Marxists Topple Statues as a Step Toward Killing People

Marxists and the other mindless morons they influence have been running around picking fights with statues of long dead slave owners that they gleefully topple and destroy. 

What’s the matter, Marxists? Why do you need to pick fights with statues? In your dreck-bedecked worldview, there are plenty of present-day, living, breathing slave owners. You call them capitalists or “capitalist exploiters.”

 

And you call their employees “wage slaves,” by which you mean real live slaves.

 

What makes you confuse employees with slaves is your lunatic belief that under capitalism, wages are set at the same level as the remuneration of slaves, namely, minimum subsistence, and that all that the workers produce beyond that goes to the capitalists as profit.

 

So, you conclude that “capitalist” is just another name for slave owner.

 

Knowing how close you are to a psychotic break, I don’t want to name any specific targets for you to demonstrate against in the name of abolition, lest you burn down their houses and kill them. But you know who many of them are. They’re very prominent. And many of them fund you.

 

I do hope, however, that when you finally get around to killing them, you’ll thank them for having sold you the means with which to do it and for having actually freely given you the money with which to buy those means.

 

I know that in the group of capitalists we’re talking about, there are many productive geniuses. Despite their genius, in the areas of economic theory and political philosophy and of personal self-preservation itself, they speak and act like lobotomized, castrated zombies. 

For a thorough analysis and refutation of Marxism, everyone should buy and read my Marxism/Socialism…, 99¢ at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu, followed by my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, at https://amzn.to/2PM19ut.

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Reisman’s Final Year’s University Lectures Available for Download Without Charge

Recently, a reader of my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, told me that he believed that he had been able to get more out of my book and do it more easily because he had listened to a series of lectures I had delivered over the years 1967-2007. 

On the basis of my discussions with him, I’ve decided to release recordings of the lectures I delivered in my courses in my final year at Pepperdine University, 2004-05. These lectures are very closely related to my book, which was the main text for the courses.

 

Try reading a chapter and then listening to the lectures related to it, or vice versa, whichever works best for you.

 

There are two 4-unit courses, which, in order to follow convention, I labeled “micro” and “macro” respectively.

Each of the courses had 13 sessions (not counting exams), typically recorded in two parts of more than an hour and a half each.

 

The chapters in Capitalism assigned in the “micro” course are the Introduction, 1-11, and 14. The chapters assigned in the “macro” course are 12, 13, and 15-19. In both courses there are also some supplementary readings as well.

 

All of the lectures are available on Google Drive and can be downloaded to your hard drive without charge. Here’s the link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MCwIHMDKrjYm0seEGWSZL7qhMKDlvnd8?usp=sharing

 

Consider these lectures as a work in progress in that I intend to make various revisions and additions over the next year or so.

Downloads for the courses include a syllabus and eight detailed syllabus supplements that describe the content of each of the lectures. 

The book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics is available on Amazon.com in Kindle, hardcover, and paperback formats. Go to https://www.amazon.com/s?k=George+Reisman&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss_2 to order it.

Slavery as the Cause of General Loss

While slavery enriched slave owners, it impoverished not only the slaves but also the United States as a whole. Its impoverishment of the US can be measured by the difference between what the slaves produced as slaves and the far greater amount they would have produced if free.

 

The effect of slavery on the slaves’ incentives was like that of a 100% income tax. They were motivated to do nothing but exactly what they were told, lest they suffer punishment. Everything over and above this, that they would have accomplished if free, was lost.

 

Slavery was particularly damaging to the South, because it created in the market value of slaves a fictional capital that made the accumulation of real capital in such forms as factory buildings and machinery seem unnecessary. It was thus responsible for the South’s economic backwardness.

 

In the North, a factory owner calculated his wealth as the sum of the values of his factory buildings, equipment, and inventories. In the South, a plantation owner counted as the main part of his wealth the mere presence of workers on his land, who were regarded as his property.

 

Thus, compared with the Northern factory owner, the Southern planation owner had a major deficiency of real capital. He was missing the factories, machinery, and materials that made up the Northerner’s capital. Instead, his wealth consisted mainly of the market value of his slaves.

 

Without slavery, Southern capitalists would have had to accumulate vastly more actual capital to be as rich as slavery gave them the illusion of being. And correspondingly, without slavery, the South as a region would have had to have accumulated far more real capital.

