The Gold Bug

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

2009-07-06T02:32:00.002-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
7-6-09

The Obama Administration is on a full-court press to achieve socialized medicine. This is a serious matter for alarm, and I would like to spend this week’s blog discussing the issue.

First, however, I owe you people a further explanation of a statement I made prior to the election. At this time, I minimized the negatives of a Democratic victory based on my observation that modern politicians spend more of their time and energy advocating the platform of their opponents than their own. I gave specific attention to the Clinton Administration, which balanced the budget, reduced the size of the Federal Government (both as measured by the number of non-military employees and Government spending as a percent of GDP).and cut back welfare. There is no Republican Administration since the start of the New Deal which has a comparable record.

Some comments since Obama’s election have pointed out his anti-liberty actions and argued that this proves me wrong. Well, I have definitely not been proven right, but I also have not yet been proven wrong. To cite a character from Shakespeare, the ides of March have come but not yet gone. The first 2 years of the Clinton Administration were pretty bad. There was a determined attempt to ram home socialized medicine. There was also a determined move in favor of gun control. The result was that the NRA organized itself and had a tremendous impact on the 1994 election. Sixty seats changed hands in the U.S. House – all in a pro-gun direction. Gun control has been dead since that time.

After 1994, Clinton is reported to have said to his staff, “We are Eisenhower Republicans, and we are balancing the budget.” (quote from memory). Compare this with the two Bushes, Reagan, Nixon and Ford. Also keep firmly in your mind that the last Republican moved forcefully to socialize several banks and automobile companies, and the current Government ownership of General Motors is the direct result of a decision by George Bush, Jr.

The principle for which I am arguing is that you have to vote your convictions and that; win or lose, the outcome will be better if you do this than if you do the opposite (vote what seems to be the lesser evil). That is, you have to do good in politics as you do good in your personal life. You don’t control the whole world, but if you do good, the results will be better than if you do evil.

Right now I cannot predict the twists and turns of politics in the Obama regime, as I could not predict the twists and turns of the Clinton regime. I was completely surprised when Clinton reformed welfare and kicked a large number of welfare moms off the rolls. I was also surprised when he brought the budget into balance. I could not predict the specifics, but my general theory of American politics was certainly very much strengthened by the events of those 8 years.

There is another factor. When the Democrats do something in the direction of socialism, it is on shaky ground. But when the Republicans do something in the direction of socialism, the Republicans start to defend it, and it is virtually irreversible. An example of this is George Romney’s socialization of health care in Massachusetts.

Certainly Obama has moved forcefully in the direction of socialism and fascism. His most shocking action was the deliberate sneaking in of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. This measure was slipped into the economic “stimulus” bill (H.R. 1), and the Democratic legislators voted for it by an overwhelming majority WITHOUT READING IT. When some legislators asked for time to read the bill, Obama pounded on the table and asserted that the “stimulus” bill needed to be enacted immediately, and there was no time to read it. (“Stimulus” is in quotes because to stimulate something means to make it better and more energetic, and the Obama economic measures are going to deal a massive body blow to the American economy. But that is a subject for another time.) The parallel with the Emergency Banking Bill of 1933, enacted March 9, 1933, on the first day of F.D.R.’s administration is too exact for comfort. In that case also, legislation which directly attacked the fundamental rights of the people was rushed through a weak-kneed Congress without being read. I well remember a quote from that period which also applies to this. “We rely on leaders whose fate is lifted to the skies.”

The cover story for the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is that its purpose is to save money on health care costs. Don’t you want to save money? Of course, the average worker in the health care field is exerting all of his efforts, every day in every way, to see to it that the system spends more money. Dangerous new drugs are approved, and their prices are jacked up. Effective but inexpensive remedies are made illegal, and the doctors who practice them are viciously attacked by the same Government which claims to be trying to lower costs. Health care costs are growing like a brain tumor, AND THIS HAS BEEN TRUE IN EVERY COUNTRY WHICH HAS PRACTICED SOCIALIZED MEDICINE OR ANYTHING RESEMBLING IT. Furthermore, Lyndon Johnson knew this in 1965 when he enacted Medicare/Medicaid. He stated at that time that an undesirable feature of the system was that it always got so expensive that countries practicing it resorted to murdering patients who were expensive to treat. He stated that this undesirable feature could be avoided here because America is a rich country and could afford any amount of medical costs.

So here we are, and the disciples of Lyndon Johnson are telling us that the rise in medical costs is a crisis and SOMETHING must be done about it. Of course it is a crisis, and something must be done about it. That something is the abolition of Medicare/Medicaid. The system is a complete and total failure (as defined by its stated purpose). But that is not Obama’s something.

As noted, many other countries have faced this problem, and the answer is always the same. Cut medical costs by murdering people. Does the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology have a different solution? Of course not. They intend to order doctors to murder their (expensive to treat) patients. Quite frankly, we will not even know when the murdering begins.

In my discussion of Germany, I showed how the Holocaust started with the attempt to murder expensive to treat patients in the German socialized medicine system. Once it started, the Germans found out that (to them) killing was fun. And they began to kill more and more people: first, the political enemies of Hitler, then the Jews and the Gypsies. This is the inner logic of any society which adopts a philosophy of love. It has a conscious and explicit dedication to love. And there is a growing quantity of hate in its heart. Gradually the discrepancy between the words of love and the actions of hate grows larger and larger. The people in this society find that killing is so much fun. This is the exact description of the average left-wing Democrat. If you say to any of these people, now that they have admitted that health care costs are outrageous, abolish Medicare/Medicaid, they will reply, “Oh, no. We can’t do that?”

