economically disfranchised are still locked out!
In all acquisitive legal aggrandizements of grants and privileges, officiallywe irrationally and organically subscribe that glorious Epicurean Paradox:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’Oliver Wendell Holmes
How often are these sentiments expressed? :
--- “I earned. all that I get.”
--- “The poor deserve the poverty they themselves have caused; theyare lazy!”
Both are irrational sentiments, mostly expressed by those with high endincomes? And both sentiments have dispensed life’s logical categoricallyimperative necessities: at first dispensing subjective necessity, thendispensing objective necessity. And both illogical deductions resulted fromasserting logical consequents in replacement of the logical antecedentprinciples, which exist naturally? , Durant observed this:
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find nonew truth because we take some venerable but questionableproposition as the indubitable starting point (the affirmed principle),and never think about putting this assumption itself to a test ofobservation or experiment. Will Durant
The mechanist sentiment, ‘compounding interest’ on scheduledsavings makes pension benefits better than SS benefits’, is frequentlyalleged. However, this sentiment is untrue, as this fact shows.--- A recent survey shows: individually paid SS benefits are twicethe amount that private pensions individually paid!
Typical mechanist economy’s private enterprise, of paternalisticadvantages, as taking profits and its complementary ‘iron cage of wages,’consistently legally has denied inflation effected cost of living adjustments(COLA’s) to wage-earned pension benefits. Contrarily, SS, ‘social usage’insurance, has provided inflation COLA’s to offset political economy’sinflation endemism, which most severely effects subsistence in retirement.About this economic paradoxical quandary, Oliver’s drama was on point:when Fagan expressed: I think I must think it out again! But like orthodox
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human concupiscence driven irrationalism, which sentiments of high endincome sycophants can and will perpetuate the irrational mechanist ideology,rather than transcend to rationalism.
Having personally served managerial responsibility for collectingand disbursing the SS OASDHI payroll tax, I gleaned enough knowledge todangerously mislead but also enough to raise important concerns.
Payroll systems are now automated; they deduct and deposit SScontribution-taxes into special accounts maintained by agencies, appointedby the government’s treasury department. Mostly these agencies are banks,which quarterly send electronic pay-outs on to the U.S. Treasury, to cleartheir contribution-tax accounts.
However, the business contract made between collection agenciesand the U.S. Treasury provide for sweet-agency-rewards: in the interim ofcollecting contribution-taxes and sending them on to the federal government,these agencies are allowed to invest the tax collections in Fed-funds, inwhich the Federal Reserve requires banks to maintain their mandatoryreserves. The Fed pays daily compounded interest on these invested funds.While the interest rate is generally lower than the Fed ‘discount interestrate,’ the amount of interest paid to SS tax collection agencies, to rewardthem, is substantial. *
* Remember Billy Sol Estas? A recent fraud involving SS contributiontaxes, implicated another Texan that in 1991 had money of no apparentsource. As a big contributor to political campaigns, he was well liked andpatronized. As it turned out, however, this Texan controlled several SScontribution collection agencies and routinely filed deferrals before payingout his accounts. While the economy was expanding, contribution-taxcollections covered his borrowing and spending as his own funds from theseaccounts. An economic downturn then revealed his fraud.
The amount in the pipeline between collection and quarterly payoutto the U.S. Treasury, can be quantified: for instance, the OASDHI receiptsfor 1984 were $226 billion. The quarterly amount, therefore, was $56billion. The midpoint of this quarterly amount is a fair estimate of ‘in thepipeline’ funds that collection agencies had legally invested as their own inFed Funds and received daily paid interest, as their legal reward. Quarterly,therefore, collection agencies, for their reward, received Fed Funds’ interest
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And banks also routinely invest customers’ money in accounts with them,"
in Fed Funds, including checking accounts’ funds until ‘the float’ of personalcheck collections are cleared. And banks collect daily interest on this routinecircular flowing Fed Funds investment.
paid on $28 billion, which the Fed then routinely loaned to banks at discountinterest rates. The net maximized estimate that collection agent banks sharein Fed paid interest returns, on the $28 billion SS collections of taxcontributions,’ quarterly in 1984, is maybe more than $840 million. When"
compared to the government’s two percent administrative cost to accountand distribute $303 billion in SS benefits, in 1986, was $1.8 billion: privatebanking sector SS collection agents’ reward is greater than the government’scost to distribute SS’s benefits?
Private businesses can directly withhold and pay quarterly theaccumulated SS contribution taxes to government. However, penalties forlate payment and the added accounting responsibility makes direct payment,a risky proposition. SS ‘deposit centers’ are mostly Banks. In the interimof quarterly payout, banks are not allowed to directly loan any SScontribution deposits, but they are allowed to invest them, alongside theirmandatory reserves, in Fed funds. Then banks borrow from the Fed atdiscount interest rates for making loans to consumers. And many will correctly observe that the costs of collecting andtransferring SS contribution taxes to government are not at all related togovernment’s SS benefits distribution cost. Still, this comparison might beinteresting although maybe unworthy of consideration. Comparatively,government’s cost administration is more efficient than are the privatizedagency costs involving banking like administrations’ of SS contributiontaxes. This cost difference relates more to government’s legal paternalgrants to banks, which legalized the ‘COLA’ like charges put on loanedfunds, which funds are available from customer deposits and Fed funds thatfor a small cost are available. This government’s grant to each bank,(‘COLA’), is regulated only by competition and rules of fair trade. Andwhile the banks’ income from ‘COLA-based’ endemism is more direct thanis profit taking from corporate business productions, the economic effect issimilar: both are related in the covert sense of economic endemism, which
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While the COLA does not directly apply to the SS tax, it does correspond"
to benefit payments on which the COLA does apply.
is unaccounted but magically appears at the completion of trade(consumption) as business owned capital.
Besides banks’ administration charges that generally don’t benefitwage-earners, which to subsist must consume at endemism inflated prices,wage-earners, who are bare of government granted mechanists’ paternalisticsystemic advantages, also are conscripted to pay inflation indexed SScontribution-taxes. This is very important since inflation endemism’s"
hidden cost effect effectively was doubled for wage-earners to pay: first tosubsist and then also to contribute to the subsistence of SS retired persons.And, as Brockway concluded, inflation endemism’s cost effect is primarilygovernment’s paternalism caused, i.e., the bankers’ COLA grant.
Anyway, no reasonable justification for assigning inflation’s cost toSS contribution taxes exists. Sure, the cost must be born somehoweconomically. However, wage-earners, whose income has no nexus toinflation’s endemism sources, surely should not doubly be charged for it.And, if efficiency with collecting the SS taxes is improved by more frequentand direct transfers to government’s Treasury Department are made, whichproposal is politically impossible since private enterprise’ politics astutelyrealizes, quite selfishly, that substantial privatized monetary benefits arederived from investing SS contributions taxes in Fed Funds in the interim‘pipeline’ of transfer to the government. *
* In private industry, however, economic paradox, fueled by digitaltechnology, has resulted in entrepreneurial attacks on banking profits fromchecking account funds invested in the interim of checking collections.When you mail your check to pay a credit card charge, for instance, yourcredit company no longer needs to present your check to your bank to effectcollection (they still return your paid check after the fact of the collection).Electronics now allows a payee to collect from your bank immediately uponreceiving your check, or preauthorization for auto-pay collection directlyfrom your bank. And this electronics convenience also allowed identityfraud to proliferate: $ five billion a year now and rising. (Which provesthat private checking accounts are insecure because they fail to secure
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personal confidential identity information!)
And when Fed funds interest slippage on hundreds of billions of SS taxcollections is contemplated, delays with clearing checks is not the only sourceof another’s funds, which banks invest and profit from. The amount of Fedfunds interest paid to private SS collection agents, through the 1980s, amountedto more than $20 billion annually. And when the SS contributions in thecircular flowing pipeline from banks into Fed Funds, then back to banks formaking private loans is considered, the general economies funds availability ismade greater, on average, by about 12 percent of total annual SS contributiontaxes ($ 167.061 billion in 1984), which are then available to fund generalinterest-bearing consumer loans. This covert aspect of political economy,which provides bank’s profit should annually be publicly disclosed, sinceinflation endemism’s greatest cause, as G. P. Brockway had reasoned, is thebankers’ COLA, which banks’ legally are allowed to charge. Andparadoxically, this silent mechanistically determined inflation endemism, whichlegally becomes enured capital that returns only to the capital side of businessaccounting, legally derives from those wage-earners who are least capable topay for their own naturally required subsistence consumption: mechanizedinflation is made into a social affliction, which legally grants economicendemism laden profit to capitalists.
Pursuing this a little further, in order for SS to issue benefit checks eachmonth, the federal government must hold in reserve a full quarter ofcontribution-tax revenue; therefore, the average continuously invested SS fundswith the federal government in 1984, $67 billion of Fund assets invested in thefederal deficit, plus the mid point of one quarter's tax collections invested inFed Funds, in total exceed $90 billion. On this fundamental SS Fundsassumption held by the federal government’s Treasury, as measured by theaccounted government paid interest, pays a rate of interest on SS funds thatmust have been lower than the rate the Fed paid to banks investing SScollections in Fed Funds. And, why don’t SS Funds, routinely invested in thefederal deficit, get interest paid that is comparable to interest that is paid onTreasury Notes?
Considering interest compounded at 3.5 percent on the accumulationof equal annual payments (rents) since SS began, this accumulation is to 2.47times the sum of the equal annual rents. However, SS contribution tax
257 Sweet Business Deals 119
Private pension plans are required to provide for and maintain adequate"
reserves. The great contemporary fiducial problem, however, is that thesereserves in private plans are routinely, deliberately underfunded.
revenues do not accumulate. They cannot accumulate since SS benefits are paidfrom current contribution taxes. An accumulation of annual rents, legalreserves, or liability, as required for private investments (and insurances) doesnot exist. Anyway, such mandatory reserves, which would be prospectivelynecessary for any calculated future benefit disbursements simply are beyondany private economic capability: safe investment capability for such onerousfanciful accumulation of contribution taxes quite simply does not exist."
However, the 1984 SS Tax law, which required substantial surplus contributiontax funds to accumulate, on which government’s accumulating IOUs to SS,should pay compounding interest on, however, the interest paid on thisaccumulating SS surplus has failed to equal what government pays to privateinvestors in its deficit. I surely would like to be proved wrong on this?
Politics for investing this SS surplus accumulation in the privatesector’s open markets, which fluctuate in value, is popular mechanist ideology,however, poses great administrative problems and greater onerous responsibilityfor which our political government is philosophically neither equipt norcapable. Current SS contribution taxes, which are necessary for paying currentbenefits are now invested in the only viable short term vehicle: i.e., the federaldeficit. And, while the administrative cost to collect and channel the SS taxcollections to the Treasury, the Banks’ cost is justifiable if not reasonable.However, entrusting SS accumulating surplus taxes to acquisitive politics is liketrusting foxes to care for chickens. Although SS surplus Fund assets areroutinely deposited with the US Treasury Department, which also offersgovernment’s debt instruments for private investing, the politics embroilinggovernment’s budgets and expenditures have yet to prove a high impartialstandard of fiducial credibility: Trust Me, this irrational politics says! (Andstill, since 9\11, a safer place for investing than the federal government’s debtinstruments, just doesn’t exist?) SS accumulations’ slippage, however,amounts to many billions of dollars. And must be considered as sweet businessdeals that, as inflation’s endemism, intrinsically is an inflation causingadministrative expense to the SS administration?
120 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Factors of Mortality applied to reduce the birth counts were: 0.9869 for age 18,"
0.7822 for age 65 and 0.7451 for age 67. These factors are from the Table of Mortalityfurnished by the Census Bureau for 1990. Numbers in parentheses relate to notes thatfollow the Table.
Has the time come for SS to be considered a partner of governmentrather than its step child? Should its status be raised to the level of the quasigovernment operation of banking, for instance? Should it operate competitivelywith banking and insurance rather than as the common dupe of them? Theanticipated response from banking and insurance to this proposal is quitecertain. Still, inherently of this response, rest myriad fundamental objectionsto investing SS surplus contributions in the fluctuating private sector markets.
For now, until the Feds quasi independence is equally given to SS,allowing SS to independently collect its taxes and disburse its funds withoutgovernment budgetary involvement, the monitoring of fiducial responsibilitiesand accounting accuracy is constantly in order. Fiducial, however, populationchanges are maybe the more critically important aspect.
POPULATION CHANGES, 20 - 65 AGE GROUP "
(millions of potential wage-earners)
YEAR ENTER(Age 18)
EXIT(Age 65)
NETCHNG.
TOT.(18-64)
TOT.(65-?)
19651966196719681969
3.653.593.603.583.77
(1) 1.491.491.561.641.72
2.162.102.041.942.05
(1) ? ?
19701971197219731974
3.863.914.024.054.16
1.801.88
. . 1.962.032.17
2.062.042.072.022.00
(2) 115.1 (2) 20.1
258 Population Changes 121
YEAR ENTER(Age 18)
EXIT(Age 65)
NETCHNG.
TOT.(18-64)
TOT.(65-?)
19751976197719781979
4.254.204.244.204.21
2.202.232.262.292.32
2.051.971.981.911.89
125.3(2) 124.9 (2) 22.41
19801981198219831984
4.114.043.973.713.56
2.322.312.312.312.31
1.801.731.661.401.25
134.8
19851986198719881989
3.473.463.553.683.51
2.302.292.292.282.28
1.171.161.261.401.23
142.0
19901991199219931994
3.223.103.123.103.13
2.232.182.142.092.05
.99(3) .91
.981.011.08
148.1(4) 147.0 (4) 31.1
19951996199719981999
3.283.293.453.563.60
2.011.971.931.901.86
1.271.321.511.671.74
153.3
2000 3.63 1.89 1.75 161.3
2005 3.78 1.97 1.81 169.9
2010 4.03 2.57 1.45 178.5
2015 (5) 3.75 2.99 .76 183.3
122 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
YEAR ENTER(Age 18)
EXIT(Age 65)
NETCHNG.
TOT.(18-64)
TOT.(65-?)
2020 (5) 3.75 (6) 3.30 .45 186.2
2025 (5) 3.75 (6) 3.34 .41 188.2
2030 (5) 3.75 (6) 2.82 0.93 191.6
2035 (5) 3.75 2.78 .97 196.3
2040 (5) 3.75 2.48 1.27 202.7
2045 (5) 3.75 2.85 .90 207.8
2050 (5) 3.75 2.92 .83 212.1
(1) Birth counts for years before 1910 are unavailable because of this: 98
The rates of mortality among the general population in the United Stateshave been calculated and published after each decennial census since1890. However, the earlier tables did not represent national mortalitysince they were based only upon data from states which require statewideregistration of births and deaths. By 1940, all the states were in thiscategory, so that the mortality rates of the tables published thereafter doreflect nationwide experience.
(2) Census Bureau’s estimates.99
(3) This year’s net change represents the lightest level of competition for jobs.A reasonable expectation is unemployment rates will abate.
(4) My population model reliably tracks through 1990 the Census Bureau’smost recent projection in the 1986 World Almanac.100
(5) Counts are estimated as published empirical counts beyond 1993 wereunavailable. 101
(6) Mortality adjusted highest birth counts of the BabyBoom.
This analysis estimates the naturally determined annual change in thework force. Early BabyBoomers in 1966 began entering the work force. Allwere included in 1985. ‘Net change,’ between entering and exiting work forcepopulations, shows unemployment is more severe when the ‘population change’
258 Population Changes 123
The World Almanac (Newspaper Interprise, 1986) 71 (Total Labor Force)"
Almanac, 71 (Estimated OASDHI Labor)""
Almanac, 69 (beneficiaries)"""
Almanac, 72 (OASI Trust Funds)""""
numbers are high. The ‘70s and ‘80s were particularly afflicted withunemployment, as two million plus new candidates annually entered the workforce, and confronted a scarcity of jobs. The situation in 2003-10 is as bad.
Social Security / worker (wrkr) analysis
(Populations Millions, $ billions)
Yr Wrkrs Wrkrs Funds $ Cntrb $ Paid" "" """ """"
‘80 106.9 86.5 103.996 105.082
‘81 108.4 86.6 123.301 123.084
‘82 112.7 87.9 124.354 138.806
‘83 35.7 143.878 149.215
‘84 36.1 167.061 157.847
If Congress had taken seriously their Humphrey-Hawkins’ assignment andachieved to control inflation, SS tax collections would have been higher and SSfunds would then have been adequate. This failure clearly was caused by theinflation effects on economy, in which the solution to increase interest ratesresulted in workers being terminated. Had government’s administration beenrational, i.e., had put inflation’s economic burden onto ‘general revenuetaxes’ rather than hiding unemployment endemism caused by the Fedsrising rates of interest, therefore, on government caused increasedunemployment and short falls in contribution taxes paid to the SS trust funds,short falls would not have happened. These shortfalls were, therefore, largely
124 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
government-policy caused. The evidence is as the above tables show.Go back to natural changes to the workers’ population. For the years
1980-’84, the population between ages 18 and 65 rose by 6.6 million individuals.The record furnished by the 1986 Almanac shows a similar increase in the totallabor force between ‘80 and ‘82. But in contributors to SS, it shows only anincrease of 1.4 million individuals (More than 5 million are either nonworking wives or they are unemployed). And look at the increases inpayments to SS beneficiaries. Since contribution rates did not change, theincreases are due to COLA’s reflecting inflation. The politics of Whigdeontology will push to ignore inflation by eliminating the COLAs while thepolitics of teleology will push to either eliminate inflation at its sources orreimburse for it from the government’s general revenue taxes. Whigdeontological politics, of the GOP, administered government policy from ‘80through ‘92. And this politics negatively effected the contributions to the trustfunds of SS. Because the natural economic factors (necessary principles) wereignored and must be recompensed, a far more accurate indebtedness to SS mustbe calculated. The following table was constructed to establish an estimate ofthis indebtedness. The natural facts are these: 86.5 million workers existed in1980 and contributed to SS. Inflation is caused by systemic endemism as thebankers’ COLA (Brockway’s thesis), fluctuating mediums of exchange (RogerSherman’s thesis), public projects, which cost is paid for at project completionby borrowed funding that is repaid over time (my thesis), and fraudulent uses ofmoney (money obtained fraudulently and passed back into legitimate economyby banks, casinos, and such. And this irrationalism as officially administratedquite imperatively concluded that the COLA-based correction for inflation mustbe put upon wage-earners’ contributions’ tax : 5.5% (SOCIAL SECURITY TAX
RATES for 1984).
(All SS contributions’ rate changes, in 1984, were fallaciously set inaccordance with compounding the annual inflation increases):
(Pop. Millions, $Billions)
258 Population Changes 125
Per Capita Income, Information Please Almanac, 1996, 53"
New rates for 1984 apply. The rate was increased 4.48%.""
.07% inc. in ’85, .14% in’86, and 5.03% in ‘88."""
Yr wage"
($1000s)Wrk(Pop.)