To learn more, read my “Capitalism: The Cure for Racism,” available for 99¢ at

https://amzn.to/3g2EJkh

The Meaning of Being “Green”

Two differences between “Lockdowns” and “The Green New Deal” are that under “The Green New Deal” you won’t have gas for your car if you want to drive somewhere. And you won’t have electricity for your TV.

But that’s alright. The purpose of your life is not your personal enjoyment, but higher, collective goods, such as “flattening the curve” and holding down the CO2 content of the atmosphere, say collectivists.

In fact, believe the Green New Dealers, the world would be a better place if a few billions of you weren’t alive in the first place, because then you’d cause much less CO2 getting into the atmosphere, and thus the planet would be a better, healthier place.

 

At least so say the implicitly homicidal maniacs who comprise the Green movement and are never censured for expressing this belief.

To learn more, read my “The Toxicity of Environmentalism” and Chapter 3 of my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Both are available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ

Lunatics In Charge

Why isn’t Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan under indictment for manslaughter and being sued for wrongful death? She withdrew any police presence from the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. Result: businesses were looted, citizens were terrorized, four were shot, and two were killed. (See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/us/defund-police-seattle-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2)

Her action constituted reckless endangerment, since the results that occurred were precisely the kind that any reasonable person would expect.

Perhaps she hasn’t been charged because it’s assumed she’d easily “beat the rap” with an insanity plea. Early in the anarchy, speaking from somewhere in La La Land, she dismissed such concerns with the remark, “We could have the Summer of Love.”

At the very least, she and the city council of Seattle and the mayors and councils of many other cities need to be brought in to determine whether or not they are a danger. They certainly are and should be locked up. The problem is that these lunatics are running the asylums.

Hate Speech: When It Is Deserved and Morally Necessary

I hate Hitler, Stalin, and Mao for their scores of millions of murders. I’m glad they’re dead and I hope they suffered as greatly as possible both in dying and throughout their lives. My words are speech and they are as full of hate as it is possible for speech to be.

Whoever objects to this hate speech signifies that he believes that monsters should not be hated, that they should be able to go through life free of this consequence of their evil. He thereby gives aid and comfort to the monsters and thus deserves himself to be hated.

Who are the morons who have dared to attach a stigma to hate speech in and of itself? Who are the morons who have listened to them?

There are two types of hate speech: justified hate speech, as against Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and unjustified hate speech, as used by such monsters against the founding principles of the United States and their offshoot the capitalist economic system.

Our culture has become so filled with morons, that hardly anyone even notices that every day there is a massive campaign of hate speech carried on by Marxists/Socialists against the principles of individual rights and economic freedom.

Every day, Marxists denounce capitalists as “exploiters,” who steal their profits from wage earners, and urge the wage earners to rise up and seize the capitalists’ allegedly stolen property. Uneducated, brain-dead “intellectuals” never realize that this is hate speech.

The same intellectuals endlessly prattle on against “discrimination” and the need for “inclusiveness,” while simultaneously accepting the blatant discrimination implied in the slogan “Black lives matter” and its utter lack of inclusiveness of any lives but those of blacks.  

We live in a society that is essentially uneducated in the realms of economics and political philosophy. Fortunately, this great flaw can be rectified, by reading and studying the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, who provide the knowledge required to fill this void.

My membership in Mises’s graduate seminar for ten years concluding in the earning of my Ph.D. under him, and also in Ayn Rand’s “collective” for a comparable period, provided the foundation for my own contributions to the cause they lead and allow me to add my works to theirs.

So I conclude by recommending that everyone who wants to fight for freedom and capitalism read the works of Mises, Rand, and Reisman. Search under these names at Amazon.com.

Arbitrary, Sadistic Democrat Congressional Inquisitors

The other day, I watched a video of AG Barr being questioned by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. I still can’t believe what I saw and so would like confirmation of it.

The Dems seemed to believe that Barr had no right to the use of the time he needed to answer their questions. The Dems held that the time he used belonged to them and again and again demanded their time back, an arrangement whereby they can ask questions, but he can’t answer.

To top it all off, the Chairman of the committee, Jerrold Nadler, actually denied Barr’s request for a 5-minute break (presumably to use the bathroom).

I have never seen such a clutch of nasty, vindictive, and downright sadistic, freakish-looking people. If they come to power it may not be long before our country is transformed into one vast concentration camp.

Don’t let such a thing happen. At the very least, arm yourselves intellectually by going to https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ and then buying and reading 

Mass Death But Never Trump

Today’s Democratic Party is the party of Marxism, Socialism, and Environmentalism. Yet “Never Trumpers” seem to prefer the possibility of our country being run by that party rather than by Trump.

Don’t they know that what stands behind these philosophies and the “Green New Deal” that reflects them is the goal of mass murder and death?

Don’t they know that the record of Marxism/Socialism is scores of millions of deaths and that the environmentalists openly call for reducing human population from 7 billion-plus  to as little as 100 million, and meet no criticism from their comrades when they do so?

Don’t they know that the only thing wrong with the coronavirus pandemic, according to the logic of environmentalism, is that it’s not strong enough to kill people on a sufficiently massive scale?

In sum, given the real-world situation, are the “Never Trumpers” out of their minds?

Listen to Socialists’ Public Confessions

Never trust a socialist businessman. As a socialist, he’s telling you he thinks profits are stolen from the wage earners. But as a businessman he’s trying to make profits anyway. With every sale, he’s confessing to being immoral by his own standards. Stay away from him.

Such hypocrisy characterized Friedrich Engels, the wealthy communist cotton mill owner who subsidized Karl Marx, who, for his part, was happy to be kept in this way, despite his belief that his subsistence came from the exploitation of labor.

Beware of those who prattle about the evils of selfishness and the morality of self-sacrifice. They are confessing every day that they view their self-interest as evil, but allege they just never act for it. What must happen if one day, just once, they do act for it?
Beneath the facade of self-sacrifice, lurks the potential for great evil.

Accountability

There’s been a lot of talk recently about making the police more accountable. There’s some legitimacy to that. But what about making mayors, city councils, governors and state legislatures, Congress, and the whole government more accountable?

Shouldn’t the mayors of Seattle, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and elsewhere be held accountable for the additional murders in their cities that they had to know would occur as a result of the inadequate police presence that they caused?

Given their decisions and knowledge of the consequences that would follow, it seems to me that these mayors deserve to be charged with manslaughter.

Mayors who allow things to reach a point where 911 calls cannot be responded to and who have not called their state governors to provide the assistance of the National Guard, should automatically be fired and replaced through a new election for the office.

To create a high barrier against unjust prosecution of the innocent, citizens left on their own to defend their lives and property should be immune from prosecution for any acts they commit in the course of doing so that are held to be less than first-degree murder.

July 6, 2020,  Nature 

While “Nature” may often be beautiful, it is also, very often, just one thing eating another alive. Nature needs lots of improvement. The primary improvement is Civilization.

Washington and Jefferson, Slavery and Marxism

Do not believe the claim made by the media morons that statues of Washington and Jefferson have been toppled because these Presidents owned slaves. Their statues have been toppled because they advocated freedom and created a country based on freedom.

In contrast, the Marxists/Socialists engaged in this desecration are advocates of slavery, out to create a totalitarian dictatorship. At the same time, as part of the same phenomenon, they claim that slavery exists all around us, in the very nature of capitalism.

They claim that the employees of capitalists are slaves: “wage slaves,” they call them. They do this on the basis of their lunatic belief that capitalists gain from the employment of wage earners in the same way that a slave owner gains from the ownership of a slave.

Namely, from the fact that a slave or wage earner is able to produce in a day more than is required to keep him alive and able to work the next day. The existence of this excess or “surplus,” they believe is the explanation of profit.

Thus, capitalists allegedly exploit wage earners in exactly the same way that slave owners exploit slaves.

This may no doubt come as a shock to many multi-millionaires and billionaires busy contributing to Marxist/Socialist terrorist organizations in the belief that doing so buys them protection. There is no protection except to expose these vermin.

And one simple and effective way to do that is to read and publicize this book, which is available in both Kindle and paperback versions at https://amzn.to/2N44uTu.

Among other major subjects, it explains the productive role of businessmen and capitalists and the actual foundations of profit.

Who Are the Supporters of Slavery?

Ever since the defeat of the Nazis in WWII, Marxists/Socialists have clearly been the world’s leading advocates of slavery. For elaboration, see Chapter 8 “The Chaos and Tyranny of Socialism” in my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.

See also my June 28, 2020 blogpost “Socialism Is Slavery and Worse” at http://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2020/06/socialism-is-slavery-and-worse.html.