.Cntrbtn($ Pd in)
Bnft($ Pd out)
Dbt $to SS
‘80 9.92 86.5 103.996 105.882 -1.92
‘81 10.7 88.2 114.377 107.963 6.68
‘82 11.5 89.8 116.034 109.921 6.13
‘83 12.3 91.2 117.272 111.635 5.64
‘84 13.1 92.4 118.312 113.104 5.21
‘85 13.9 93.5 132.723 114.45 18.3""
‘86 14.8 94.4 152.664 115.552 37.1"""
‘87 15.7 95.6 187.028 117.021 70.01
‘88 16.7 97 201.85 118.735 83.12
‘89 17.6 98.2 226.3 120.204 106.1
‘90 18.5 99.1 240.05 121.306 118.7
‘91 19.1 100 250.01 122.408 127.7
‘92 20.8 101 274.98 123.595 151.4
‘93 21.8 102 291.05 124.818 166.2
‘94 24.1 103.1 325.23 126.164 199.1
‘95 26.5 104.4 362.13 127.755 234.4
126 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Per Capita Income, Information Please Almanac, 1996, 53"
Yr wage"
$1000WrkPop
Cntrbtn$ Pd in
Bnft$ Pd out
Dbt $to SS
‘96 28.8 105.7 398.46 129.346 269.1
‘97 30.1 107.2 422.356 131.549 290.8
‘98 31.6 108.9 450.435 132.878 317.6
‘99 33.2 110.6 480.629 134.952 346.7
‘00 34.8 112.3 511.535 137.026 374.5
Is the Social Security System responsible for inflation’s endemism
(the COLA adjustments) on benefits paid to SS beneficiaries? Ethically,
rationally, SS is not responsible for the inflation. The above
tables’ focus was on political answers to this inflation question: i.e., on howpolitics addressed these responsibility issues, however, also determined howmuch the government owes to SS, because wage-earners contributed theinflation loaded contribution tax surplus to government, which was thenroutinely spent as government’s general revenue.
If politics contends that SS is responsible for inflation, as is inferred bygovernment’s action, then we must also consider how COLAs on pay to federalemployees’ are considered, accounted, and paid. Why is inflation the nation’sproblem accept when it is politically, legally, put onto SS, medical insuranceand such? The reasoned answers are these: SS, medical insurance and such,is not to blame for inflation! : therefore, the nation’s debt to SScontribution funds includes all inflation that was inappropriately loadedonto SS benefit payments. On this basis, the nation’s debt to SS TrustFunds in 2000 is more than $3 trillion. And the national debt since thenincreases by nearly $500 billion annually.
260 SS’s ECONOMIC VALUE
258 Population Changes 127
In previous sections, the Politics and the value of Social Security assets wasaddressed. Now society's economic values are confronted.
Factual Socioeconomic Realities
On April 20, 1983, President Reagan signed a compromise bipartisan bill tosave Social Security from bankruptcy. [In fact, the inflation burdened102
SS benefits had risen abnormally, exceeding SS contribution tax revenues]In 1984, Congress changed government’s fiscal accounting, to end in September.This three-month extension’s resulted in the deficiency of available SS reservesto cover SS expenditures for the added months. The problem was immediatelysolved by borrowing from another SS trust fund (And in fact, Budget DirectorStockman had reported that the federal government was running dangerouslydeficient of revenues). President Carter’s 1978 SS commission’s analysis hadreported that SS tax rates were adequate until the year 2000: AndHumphrey-Hawkins full employment law put the onus squarely on Congress tosolve the inflation problem. Was it because added tax revenue were needed thatReagan’s administration responded to Director Stockman’s report by assertingthat SS was bankrupted, while the federal government was running hugedeficits? : was this misstated assertion similar to President George W Bush’smisstated assertion, from which he justified war with Iraq? : ‘the Bogeymen arecoming’ was usual Cold War political hype, which was the norm during the1980's. In hyped ‘fear,’ government’s economic expedience seemed to rule?
During the middle 1980s, the government had at times, although forshort periods, operated solely on the surplus SS contribution-tax revenues. And,without the SS surplus taxes, the annual federal deficits would have been a fargreater socioeconomic problem. Therefore, for economic prudence, SSrevenues should be separated from government’s budget processes andthereby from any possibility of administrative political short-circuiting ofthe SS law’s intent for surplus revenue taxes: the mechanists’ politicallyhave persisted to contend that SS contribution taxes are legally a form ofgovernment’s taxation and are expendable in any way by government!
Also, because inflation is a hidden economic problem for Congress tosettle, inflation’s effects put onto SS benefits are a related responsibility forCongress to resolve: inflation affecting SS benefits, should be a cost burden forgovernment’s general revenues and not a burden for SS taxes: government’s
128 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
budgeted inflation cost effects on SS benefits must retroactively be reimbursed.
About SS’s added value to the general US economy, conventional,mechanist orthodox economists have said nothing, which credits the circulareconomic SS benefit’s flow as having moderated the economic devastation ofBlack Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market crashed similarly as it didin 1929? (And the crash of 2002 can now be added; without SS benefits, thesemodern economic crashes would have more severely impacted the economy.).
The economic cash flow of SS benefits is undoubtedly the greatesteconomic difference, as compared with economy in 1929. Therefore, theeconomic swings reviewed on line graphs before and after the installation ofSocial Security, undoubtedly showed that the highs and lows were substantiallymoderated. The New Deal policies, if not Social Security benefits, surelyprovided the greatest factor of moderation. So, before allowing mechanistsWhig-based ideology, which is unitary-materialism-deontology-based, which isdesigned to abuse (exploit) economy for materialist gain, to politically includeSS revenues investment in private mechanist economy, with intent eventually toscrap the SS System, let's at least first recognize SS for its socioeconomic value?
An estimate of the socioeconomic value is logically justified by anaccounting of benefits disbursed since SS’s inception. This economic value,which can easily be tabulated, and normalized to current dollar values, wasmostly spent directly by the SS beneficiaries, therefore, this amount hascirculated over and over in the general economic flow (And, these SS benefitsinfusions represent a separate form of Professor Schunperter’s static circularflowing economic model). SS has surely furnished a huge economic stimulusto underpin our economic growth since SS began in 1936.
But, this is not the only SS socioeconomic benefit to general economy.Another great economic benefit derives from the economic stimulus that SScontributions tax collections, before paid to the US Treasury, is first on depositin private-appointed collection centers, which invest these funds with the Fed.This substantial economic benefit disproportionately has benefitted banking(even the investment banking consortiums, which recently (1980s) are engagedin corporation buy outs).
To this socioeconomic value so quantified, add $ billions for the valueof interest slippage, as is examined in my section 255, which bolstered banksduring their most recent times of extreme fragility. Add a few trillion for
258 Population Changes 129
revenue taxes not lost to economic depression, as in the aftermath of the Oct. 19,1987 stock crash and again during the recessions of '90, '91, and 2001. Theserecent economic crashes went by almost unnoticed by the overall economy,partly, if not mostly, because of the SS circular cash flow (more than $200billion in 1987 alone): that fed directly retiree subsistence Consumption, whichconsumption function, in total, represents two thirds of the US economy (Thesurreal economy of fluctuating futures and stock markets largely operatesseparately from goods and services economy, as related to subsistenceconsumption). This SS ‘revenue machine’ truly acted on the economy similarlyto accumulations of personal savings would act in times of crisis and this factshould be conceded by politics that has opposed SS, from its beginning: 103
When the recession in 1937 occurred, many observers concluded that theaccumulation of the Social Security surplus (taking capital from theeconomy) was the cause.Initially, this political opinion posed validity as money saved in bank Accountsdiminished, but as SS contributions began circulating, coincidently of the‘circular SS flow,’ as Schumpeter’s static economic model represented, most wasspent, increasing economic subsistence consumption. Therefore, SS has actedprimarily positively on our consumption driven real economy (consumptionwhich drives two thirds of our total economy; the Fed, however, particularlysince the fluctuating markets’ crash following 9/ 11/’01, seems preoccupied withonly the surreal one third’s fluctuating markets’ economy *).
* Greenspan: Big deficits may harm economy 104
Washington -- While the Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspanwarned “substantial and excessive deficits” could harm the economy,President Bush heard more encouraging words from hand pickedeconomists.
Bush invited private economists to ensure him, to try to persuadethe country that the deep tax cuts he engineered are helping create jobsat a time when the unemployment rate is at a nine-year high of 6.4percent. . . . The economists summoned to the White House said they sawno short-term harm in the deficits, which the administration projects willsoar to a record $455 billion this year and $475 billion next year. . . . Concerning issues of a sound economy, economists are not logically disposed,as the nations’ politics is also is similarly divided. What fundamentally divides
130 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
politics is the divided economic definition. President G. W. Bush’s idealmechanist view of fluctuating markets is considered to provide the antecedenteconomic value, with the Consumption-based economy providing aconsequential effect: this ideological view represents the unitary materialistantecedent political value, which economic value derives from investments morethan from consumption of produced goods and services. Great dogma relatedparadoxes are at play in this mechanism-based political ideal, and alwayseventually become problematic. The political contest for a cardinal antecedenceis not new: ‘Antinomy’ (the conjunct of anti and nomos) has since the beginningof time been similarly politically active: 105
Like Western philosophy in general, philosophy of law in particular firstemerged in ancient Greece. In the 5th century BC the Sophists andSocrates, along with his followers, took up the question of the nature oflaw. Both recognized a distinction between things that exist by nature(physis) and those that exist by human-made convention (nomos). TheSophists, however, tended to place law in the latter category, whereasSocrates put it in the former, as did Plato and Aristotle.Sophist republicans of the GOP routinely ‘assert’ that their nomos-based natural‘consequents’ are the preferred principles of their ‘positivist’ assertive politics.Consistently, political sophists ignore, say no to, or deny the naturally‘antecedent’ principles: in this, they ignore rationally natural ‘antecedence’: 106
antecedent 4. ‘Logic’ the part of a conditional proposition which statesthe condition and upon which the other part (the consequent) logicallydepends.
Affirming unitary materialist nomos, classical Sophists ignored thelogical antecedents of deliberate reasoning as represented in the accounts andworks of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle . . .. And, classical mechanistconservative values were persuaded by the Sophists’ unitary material side of life:they also are stuck in the favor of nomos in the dogmatic ideal of mechanism:
everything that exists now is the result of factors and conditions thatexisted before. [This mechanism-based determinism (of unitarymaterialist belief) concludes that the universe behaves like a big machine]
It might also be recalled that the general tax reforms of 1981 and 1984were intended to generate personal savings which savings by a select few surely
258 Population Changes 131
happened but did not improve the economy of those below them (7 percent ofincome was saved in 1979, only about 2 percent was saved in 1987). The valueof SS to the economy during the economic perils of the 1980's cannot beoverstated and, rather than the SS beneficiaries, the wage-earners and businessesbenefitted the greatest from the nation's economic stability as provided by thebenefit payments of SS and spent to bolster the consumer driven economy. Butthis acknowledgment should not overlook the inefficiencies of SS asgovernment’s welfare dispensing agent, still, its efficiencies in dispensingretirement benefits also should not be overlooked. Still, critical analysis, debate,and actions that improve SS are surely needed.
The following comments are taken from Civitas, i.e., research appendedto section 205, which I wrote to address the essence and political issues affectingSS. These comments address a critical necessity for money to constantlycirculate broadly for our economy holistically to be healthy. 107
As in a poker game where the chips are concentrated in fewer and fewerhands, the other fellows stay in the game only by borrowing. Whentheir credit [runs] out, the game [stops].Fed Chairman, Marriner Eccles expressed this thought to explain a cause of theGreat Depression. Eccles, a conservative banker, supported solutions to theeconomy that Keynes had proposed. Eccles proposed this to senators: 108
We will either adopt a plan which will meet the problem ofunemployment under capitalism, or a plan will be adopted for us whichwill operate without capitalism.
Eccles' assessment did not overstate the critical economic situation andit is as accurate today. Now, as then, this assessment deserves urgent actions.
The new economic principles that Marriner Eccles happened upon in hisearnest research would be enshrined later as "Keynesian economics," thedoctrine that reigned over government management of the economy fornearly fifty years. Eccles articulated these new ideas at least three yearsbefore John Maynard Keynes would publish his "General Theory."109
. . . The only way we could get out of depression was throughgovernment action in placing purchasing power in the hands of peoplewho were in need of it. 110
Revealing Marriner Eccles, William Greider wrote this: 111
The fundamental weakness of the 1920s prosperity was not that Americans
132 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
were profligate, spending too much and saving too little, but the opposite."We did not as a nation consume more than we produced--far from it,"Eccles declared. "We were excessively thrifty." The mal distribution ofincomes guaranteed that millions of potential consumers--workers,farmers, everyone who did not earn enough to join the ranks ofaccumulating wealth--would eventually exhaust their purchasing power."While the national income rose to high levels," Eccles explained, "it wasso distributed that the incomes of the majority were entirely inadequateand business activity was sustained only by a rapid and unsoundincrease in the private debt structure, including ever-increasinginstallment buying of consumption goods." When the consumers' chipswere gone, when they could no longer borrow or buy things, the producerswould naturally curtail their production of goods too. More factorieswere closed; more people lost their incomes. The game was over.
For Eccles, it did not matter greatly who owned wealth or howmuch they owned. Money itself was neutral as an economic force--positive if it was put into transactions and investment, harmful if it washoarded in idle savings. What mattered was that people kept theirmoney moving.
Eccles observation -- it does not greatly matter who owns wealth, orhow much they own -- bears more on money hoards which are mechanisticallydetermined to grow and concentrate: most high incomes are put into transactionsthat will not result in the circulation of money in the lowest estate of capitalism(Theirs is invested in a casino like economy in which the highest returns are thestimuli for investing).
Inflation is caused by the Bankers’ COLA, G. P. Brockway concluded.If true, and I expect that it is, capital invested in production and jobs thatcirculate money with wage-earners, is far more effective, critically, while not asattractive to investments of society’s affluence, which grow inordinately, asgreatly enhanced by inflation, which magically legally enures as a capital return.
If irrational ideological political economy ever achieves to sponsor theinvestment of SS contributions in fluctuating markets, then workers’ surpluscontributions (savings for retirement), will become a subject cause of greaterinflation: will become an accomplice of mechanisms’ endemism that magically
258 Population Changes 133
shows up at points of consumption as inflation? , Which legally enures as capitalthat returns to feed the capitalist interests of economy. The far better teleologyfor workers that mechanistically pay the full bill for inflation is for Congress tofulfill its constitutional charge: reduce inflation by consistently restricting theBankers’ COLA. I suspect the ‘golden ratio,’ named Phi (N), that the Greeksfound, have natural application to our capitalist democratic economy: to near ridit of systemic inflation. Mathematically, ‘the golden rule of consumption,’ in112
which growth in economy equals growth in population (and consumption ismaximized), is nearly in balance when the ‘golden ratio’ applies to economicgrowth. An irrational number like B, N approximately has the decimal value of1.618. If Congress accepted its constitutional teleological charge and113
controlled inflation, investments in production and wage-earning would shiftaway from the casino economy of fluctuating markets into real economy. Anda dollar earned would retain its value.
Roger Sherman’s ‘A Caveat Against Injustice’ is on my desk toremind of the evils of fluctuating values of our Mediums of Exchange. Shermanthought he had secured the constitutional provision for non fluctuating valuestandards. The Constitution’s instruction to Congress is Article I Section 8.
. . . to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fixthe standards of weights and measures.
Sherman vs Battle must be revisited with Real economy, of wages earned, vsSurreal economy, of the non earned accumulations, the argument. Inflation isof economic value only realized in a particular sector of economy by debtinstruments that over time are amortized. Inflation might be considered as valuerealized immediately by some but not yet paid for by others. Similar butoppositely oriented are stock, futures and money markets. In these mechanismsthe public bids for positions of profits expected to be realized in the future (IPOs,for instance allows corporations to set a nominal value on new stock issues thatthe market will offer to the public in a bidding process; when all shares aresubscribed, a higher market value generally results to instantaneously enrich thevalue of the nominal stock). Heilbroner tells this story that I have taken libertyto condense somewhat:114
Under a contractual but verbal arrangement, Rockefeller issued anunfunded check for the full amount of purchase with explicit agreement
134 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
with the seller that for a specified time he would not deposit the check forcollection. Rockefeller then made a public offering of stock for an amountnearly double the purchase. From the proceeds from the sale of stock,Rockefeller deposited to cover the check and accounted the remainder asprofit. In other words, without using a penney of their own money,William Rockefeller and Henry Rogers purchased the assets and thebusiness organization of Anaconda Copper Company: and they put a hugeprofit into their private accounts.Such private enrichment by magically effecting an ownership position bymanipulating a bank license and ownership of corporate stock, in an agreed timedelay between the issuance of a check and its collection, surely is illegal andconsidering the resulting business gain, grandly inflationary. However, bankingconsortiums have for twenty years, or more, similarly effected corporate ‘buy-outs’ while not being busted for engaging the common banking chicanery. Theinvestment banking consortiums arranged to buy back all the stock, then issuedto the consortium members new nominal stock positions and with new IPO’smagically accomplished what Rockefeller and Rogers had done, enriching thempersonally without affecting the corporate productions: while they were notbusted for violating the law, general inflation’s endemism as caused by theseinvestment banking schemes became far more extreme while the investmentbankers enriched themselves. To these concupiscent bankers, this has becometheir touted ‘American Dream.’
Section 252, Comparative Applications of Social Security, evaluates andcompares facts and tables of sequential twenty year groups of wage-earners:OASDHI contribution-taxes paid, or anticipated will be paid, in constant dollarutils, is the basis of comparison.
252 Comparative SS applications as related to homogeneous groups of young adults
Let's not tax you
and don't tax me.
Let's tax those guys
who are to be.
252 Comparative SS Applications 135
SS contribution taxes, spent by government as general revenue, where real"
SS surplus contributions were accounted in fictional accounting entries,represent a full circle from the Greeks’ experience when developing thenumber system: Fictional notions began to arouse ‘positive’ thoughts amongthe early Greek mathematicians when the inferred significance of negativenumbers was mathematically considered. Similarly, positivist minded Whigsconceived of fictional corporate organizations to accumulate wage-earnerproduced capital to eventually reward them with privatized profit. Which
The 1984 SS tax law changed the philosophical basis of Social Security and, forthe first time, dedicated contribution-tax revenues to a specific future equity.(The law also specifically provided to eventually make the contribution-taxcollections an off-budget consideration.) The system was changed by this lawto over time, shift from its traditional pay-as-you-go to a pay-for-yourselfinsurance basis. H. B. Leonard wrote this about the ideological politics for thischange, which has existed since the SS System’s inception: 115
The Perkins committee had flirted briefly with pay-as-you-go financing.Morgenthau's amendment, adopted with the original legislation, called foressentially full funding. The Supreme Court ignored the full-fundingcharacteristic and treated the system as if it were financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Many observers were concerned about the potentialaccumulation of the vast reserve fund implied by full funding. Thisissue had been raised in the 1935 debate, and the administration hadpromised to study the issue of reserves further. Senate conservatives, whomight have been expected to insist on full funding, soon became moreworried about huge reserves in the hands of federal officials. Wouldthey buy up the private sector? Senator Arthur Vandenberg opined in1937 that "it is scarcely conceivable that rational men should proposesuch an unmanageable accumulation of funds in one place in ademocracy.Pay-for-yourself SS represents a fundamental change that, for custody andeventual disbursement of the huge SS surplus (the government’s only accountingreality is made in IOUs), pits each productive worker population in a politicalstruggle with its complementary dependent retired population. Unfortunately,"
136 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
reminds one of lending money that the borrower never repays and whenconfronted, his retort is this: I’d rather owe it to you than cheat you out of it!Rational people must be aware that political positivist politics, is aware that SSwas originally considered as legal under revenue tax laws: and this politicalpositivism considers SS contribution taxes as government’s to use as politicswills it be used.
in the mix of this politics, all participants of SS (present, and future) stand tolose the promised SS surplus contributions to mechanist political deontology,which emanates from the affluent money hoarding accumulation side of our
surreal economy: Deontological mechanist politics threatens the SSsurplus, which is accounted in IOUs. Politics in 1984 achieved to changethe SS System from pay-as-you-go by adding a confused IOU accumulation thatintends to end in a privatized pay-for-yourself insurance system.