Nevertheless, Marxist/Socialist super-hypocrite-thugs dare to pull down statues of Washington and Jefferson on the grounds that these men owned slaves.

These men set forth the principle of individual rights and of government existing for no other purpose than to protect those rights, and fought a war to establish a country dedicated to their protection.

Their success was the indispensable precondition of the abolition of slavery in the Civil War.

To attack them for not having freed their own slaves is comparable to attacking Marx and Engels (a wealthy cotton mill owner) for Engels’s “exploitation” of alleged “wage slaves” and Marx’s willingness to be supported by it.

It would have been a good thing for all the parties to have abstained from actions that violated their principles.

Had Washington and Jefferson done so, their record would now shine with even more luster than it does.

Had Marx and Engels done so, scores of millions more people would have lived instead of being executed or dying of starvation. Hundreds of millions would have avoided the experience of life as torture.

The paragraph before last is a measure of the good accomplished by Washington and Jefferson. The last paragraph is a measure of the evil accomplished by Marx and Engels and their supporters, including the hordes of uneducated children today masquerading as college graduates.

(And very often even passing as professors, journalists, mayors, governors, and United States Congressmen and Senators.)

The remedy for our growing chaos begins with reading and studying the works of Ludwig von Mises, the greatest man of the 20^th Century, and of Ayn Rand, the greatest woman of the 20^th Century.

Having been a member of Mises’s seminar for 10 years and a member of Ayn Rand’s “Collective” also for many years, I think I have been able to add some major intellectual contributions of my own to those of these giants. See again amzn.to/2PM19ut.

We have the answers and all we are up against is a horde of semi-savages who are in process of withdrawing themselves from Western Civilization and its values. To reverse the process, read Mises, Rand, and Reisman.

Freedom of Economic Inequality Is Not Only Not a Problem But the Solution to Economic Problems

On July 1, the NY Times ran an article titled “Is Economic Inequality Really a Problem?” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/opinion/economic-inequality-moral-philosophy.html?searchResultPosition=1)

The author was unable to provide an intelligent answer to his question because, like virtually all “liberals,” he doesn’t realize that under capitalism and its saving and investment, one man’s wealth is the source of other men’s wealth.

For example, one man’s billions invested in auto plants are the source of tens of millions of average people having automobiles. And similarly for all other products.

The liberal ignoramuses think products come from nowhere and that the capital wealth that makes them possible resides in a heap of consumers’ goods that serves no purpose except to make capitalists immensely fat while everyone else starves.

These ignoramuses have created generations of other ignoramuses, who are now getting ready to destroy the capital wealth that sustains them. Whoever wants to know better can do so by reading my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Available at amzn.to/2PM19ut

On Maintaining the Police and Army

The essential and only proper function of government is to protect its citizens against the initiation of physical force. This means having a police force to protect them against criminals and a military to protect them against foreign aggression.

Any government which disbands its police force or army thereby vaporizes itself and no longer exists as a government. At that point the right returns to the citizens to create a government, to provide for their common defense.

Those legally responsible for the destruction of the previous government should be subject to arrest and trial for having endangered the lives and property of the citizens through acts depriving them of the force(s) needed to protect them.

This means that there are some mayors, city councils, and possibly governors who should immediately be removed from office, arrested, and put on trial for willful endangerment of human life and property.

For more, read Ayn Rand’s essays “The Nature of Government” and “Man’s Rights.” Both are available in her books Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness.

They can be found at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ayn+rand+books&crid=2YSG40JF1I48V&sprefix=Ayn+%2Caps%2C214&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_6_4

Socialism Is Slavery and Worse

Socialism is government ownership of the means of production. Since all work requires the use of means of production, under socialism the government is a universal monopoly employer. Everyone is forced to work for the government. Everyone is the government’s slave.

Lacking the competition of employers for labor, the natural level of wages under socialism is minimum subsistence. Even if it had the means, a socialist state always has something more important to attend to than the standard of living of its citizens.

The moral ideal of socialism is “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Since ability is limited while need is unlimited, socialism proclaims its ideal world as one of limitless shortages, in which who gets what is determined by arbitrary, brute force.

This includes the determination of who works at what, where, and to what extent. Under socialism, everyone is a passive tool of the government, waiting to be told what to do, how to do it, and where to do it.

The nature of socialism is revealed in its adherence to the proposition that the individual is the means to the ends of society.