The 2001 mechanist politics, which returned $1.135 trillion “only to those thatpaid general revenue taxes” confirm the real intent of this political threat,which, whether spent or not, affects all SS surplus contributions.
Should an overt battle not occur sooner, for reasons of inequity, apolitical battle for the SS surplus is destined to occur between Sean-Michelle'sgroup and Harry-Kari's group, with Slite-Hope's group biased to favor Harry-Kari's group position.
‘John-Mary,’ represent the young productive adults of 1940, ‘Tom-Sue’ thegroup of 1965, ‘Sean-Michelle’ the group of 1987 (the Baby Boom), ‘Harry-Kari’ the group of 2005, and ‘Slite-Hope’ the young adults of 2025.Comparative applications to these homogeneous twenty year age groups arepresented here. The Population of each group spans twenty years. The naturalbirth counts, populations, are respectively: 55, 50, 77 (births of ‘Harry-Kari’and ‘Slite-Hope’ are each estimated at) 69 million.
That SS cannot survive without the cohesive philosophical basis of itsorigin is imperative: And this philosophical basis was changed with the 1984 SSTax law. For the politics mechanist conservatives idealistically expressed whenreacting to Morgenthau's amendment, private sector politics will never allowthe federal government to operate the SS system as an insurance company or a‘financial services’ company: with (privatized) fund accumulations, reserves, andsuch. SS surpluses are too extensive and threatening, in any competitive sense,
252 Comparative SS Applications 137
to be invested with the private enterprise economy (The U.S. TreasurySecretary, June 2001, put the inflated unfunded liabilities of SS at $10 trillion):which calculation represents inflation feeding inflation? An accumulation of $12trillion (anticipated in the late 80's) is consistent with the Treasury Secretary’scalculation and the amount simply overwhelms the private sector economy. Forinstance, assuming the amount actually existed as reserve funding and wasinvested, the annual Bankers COLA, alone, represents an annual $360 billioninflation endemism cost to taxpayers (and the evidence now shows clearly whichfunctional side of the real political economy’s equation, is made to pay forinflation): That return on inflation amount essentially equals the average annualsurplus of contributions paid into SS during the 1990's. Does this result ofirrationality indicate where deontological inflation-based assumptions are takingus? One might ask, and they should, why the Dow Jones Average is stuck atlevels that are half what it once was. Investors now have personal computerizedcapability, to move into and out of the market. This new reality limits the stockmarket’s ‘exuberance,’ which might never perform again, as it has in the past?
SS is ‘socialusage insurance.’ Itis not a pension planwith liabilities, whichmechanist idealismasserts that it has.But, it continuouslyrequires unique fiduciala d m i n i s t r a t i v eresponsibilities andfunding that disallowsany investment of it inpr iva te economicinstruments: It surelywould enhance theDOW index, but wouldprovide no opportunityor advantage to the
individual wage-earner’s, as regards privatized profits, which private investorshave always enjoyed: SS funds investment would be as the dove is to the hunter
138 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
The federal government, as sovereign, acts as a constitutional compact and not as""
mechanist-affirmed contract. What such contract would ever be legally binding on afuture generation or on a now dead one? Mechanists do take advantage of this fact,whenever in administrative charge of government, deficits are rationalized.
and this scenario undoubtedly is behind the mechanist politics that championedthis privatized investment notion. ""116
In 1987, Mary [Of the population pseudonym for all persons born in thefirst 20-year period of this review (Mary conceptually was born in 1906)] isalone since husband, John, departed life a few years ago. Mary has in’87 passed80 years of age and she receives Social Security benefits that are about 80% ofthe benefit, that is paid to the next twenty-year group, Tom-Sue: and even asmaller amount than the benefit scheduled to be paid to individuals of followinggroups. But you should also note that the amount of John-Mary's contribution-taxes, which were adequate to pay for SS benefits, as provided to the earliest SSretirees, were also much lower. And you may recall the comment about thematurity level of the SS System, which is here repeated: The ratio of 19 millionbeneficiaries to the 62 million worker-contributors in the group [in the mid '60s]represents the maturity level that the Social Security system had reached. Afterthirty years of collecting contribution-taxes and paying out benefits, the SSsystem’s maturity level had reached only 0.31. Twenty years later, in 1988, thematurity level had reached 0.92.
The maturation of the SS System, while expected, was impossible to explain tothose paying the contributions: tax increases as required to pay benefits to thehigher percentage of beneficiaries whose benefits were inflated to pay increasedsubsistence costs, are like trying to convince wage-earners that swallowingwhole watermelons was a necessity.
However, those that got the shortest political shaft are the ‘NotchBabies’ (those born between 1917 and 1926). They were the 29 million birth-crest of pre depression and war years (many were the children of emigres). Theirnumbers were systemically burdensome at the wrong political time (When in1984 the SS funds did not cover benefits, for instance). With contributionsurpluses necessarily being used as general revenue (This unfortunate politicshas not improved over the years). With the Tax Bill of 2001 changing all thathappened in 1984, Senator Reid (D, NV) reportedly was preparing to reintroduce
252 Comparative SS Applications 139
a Bill to equalize benefits paid to the Notch Babies that, then beyond age 75,were still alive (Ken Bouton reported that mortality was claiming 12 thousandof these lives each month). If one wants to monitor how mortality has its naturalway, the statistics on this smaller birth crest should enlighten about longevitiesthat BabyBoomers (indeed all of us) can reasonably expect.
The unnatural expansions to SS have rushed the system’s maturity levelsomewhat: SS began in 1936 with (OAI) retirement Insurance. SurvivorsInsurance (SI) was added in 1940 and Disability Insurance (DI) in 1956. Theexpansion to include Medicare in the SS revenue collection process does notcontribute to the SS system’s maturity (relative density of benefit outlays) butit does have an impact on the contribution-taxes that are paid.
To say that a political social agenda has burdened SS benefits adverselyis to understate the political fact. SS was abused by mechanist politics that isintransigent and remains to require legislative redress action. The wage-earnerbase of SS contributions funding in fact had expediently provided an acceptablesolution to resolve this mechanist political intransigence: SS surpluscontributions’ taxes were expedient to offset government’s revenue shortfalls.
Comparative constant dollar utiles of ‘Per Family’ contributions to SSsurplus with the corresponding total OASDI contributions, were analyzed.These utile values are nothing more than a means of comparison, and no moreis intended. What is compared is each normalized group with each other group.
Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope are pseudonyms of then unborn generationsthat represent the unsuspecting groups that are destined to pay most for the 1984SS surplus fix. Look closely at Sean-Michelle’s utile value. Each family intheir group will have contributed $126.2 utiles of which only $18 utiles repre-sents SS surplus that ostensibly will be repaid to them in retirement benefits.Will any contributed surplus funds be there?
GROUP VALUES
PER FAMILY GROUP UTILES *
GROUP SIZE 0ASDI SURPLUS 0ASDI SURPLUS
millions value value utiles utiles
John-Mary 55 $40.3 $0 1108 0
Tom-Sue 50 74.5 1.8 1862 45
140 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
PER FAMILY GROUP UTILES *
GROUP SIZE 0ASDI SURPLUS 0ASDI SURPLUS
Sean-Michelle 77 126.2 18.0 4859 693
Harry-Kari** 69+ 143.4 28.6 4947 987
Slite-Hope** 69+ 143.4 9.2 4947 317
* (½ group population) X (family value) = group utiles
** These estimates, values and utiles, are based on the grossly understatedpopulation projections of the early ‘80s: the US Census Bureau’s populationestimate, of 19 years and younger, on July 1, 2001 totaled 80,265,000 and byadding the one year average to estimate a twenty year comparison to theBabyBoom’s 77 million population, this twenty years population is 84.5million. Which shows that my analysis is indeed conservative. 117
The ‘84 SS contribution tax surplus is unfairly oppressive and should be greatlyreduced, particularly to reassign inflation costs to government’s general revenue.
George Will was right in the late ‘80s when he said, “for ethicalreasons, the SS Contribution Tax should be cut.”
GROUP 0ASDI SURPLUS
REPRESENTATIVE VALUE VALUE
John-Mary $40.3 0
Tom- Sue $74.5 $1.8
Sean-Michelle $126.2 $18.0
Harry-Kari $143.4 $28.6
Slite-Hope $143.4* $9.2*
* If the SS tax is not reduced, Slite-Hope will contribute to SS surplus verynearly the same as Harry-Kari. But the part not shown will go to Harry-Kari’sand their own retirement (Since, by then mortality will have reduced the lives ofSean-Michelle, it will no longer contribute to retiring the ‘BabyBoom’).
Also, now to consider that the Census Bureau, late in 1992, revised theirpopulation projection for 2050: to 380 million instead of 250 million whichpreviously they had projected and I had used in my analysis. The utile valuesas indicated for Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope are, therefore, far understated. Their
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SS contributions’ taxation is irrationally oppressive and unethical. For thisinevitable holistic result, surplus funding for the SS retirement of Sean-Michelle(the ‘BabyBoom’) should never have happened. This political result was sealedin April 2001, when this final paragraph was necessarily inserted: SS surplusnever accumulated. Instead, Congress spent it as if it were the generalrevenue of government. Therefore, Government owes a debt to SS Fundsthat reaches far past $3 trillion as the new millennium approaches. Mostly,the surplus contributions’ tax was paid by Sean-Michelle. And it shouldend there. Surplus provisions of SS Tax law must be reversed.
As the table of per family Group utiles shows, Sean-Michelle'scontributions to Social Security surplus are less than the contributions providedby the groups following the BabyBoom. By design of the 1984 SS Tax Law,these following groups also were conscripted to pay contributions surplus for topay retirement benefits to Sean-Michelle: The political intent of the1984 SSTax law is not as was later rationalized, i.e., was never a mechanism toconvert to ‘pay for your self’ SS insurance.
But, if Sean-Michelle's group, in fact, is the larger group the adjustedcomparative value must, of course, also consider each groups’ size (theadjustment of the early ‘90s population projection, makes Sean-Michelle's groupsize comparison more ordinary). Still, the value of Sean-Michelle's totalcontribution was adjusted:
Instead of $126.2, the refined utiles value is $73.2. Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope’s surplus contributions make up the difference. This shows that Sean-Michell’s contributions’ taxation is level with Tom-Sue’s, with the surplus taxburden shifted onto Harry-Kari and Slight Hope. [Since, they were notyet born when the SS law to collect surplus contributions became effective,under what rational contractual legality is there for having done this?]
Who (or mechanistically what) is responsible for World War
II and depression?
This critical question abides unresolved: hotly debated as our nation’sgovernment was formed, as represented by Burke and Paine, continues withoutresolution. This excerpt from section 109 attests to this fact:
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The mechanist ‘conservatism’ of England and America (which also based itsphilosophy on Comte’s positivism) illogically denied Locke to affirm Hobbes.And hate was not the only mutuality between capitalism and communism:dogmatic values of unitary materialism, including nihilism, positivism, andNietzschean ‘blond brutes’ are also common. All represent illogicallyfallacious (‘irrational’) values which function prescriptively in the logos ofdogmatic mechanist believers. And when natural values of noumenon are deniedor suppressed, an economy based on unitary materialism is destined to producecorresponding tyrannous results.118
Proudhon’s answer to Marx is so profoundly moving and prescient thatit is worth quoting [again]:
Let us together seek, if you wish, the laws of society, the mannerin which these laws are reached, the process by which we shall succeedin discovering them; but, for God’s sake, after having demolished all the‘a priori’ dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinatingthe people. . . . I applaud with all my heart your thought of inviting allshades of opinion; let us carry on a good and loyal polemic, let us give theworld the example of an informed and farsighted tolerance, but let us not-- simply because we are at the head of a movement -- make ourselves intothe leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the apostles of a newreligion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion of reason. Let usgather and encourage all dissent, let us outlaw all exclusiveness, allmysticism, let us never regard a question as exhausted, and when we haveused one last argument, let us if necessary begin again -- with eloquenceand irony. On these conditions, I will gladly enter into your association.Otherwise, no!
What in the nihilistic prejudice of the ‘Absolute materialism’ of communism isdifferent from the ‘Absolute materialism’ of capitalists? Are the economicdestinies the same? Or, does the outcome of our American economic experiment(The American System of Political Economy as supposedly imbued withphilosophic democracy), depend on if and how the natural noumenal dialecticsend up being governed? : on the philosophic ‘Rational empiricism,’ that mustfind teleological principle as the fiducial regulator, the mechanist ‘Absolute
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idealism’ of capitalism? Unitary materialistic values which tout democracywhile practicing the unitary materialistic values of ‘Absolute idealism,’ areexposed by the ‘Positive’ laws approved by our dogma-jaded judiciary: 119
stress[ing] the existence of one ‘absolute reality,’ a being or element thatis complete in itself and does not depend on anything outside itself. Itasserts that there is a principle of authority expressing the will of theabsolute. As a political philosophy, ‘Absolute idealism’ considers the‘state,’ or the national government, as the absolute, according to thisphilosophy, everything in society is a part of the state and subservient toit. From these doctrines follow dictatorship by an absolute ruler,rejection of parliamentary procedures, and submission of the individualto the state.
Mechanist dogmatic belief disqualifies them in fiducial matters of naturalnoumenal dialectics, which must be reserved for those who fully subscribe thevalues of ‘Rational empiricism’ and respect the democratic sovereignty thatunderpins the American democratic ‘state’: fiducial representation of thedemocratic sovereignty can fill the ‘necessary role’ of this natural humandialectic, and the powers of ‘state’ must never be raised in power and authorityabove the collective sovereignty of rational human beings which comprise it.
Belief that all action, thought, and feeling can be explained bymovements and changes of matter, i.e., ‘materialism,’ is fallacious dogma thatis easily exposed by tautological testing. This logically fallacious beliefdominates ‘Dialectical materialism’ and ‘Absolute idealism’ forms of ‘state’and, untoward, also threatens constantly to render the principles of ‘RationalEmpiricism’ ineffective. An ontological dominance of ‘materialism’ invariablyestablishes a caste of believers in the ‘determinism’ of natural forces (Which, asHamilton argued: should be marshaled by the exclusive sovereignty of theowners of property? Unfortunately, materialism-based forms of ‘states’dehumanizes the individuals that by choice, prejudice, a lack of financialstanding, . . ., is excluded or expelled from governance (this situation happenedin the U.S. with the Presidential Election of 2000). Whigs designed TheAmerican System of Political Economy to effect this sovereignty of caste:Parrington called it “an ingenious scheme to ‘milk the cow’ and distribute the
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The greatest economic paternalism to ‘fictitious person’ corporate entities,"
and increasing debt to society, is legalized ‘perpetual existence.’
Particularly, dogma about ‘leveled’ sovereignty which had rationalized that""
only our souls [are] equal, which doctrine represented the effective reversalof humanism's divorce of the secular from the theological.
‘milk’ to those who superintended the ‘milking.” The propertied caste that"
controls the sovereignty of our political economy thereby expects a ‘Brahmanist’type of perpetuity.
Unfortunately, however, a natural categorical imperative of collectivesovereignty is that the controlling intelligentsia is noumenon-persuaded (as Platosaid, let the philosophers rule): Those who rule by force or dogma-basedopinions are surely not noumenon-persuaded. They can be expected to blamenature rather than their dogma for happenings, as for instance, Proudhonreasoned argument: ‘What is Property?’
Maybe, John Locke's reasoning of ‘self’ had influenced Proudhon: each man'sown and exclusive ‘property,’ as this philosophic principle always applies insovereignty’s debate about : What Parrington observed as returning to the""
seventeenth century (Hobbes) from which the eighteenth (Locke) had reacted.In dogma that evolved, traditional sovereignty of a ‘collective’ (a community,a state or nation) was philosophically based on power and force. Hobbes’interpretation (when history is restricted to an ontology of ‘positive’ reality, i.e.,based on Plato’s Visible Realm of truth only) suggests the values of centralizedlogos which supports the collective’s sovereignty of ‘armed force’ must not beshunted by philosophic (noumenon-based) values of democracy (withoutcommon consent, never an aggressor).
Locke was not alone in the philosophic development of democracy.Credit for this development finds ‘the levelers’ of sovereignty. Particularly, asC. Thomas mentioned, John Lilburne:120
Lilburne’s title, ‘The Freeman’s Freedom Vindicated,’ of 1646, where,after acknowledging ‘God, the absolute sovereign Lord and King of allthings in heaven and earth,’ he speaks of ‘individual man and woman’ as
252 Comparative SS Applications 145
always having been and remaining ‘equal and alike in power, dignity,authority and majesty, none of them by nature having any authority,dominion, or magisterial power one over or above another; neither havethey, nor can they exercise any, but merely by institution or donation, thatis to say, by mutual agreement or consent and agreement, for the goodbenefit or comfort of each other . . ..’ The naked power of such anassertion has long since departed, and the novelty has long since beensuppressed by cliche [belief in dogma?]. . . . In the midst of civil strifethat may be variously termed a revolution, a rebellion, or a war, JohnLilburne, one of the nation’s greatest unsung heroes, was able to speakauthoritatively and calmly concerning political principle. And thisquotation aptly begins any examination of their cause -- their cry in thewilderness, even in 1646, before their defeat by Ireton and Cromwell inthe debates at Putney and Whitehall (Which to remark in Cromwell’sfavor were perhaps the only two moments in history when an army putschhas paused to debate the nature of the ensuing constitution). . . . Lilburnecontinues that it is ‘. . . unnatural, irrational, sinful, wicked, unjust,devilish and tyrannical . . . for any man to appropriate and assume untohimself a power, authority and jurisdiction, to rule, govern or reign overany sort of men in the world ‘without their free consent . . ..’ The levelersfound themselves confronted with that ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’[unnatural, i.e., manmade phenomenon] ‘sovereignty’ of Parliament. . . .
Thomas Rainborough and John Wildman are mentioned as representing ‘thelevelers’ in the Putney Debates: “The Putney Debates (1647) areremarkable for the clash between two views of democracy, that of ‘thelevelers,’ in which every man . . . has an equal stake or interest . . . in theconstitution that would ensue, while Ireton on the other hand speaks forthe Independent and Presbyterian [Calvinist] factions and of a ‘fixedinterest in the country’ (i.e., landed property) which alone will qualify aman to have a voice in the state.”
It is, I believe, in this philosophic values dilemma that we find the greatestresurgent intrusion of fundamental religion in American party-politics.
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Organized religion has always assumed a representative form of sovereigntyunder the guise of paternalistic interest in the welfare of its members, who,because of religious dogma (that claims, only our souls are free), can effectivelyargue that individuals lack standing to act for themselves. This is a sample ofWildman’s position:121
‘how governors shall derive a just power from the people but by an assentof the people, I understand not.’ They are the inheritors, whether entirelyconsciously in all cases, of the tradition of natural law theory, togetherwith -- most importantly in the instance of those who may so easily becharacterized as radical only in religion, and religious in all theiropinions of the sublunary sphere of government -- humanism's divorce ofthe secular from the theological -- the rescue of natural law theory fromits theological constraints, which allowed the perpetration of feudalism,of hierarchy and enslavement on the one hand and the aggrandizementof property on the other simply because’ Only our souls were equal.’
Excerpts from Thomas’ take on Locke’s Two Treatises are:
--- The right to property is defined as an essential or basic right forthe purpose of defining the sovereignty of the individual and the necessityto guarantee his rights and property 'against' others, 'not' so as to allowhim to acquire, to control, to achieve domination through landedproperty.
--- Every Man has a 'Property' in his own 'Person.'. . .
--- Men living together 'according to reason' are properly in the Stateof Nature.'
--- No individual has a right or power over the life of another.
--- Force without Right, upon a man's person, makes a State of War.. . .
--- It is a 'right,' a possession of each individual which must beprotected together with his other freedoms, protected from otherswho are in a 'State of War' against the individual . . .
--- He that in the State of Nature, 'would take away the Freedom,'
252 Comparative SS Applications 147
that belongs to anyone in that State, must necessarily be supposedto have a design to take away everything else, that 'Freedom'being the foundation of all the rest. . . .122
Locke deliberately employs the idea of the 'state of Nature' rather than the'law of Nature.' He insists not upon uncovering any 'laws' of nature (i.e.,human nature) but rather upon the capacity of human 'reason' topromulgate a code of civil law that is the 'constitution' of a just politicalsociety. . . . Human reason alone was 'universal' among human beings,and by its application would men be able to develop a concept ofequivalence linked to necessary justice. . . .
The 'State of Nature' is that which is governed by a 'natural' lawor 'right Rule of Reason' (i.e., the admission of the equivalence of others).. . .
Locke is not out to prove the existence of any law of nature but toassert it ‘in defiance of the contemporary,’ to radically 'claim' that it istrue by the admission of any individual that his or her requirements ofliberty and freedom must be admitted to others, 'unless' the form ofpolitical society under which they live is unjust. 123
‘The levelers’ and Locke refuted Calvinist dogma that effects philosophicallythat ‘only our souls are free.’ This nihilistic dogma, of Calvinist origin, intendsto make noumenon passive. It is found in Edmund Burke’s arguments whichfounded English and American ‘conservatism:’ in the Federalist-Whig line ofAmerican politics.
While ‘Dialectical materialism’ is vulnerable to economic determinismthat without restraint eventually can evolve to despotic dictatorship, as theRussian experiment of Lenin showed, all forms of ‘Absolute idealism’ (includingAmerica’s Capitalism) are, by the intrinsic philosophic determinism of unitarymaterialism, vulnerable to despotic ‘absolute power’ that converts to despoticdictatorship, as Hitler showed. Only government that responds reasonably anddeliberately to noumenal-based dialectics can avert this disaster.
American ‘conservative’ philosophy is clearly persuaded by thetautologically fallacious philosophic principles of ‘Absolute idealism.’ And
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since the Constitution has been interpreted by administrative policies andlegislation that supports the ‘conservative’ proposition, the ‘American state’ (asdriven by the American System of Political Economy, while ‘fictitious,’ ispresently ‘absolute.’ This ‘absolute authority’ of the ‘American political state’is legally but fallaciously contending as based on a ‘fictitious,’ but ‘absolutelegal contract.’ Law, in the ‘conservative’ view, therefore, is the supreme‘American Monarch,’ which politically and fictionally is divinely endowed witha king’s alter ego and authorities. However, unlike the Russian experiment,which openly enforced ‘dialectical materialism’ doctrine, the emphatic‘materialism-basis’ of legally licensed American Political economy is found indogma that rules politically. And, unless reason-based dialectics prevail tosubdue the ‘materialist dogma’ intrinsic of the ‘conservative’ view, the end ofthe American political economy is deterministically destined to failure, as Marxhad predicted. And Joseph Schumperter’s more recent circular flow economicanalysis is, therefore, comforting political economic analysis!
The sides of this political debate were argued by Englishmen (Edmund Burkeand Thomas Paine) and the argument was continued in America betweenFederalists (joined by Tories and Whigs) and democratic republicans (asBenjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson). . . .
Burke’s ‘positivism’ (dogmatic realness aspect of unitary materialism)shows up in his many debates. In his debate with Tom Paine, both philosophicseeds of American liberalism and conservatism are found (Remember, however,that both sides in this controversy have a ‘liberal’ origin: and both opposedTories who dogmatically, unreasonably, served the despotic ‘Absolute idealism’of the English Crown). American ‘conservatives,’ who followed Burke,assumed his ideological vanity which underpinned his ‘us’ versus ‘them’ caste(‘Us’ being an asserted divinely privileged Aristocracy).
Paine superbly exposed Burke’s unitary materialist leaning in the longrunning debate about the political state. And, Paine’s distrust of governmentgreatly influenced Jefferson. 124
It is the injustice of government that creates armies to defend theearnings of injustice. But every wise government will respect itslimitations. As a child of the eighteenth century, Paine hated theLeviathan State as a monster created by a minority to serve the ends of
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tyranny. The political state he accepted as a present necessity, but hewould not have its prestige magnified and the temptation to tyrannyincreased by the cult of nationalism. “Government is no farthernecessary,” he believed, “than to supply the few cases to which societyand civilization are not conveniently competent.” At best it is anartificial thing. [In “Rights of Man, Part II, p 407, 408, Paine wrote asfollows ]
Formal government makes but a small part of civilized life; and wheneven the best that human wisdom can devise is established, it is a thingmore in name and idea than in fact. . . . The more perfect civilization is,the less occasion it has for government, because the more does itregulate its own affairs, and govern itself. . . . All the great laws ofsociety are laws of nature.
The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is found in “TheRights of Man.” This extraordinary work, the most influential Englishcontribution to the revolutionary movement, was an examination of theEnglish constitution in the light of what Paine held were the true sourceand ends of government. It is a brilliant reply to Burke, who rested hisinterpretation of the English constitution on the legal ground of thecommon law of contract. Following the Revolution of 1688, Burke hadargued, the English people through their legal representatives, enteredinto a solemn contract, binding “themselves, their heirs, and posteritiesforever,” to certain express terms; and neither in law nor in equity werethey, of whatever generation, free to change those terms except by theconsent of both parties to the contract. This was an elaboration of thetheory of government tacitly held by the Old Whigs, which derivedgovernment from a perpetual civil contract as opposed to the radicaldoctrine of a revocable social contract; and in attacking it Paine alliedhimself with such thinkers as Price, Priestley, Franklin and Rousseau.[For an excellent discussion of this, see C. M. Walsh, “The PoliticalScience of John Adams,” p 203-226] he pointed out the absurdity ofcarrying over the law of private property into the high realm of political
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principle -- to seek to impose the dead past upon the living sovereignty.If sovereignty inhered in the English people in 1688, it must inhere inthe English people in 1793, unless it had been violently wrested fromthem; no parchment terms of another age can bind that sovereigntyother than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of a single, staticcontract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation of natural rights. Anygeneration - as the generation of 1688 - is competent to deal with itsaffairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter away the rights of those unborn;such a contract [as the SS Tax law of 1984 which preemptively set rates to
collect surplus contributions] on the face of it is null and void.
Indisputable evidence shows that Whig unitary materialist influenceinstalled our leviathan-based political economy, called ‘The AmericanSystem of Political Economy.’ Broad political belief in unitary materialism-based dogma provided the political foundation to the myriad mechanist Whigdoctrine, which finally, following Lincoln’s death, succeeded to dominate theAmerican government and law. With ‘positive laws,’ which are based onBurke’s philosophy of ‘a fixed contract’ (to represent or supplant the state’ssocial compact), our leviathan political economy philosophically entitles theaffluent factional entities of society to mechanism-based economic paternalismwhich is paid for by consumers and general taxation [inflation’s endemismcaused by the ‘landed gentry’ is mechanistically paid for by wage-earnerconsumers]. As Parrington noted, this returned America’s political economy tothe seventeenth century from which the eighteenth was a reaction, and Paine’sstatement is as pertinent today as it was when he wrote it:
It is the injustice of government that creates armies to defend theearnings of injustice.
Particularly, when Congress does not do what the Constitution, in Article ISection 8, authorized that it do, inflation-based earnings, which are not earnedat all, are ‘earnings of injustice.’
Parrington wrote this about the Harvard trained lawyers of the fourth generationof John Quincy Adams: 125
The capitalist is ‘the most lawless’ of citizens. In his attitude towards the
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state he is essentially anarchistic; he evades or nullifies a law that he doesnot like, while clamorous for the enforcement of a law that works in hisfavor.
From ‘The Theory of Social Revolution,’ Parrington inserted:
If the capitalist has bought some sovereign function, and wishes to abuseit for his own behoof, he regards the law which restrains him as a despoticinvasion of his constitutional rights, because, with his specialized mind,he cannot grasp the relation of a sovereign function to the nation as awhole [his mind’s designs and intents are held captive by his acquisitiveinward-turned thoughts]. He, therefore, looks upon the evasion of a lawdevised for public protection, but inimical to him, as innocent or evenmeritorious.
This attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shapingthe American legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards theconstitutional form of government which exists in the United States, asa convenient method of obtaining his own way against a majority, butthe lawyer has learned to worship it as a fetish. Nor is this astonishing,for, were written constitutions suppressed, he would lose most of hisimportance and much of his income. Quite honestly, therefore, theAmerican lawyer has come to believe that a sheet of paper soiled withprinters’ ink and interpreted by half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snuglydozing in armchairs, has some inherent and marvelous virtue by whichit can arrest the march of omnipotent Nature. And capital gladlyaccepts this view of American civilization, since hitherto capitalists haveusually been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes.
The skepticisms of the House of Adams came to their frankestexpression in the writings of Brooks Adams. The passion for social justicehad brought him at last to a philosophy of history that made him atrenchant critic of the American of his generation. He rejected alike thehumanitarian optimism that, from Condorcet to Herbert Spencer, hadinspired generous souls with hope for future progress - and that even
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When the cost of protecting property and wealth is distributed"
unevenly, more than income, isn’t this a valid reason to collect taxes ona graduated scale? : what is rational about reducing high end taxation?
Henry Adams clung to - and the economic optimism that from thebeginnings of the westward movement had inspired acquisitive souls withthe hope of continuous gain. Nothing perhaps marked him more as arebel than his denial of the god worshiped by his fellows. The gospel ofprogress was for him no more than a fetish of the economic mind. In theebb and flow of civilizations under the attraction of fear and greed, whatjustification was there for faith in a benevolent progress? His lot hadbeen cast, unfortunately, in an age of capitalism, when the acquisitivemind was triumphing over the imaginative, the banker over the priestand craftsman and mystic; but he could see no reason in heaven orearth to brag of that fact, and he would have held himself a fool to applythe term progress to the spread of greed that was crowning the usureras master of men.
From Brooks Adams, ‘The Law of Civilization and Decay,’ p. 292
The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, forit is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legionswere a toy - a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revoltis hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupiesthe ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or bribe.
Who pays the tax bill for this protection of capitalist property and wealth? :Taxation of wages earned was the mechanists’ solution to covering the risingcost of policing our capitalist leviathan government’s paternalism and lawfullyfictitious mechanisms, which protect ‘property’ and wealth as owned by the ‘us’economic caste while regulating the mass of wage-earning ‘them,’ who are the‘iron caged’ economic slave class. Brooks Adams’ described fallaciously"
dogmatic values and politics of this conservatism, and the dogmatic valuesquite clearly infers why aristocratic conservative mechanists unreasonablyeschew the values gained by graduating from Harvard.
252 Comparative SS Applications 153
In the dogmatic values of class prejudice, as the ‘us’ vs. ‘them,’prejudice above described, and are made into a fixed value of belief: as religiousbelief for instance, class prejudice is then celebrated as virtue, andblasphemously then is believed as “God’s truth”: And this sort of prejudice hasdeep roots in the politics of the conservative ‘right-wing.’ And, its ‘believers,’like the sycophantic disciples of ‘magnificent blond brutes,’ are indigenous toall aristocracies. The American political ‘right-wing’ is surely not an exception.
Celebrating ‘brutish’ aspects of human being, Friedrich Nietzschecelebrated visceral values of ‘magnificent blond brutes.’ His philosophy decriedreasoned authorities, and moral-values (all of which are found in the logicallyliberal democratic dualism, i.e., the spiritual noumenal self side as opposed tothe material visceral side). So, where does the mechanist unitary materialism fit?Nietzsche disputed anti-Semitism, but sanctioned Nazi fascism: Hitler, Stalin,maybe Napoleon, and bin Laden, also qualifies as Nietzsche’s ‘blonde brute.’(Who are the ‘blonde brute’ heros of capitalism? :are they any better? : isCategorical Imperative, the common mechanist hate?) 126
Christianity is the religion of pity. Pity oppresses the noble passionswhich heighten our vitality. It has a depressing effect, depriving us ofstrength. As we multiply the instances of pity, we gradually lose ourstrength of nobility. Pity makes suffering contagious and under certainconditions it may cause a total loss of life and vitality out of all proportionto the magnitude of the cause. . . . Pity is the practice of nihilism.
Notice the thought, ‘Pity is the practice of nihilism’: Nietzsche meant this!
He called himself a nihilist. And he meant that pity should be put out of mind.
When conservatives say, Liberals are bleeding hearts,’ they representNietzsche’s ‘brutish’ values! They axiomatically emulate Nietzsche’sphilosophic nihilistic prejudice! And this nihilistic prejudice is similar toComte’s ‘positivism!’ Both are philosophic forms of unitary materialism-baseddogma that denies Immanuel Kant’s reason-based finding that ethical morality,’‘justice,’ . . ., which are of noumena, only achievable by deliberate reason inpursuit of ‘truth.’ The nothingness of ‘nihilism’ exists whenever human mindsare closed to deliberate reasoning, and ‘belief’ in unitary materialism-baseddogma is of Brahmanist design to do this.
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How right-wing religious ideology corresponds to philosophic nihilism(axiomatic denial of reason-based truths and values), revisits the puzzlingdilemma which Kant confronted, and from which he concluded the natural divideof human being: noumenon and phenomenon. Answers to this dilemma areimplicit of philosophic values, and both ‘nihilism’ and ‘religious orthodoxies’are dogmatically based on unitary materialism which dogma results in thenihilistic conflation of noumenon and this antithesis of philosophic ‘rationalempiricism’ spiritual side sponsors’ democratic imbalances: Right-wingconservatism is ‘agenda-based’ on the fictitious assumption axiomaticallyapplied of the deified ‘absolute’ authority of ‘monarchy.’ Otherwise, it is aphilosophic denial of human capability to reason. 127
Ultimately, our troubles are due to dogma and deduction; we find no newtruth because we take some venerable but questionable proposition as theindubitable starting point, and never think of putting this assumption itselfto a test of observation or experiment. W. Durant
Religious orthodoxy asserts deified authorities to effect ‘absolute’ answers andjudgements: therefore ‘absolutely’ challenges unwanted deliberate reason asheresy (as the persistent debate, which pits belief-based Creationism againstEvolution). Religious orthodoxy, as nihilism, contests Jefferson's reasoneddescription of the only axiomatic human ‘reality’ of our sovereign nation. 128
But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We havecalled by different names brethren of the same principle. We are allRepublicans. We are all Federalists. If there be any among us who wouldwish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let themstand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinionmay be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
While sustaining the popular philosophic error of its dogma, religious orthodoxyrepeatedly demonstrates its failure to abide in enlightened deliberate reason: a‘ditto head’ sycophantic class of believers rather than a class of commonknowledge befits this believed religious orthodoxy. The philosophic base of thisorthodoxy is, therefore, a self promoted upper caste of priests and intellectualswho, by designing dogma, control the minds and actions of the sycophanticunder caste, as historically is patterned on Hinduism.
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Conservatism, the word’s meaning, obviously derived from conserve,i.e., to keep things as they are, apposed to innovation and change. And whensuch oppositions are innately centered, all persons of habit, are conservative. Infact, all humans are conservative and of habit! However, we also are blessedwith innate capability to be reasonable. Mostly, however, natural conservatismtends to react in the manner of this philosophic quip: ‘if it isn’t broke, don’t fixit.’ Only when the liberally persuaded plurality exceeds dogmatic convention,do the ‘rational’ then take the lead, i.e., are allowed to sponsor needed changesto orthodoxy. And for this manner of abuse to conservatism, orthodoxy hasdubbed these sponsors of change ‘liberal radicals.’ In the frames of thesefundamental meanings, R. L. Heilbroner’s analysis of Adam Smith’s liberaleconomic system also applies to conventional conservative notions: 129
In a sense his system presupposes that eighteenth-century England willremain unchanged forever. Only in quantity will it grow: more people,more goods, more wealth; its quality will remain unchanged. His are thedynamics of a static community; it grows but it never matures.
[Static conservatism also never matures!]
While conservatism enjoys natural status-quo political inertia, like camels withtheir heads buried in the sand, conservatism is ill equipped to either recognizeor sponsor needed rational change. All progress involving matters of truthinvolve mature intelligent noumenon, therefore, liberals are always radical.
Conservative, in the sense of a state’s form and depending on theestablished philosophic ideology, ‘Absolute idealism,’ involves far more subtlemeanings. ‘Rational empiricism’ must always entreat the inertia of the statusquo, and when successful and changes are achieved, liberal contributionsbecome, part and parcel, of the subscribed conservatism. ‘Conservatives’temporally naturally control politically and can be expected to either return towhere things were or install dogmatic controls to thwart additional reason-basedchanges. The rational revolution never ends.
Culturally, the U.S. form of government is a philosophical hybrid: amixture of ‘Absolute idealism’ and ‘rational empiricism.’ Conservatives, whichnaturally practice the dogmatic mechanist fallacy, contend that ‘liberal’ valuesare the more philosophically related to communism’s values. This Conservative’fallacy then deductively contends that ‘liberal’ values are the sponsor of
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Plato in his Divided Line, defined opinion and reason, as used here.""
economic socialism, to which they equate insurance-based social usage, whichprivately and for profit, they endorse and subscribe, particularly when it servestheir privatized property-based ideology. But until ‘liberal’ values agree withconservatism that unitary materialism is the only ‘positive’ reality, thisconservative opinion-based view is naturally dogmatic and fallacious, andtherefore, is surely not reason-based. Oppositely, truthfully, American""
‘liberals,’ with very good reason, should be concerned that ‘conservatives,’‘communists,’and ‘socialists’ are in fact related philosophically by the commondogmatic belief-based practice of ‘unitary materialism,’ which has conflatedtheir human spiritual capability to reason. Their ‘absolutist’ notions of politicaleconomy are dogma-based, and Fascism prone beliefs, i.e., are not of reason.
The true liberal’ is represented in men as Theodore Parker, aTranscendental Minister. Parker’s view of the American constitution caught theamalgamation of conservative and liberal values as represented by republican-Whigs and agrarian landed democrats. 130
[Parker] had his own views of the American government, and majesticappeals to the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted,‘as a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of theDeclaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and South.America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy, aristocracy,and monarchy, only to set in their places ‘ the institution of money -- themaster of all the rest.’ . . . He declined to be deceived by party cries andplatforms, either Whig or Democratic; both parties served economicsrather than justice.
So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central nucleus andidea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party; its motive ispecuniary. . . . It sneers at the poor; at the many; has a contempt for thepeople. It legislates against the poor, and for the rich . . . the few whoare born with the desire, the talent, and the conventional position tobecome rich. ‘Take care of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,’
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Does this define the neocons of politics since 2000?"
is its secret maxim. Everything must yield to money. . . . With this partythere is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong. . . . There is Expediencyand Inexpediency. . . . Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by thisparty as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal; healone has attained ‘the measure of the stature of a perfect man.’
The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority,right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law. There is no vital differencebetween the Whig party and the Democratic party; no difference in moralprinciple. The Whig inaugurates the Money got; the Democratinaururates the desire to get money. That is all the odds. . . . There isonly a hand rail between the two, which breaks down if you lean on it, andthe parties mix . . . a Democrat is but a Whig on time; a Whig is aDemocrat arrived at maturity; his time has come. A Democrat is a"
young Whig who will legislate for money as soon as he has got it; a Whigis an old Democrat who once hurrahed for the majority -- ‘Down withmoney! There is a despot! And up with the desire for it! Down with therich, and up with the poor!’ The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous,in 1812 was a democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, andaccordingly ‘one of our eminent citizens,’ in 1851 he was a Whig, andwent a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. America of131
Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker knew it. LikeLincoln he did not disapprove.