Since “society” has no real existence apart from the individuals who comprise it, what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of society AS DIVINED BY THE RULERS OF SOCIETY.

And what this means is that the individual is the means to the ends of the rulers.

Slavery under socialism is the worst form of slavery. A slave is the property of the state, not of any private individual, who would experience the slave’s injury or death as his loss. Under socialism, the slave’s life and well-being are valueless. So, millions are slaughtered.

Thus, socialism goes from enslavement to mass murder.
When you hear a socialist or talk to a socialist, know that you are dealing with someone seeking to enslave you and who is an accomplice to potential mass murder.

To learn more, read my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics available at amzn.to/2PM19ut.

Tuition Refunds for Today's Uneducated Graduates

Most college and university graduates of the last generation or more are essentially uneducated in the nature and values of modern Western Civilization and its leading offshoot the capitalist economic system.

The courses that should have given them this education, namely, the courses in the liberal arts and humanities, did not, despite the fact that in many cases the students not only paid for this education but incurred substantial debt in order to do so.

These students deserve a refund. In the case of private colleges and universities they should be paid to the extent possible out of the endowments of the schools they attended, which in some cases amount to tens of billions of dollars.

For the rest, all government financing, direct or indirect, serving to support education in the liberal arts or humanities should be abolished, including in primary and secondary education, as well as in higher education.

In all cases in which licensing laws require degrees of any kind that contain a liberal arts or humanities component, that requirement should be deemed satisfied upon a statement to that effect from the candidate’s prospective employer.

This would make it possible for new centers of learning to be established that either avoided liberal arts/humanities courses altogether or offered new and different varieties of such courses.

It is time to defund "education" whose product is ignorance and savagery.

Riots Are Riots Even Though the New York Times Calls Them "Protests"

The New York Times has described the Minneapolis police force as peaceful and non-violent for the most part———OOPS! MISTAKE!!! MISTAKE!!!

The New York Times has described the “PROTESTS” as peaceful and non-violent for the most part (putting aside the mass looting and destruction of stores in major cities across the US, including the US’s best-known department store, Macy’s at Herald Square in NYC).

Insurance companies in contrast have accurately described the protests as belonging in the category “riot and civil disorder event,” which is a category representing at least $25 million in damage.

Here’s an example of the “peacefulness” and “nonviolence” accompanying the protests: https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/72C23D5A-A5CE-11EA-9237-EF7B9133097E

Such destruction was not the result of each and every protest but just of a significant fraction of them, enough to cause not only many millions in losses but also the loss of several lives too.

The reporters and editors of The New York Times are all Marxist-educated and thus unwilling or unable to report the news objectively. They simply do not bother to report much of what they dislike and they twist and “spin” much of the rest.

Indeed, our culture and its educational system have deteriorated to the point that for several generations almost everyone has been taught to believe the teachings of Marxism in economic theory and political philosophy.

If you’d like to start flushing this poison from your brain, you need to read the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. My writings available at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ provide a good introduction to their ideas and also present some further contributions of my own.

What the Protests Are Protesting

The “protests” are not against the death of George Floyd. His connection is no greater than the length of the fuse needed to set off a vast accumulation of explosive hatred for the United States, the capitalist economic system, and rationality itself.

If the protests were about Mr. Floyd, they would have stopped with the filing of murder charges against the officer directly responsible for his death, and with the filing of charges against the three other officers present.

Despite the filing of charges, the protests went on, virtually without skipping a beat. Perhaps if the officers had been dragged from custody and been hung or beaten to death, the protests might have stopped, simply out of shock at what had been done. But not necessarily.

The protests have the flavor of a pogrom incited by a single incident and taken as symbolic of something vastly larger. They have the same character as the vast destruction of Jewish businesses in Germany in Nov. 1938, in response to the killing of a German diplomat by a Jew.

Generations of miseducation, akin more to a process of protracted lobotomization than to education, especially in the so-called social sciences and the humanities, has produced millions of graduates who are profoundly ignorant and barely capable of thinking.

To protect themselves from ever learning anything by listening to ideas that conflict with their dogmas, they shout down speakers. When the opportunity arises, they seek to get professors with alternative views fired, if they’ve managed to be employed in the first place.

The educational system’s graduates are so ignorant that despite the scores of millions of deaths it has caused, they do not know that socialism is a system of slavery, terror, and mass murder, and want to impose it on the United States.