One might recognize Parker’s view in the Presidential politics of 2003: inLiebermann and Kerry, politicians hugging the political middle, as challengedby Howard Dean’s democratic advocacy. The middle offered the only chancefor a democratic victory in 2004, most believed? But, Dean’s appeal is amazing:If ‘independents,’ ‘green’ and Bill Maher’s ‘politically incorrect’ following joinhim, incumbent Republican Whigs, should beware of the impending politicalwreck that is brewing!
Philosophic differences between the unitary materialism of ‘absolute idealists’
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My reference here is to mechanism, as defined in this insert from my sect.""
210: Natural essential causality, teleology, is literally switched to mechanism-based causality when unitary materialist belief conflates human essence, theeconomic effect of which is determinism: [Dictionary (1965) 1196]: Mechanism n. . . . 6. The theory that everything in the universe is producedand can be explained by mechanical or material forces: “the influence ofmechanism and materialism in science (Science News). [The materialistbelieves in free-market economy, i.e., that mechanism-based causality freesentrepreneurial synergism to improve economy, however, unfortunatelynegates the human essence.]
and ‘communists’ are about economic ordering: market oriented privateenterprise vs. ‘state owned’ and ‘state run’ enterprise. Despite the ordering,however, both affirm, as economic principle, ‘unitary materialism’ dogma thatBertrand Russell exposed as fallacy. 132
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room forfalsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may becalled ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in which truthsare things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth and falsehood areproperties of beliefs and statements; hence a world of mere matter, sinceit would contain no beliefs or statements, would also contain no truth orfalsehood. Bertrand Russell
[When overwhelmed by orthodox unitary materialism belief, i.e., the humannoumenon-based capability to think is conflated, a denuded truth value results.]
‘Materialism’ incontrovertibly is a subject pursued by rational science.‘Materialism,’ as deduced empirically, cannot truthfully be transposed to anantecedently reasoned principle. Irrationally, however, this happened whenGOP-Whigs in administrative control, asserted that materialism-based causalmechanism was an antecedent principle of the American political economy.""
World Book provided this definition of mechanism causality: 133
Mechanism is one of the two great philosophical theories of cause and effect inthe universe. Opposed to the theory of mechanism is the theory of teleology. Any thing that grows and develops can be explained in two ways. Mechanism
252 Comparative SS Applications 159
explains it from behind, in terms of its [temporal] origins. Teleology explainsit from the front, in terms of the goal it is seeking.
[Temporal experience intrinsically implicates materiality that isparadoxical and, therefore, is inferior to pure reasoning, which Descartes hadreasoned was life’s most critical purely intelligent essence distinguishing aspect.]
Epicurus (about 300 BC), a materialist, believed the world and everything in itwere chance combinations of atoms. From this, Holmes’ evidence for his134
glorious Epicurean Paradox was observed:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life’s noumenal necessaries are clearly denied, as life’s luxuries are enjoyedsans moral accountability: what politically is asserted orthodoxy in replacementof natural principle is naturally clearly fallacious.
As, with unitary materialism’s philosophical denial of the human essence ofthought, inflation’s endemism that is common to all political economic systemsis also forgiven, which particularly include the American System of economy,fascism, and communism. Maybe most important, the spiritual LOGOS of God
is conflated and by this denial: to this, St. John declares, if we say that we havefellowship with Him, and walk in darkness, we speak falsely, and performnot the TRUTH. Despite the clear evidence of this, American GOP135
Republicans dogmatically assert and, as irrationally, flaunt their religiouspolitical belief alongside their assertions of unitary materialism, whichconflated their noumenal reasoning effects. Communism’s outright denial ofreligion, while maybe more unitary materialism imbued, is more rational.Unitary materialist dogma, when asserted as principle, is irrationally fallacious.
‘Pure Truth’ is ethereal spiritual reality that only is found in logical pursuits oftruth, in which value predicates are necessarily consistently ‘true.’
‘Conservative American Whigs,’ sponsored the politics of mercantilism-based capitalism and, thereby, fallaciously asserted politically mechanism-baseddeterministic unitary materialism-based dogma. E. K. Hunt wrote this aboutdeontological mechanist capitalists ideology-based essentials: 136
Capitalism is defined by . . .[logically irrational] essential features that are
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always present in a capitalist economy.---- First is the ubiquity of monetary exchange. For the vast majorityof people in capitalism, one can get the things one wants and needs onlyif one has money with which to buy these things in the market.---- Second, capitalism always has at least four clearly identifiablesocioeconomic classes: the class of wealthy capitalists, the class of smallbusinesspeople and independent professionals, the class of workingpeople and the class of destitute persons who live by various welfareprograms or by theft, prostitution, or whatever means are available. . ..
The working class has no significant access to or ownership ofproductive resources. Individuals in this class must sell control of theirpower to labor (i.e., get a job) as their only means to escape sinking to thedestitute class. . . . [T. R. Malthus and Max Weber observed ‘theiron cage of wages,’ as befitting these mechanist determined classes]
Income from ownership and the wages of workers are consideredto be the only socially respectable sources of income. The destitute classmust depend on the somewhat “less than respectable” sources of income,such as welfare, charity, or the fruits of quasi legal or illegal activities inorder to get by. The stigma that attaches to members of this classmotivates all propertyless individuals to try very hard to secureemployment even if working conditions and wages are poor.Deductively, resulting from their mercantilist-capitalist value predicates,Federalist-Whigs sponsored the constitutional provision for the practicalsovereignty of property. Then, by legally enforcing exclusively the mechanistmercantilist-unitary materialism, democratic sovereignty, the natural humansovereign essence was routinely, systemically compromised. Parringtonrecognized this clever economic fallacy and called it: “an ingenious scheme to‘milk the cow’ and distribute the ‘milk’ to those who superintended the‘milking.’” While Republican GOP Whig ‘conservatives,’ continue theirconflated charade to hide, even deny, their irrational assertions, which supplantantecedent principles, which incidently also conflates God’s reality, and whiletheir rhetoric shows their hate of communism, which also philosophically,irrationally is a form of unitary materialism, called dialectical materialism, as
252 Comparative SS Applications 161
its irrational political principle antecedent. Their purer love and worship, i.e.,materiality, which conflates God’s noumenon, is of Mammon. Politically, whilein administrative control of government, Federalist-Whigs officially establishedthe mechanism-based American System of Political Economy, which economiccausality had shackled all US citizens, regardless of politics, to legally abide themechanism-based ‘economic’ paradoxes, while routinely also rhetoricallyblaming liberals’ noumenal political essence for failing to rectify the nation’seconomic problems: because shackled by causal mechanism, government’seconomic administration fails to act logically, according to necessary principles.Parrington described the Mammon-based Whig political economy, as “aningenious scheme to ‘milk the cow’ and distribute the ‘milk’ to those whosuperintended the ‘milking.’”
Irrational political value predicates of Whig Republican’s challenge the naturallogical principle values’ of Democrats.’ And, although politically both nowcontend for the common ground economic center, Lincoln’s sober words applyto the American political economic circumstance.137
‘But, soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jeffersonfrom total overthrow in this nation. . . . The principles of Jefferson are theprinciples and axioms of free society and yet they are denied and evaded,with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glitteringgeneralities.’ Another bluntly calls then ‘self-evident lies!’ And othersinsidiously argue that they apply to ‘superior races.’ These expressions,differing in form, are identical in object and effect -- the supplanting theprinciples of free government, and restoring those of classification,caste, and legitimacy. . . . They are the vanguard, the miners and sappersof returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate us.’
In prejudice made more irrational by a conflated unitary ‘materialism’dogma, with its corollaries’ mechanism-based determinism and positivism,conservatives (Whigs particularly) routinely rhetorically with great confidencenow indict the American brand of liberalism for being philosophically allied totheir arch enemy Communism, which also as irrationally had clearly assertedunitary dialectical materialism as its asserted political economic principle. Thisconservative ‘unreason’ indicts logical ‘reason’ for the favor of it own dogmaticpolitical opinion: materialism-based theory that dogmatically also subscribes
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‘positivism’ that dogmatically holds that only ‘objective facts’ are important. Inthis dogmatic prejudice, conservatives believe absolutely that to be liberal is,therefore, to be evil. All of which ends in nothing more than ‘sick rhetoric’ thatfails either to cohere or correspond to the necessary principle fiducial gauges oftruth: i.e., the concupiscence, which St. John had written his First Epistle about.
The uniquely fundamental difference of democracy and communism isidentical to the fundamental difference between democracy and fascism; thefaculty of human reason is unique to the philosophic basis of democracy. Andthe God given faculties of human reason are the human noumenal fiducialidentity connection with the intelligence of nature’s creation. Democracy’ssympathy with ‘materialism,’ which fundamentally underpins communism andfascism, is naturally consequential materialism, which temporally effects life.138
‘Rational Empiricism,’ the philosophic basis of democracy, believes thatthe world is both material and spiritual. It holds that change andprogress occur by applying reason to experience, and human nature canbe changed and improved by experience. On the basis of these principles,democracy stresses discussion and the use of reason as a way of arrivingat conclusions. It emphasizes the importance of tolerance and freedomin developing intelligent, loyal citizens.
Pure democracy, unaffected by human prejudices, is the only philosophicpolitical definition that fosters fiducial parameters of truth: value-parameters ofnature’s LOGOS as inferred by the phenomena of natural materialities. Truth’snatural fiducial parameters, of nature’s LOGOS, require human perceptions to‘cohere’ with the value predicates of nature’s LOGOS. And truth’s fiducialparameters (natural phenomenal principles), requires of human perceptions to‘correspond’ with the rational natural factual inferences. (Unfortunately, ‘facts’created by human actions are often confused with natural phenomena; whenperceptions correspond to manmade ‘facts,’ truth is commonly said to exist butoften is paradoxical fallacy: Plato’s truth Forms recognized truth of ‘reason’ wasthe most pure; ‘illusion’ the least pure; and ‘belief’ was in between).
-- End of section 109's research insert --Causally, catastrophic events (World War II and the Great Depression)
acted sociologically to portend the low births of the 1930s and ‘40s, making thepost World War II years appear as a ‘birth boom.’ Therefore, war and depression
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had a causal nexus with the BabyBoom. But surely, Harry-kari and SlightHope, whose births did not begin until the mid 1990's, had no causal nexus tothe sociological catastrophes of a half century earlier. This verse fits!
Let's not tax you and don't tax me.Let's tax those guys who are to be.
Whenever conservative society acts to mortgage economic progress, as
repaid by taxes, society then taxes those guys who are to be. And politically,this only can happen by interpreting our Constitution to accord with the classicalWhig conservative doctrine of a ‘fixed contract,’which only considers reality interms of unitary materialism. Edmund Burke gave definition to this dogmaticconservative doctrine. And Federalist-Whig politics, as deduced from the fixedcontract doctrine. has fostered and persuaded American government to operatepolitically from this asserted irrationally transposed antecedent economicprinciple. Without evidence to support the suspicion that they were aware thatconflated unitary materialism led to the irrational concept of state, which CraigThomas observed and wrote about, one is still left to speculate that they wereshrewdly aware of their deliberate irrational assertions: 139
. . . to be precise, not even Germany but prenational Prussia underFrederick the Great. Christian theology assumed a [unitary] merger withthe divine after this life; Hegel posits such a merger here on earth -- withhistory and the collectivity he terms the state.Craig Thomas also wrote this about philosophers who influenced Hegel’s unitarymaterialist view (Although, Hegel said he wasn’t a materialist!):
The principal Idealists -- Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel -- sought, aboveall else, a unitary explanation of reality, some essence behind allappearance -- in Kant’s terminology, a ‘common’ and universalnoumenon, and in the poet Hölderlin’s description, the ‘spirit that is ineverything’ [ontologism]. They were [expedient idealist] systemizers,assuming that there could be discovered some essential explanation ofall experience, knowledge, and reality, and it was largely on this basisthat they objected, Fichte most immediately and systematically, to Kant’sdivision between self and the world, which [as irrationally, theycontended] for Kant could be no more than a world of appearances. Toachieve the healing of that dualism the Idealists posited, in Fichte’s theory
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In this, the principle idealists conflated even God’s antecedence, to which"
Nietzche cried out, “we have killed God!”.
most succinctly, the ego as the ‘ground of experience.’ It was not therational ego of Kant [Plato and Descartes] nor the passive receptor of theempiricists but what Fichte describes as the ‘active ego,’ inextricablyintermingled with reality, imposing itself upon the world of experience,to a degree ‘making’ the world of experience in its own image. As"
Fichte claims in ‘The Vocation of Man’ of 1792, ‘Not to KNOW but toDO, is the vocation of Man.’ For Fichte (1762- 1814), there were onlytwo possible responses to the world, that of the realist, or ‘dogmatist’ inhis terminology, and that of the idealist. The philosopher’s response,more profound than that of the ordinary man, is idealist, while realismremains the province of non-philosophical response to an understandingof the world. . . .
Thinking is no longer reflection, it is experience. Also, becauseof this, there can be no kind of reality that is distinct or separated fromthe ego that experiences it. Whereas empiricism posits, at least byimplication, a ‘real’ world that is experienced, the Idealists assumed nodistinction between the subject of the experiencing agent and theobjective world being experienced. [Which came first, the egg or the chicken, is of no consequence to this unitarymaterialist conservative idealism that compounds the issue rather than findinganswers to the question; the dogmatic focus is on the neatness of confusion.]
Further, Fichte and Schelling assumed that the ego was innatelya moral agent, again contrary to Kant’s conception of the effort of moralduty for the rational being, the necessity to achieve the categoricalimperative [of ‘do unto others . . .’] in making any moral decision ortaking any moral action. Men are regarded by the Idealists as innately,though imperfectly, moral in their essential, nondualistic natures. Thisleads, as we shall see, to a strangely Hobbesian view of the State aspossessing the right and duty to perfect the ego’s moral imperfection bythe exercise of its authority.
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[Note how irrationally dogmatic ‘Idealists‘ are blameworthy for the fallaciousphilosophical underpinning of conservatism’s materialist philosophy]
Oppositely to this unitary materialist view, and particularly, Tom Painecited unborn individuals’ rights that far transcends any unborn individual’s rightto life and sovereignty. Paine’s transcendent view was realized in the SSsurplus contributions’ taxation, which began in 1983, as SS law:--- Should, will, Harry-kari and Slight Hope shoulder the extorted SScontributions’ tax that was politically, irrationally lawfully made a half centurybefore they were born? And will classical doctrine deny culpability for the taxlaw’s extortion, for instance, shifting blame onto the SS system for the inflationthat is an endemism of political economy?--- How will domestic and foreign terrorism, which is causally related toeconomic extortion, affect Harry-kari and Slight Hope? Politically, will theyact irrationally, perpetrating terrorism, or rationally, but radically, by declaringtheir natural sovereignty, as did our nation’s forefathers, oppressed by England’scapitalist mercantilism-based taxation?
In 1983, because revenue shortfalls were caused by 1981's tax law, governmentdesperately needed supplemental general revenue.
-- section 240's research provided for this accounting --
Fallacious dogmatic political value predicates are hidden in the SS tax law of1983-84: this politics spun perceptions that SS had become bankrupted.
By 1985, the first full year of SS surplus contribution tax revenue hadmade the total government’s revenues equal to its revenue collection in 1980:revenue lost from high end tax payers by the ‘81 tax cut had been reversed by theSS surplus contributions’ tax revenues. But, government’s orders for armamentswere increased greatly and, therefore, government’s deficits were primarilycaused by the armaments’ buildup (And, while political spin claimed, this hugeexpenditure had won the Cold War; more candidly, however, David Stockman,allowed that the USSR had reached financial ruin before the U.S. did; which if‘true,’ wage-earners can rightfully claim that their SS surplus contribution taxesmade the economic difference between winning and losing the ‘Cold War.’). Bythe increase in the SS contribution tax of ‘83-84, which then collected SS surpluscontributions from wage-earned income, replaced the high end income tax reliefthat the ‘81' tax cut had forgiven: the increased taxation on low income hadreplaced revenue lost by 1981's high end income tax cut, essentially equaling the
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lost revenue. While wage increases lagged the economic effects of inflation onincome, the total ‘85 revenue appeared comparable to the ‘80 revenue. A taxfoundation illustrated this comparison. And, while the prescriptive politicalsophistry emphasized that SS contributions’ surplus were not general-revenuetaxes, government expediently and conveniently routinely spent all SS surplus.
Tax Freedom Day
1980 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
1984 xxxxxxxxxx (This shortfall reflects tax relief for high income)
1985 xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(While the ‘81 tax cut only benefitted high incomes, first-dollar wage-earnedincome, to which the added SS surplus contribution taxes applied, in ‘85, offsetthe revenue lost from the ‘81 tax cut.)
The SS surplus contributions’ tax politically was rationalized to eventuallybenefit the Baby Boom (Sean-Michelle's birth group, when beginning in 2010their oldest members would become eligible to retire), however, the benefit, inreal terms, was directly related to forgiven taxes of high end incomes, all-the-while that SS surplus tax-based revenues were routinely spent as government’sgeneral revenue: So, if not available or needed for paying the SS benefitswhen the baby boom retires, what political excuse will then be given for theirrational tax relief given only to high end income taxpayers?
Then in 2000, when accounting analysis of government’s revenue flowinferred a surplus, mostly since SS surplus contributions taxes were commingledwith and routinely spent as government’s revenue, this projected surplus wasagain rationalized by the mechanist government to each year additionally refund$1.3 trillion of the general tax revenues to the affluent class of general revenuetaxpayers who also benefitted most from inflation’s endemic economic effects?And this added tax reduction continues (now past 2006)? This politics isimmoral. And redress surely must come and soon.
Quarterly deposited in the US treasury, modest amounts of SS tax surplus beganin 1984, $50 billion annually at first, and in 2000 reaching $400 billion: whichoddly, was the amount legislated to fund the annual general revenue taxreduction act of 2003. Politically touted as necessary to create jobs to increasethe SS contributions’ tax surplus to fund similar top end revenue siphoning, the$1.3 trillion tax reduction of 2001 and 2003's continual annual tax reductions
252 Comparative SS Applications 167
substantially acts to siphon all SS contributions’ surplus to directly benefit theeconomic caste of affluent Americans: i.e., the ingenious irrational mercantilism-based American System of Political Economy, which Parrington cited a centuryago as the Whigs’ bequeath to America, has gotten more irrationally ingenious.
This analysis is excerpted from SS PART II (section 252):
Had wages in 2001 kept pace with inflation, median wage-earned income wouldhave been $89,852.00. The 2000 reported median income for white males (thehighest cited income group) is far short of inflation’s pace: it was $29,696. Forwhite females, it was more anemic: $16,190. And, relatively still worse forminority races as blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Wage-earners, after all was theWhig determined slave-like underclass of the American System’s economy: onlythe economic mechanist upper-caste, of owner-superintendents, was legallyrewarded by the American System’s mechanism-based determinism: mechanism-based rewards, distinguishing what commonly is called ‘the American Dream.’
And this excerpt from SS PART III (section 253) defines the determinism:
Inflation endemism, when consumed, returns from retail consumption as
168 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
exclusively accounted business owners’ capital: i.e., endemic inflation’seconomic effect, as consumed, legally enures: Mechanistically and logically140
therefore, as regard’s inflations’ cost that also is endemic of SS benefitsbecomes business owners’ legally enured economic obligation. And, therefore,must be made government’s duty to collect from enured unearned businesscapital an appropriate tax to pay for the endemism in SS benefits. The CPI’sempirical inflations’ effects on consumer goods and services show that $ .54 in1945 required $ 5.29 in2001 (i.e., $1.00 in 1945 required $9.80 in 2001) 141
When also considering that SS is not to blame for population changes,and because the population mix is very stable, as the above graph shows, the SSrates and caps should hold for a half century or more, particularly wheninflations’ cost in SS benefits is reimbursed from general revenues.
An adjustment to Sean-Michelle's surplus tax utiles arises from utilesas contributed by other twenty-year population group’s. So what beneficencefor SS surplus taxation is served by surplus contributions taxation on wagesearned during and after Sean-Michelle group has retired?
The comparative adjusted total utiles’ value, for each individual familyof Sean-Michelle's group is 73.2: approximately equivalent, but a little lessthan, Tom-Sue's contribution utiles’ value. And with the SS system being nowmature, and considering that SS is not to blame for inflation, that irrationallypolitically has mechanistically been loaded onto the SS Contribution taxes, Tom-Sue's SS contributions’ taxation is an appropriate benchmark for comparinginflation neutral SS rates of taxation. Only population facts are represented inthe following graph (births that occurred after 1997 are conservatively estimatedand have relatively little effect on the population in 2050; otherwise, mortalityis the most likely error of this analysis that might change slightly from theCensus Bureau’s 1990 factual experience). Changes to the population mix dueto immigration is not considered, but should not adversely affect the naturalbirths and mortality pattern. On this basis, my rational conclusion is this: Thecontribution-tax burden will not be as great as mechanist politics hadrecommended to the SS tax committee in 1983. The mix of workingAmericans, in proportion to the population of aged dependents, is very stableover time and, therefore, fails to threaten the SS system as the mechanistpolitics had postulated. But inflation, endemic of each worker’s paycheck,was a far greater cost problem than the SS benefit’ outlays of a maturingSS system had portended: anyway, inflation is solely government’s
252 Comparative SS Applications 169
With others, as Malthus and Max Weber’s ‘iron law’ of wages attested,"
wages earned in capitalist mechanisms are causally suppressed. Whenconsidering wages in 1935 when SS began, a comparable wage adjusted forinflation in 2001 is far greater than $80,000.
constitutional problem, therefore, SS should not, cannot be expected toresolve it! And because the Constitution specifically assigned inflation toCongress for resolving it equitably, Congress, therefore, is derelict in theaccomplishing of this constitutional assignment.
Inflations’ cost economically is endemic of the productions of goods andservices, as consumed at the retail level. Therefore, inflation adversely affectseach wage-earner-consumer’s subsistence cost. And when wage increases areless than inflation’s effects on subsistence cost, as the CPI index clearlyindicates, and SS contributions’ taxation applies to the endemic inflation-intensive first dollar wages, but not to wages above the SS cap, as systemicallymechanistically is codified, then SS contributions’ taxation represents anirrational inflation-burdened tax, that is compounding, is at first onerous, theneventually impossible. Since 1984, this impossibility applies to SS tax"
surplus, which Congress routinely spends as the government’s general revenue.So, looking back, no justification existed to levy the highest SS contribution-taxburden ever imposed? And, no rationally valid justification exists! *
* Because higher incomes are mechanistically benefitted by inflation, evenwhile not a primary cause of inflation, and when beyond the SS contributions’cap, income is exempted from paying the SS tax (pays for neither inflation norSS taxes). Such high end incomes had general revenue taxes returned withoutany reconciliation for inflation, and are, therefore, without justification: thisunjustified result happened because of sheer politically asserted irrationalism bymechanists who were in administrative control of government.
A sharp decline (about 8% each five years) in fertility rates followed thepost-World War ll’s birth boom. The population’s birth boom in combinationwith a follow-on birth trough had and will effect extensive current and futureeconomic consequences. The responsibility for both the birth-boom and thefertility decline surely is on the whole of society, rather than as politically,mechanistically put onto the wage-earners who by SS law pay SS contributiontaxes. Rationally, wage-earners should not be the exclusive economic base
170 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
for insuring SS benefits. Still, effects of the birth-boom, as with all waveactions, will eventuallysettle. Even in a worstscenario, the Birth-Boomis a phenomenon that, inthe long run, even underthe theoretical scenario,of approaching zeropopulation-based fertility,as published by theCensus bureau andrecommended to theCongressional panelreviewing SS taxation(suggesting 40 percent ofthe population would beolder than age 65), whichcannot apply so long asfertility rates remain high
and the aged population, therefore, necessarily is a much smaller percentage ofthe total population. Nevertheless, to eliminate the potential for a politicalgenerational war, we must challenge the mechanist mind sets which hadinfluenced Hobbes and Nietzschean conclusions as representing the innatelypredominant human nature: we must ‘grow-up,’ to expose, then abandon theseunitary materialist opinions, to distinguish reality from believed illusion. Totranscend these conservative fallacies, we must first transcend our irrationalorthodox belief-based biases: traditions and personal mechanist convictions,which are themselves a prominent source of aggressions, and wars. 142
In the nature of man we find three principal causes of quarrel. First,competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first, maketh men invade for gain; the second for safety; andthe third for reputation.
Hobbes clearly did not consider the paradox, which embroiled his assumption.Nevertheless the hedonistic paradox does address this paradox:143
The apparent contradiction arising from the doctrine that pleasure [i.e.,
252 Comparative SS Applications 171
competition, diffidence and glory] is the only thing worth seeking [is] the factthat whenever one seeks pleasure, it is not found. Pleasure normallyarises as an accompaniment of satisfaction of desire whenever onereaches one's goal.In an economic causal sense, orthodox mechanists illusion-based affirmationsmade the population groups, Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope, into those guys whoare to be, i.e., dupes of the '84 SS Tax Law. Facts now expose the mechanistfallacious affirmations for prescribing an advocacy for the hedonistic paradox.
In summary, the utiles value of John-Mary's contribution-tax is thelowest. They also received smaller SS benefits (as the notch babies did also).But, surprisingly, when considering SS surpluses, the adjusted value of Sean-Michelle's tax is the next lowest, then comes Tom-Sue.
Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope's taxes are not only great. They areextreme. In any sense of fairness, surplus contribution-taxes of the 1984 law areunjustifiable. And, as regards this irrational fallacy, the huge population countcorrection made by the Census Bureau at years end 1992 must sometime soonregister in our collective rational consideration.
Evident is that Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope represent the workingpopulations conscripted to contribute most of the SS surplus, which in fact thefederal government routinely spends, as if it were intended as general revenue,and otherwise has funded tax returns to the highest economic class that mostlycaused and also benefitted from the nations’ inflation. Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope represent those guys behind the tree that law has destined to pay the most.Predictably as the mantle of sovereignty passes to them, Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope’s politics might either redress the contributions tax or radically dismantleSS. If SS is to be saved, our nation’s politics must adopt holistic teleology thatredresses the inflation endemism that mechanistically is in SS contribution’s.
This utiles’ analysis of the '84 SS contribution-tax law that perpetuatedSS surplus to fill the government’s general revenue shortfalls, and gave politicsan excuse not only to reduce high end general revenue taxation rates but to returngeneral revenues, which did not exist, ‘to those that paid them,’ is tautologicallyfallacious. This political irrationalism must end.
John-Mary’s income producing years were mostly before the '84 taxLaw. And, they did not contribute to the SS Surplus. The surplus utiles analysisfor Tom-Sue, Sean-Michelle, Harry-Kari, and Slight-Hope, shows that 20
172 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
percent, or more, of SS contributions since ‘84 was accounted as SS Surplus,but, again, all SS surplus was expended on government’s outlays. Therefore,any rationale that SS surplus gave politics any rational basis to return general taxrevenues to taxpayers or to reduce general revenue tax rates was completelyfallacious fabrication. Of note, the years ‘84 - ‘87, when SS surplus was slight,was omitted from this analysis. This analysis was deliberately conservative tonarrow differences between the groups.’
While (for 1988-1989) the result probably overstates Tom-Sue and Sean-Michelle’s utile value, the deliberate conservatism, makes the value-comparisonwith the other groups more reliable.
Comparison of each generation’s equities in surplus contributions’ is moreimportant to the purposes here than is an accurately calculated accumulation ofcontribution-tax surplus.
The following histories of comparative contribution values track with theorder of each generation. Some will correctly observe that Sean-Michelle'sgroup is the largest and therefore comparing individuals' utile values ofcontribution-taxes is not valid. However, Sean-Michelle's group nearly matchesHarry-Kari and Slite-Hope. (In fact, the birth facts listed in more recentAlmanacs show that Sean-Michelle's BabyBoom was not anomalous since latertwenty year populations are, in fact, substantially larger.) JOHN-MARY COMPARATIVE VALUE of CONTRIBUTION TAXES
IN CONSTANT DOLLARS (000 omitted) ----- VALUE ------
YEARS INCOME (0ASDI) (HI)1936 - 1954 $257.5 $7.7 $---1955 - 1959 84.0 3.4 ---1960 - 1964 98.5 5.9 ---1965 - 1969 115.0 8.3 --- 1970 26.4 2.2 0.3 1971 26.5 2.4 0.3 1972 26.6 2.4 0.3 1973 26.7 2.6 0.5 1974 26.8 2.7 0.5 1975 26.9 2.7 0.5
TOTAL VALUE
for John-Mary 40.3 2.4
252 Comparative SS Applications 173
TOM-SUE’s COMPARATIVE VALUE of CONTRIBUTION-TAXES
IN CONSTANT DOLLARS (000 omitted) ----- VALUE ------
YEARS INCOME (0ASDI) (HI)1955 - 1959 $84.0 $3.4 $---1960 - 1964 98.5 5.9 ---1965 - 1969 115.0 8.3 --- 1970 26.4 2.2 0.31971 - 1972 53.1 4.8 0.61973 - 1974 53.5 5.3 1.0
1975 - 1977 81.0 8.0 1.5 1978 27.3 2.8 0.5 1979 27.0 2.7 0.6 1980 26.7 2.7 0.6 1981 26.0 2.8 0.7 1982 25.3 2.7 0.6 1883 24.6 2.7 0.61984 - 1987 98.4 11.2 2.71988 - 1989 49.2 6.0* 1.4 1990 24.6 3.0* 0.7
* approximately 20% of these amounts are accounted as surplus.
TOTAL VALUE
for Tom-Sue $74.5 $13.7
SEAN-MICHELLE’s COMPARATIVE VALUE of CONTRIBUTION-TAXES
IN CONSTANT DOLLARS (000 omitted) ----- VALUE ------
YEARS INCOME (0ASDI) (HI)1975 - 1977 $ 81.0 $8.0 1.5 1978 27.3 2.8 0.5 1979 27.0 2.7 0.6 1980 26.7 2.7 0.6 1981 26.0 2.8 0.7 1982 25.3 2.7 0.6 1883 24.6 2.7 0.61984 - 1987 98.4 11.2 2.71988 - 1989 49.2 6.0* 1.41990 - 2020 762.6 94.6* 22.1
* approximately 20% of these amounts are accounted as surplus.
174 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Sean-Michelle’s TOTAL VALUE
$126.2 $31.3
Plus Paid in surplus (to be returned in benefits
paid to them) 18.0
COMPARABLE VALUE $144.2
Less surplus paid by other groups to subsidize Sean -Michelle's benefits:
Tom-Sue (1.8)
Harry-Kari (28.6)
Slite-Hope (29.2)
ADJUSTED utiles’ VALUE for
Sean-Michelle 84.6
HARRY-KARI’s COMPARATIVE VALUE of CONTRIBUTION-TAXES
IN CONSTANT DOLLARS (000 omitted) ----- VALUE ------
YEARS INCOME (0ASDI) (HI)1995 - 2042 $1,156.2 $143.4 * 33.5* Approximately 20% of this amount will accumulate as surplus contributionsostensibly made to benefit Sean- Michelle's group.
SLITE-HOPE’s COMPARATIVE VALUE of CONTRIBUTION-TAXES
IN CONSTANT DOLLARS (000 omitted) ----- VALUE ------
YEARS INCOME (0ASDI) (HI)2015 - 2030 $369.0 $45.8* $10.72031 - 2062 787.2 97.6* 22.8
TOTAL PAID IN VALUE
FOR SLITE-HOPE $143.4
* Approximately 20% of this amount accumulates as surplus to benefit Sean-Michelle's group. And, these calculations are probably low because the SSs’ wage
cap’s raises were estimated.
HARRY-KARI and SLITE-HOPE clearly are the duped groups of the SSsurplus taxation law of 1983-4. And, in fact, when considering the CensusBureaus disclosure that the population will grow by more than 100 millionduring the next 50 years, both Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope's group probably willbe larger than Sean-Michelle. (The calendar range and contribution tax values
252 Comparative SS Applications 175
were normalized, as explained at the outset of section 252, therefore these utiles’comparisons are valid, if not entirely accurate.) Sean-Michelle’s normalizedutiles’ value is comparable to the utiles’ value of Tom-Sue only when thesubsidized utiles from follow on HARRY-KARI and SLITE-HOPE areincluded. The SS surplus contribution taxation of these following groups shouldbe discontinued since the taxation is not only onerous but also inequitable.
In 1984, the contribution-tax revenue needed to pay SS benefits is 11.8times the tax revenues needed in the mid-sixties (When the expansions to SocialSecurity are included, Medicare for instance, the total contribution’s revenueneeded in 1984 is 14.5 times that needed in 1965). Wages earned were only fivetimes greater, and the population had grown a mere 1.5 times. Thesefundamental facts frame the mechanist political irrationalism that had set the SScontribution-tax-rates, which included surplus contribution taxes: while thegovernment needed supplemental revenues to offset top end tax returns, theessential justification for increasing the SS contribution rates implicatedeconomic inflation endemism and the systemic maturation of SS.
Intrinsic of the above analysis, the count of retirees receiving SS benefits haddwindled while total dependent SS beneficiaries had greatly increased. In otherwords, during the ‘Great Society’ years of the 1960's, the SS System, and thebenefit pipelines from it, were politically assigned social welfare roles. In 1988,the SS Commissioner, Dorcas Hardy, commented about the OASDI benefitoutlays: She reported that 60 percent went to retirees, 40 percent to spouses’survivors (that lived on scanty wages and retirement income of those retired) andthose on SS disability insurance. The population of those over 65 rose from144
18 to 27 million, in line with the expansion of employment, while the aggregateof individual benefit payments to retirees rose on average to four times what theywere in 1965, which is less than the increase in wages earned (this fact confirmsthe previous statement that John-Mary received benefit checks that in constantdollars are 80% of what the other groups would receive).
In the ‘1980s, 93% of all people aged 65 and over were eligible for cashbenefits. As for SS’s systemic maturity (with eligibility now including most145
women, as well as men), SS was surely reaching relative ‘maturity.’ This saysonly that the inordinate pressures on the contribution tax rates, set in ‘78 and ‘83,no longer included systemic eligibility growth, which I call ‘maturation,’ asthe primary cause to increase SS tax rates. But the ‘70s and ‘80's gave usrampant inflation that would reach past 20 percent. And inflation endemism is
176 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
more pernicious to SS than systemic maturation ever was. And SS has no causalnexus with this inflation. Therefore first dollar taxation, as based on the endemicinflation, as causally mis assigned, is grossly and patently unfair.
In 1984, the contribution-tax collections totaled $226 billion. $184billion went to the OASI Trust Fund, $16 billion to the DI Trust Fund, and $42billion to the HI Trust Fund. Now, try to fit these collections with theCommissioner's disclosure: 40 percent of OASDI funds go to others than retiredbeneficiaries. With the total collection disbursed, $120 billion (or half of thetotal) went to retirees (93% of 27 million, or about 25 million retirees).
Now, try to comprehend that 40-50 million -- 17-20% of the totalpopulation (all ages) -- exists in our society below the income level that definespoverty. These individuals are the economic products of our mechanist politicalcapitalism and many aren't eligible for SS While others, who receive SS benefits,have no other income.
E. K. Hunt provided Capitalism’s ideological mechanist essentials: 146
Capitalism is defined by . . .[logically irrational] essential features that arealways present in a capitalist economy.
---- First is the ubiquity of monetary exchange. For the vast majorityof people in capitalism, one can get the things one wants and needs onlyif one has money with which to buy these things in the market.
---- Second, capitalism always has at least four clearly identifiablesocioeconomic classes: the class of wealthy capitalists, the class of smallbusinesspeople and independent professionals, the class of workingpeople and the class of destitute persons who live by various welfareprograms or by theft, prostitution, or whatever means are available. . .
The working class has no significant access to or ownership ofproductive resources. Individuals in this class must sell control of theirpower to labor (i.e., get a job) as their only means to escape sinking to thedestitute class. . . . [T. R. Malthus and Max Weber observed‘the iron cage of wages,’ as befitting this mechanist determined caste]
Income from ownership and the wages of workers are consideredto be the only socially respectable sources of income. The destitute classmust depend on the somewhat “less than respectable” sources of income,
252 Comparative SS Applications 177
such as welfare, charity, or the fruits of quasi legal or illegal activities inorder to get by. The stigma that attaches to members of this classmotivates all propertyless individuals to try very hard to secureemployment even if working conditions and wages are poor.
Clearly Hunt wrote about The American System of Political Economy’sCapitalism. American Whigs, contemporaries of Lincoln, achieved to establishthe ideological deterministic mechanisms’ economic system.
SS Benefits for 1963 (before the existence of HI) totaled $15.4 billion,and contributions amounted to $15.6 billion, adding $0.2 billion to the OASItrust funds as were recorded at $20.7 billion. Then, in 1984, government’s fiscalaccounting year was shifted, adding a full quarter of cost without providing foradded revenue funding. And the $27 billion OASI funds ran short. Typical offallacious political rhetoric, this short fall was dubbed ‘the bankruptcy of SS,’while the federal government was running annual deficits as never before.
With increased contributions tax rates and wage caps of the 1983 SSlaw, surplus contributions began, reached $110 billion in 1988 and in 2000(when the wage cap had increased to $86,000) $500 billion annually (Willgeneral revenue tax returns and rate reductions, as in 2001 and ‘03, starve SSTrust funds intended to retire the BabyBoomers?).
Research Institute of America, published this interesting report (only thecover is quoted): Bedrock of Executive Wealth.147
The Social Security System touches the lives of most people in thiscountry. Yet how much do you actually know about the programs oramount of financial protection offered by the system? Most people tendto think of social security as just a pension plan for when they retire.However, it is also a system that replaces income lost by a disabledworker or the family of a deceased worker regardless of his or her age.
Inside you'll see the case of a typical young executive who alreadyhas $454,480 worth of "life insurance" -- plus $605,040 in otherinsurance, for a grand total of $1,059,520 -- from the government'sregular social security program.
The fact is, social security offers big financial protection to peoplein every age group and every financial circumstance. For executives, itcan be the bedrock and basis, the 'hard' foundation of every wealth
178 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
accumulation plan.As one ponders these SS benefits and considers that with surplus contributionstaxes, future benefits are based on paid-in-equities, one should conclude that theSS system has failed in at least two aspects:
---- 1) Poverty was not eliminated. And SS was not initially supposedto accomplish this. However, political enactments put many welfareburdens onto SS.---- 2 Politics made SS a Ponzi Scheme in which SS contributions’surplus funds became the political prize for returning high generalrevenue taxes (to those that paid them, and is the greater failure): Withthe 1984 SS rate ‘fix,’ which began to collect surplus contribution taxes,Tom-Sue is the last group of SS beneficiaries to enjoy politics’ freedistributions of SS benefits.