At the same time, they regard the United States, the first country in the history of the world created on the principle that individuals possess unalienable rights that governments are instituted to protect, as though it were a tyranny ruled by evil “capitalists.”

They ignore the fact that to rid the country of slavery and make it true to its founding principle of individual rights, more than 300 thousand Union soldiers died in the Civil War, out of a population 20 million, which toll is comparable to almost 5 million today.

They are so pathetically ignorant that they do not even know what biologically distinguishes men and women and believe that by wishing, they can override these biological differences.

They do not know that freedom is the absence of the initiation of physical force, and that it is secured by the ability and willingness to counter the initiation of force with greater, defensive and retaliatory force, thereby creating personal safety.

They do not know that a police force and army are essentially the one proper function of government, and that in preventing, or, if necessary, overcoming the initiation of force, it secures the freedom of the individual and respect for his rights.

They do not know that the essential problem in securing individual rights and freedom is keeping the government in check. It must be prevented from itself initiating force, which it does any time it makes illegal something that is not the initiation of force.

In an upside down, inside out, total reversal of rationality, today’s protesters in seeking to achieve socialism seek the use of government force in every area of life. Their newly discovered exception is prevention of common crime. They want to abolish local police departments.

Perhaps there is a logic in all this. Namely, today’s looters and fire bombers might serve as “post-police,” enforcing endless regulations, working as spies, and guarding inmates in the socialist state’s concentration camps. There will certainly be no shortage of such monsters.  

There is practically no hope of any serious news analysis from today’s mainstream media. The New York Times, for example, has sunk to the level of urging people to eat insects (https://nyti.ms/2O0ivSS) and to avoid the use of toilet paper (https://nyti.ms/3aPuZs0). Loathsome.

Readers who want serious discussions of leading current issues can start by consulting my Amazon author’s page at https://amzn.to/2NLvVVZ. The works found there, especially my Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics, provide references to all the important relevant literature.

Trump Versus Our Enemies

Retired General Mattis has accused Pres. Trump of dividing the country in a time of crisis.(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/politics/jim-mattis-trump-protests.html?searchResultPosition=2) 

This is a false accusation. The country has been growing increasingly divided for many years. The fundament division is between those who want to preserve the American way of life and the capitalist system and those who want to destroy it.

In the last week or more, the division has manifested itself as between looters and arsonists on the one side and their victims on the other. Pres. Trump stands with the victims.

General Mattis apparently does not know of this conflict. He represents the rare case of a general who apparently does not know that his country has enemies or who its enemies are. Fortunately, President Trump does.

Bailouts and the Destruction of the Buying Power of Money

In the first chapter of Capitalism, I wrote, “In the absence of a widespread, serious understanding of the principles of economics, the citizens of an advanced, division-of-labor society, such as our own, are in a position analogous to that

of a crowd wandering among banks of computers or other highly complex machinery, with no understanding of the functioning or maintenance or safety requirements of the equipment, and randomly pushing buttons and pulling levers.” 

Those words describe the recent actions of Congress in enacting multi-trillion dollar legislation the alleged purpose of which is to offset the loss of trillions of dollars of sales and incomes caused by the imposition of “lockdowns” allegedly required to combat the coronavirus.

What Congress has done is not provide any kind of genuine relief for the damage caused by the lockdowns, but rather added to that damage. It has added to a massive forced reduction in the supply of goods and services a comparably massive increase in the quantity of money.

The consequence of this will be that when the economy recovers from the lockdowns, it will face a major increase in the quantity of money and volume of spending, which will substantially raise prices. Tens of millions of elderly people will suffer a major loss in buying power.

What will Congress do then? Create still more money to “bailout” the elderly? As the Constitution makes clear with respect to the power of the states, the Federal government too should have no power to make anything but gold and silver coin or bullion legal tender.

That would protect us from further arbitrary increases in the quantity of money. It would prohibit all new attempts to destroy the buying power of money in the delusion that in doing so, one is rescuing the economic system.

P. S. The Destruction of Hospitals

Since mid-March, elective surgeries have been radically reduced in anticipation of the need to make hospital facilities available for a flood of coronavirus patients that never materialized. The revenues lost from these surgeries have threatened the solvency of hospitals.

How is it possible for such policies to be continued? Are hospital managements robots, unable to change decisions that have been proven wrong? Or are they working under orders from robot-like government officials, who have no financial stake in the fate of the hospitals?