General Revenue Tax laws of 2001 and 2003 provide samples of specialinterest politics that has the SS surplus, as its exclusively entitled prize, inpolitical focuses. With politics of SS contribution tax payers at odds with retiredbeneficiaries, together they are vulnerable to the vastly more powerful politicsof general revenue tax payers: with income not subjected to the SS tax laws,those with income beyond the SS cap and otherwise from the capital side ofeconomy (not considered wage-earned income), but causally is most responsiblefor the economy’s inflation-endemism, many general revenue taxpayers areexcused from paying the SS contribution tax. However, inflation endemism mostheavily burdens the SS contribution taxes. SS carries the load of inflationwhile general revenue tax payers benefit from it. And their mechanist politicsgets the tax relief that contribution tax surplus justified: which clearly defines apolitically controlled economic ponzi scheme, all right?
The 1984 SS tax law changed the philosophical basis of Social Security and, forthe first time, dedicated tax revenues to specific future equities. Thisfundamental change now pits the productive workers’ population against thedependent retired population in a political struggle for disbursements of the SSSurplus and mechanistically, in the end, politically both lose their equitableclaim on SS surplus to the entitled ‘owner’ political demands for the surplus.Mechanist politics is the greatest threat to SS surplus.
Should the battle not occur sooner, for reasons of inequity that willbecome apparent, a battle for the surplus is destined to occur between Sean-
252 Comparative SS Applications 179
Michelle and Harry-Kari with Slite-Hope strongly favoring Harry-Kari'seconomic disadvantage.
SS’s direct, simple cohesive philosophical purpose, cannot survive themechanist acquisitive exploitative politics that has embroiled the SS surpluscontributions issue. And, 1984 changes in the SS law badly damaged thiscohesive original purpose. Particularly, SS surplus taxes that deliberatelypolitically are commingled with government’s budget processes and thenroutinely spent as government’s revenue does not bode well as to fulfilling SS’spurposes, and therefore, SS, as the Fed and Banking, should be isolated frompolitics, i.e., administered independently as a vestige of government.Government’s obligation to SS regarding inflation’s endemic effects on SSbenefits would then be more clearly defined as a routine expense of governmentto be budgeted. And periodically paid to the SS Trust.
Politics of the federal government is not suited to operate the SS systemas a private insurance company, with regulatory requirements as fundaccumulations, reserves, and such. And the routine acquisitive political piracyby mechanist entitled ‘owners’ is not the only reason: SS insurance reservesrequired to fund future liabilities of such an ideological private system quitesimply overwhelms the private enterprise economy. (In fact, unfunded reservesare a huge continuing problem, the inadequacies of which aptly apply to privatepensions of all sorts – as if a private, municipal, state, -- and they go withoutadministrative concern or adequate resolution when administered by mechanists.)This observation was attested recently (2009) by economists Thomas Philipponand Ariel Reshef’ in a paper, which economist Paul Krugman observed ‘couldhave been titled,’ “The rise and fall of Boring Banking” (it’s actually titled“Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909 -2006").
Krugman wrote this: They show that banking in America has gone148
through three eras over the past century.
Before 1930 banking was an exciting industry featuring a numberof larger-than life figures, who built giant financial empires (some ofwhich later turned out to have been based on fraud). This highflyingfinance sector presided over a rapid increase in debt: Household debt asa percentage of GDP almost doubled between World War I and 1929.
During this first era of high finance, bankers were, on average,
180 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
paid much more than their counterparts in other industries. But financelost its glamour when the banking system collapsed during the GreatDepression.
The banking industry that emerged from that collapse was tigthtlyregulated, far less colorful than it had been before the depression, and farless lucrative for those who ran it. Banking became boring, partlybecause bankers were so conservative about lending. Household debt,which had fallen sharply as a percentage of GDP during the depressionand World War II, stayed far below pre-1930s levels.
Strange to say, this era of boring banking was also an era ofspectacular economic progress for most Americans.
After 1980, however, as the political winds shifted, many of theregulations on banks were lifted – and banks became exciting again. Debtbegan rising rapidly, eventually reaching just about the same levelrelative to GDP as in 1929. And the financial industry exploded in size.By the middle of this decade, it accounted for a third of corporate profits.”
[And we now know about history repeated in 1987 and 2009!]
So, returning to the SS political plight:
---- Was the surplus provision in 1984 SS Tax Law necessary? Or, in theaftermath of the 1981 general revenue tax cut, was the mechanist politicalmotivation: to recover needed revenue for the general operations of government?Political rhetoric has obscured the true answer to this basic question. It mightnever be answered. But the evidence, which shows that the SS benefit valuepolitically designed to go to Sean-Michelle’s retiring group, is more than twicethe value that Tom-Sue’s group enjoyed. Since this analysis considered constantdollar values, inflation’s effects while not eliminated, were neutralized.Conclusion. The political urgency for collecting SS surplus was not onlyoverstated. It represents a political fraud. Political expedience involvinggovernment’s foreseen perpetual deficits posed the only real urgency for the SSsurplus: and after spending the SS surplus, government’s deficits have continuedas if the SS surplus had been designed exclusively for covering the politicaldesigned deficits. About this devastating deficit projection, President Reagan’sBudget Director, Stockman, wrote this:149
253 Pensions 181
To convince it really was as bad as I was saying, I invented a multiple-choice budget quiz. The regular briefings weren’t doing the job. . . . Thequiz allowed [President Reagan] systematically to look at the whole $900billion budget, to see it brick-by brick. . . . He sat there day after day withhis pencil. . . . After making all his cuts, the deficit remained . . .staggering . . .. [At a following meeting] When the discussion turned totaxes,[the President’s] fist came squarely on the table. “I don’t want tohear any more talk about taxes,” he insisted. “The problem is ‘deficitspending!”
It is difficult politely to correct the President of the United Stateswhen he has blatantly contradicted himself. The . . . deficits were theresult of the spending he didn’t want to cut. . . . The spending bar wasat 24.5 percent of GNP and the revenue bar with existing taxes was at18.9 percent of GNP. The accumulated federal deficit became $1.9 trillion through 1990. 150
Sean-Michelle's real concern, should focus on assurances of an equitablepay back of the contribution-tax surplus that exists only as accountings ofwhat is owed to SS. Now is too late for them to dwell on the amount they arepaying in SS contribution-taxes. More important, if politically focused, theystill can achieve the redress of SS Tax Law, the recompense for inflation,and return the already misspent SS surplus in greater insured workerbenefits. If they focus on this teleological oriented political service role, Harry-Kari and Slite-Hope's groups might probably follow their political lead tostrengthen SS rather than, as irrationally designed in 1984 by mechanistpolitics, destroy it.
253 PENSIONS
Private pensions are not easily compared with Social Security: the differencesmust be clearly drawn for any valid comparison. Particularly, the SScontribution-tax is not equivalent to scheduled premiums paid to private pensionplans. While benefits as scheduled upon the amount of pension fundscontributed, are about the same as the employee's contribution-tax paid to SS,
182 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
Just as important, the Fred Meyer deal brought a crucial financial ally into KKR’s"
fold: the Oregon state pension fund. Some 40 percent of the money that KKR neededfor the Fred Meyer buyout was provided by the Oregon fund, nearly 100 times theamount of money that Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts themselves invested in the deal.. . .
Over the next five years, pension funds in nearly a dozen other statesfollowed Oregon’s example and agreed to help bankroll KKR’s deals. (G. AndersMerchants of Debt, p 43)
many pitfalls in private pensions are not found in SS. Yet, many publishedreviews portray private pensions as the better deal. And, these portrayals holds‘true’ only so long as interest rates remain high and are compounding. Since the‘70s through 9-11-2001, interest rates are excessive. Still SS outperformedprivate pensions in furnishing income to retired seniors: interest income fromprivate pension reserves rewarded pension plans’ owners instead of enhancingpension benefits.
Private pensions are not as pure or virtuous as they are represented.And, future pay outs must not be taken for granted. They are, at times, not therewhen retirement comes. Most important, in fragilities of economic competition,is that employers own the assets of defined benefit pension plans: the actualityof receiving even fully vested benefits depends upon the employer's financialoutlook and ability when employee participants’ time for retirement arrives (In1974, law made Government responsible for a meager $20,000 worth of eachprivate pension’s benefits). And, contemporary business failures (as Enron)confirm that private pensions are sometimes not paid as promised. When a newcompany owner takes over, which occurs more frequently, new owners canlegally rearrange pension plans. And owners have used pension plan reservesto effect changes of ownership. Anyway, pension plan assets are controlled by"
fiduciaries who usually are corporate officers or are accountable to the corporateofficers who represent the corporate ownership of the plan.
Defined contribution plans are not much better. Together, Peter Druckerestimated that private pension reserves would in 1985 own 50% of corporatestocks and public debt. In recent years the corporate officers have used pensionplan assets ($3 trillion in the late ‘80s) to enhance leveraged power and control(Example: Teamsters’ Union controlled pension funds provided loans to buildcasinos in Las Vegas; The pension funds’ Controllers became the casino
253 Pensions 183
owners.). Similarly, fiduciaries of pension plan assets have incestuouslyinvested the assets in corporate stock, yielding greater individual leverage andcorporate control: sometimes providing financial leverage in takeover bids.Result: private pension plans are often of more value to corporate raiders thanto the individuals whose only legal right is a vested interest in the retirementbenefits of a pension: When corporate raiders have gained owner-control, privatepensions have often been stripped of assets and retired. Private pensions are notnearly as secure as SS and, at best, only as good as the economic well-being ofthe plan’s sponsor.
About the private pension density factor, only few wage-earningemployees qualify for full private pension benefits: from my own thirty-year-career in one industry, I gratefully collect a pension annuity. But of my thirtyyears of employment, only the last eleven years counted to define my benefitpayment. My career was with four employers that touted: We offer unexcelledjob security and fully funded pensions. No one disclosed that my secondemployer would be consolidated with three others (including my first employer),and that with reorganization would become a totally new employer:reorganization is a reality of corporate life in which employees, as myself, haveno influence, or control over. The reorganization’s designers were not disclosed.
In the new organization, only key employees were appointed to aposition to begin with. Eventually, I was also assigned. But many weredeliberately let go because new managers ‘could or would not fit them in.’ Inmy case, my old position had become a statistic of the deliberate reorganizationand downsizing: a deliberately managed attrition. My new employer hadchanged everything: my old position, which reported directly to the formerCEO vanished, as also did the old CEO. Frustrated? Yes! Disappointed thatI came to New York City for that executive position? Yes! A survivor? Yes!
Working for a highly pedigreed Actuary-CEO of a nationalinsurance association is why I came to NYC. The reorganization’s CEOposition was not assigned to him. And he was among the first to take avery suitable position elsewhere. Now, those of us who worked for himwere without a sponsor in the new organization. We were on our own inthe highly political circumstance of 35 executive positioned employeesbeing placed among the thousands other employees of the four nationalassociations being merged to form a super insurance services association:The Insurance Services Office (ISO). Stripped of office and title, my first
184 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
interviewer was the new manager of ISO’s Property UnderwritingDepartment: in an opening lament, he said to me, “I need more informationabout you to appoint you to a specific position.” He then assigned me,without position or title, to a research pool, which conducted assignedspecific projects. I soon realized that most other employees of this poolhad been treated similarly and, therefore, suspected it had been a deliberatetactic to achieve voluntary employment attrition. And, about to resign, aproject was assigned to me that greatly held my personal interest: I wouldcomplete it, I decided, then consider leaving. I submitted my report, andonly indirectly learned it had been well received. Then, another highlycredentialed actuary, whose newly assigned title was manager of anActuarial department, picked me to assist him. It was ‘deja vu all overagain’: but now an ‘assistant manager’ on an employment rung of the newcorporate ladder with far more rungs ahead: too many to provide anysecurity comfort to me. Politics at every turn, was a new experience, andwas anything but what had brought me to New York City. But withfocuses singular to jobs at hand, as time passed slowly it seemed, my skillsagain became in demand. Then, equally as deliberately, as covertly as theknowledge of reorganization had been disclosed to me, and now in my midforty’s, I resigned, to seek an employer of my choosing, in which I hadfaith and could dedicate my future and security to (And with urgentreminders from my wife how foolish I was to give up seventeen vestedyears in the consolidated pension plan of ISO.) *
*Just before leaving, a memo from ISO’s president’s office had appointedme to a newly created position, described generally, as ‘actuarial liaison tothe government’s FAIR Plans.’ This surely was a great honor. And, Iwould have enjoyed the position. But months earlier I had moved thefamily for the start of school, remaining and living out of a suitcase in NewYork until all the loose ends were settled: I left on what I contend was ‘bestpersonal terms’ but still lost seventeen vested years in the pension plan.
Maybe more important, the new organization provides position,pay and pensions to many others. But the deliberate processes and attrition,I will never forget. They were extreme. It disappointed me greatly thatformer employees had asked me to intercede on their behalf, but when nolonger of position or status to be able to help: some found positions withinsurance companies and maybe (doubtful) they improved their security.
253 Pensions 185
Some months following my deliberate resignation, I accepted anassignment to reorganize a service association of smaller insurers andcommitted ten years‘ employment to complete this assigned mission: toprovide for alternative statistical-actuarial services to the smaller mutualcompanies that felt insignificant and unrepresented in the ISO organization.
Then, with no one hired to replace me when my agreed missionwas fulfilled, I remained until my eleventh year was completed. My reasonfor including this personal experience is this: Attrition of employmentseems to proliferate, and it diminishes greatly the populations ofeligible participation in private pension plans. And due to attrition, thelow density (maturity) of these plans, makes them appear less expensive.This orthodox corporate view, as I interpret it, says this: The AmericanPolitical Economy gives organizations the ‘right’ to change everythingaffecting employees personal lives while allowing former employees onlythe choice to either accept what they are offered or find employmentelsewhere. Thankfully, such politically grounded retirement benefits do notapply to SS. But let SS become a privatized operation, orthodox mechanistpolitics will work to dominate and control it, to leverage SS similarly andmechanistically as private pensions are leveraged to serve primarily thebase of property ownership.
With private pension plans, class actions are inevitable and will happen asour nation's economic fragility becomes more extreme. (This thoughtoccurred long before Enron and WorldCom had fulfilled this anticipation)
Gratifying to me are the reports of successful law suits againstcompanies that decided to relocate, leaving local economies bare. Theissue has become politicized and local officials have become the litigantsbecause they are interested to retain their elected positions (which remindsme of Shumperter’s analysis concluding that an underlying corporateculture, which had displaced Kings would eventually turn onto itself). Andwhile such political response often is too little too late, it is appropriate.Too bad though, when just a lessor people problem, our ineffectivedeontological ethics, usually finds no Sponsors for such Law suits.
And, since 1994's election, a political drive to change LiabilityLaws does not bode well for those hoping their pension rights arelegally protected. What happened to me in 1970, unfortunately, has
186 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
become an expected situation of business existence. My experienceimpressed me with government's necessary role, which particularly mustassure the individual security of older Americans. *
* This politics wants caps on liability and proclaims that trial lawyers
are the cause of high liability settlements. The privileged rights allowedor bestowed by Political Economy now want their economic unequalness
protected from penalties assigned by law suits.
Now retired, I receive an annuity from my fourth employer that is about35 percent of the amount my total service years define. I receive nothingfor my first seventeen years although pension plans were touted, whenhired, for being fully funded. But I'm fortunate when compared to themany others receiving no private pension at all.
Potentially worse, my employer purchased an annuity from the18th largest life insurance company in the U.S., to satisfy and administermy pension payout, Then, only five years into retirement, I read thefollowing news with great concern and dismay:
Newark, N.J. -- Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. suffered a blowMonday when a leading rater of insurance companies lowered itsrating of the company's ability to pay claims.
Mutual Benefit has more than $14 billion in assets and400,000 policyholders nationwide. - - - -151
Trenton, N.J. -- The nation's 18th largest health and lifeinsurer is expected to ask state officials Monday to take control of thefinancially troubled firm, a source said Friday.
"Mutual Benefit has had problems with its real estateportfolio," said the state official who spoke on the condition ofanonymity.152
So for me, which surely is the situation of many others as well,even the small pension that is based on only 35 percent of my career ininsurance, was in doubt. As economist Schumpeter opined, politicaleconomy might be an economic success but it fails sociologically. **
** After destroying the moral authority of so many other institutions, in
the end capitalism turns against it own (Schumperter). (Inflation’ssystemic endemism shows substantial evidence of Shumperter’s keen
253 Pensions 187
analysis of capitalism’s pernicious endemic effects that rest hidden bythe ubiquitousness of Capitalism’s money, which was created as aneconomic utility, however, ideologically was made into a commodity.)
And when I read the reports of economic growth, I wondered who hadmeasuring what, when the 18th largest insurer lost economic stabilitybecause of the investments it made while bolstering the nation's growth.As also, the very purchase of my annuity had bolstered the appearances ofthis economic growth of the 1980s. (Rereading this reminded me that I hadinserted some pages back, the observation attested recently (2009) byeconomists Thomas Philippon and Ariel Reshef’ in a paper, whicheconomist Paul Krugman observed ‘could have been titled,’ “The rise andfall of Boring Banking” (it’s actually titled “Wages and Human Capitalin the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909 -2006").
With some bias but more because the trend is for increased jobmobility or less than full time employment with no employee benefits atall, most, I contend will never receive full private pension benefits.
To compare SS to private pensions is to compare what is more firmand real with what is arbitrary, capricious, and often legally crafted to beillusionary: incomparable! Such comparisons must conclude in nothing buterror. As disturbing as the escalating cost of SS is, the company-sponsoredprivate pensions are not and particularly now should not be considered asalternatives. They are a gamble legally designed to appear as even handedbut in reality favor the sponsoring business owners: The contractuallanguage always is skewed to put ‘golden handcuffs’ on employees whilegiving the managers freedom to legally act with little to no impunity whenemployees are no longer needed.
The percentages of ‘contingent workers’, so called, in the U.S. * 153
1980 1986 PERCENT.
(in millions) INCREASE
Part-timers 16.3 19.5 20%
Temps .4 .7 75%
Other** 3.3 4.8 45%
total 28.5 34.2 20%
* Those who by design or necessity pursue nontraditional,
188 250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
flexible employment careers.
** includes contract workers, consultants, etc.
Fading Benefit 154
Divorce, Employer restructuring and failure involving both activeand already retired employees, Job hopping, Mothers and necessarytime out to attend to family raising.
In ten to fifteen years people probably won't be able to retireat all declares Keith Kilty, Professor at Ohio State University, whohas been researching retirement planning for the past eight years.
In 1981, 45% of American workers were covered by privateplans. In 1985, 43% were covered. In 1950, just 22% were covered.(figures furnished by Employee Benefit Research Institute)
With pension reserves totaling more than $3 trillion, such questions(as who owns the retirement benefit?) are very important in divorcesituations. And while this was addressed by Federal pension reformlegislation in 1974, most are left out of this law's protection:---- ‘Who owns’ a benefit provided to a worker by the employer who
passes the benefit-cost onto the consumers of the businesses’product-services?
---- Who, in moral reality, paid for and, therefore, should own thebenefit: the worker, the employer or the consumer?
There's only one person to look out for you, and that's you!Some years have passed since a draft of this section was completed
and since, there has been no uplifting news to report. This excerpt from anarticle written by David Mastio confirms what I have written: 155
WASHINGTON -- Citing a 50 percent drop in employer contributionsto private pension plans during the 1980s, a widely respectedeconomic group is recommending significant changes in pension lawsto avert a “looming crisis” in America’s pensions. . . .
In the 1980s, Congress approved legislation limiting theamount of money companies can contribute to pension plans. Thatpolicy resulted in the significant drop in employer contributions tothese plans. . . .
The report, “Who Will Pay for Your Retirement? The
253 Pensions 189
Looming Crisis,” cites a number of examples of regulations that,while intended to address such issues as retirement equity andsecurity, made it harder for employers and employees to save froretirement.
According to the CED, the most “damaging” regulationswere enacted in 1987 and limited the amount companies could put intax-deferred accounts for their employees’ retirement.
Previously, there was no limit on the amount companies couldstash away in retirement plans for their employees in good years,according to the Employee Benefit research Institute.
By often contributing more than was necessary, in order tolimit tax liability, companies were often able to contribute little ornothing in bad years and still maintain strong pension plans.
The result has been a significant underfunding of the actualbenefits to be paid out.
[Enron and Worldcomm confirm the tip of his economic iceberg.]A private pension can never duplicate the SS insurance coverage.
A private pension’s benefits do not cover mishaps of the working years nordo they cover family members. Unless the coverages are analyzedcarefully, comparing SS to private pensions is nothing but folly. And, forsure, do not overlook COLAs. Private pensions’ usually provide benefitsof a ‘fixed contract’ nature, which ignores rising costs due to inflation.
190 ENDNOTES
1 World Book Dictionary (1965) 1293
2 M. Heidegger, Metaphysics (Anchor, 1961) 149-150
3 V. L Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol II, 197-98
4 G. P. Brockway, The End of Economic Man (Cornelia & Michael Bessie
Books, 1991), 4
5 Parrington, Vol. II, 78
6 Parrington, Vol. II, 66
7 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (Touchstone, 1986) 14
8 Lawson and Appignanesi, editors, Dismantling Truth (St. Martin’s
Press,1989), 6 : [Science look-a-likes as] Humanists -
philosophers, theologians, historians, literary critics [and
judicial officers particularly] -- have to worry about whetherthey are being scientific - whether they are entitled to think oftheir conclusions, no matter how carefully argued, as worthy ofthe term ‘true.’ Richard Rorty
9 Parrington, Vol. I, 300-301
10 Parrington, Volume Two, Winds . . ., 297
11 J. N. Fugii, Introduction to the elements of Mathematics (J. Wiley &
Sons, 1961) 45
12 Parrington., Vol. I, 70
13 E. K. Hunt, PROPERTY AND PROPHETS (Harper and Row, 1990)
123
14 Hunt, 132
ENDNOTES 191
15 Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 647
16 Based on, E. K. Hunt, PROPERTY AND PROPHETS (Harper and Row,
1990) 100-101
17 Hunt, 182-83
18 K. Vonnegut, A man without a country (Seven Stories Press, 2005) 88
19 World Book Encyclopedia (1965) Vol. 4, 851
20 Hunt, 100-101
21 Parrington, Volume Two, Winds . . ., 297
22 T. Honderich (editor), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford,
1995), 476-77
23 Lao-tse (see C. H. Monson, Jr., Philosophy Religion and Science, 268)
24 C. H. Monson, Jr., Philosophy Religion and Science (Chs. Scribner’s
Sons, 1961), 161
25 C. Thomas, There to Here (Harper Perennial, 1991) 82-85
26 Thomas, 89, 91
27 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (Touchstone, 1986) 14
28 Parrington, Vol. I, 70
29 C. H. Monson Jr., 272 (from The Conduct of Life, translated by Ku
Hung Ming. London: John Murray Co., 1906, sections 1-29)
30 L. P. Pojman, Philosophy, The Quest for Truth (Wadsworth, 1989) 152
31 T. Honderich, 483
192 ENDNOTES
32 Law, Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, 1993
33 Deut. 32:1-6 [text is taken from E. S. Bates, The BIBLE, (Simon &
Schuster, 1993) 149]
34 Heilbroner, 129
35 Heilbroner, 319
36 R.Sherman, A Caveat against Injustice (Spencer Judd, 1982)
37 Parrington, Vol. II, 66
38 Parrington, Vol. II, 67
39 Encyclopedia, Vol. 15, 348
40 Pojman, 152
41 In Parade, Las Vegas Review Journal, January 5, 2003
42 Pojman, 152
43 J. M. Keynes,‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ 1920
44 The movie ‘Catch me if you can,’ is a must see.
45 J. N. Fugii, Introduction to the elements of Mathematics (J. Wiley &
Sons, 1961) 45
46 Parrington, Vol. I, 300-301
47 Parrington, Vol. II, 298
48 N. Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (Owl Books,2003)
49 H. B. Leonard, Checks Unbalanced (Basic Books Inc., 1986) 59
ENDNOTES 193
50 This excerpt from my research section 256 appertains to the mechanist
philosophy: Mechanism, i.e., ‘the universe behaves like a bigmachine,’ is causal theory, which cannot be a logically rationalnecessary principle because it is an empirically deduced consequentwithout antecedent necessity? Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) assertedin his Leviathan (1651) that machine like determinism was naturalcausal principle. V. L. Parrington had referred to Hobbes’ assertedcausality as orthodoxy when he observed America’s return to thesixteenth century from which the seventeenth had reacted. MyriadParadoxes resulted! Not until recent scientific study, wasdeterminism’s dragon shown as being orthodoxy akin to ‘flat earth’:Prof. R. C. Weatherford, Univ. of South Florida gave thisphilosophical account of determinism:
determinism. It is often taken as the very general thesis aboutthe world that all events without exception are effects -- eventsnecessitated by earlier events. Hence any event of any kind isan effect of a prior series of effects, a causal chain with everylink solid. The thesis is fundamentally simple. The ideas whichit contains, notably those of events and causal connection, arecertainly open to definition. If the thesis cannot be expressed assome part of science or theory in it, some determinists say, theshortcoming is not in the thesis.
If the thesis is true, future events are as fixed andunalterable as the past is fixed and unalterable. One graphicexpression of determinism is in terms of what William Jamescalled ‘the iron block universe’: “those parts of the universealready laid down,” he wrote, “ appoint and decree what otherparts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hiddenin its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with onlyone totality. Any other future complement than the one fixedfrom eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and everyunity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation orshadow of turning.” If this is what the way of the world is, thenonly what actually happens in it could possibly have happened.
194 ENDNOTES
There are no genuine alternatives to be realized.Philosophers and scientists have been concerned with
the question of whether determinism conceived in this generaland all-inclusive way is true. The problem is ancient in itsorigins. The Homeric Fates were enigmatically described ashaving power over the future. Early forms of atomism weremore clearly deterministic, so disturbingly so that Epicuresfound it necessary to hypothesize an uncaused ‘swerve’ of theatoms as they fell through the void. Hobbes and Hume, andmany great and not so great philosophers after them, havebeen determinists.
But philosophers have been more concerned with whatis to many of us the most compelling part of that generalquestion: whether we ourselves, persons, are subject to thesame sort of causal necessity. Philosophers have cared lessabout whether or not the rest of the universe is determined --what they have cared more about is whether or not our livesare determined. Indeed determinism has often been taken as themore limited thesis that all our choices, decisions, intentions,other mental events, and our actions are no more than effects ofother equally necessitated events. The problem of determinismin this second sense is pretty well identical with the problem offreedom, or the free will problem.
When philosophers have worried about this limitedthesis in the past, they have typically focused on what it wouldmean for our concept of moral responsibility. But Strawsonled us to see that more is at stake than that, including manyhuman attitudes such as resentment [particularly resentment
ending in terrorism?] and gratitude. Honderich has raised thestakes higher. Determinism puts in doubt all “life-hopes,personal feelings, knowledge, moral responsibility, therightness of actions, and the moral standing of persons”. Andvan Inwagen has suggested that if determinism were known to
ENDNOTES 195
be true, no one could ever rationally deliberate about any typeof action. Deliberation, it is said, makes sense only if genuinealternatives are available to us. If I deliberate about whetheror not to raise my arm, my deliberation is rational only if I amable either to raise it or not to raise it. If determinism is true,only one course is genuinely open to me. So it is alleged, mydeliberation is irrational.
But, as remarked, the most important issue historicallyhas been moral responsibility. And what can be said about itapplies in a general way to the other implications ofdeterminism. Typically we believe that agents are morallyresponsible only for those acts that are freely chosen andwithin the power of the agent to decide. We are guilty only ifwe could have done otherwise. But if determinism is true, thenin some sense we never could have done otherwise. Thus manyphilosophers have concluded that determinism and holdingpeople responsible are incompatible. Others have stronglydisagreed.
Recently, however, quantum mechanics and relativitytheory have generally displaced Newtonian mechanics, andvarious proofs of them have been claimed. Many scientistsand not a few philosophers believe that the dragon ofdeterminism has been slain. . . . World Book Encyclopedia refers one to ‘mechanist’ as fundamentalmeaning to deontology in contrast with the meaning of teleology:because the cultist foundation of deontology is also a root meaning ofcausal mechanism, therefore, conservative orthodox mechanistculture, the philosophy of which is paradoxically both blessed andcursed with practicing deontology’s moral lac of goal or purposes.
Philosophic mechanist underpinning of unitary materialistcausality is dogma which mechanists’ politically asserted asdeontological economic principle, and as orthodox political beliefbecame installed as law following President Lincoln’s death, making
196 ENDNOTES
deontological causal mechanism the official but fundamentallyfallacious principle of The American System of Political Economy:World Book Encyclopedia stated this philosophy of deontology:
MECHANIST is a person whose philosophy states that theuniverse behaves like a giant machine. Everything happensaccording to physical laws of cause and effect. He believes thatno living thing has a choice in the way it behaves. Themechanist says that events of yesterday determine what happenstoday. Only the past and present can control the future.
[Mechanists are clearly political conservatives, the secularpolitics of which in the U.S. eventually succeeded to install TheAmerican System of Political Economy]
This fundamental question should be answered by all whoclaim to be Christians: If Christ’s philosophy is strictly teleologicaland to be a Christian teleological philosophy must be practiced, whatjustification is there for supplanting mechanist determinist deontologyand then claiming that Christian philosophy is still at the base of thisparadoxical practice?
51 Clay, Henry, Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, 1993; World Book
Encyclopedia, 1965
52 Parrington, Vol. II, 66
53 Brockway, 91 (from Smith, Wealth. 6)
54 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1978, 8
55 The World Almanac, 1994, 957-958
56 The World Almanac 2002 (New York Times) 385
57 The World Almanac 2002, 374
58 World Almanac 2000, 381
ENDNOTES 197
59 Hunt, 12
60 D. Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGrawHill 1982) 219:
Today the term currency school is closely associated with monetarism. Theschool’s principle conclusions --- (1) that rules are preferable to discretionin the conduct of monetary policy. (2) that inflation is largely or solelyproduced by excessive monetary growth. (3) that monetary shocks are theprimary source of economic disturbances. (4) that the entire stock ofmoney and money substitutes can be governed via control of a narrowlydefined base --- constitute the core of monetarist doctrine.
T. M. Humphrey
61 World Almanac, 1994, p 686 (footnote 4 indicates many considerations to the
estimate of net interest)
62 World Almanac 2002, 739
63 Parrington, Vol. I, 171-175
64 Max Weber’s Iron Cage that Malthus had called the Iron Law?
65 Parrington, Vol. I, p. 333-35
66 Parrington, Volume Two, Winds . . ., 297
67 E. A. Powell, Americans drowning in sea of debt as bankruptcies,
defaults rise, Las Vegas Review Journal, June 20, 2001
68 Leonard, 59
69 Honderich, 707
70 Workers and Beneficiaries, World Almanac, 2000, 767
71 World Almanac 1986, 257
72 World Almanac 1994, 958
198 ENDNOTES
73 Social Security; World Book Encyclopedia, 1965
74 Social Security; World Book Encyclopedia, 1965
75 In 1990, the Census counted 31 million older than age 65. And in 2025,
the survivors of natural birth are similar natural facts, that when consideringmortality, will nearly total 33.25 million older than age 67. I suspect,therefore, that the 80 million cited during the 2000 campaign for President,was a political assertion based on an almanac’s published error: that hadstated 80 million, representing what clearly in context was shown as eightmillion: slipping digits is a common error. However, citing this error as afact was a deliberate ideological irrationalism. About this simple unreality,I wrote this: “Has an over active political imagination retold 1983'sprojected ‘fish story’ of only two workers per retiree?”
76 D. A. Stockman, The Triumph of politics (Harper & Row) 397
77 Letter to H. L. Prince, April 6, 1859, in Works, Vol. V, pp. 125-126
78 World Almanac 2002, 103
79 J. M. Keynes,‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ 1920
80 World Almanac 2002, 739
81 Stockman, 268
82 Stockman, 357
83 R. L. Heilbroner, 293
84 Heilbroner, 72
85 Parrington, Vol. III, 21
86 N. Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival (Owl Books, 2003)
87 J. M. Keynes,‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ 1920
ENDNOTES 199
88 Parrington, Vol. II, 197-98
89 Heilbroner, 187-189
90 Hughes, 32
91 Edwards, 450
92 Heilbroner, 191
93 F. T. Saussy (R. Sherman), A Caveat against Injustice (Spencer Judd,
1982) 23
94 Parrington, Vol I, 300-301
95 C. Thomas, There to Here, (Harper Perennial, 1991) 69
96 Stastical Abstract of the U.S. (1949) 287
97 The World Almanac 2000 (New York Times) 151
98 W. O. Menge & C. H. Fischer, Mortality Tables, The Mathematics of
Life Insurance (Ulrich Books 1965) 7
99 Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (1978) 8
100 World Almanac 1996, 258
101 O. Johnson (Editor), 1996 Information Please Almanac, 840
102 US History: Almanac, 2000, 531
103 H. Stein, The 'threat' of a Budget Surplus, Wall Street Journal, April
7, 1988
104 S. Lindlaw, AP, Las Vegas Review Journal, July 17, 2003
105 Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia
200 ENDNOTES
106 Dictionary, 84
107 W. Greider, Secrets of the Temple (Touchstone, 1987) 306-307.
108 Greider, 309
109 Greider, 308
110 Greider, 306
111 Greider, 307-308
112 D. Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 115
113 Over the last century, average stock growth was 4%, inflation 3%:
stock growth reflects non earned income (shares of corporate profits thatenure to investors), inflation the growth in consumer cost. Stock growthenhances affluence while growth in consumer cost mostly impressesnegatively on wages earned: systemic ‘giving to Peter by taking from Paul.’
114 Heilbroner, 216
115 H. B. Leonard, Checks Unbalanced (Basic Books Inc., 1986) 56
116 See H. B. Leonard’s book
117 Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac 2004, p828
118 Heilbroner, 153-54
119 World Book Encyclopedia (Vol. 15) 348
120 Thomas, 58
121 Thomas, 69
122 Thomas, 89, 91
ENDNOTES 201
123 Thomas, 82-85
124 Parrington, Vol. I, 333-335
125 Parrington, Vol. III, 234-35
126 Parrington, Vol. III, 385
127 New Dictionary of Thoughts, 665
128 (First Inaugural Address) edited by Diane Ravitch, The American
Reader WORDS THAT MOVED A NATION (Harper Collins, 1990) 42
129 Heilbroner, 72
130 Parrington, Vol. II, 421-22
131 T. Parker, ‘The Nebraska Question,’ Addnl. Speches, Vol. I, 331-335
132 Pojman, 152
133 World Book Dictionary (1965), 1202
134 Encyclopedia, Vol. 6, 263
135 I John 1: 6 (from the original Greek Diaglot)
136 E. K. Hunt, 12
137 Letter to H. L. Prince, April 6, 1859, in Works, Vol. V, pp. 125-126
138 Encyclopedia, Vol. 15, 348
139 Thomas, 264-265
140 World Book Dictionary, 658
141 The World Almanac, 2002, 103
202 ENDNOTES
142 Pojman, 391 (The Absolutist Answer: The Justification of the State Is
The Security It Affords)
143 Pojman, 474
144 The Daily Spectrum, St. George, Utah, January 25, 1988 (Copley
news service report on a speech delivered by Dorcas Hardy; Are SocialSecurity Benefits still secure for retirees?)
145 Encyclopedia of Economics, 1982, 866 (B. Clyman, S.S. Programs)
146 E. K. Hunt, 12
147 The Bedrock of Executive Wealth, The Research Institute of America, Inc.,
90 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10011
148 Salt Lake Tribune, April 11, 2009
149 Stockman, 357
150 Stockman, 268
151 Life Insurance firm rating lowered, Las Vegas Review Journal, July
9, 1991
152 Difficulties hit insurance group, The Daily Spectrum, July 13, 1991
153 The Conference Board, Managers Face Dilemma With 'Temps,’ Wall
Street Journal, April 5, 1988.
154 The Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1987
155 , Shifts urged in America’s pension laws, David Mastio (Knight-Ridder
Newspapers), Las Vegas Review Journal, May 5, 1995
CONTENTSof
OUR FEDERAL SAVINGS PLANand
ETHEREAL-GOLD(the shaded titles)
FOREWORD100 Quintessential Foundations (An Introduction)
101 Security: our Heritage102 Insurance: our Heritage103 Political Economy: the foundation of our Heritage
(introduces 205)104 Exercising Sovereignty: a responsibility of Heritage
(introduces 208)109 Truth’s Fiducial Gauges (introduces 209)
200 Substantial Quintessence (Virtuous Knowledge)201 Life’s enigma and the essential need for philosophy202 Perceptions of reality and illusions203 The requirements of self in finding truth204 Politics for what it is205 Political Economy205 Appendix, Petitioning ‘Civitas’206 Liberal and Conservative207 Our "Captains of Industry"208 Sovereignty
209.1 Truth: The value predicate divisions of209.2 Truth: The Fiducial Gauges of210 Truth: Postscript about Organizations211 Truth: Postscript about Emotion212 Truth: Postscript about Faith220 Truth: Postscript about Paradoxes230 Truth: Postscript about Paradox and Mechanism240 Truth: Postscript about Deontology sans Teleology250.1 Virtues of Social Security and Vices of organization250.2 Virtues of Social Security and Vices of organization
In 2000, wage-earners have a $2 trillion (+) stake in the Economy.Teleologically, this $2 trillion stake (with interest) should have beenrepaid before the top 20 percent of income earners (who did notcontribute to SS) were given a revenue tax refund (top income earnersgot tax refunds, common wage-earners did not).
ABOUT ETHEREAL-GOLD
“It is the uniqueness of individuals, as they are encouraged
to develop responsibly, into which the beauties of nations
bloom. The American heritage is ETHEREAL-GOLD. The
unalienable qualities of individuals are not compatible with
anything that we produce, particularly on production lines.”From Petitioning‘Civitas,’ the Appendix to 205
The American System of Political Economy is a mechanism that opposesteleology: It divides the economy and upsets the ethical flux in culture. OurPolitical Economy locks Americans of the REAL ECONOMY betweenAmericans of the SURREAL ECONOMY and Americans of the NON
ECONOMY. Tyrannous Determinism results to compromise the humanrights bequeathed by the Constitution.--- Are we losing our unique AMERICAN HERITAGE?
--- Do we allow Mechanism to gamble with Teleology?
Increased in 1967 to provide for Medicare, Congress increased Social Security
contribution-taxes again in 1984 to fund OUR FEDERAL SAVINGS PLAN for SS(Then spent the money) and (as reported in NEWSWEEK, May 13, 1991, p. 35)"the centrists [in Congress] say the deficit-ridden government needs the money."
All attempts to cut SS taxes have failed. Political Economy, however, now calls
for general tax reductions. The Administration of 2001 anointed this politicalobjective.