Why can’t they do that? The U.S. health care system was unsocialized from 1776 to 1965, and Americans had the best health care in the world. The answer is that they like to kill. The system is built on love in theory and hate in practice. Officially, “We provide health care for all our citizens because we are full of love.” Practically, “Well, we don’t like to talk about what the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology does, but it is necessary to make the system work.”

This is why I have written extensively about the philosophy of love of Jesus of Nazareth. It all goes back to him. To those of you who have been offended by my critiques of Christianity, I am sorry, but you people are not Christians. Bismarck was a Christian when he introduced the welfare state, calling it “Christian Government.” The left-wing crazies who insult formal Christianity are also Christians, although they go to great lengths to hide it. Indeed, their attacks on the religious sensibilities of the majority are deliberately designed to throw our society off the track. Their attacks on religion are so offensive and in such poor taste precisely because they are practicing the magician’s trick of distraction. They are trying to convince us that they are anti-Christian.

This strategy goes back to Karl Marx, and I call it the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Before that the socialist movement in the western world was openly Christian and bragged about its association with religion. Marx put an anti-religious cover on it (the sheep’s clothing). It has been a lie ever since. Indeed, perhaps you can remember, prior to 1989, that the old Soviet Union would have a May Day celebration every year on May 1. Do you know what they were celebrating? Was it Lenin’s birthday? Was it the day Karl Marx fled Germany? Is there any connection of this holiday with modern socialism?

No, May Day in the old Soviet Union is the old May Day you may have learned in school or been brought up with when everyone danced around the Maypole. At the time of the Reformation, this holiday was celebrated by Catholics and rejected by Protestants. At this time, the Catholics were communists, and the Protestants were believers in private property. In the early settlement of New England (for example), some towns were Catholic/Episcopalian and hence communist. Other towns were Puritan/Independent and hence pro-private property. The former celebrated May Day and danced around the Maypole. This, by the way, is why Protestant countries are, by and large, richer than Catholic countries.

So it was then, and so it was up to 1989. The left-wing disguise of being anti-religious is a lie, and to know this is necessary if you want to fight them.

The standard conservative critique of socialized medicine is that it is too expensive. This is true, but they have worn this point to death. By only focusing on expense, the conservatives allow the leftists to respond, “Oh, I don’t care about cost. I am a person of love. I want to help people.” This plays right into the practical vs. moral dichotomy with the conservatives on the practical side and the left on the moral side.

The practical side and the moral side have been fighting in western society for the past 2000 years (and probably a lot longer). The battle always comes out a tie. The number of people who will choose the practical over the moral is equal to the number who will choose the moral over the practical. So it has always been

The solution is to prove that the practical and the moral are not opposed to each other. This can be done easily in the field of health care by focusing, not on the costs of socialized medicine, but on its brutal consequences for health care.

For example, it has been scientifically proven again and again that vitamin E reduces one’s risk of heart attack by 40%. Yet establishment cardiologists bad mouth vitamin E and try to steer their patients toward bypass operations and statin drugs. However, the scientific evidence for the heart bypass operation shows that it does not work. (See Heart Frauds, by Dr. Charles T. McGee (Coeur d’Alene, ID, MediPress, 1993), pp. 24-30.) The reason an establishment doctor recommends it is that a heart bypass operation costs $50,000 to $70,000. Vitamin E costs $2 per ounce. Actually, you can get your vitamin E by eating whole wheat bread. This also gives you magnesium, which is vitally important for the heart. When white bread replaced whole wheat bread around WWI, there was a massive increase in deaths from heart disease except in the country of Italy (which banned white bread). The continued use of white bread in our society without a single protest from any established health institution is an absolute disgrace and shows the moral corruption of our society. The doctor who discovered vitamin E, Wilfred Shute, was persecuted by the medical establishment, and an attempt was made to take away his license. However, the prosecuting doctor died on the way to the hearing (from a heart attack); this threw a money wrench into the prosecution

The medical establishment talks incessantly about cholesterol; yet cholesterol only has a small correlation with heart disease and does not appear to be a cause. Homocysteine is a much more important cause of heart disease. I take a combination of vitamin B-6, B-12, folic acid and Trimethylglycine to keep my homocysteine low. It is also important to avoid inflammation. And a good herb for this purpose is tumeric (the Indian herb in curry). Also showing good results is Zyflamend, a combination of 14 herbs put together by New Chapter. The main cause of inflammation is arachidonic acid, and this is caused by the feeding of corn to animals. Corn is not natural to most animals and causes a high production of arachidonic acid. When you eat the corn fed animal, the arachidonic acid passes into you, and this causes inflammation. You can minimize this by eating wild fish, grass fed meat and free range eggs (different from omega 3 eggs or organic eggs). I also take pomegranate capsules and vitamin K-2. (to open up my arteries and reduce calcification). For those who wish to pursue this further, I recommend Life Extension Foundation, 1-800-544-4440. They publish an excellent magazine with a great deal of scientific information about alternative medical treatments.

There was a brilliant period in medical history, from about 1800 to 1965. This was the period when one disease after another was cured, and the human lifespan dramatically extended. The last major disease which was cured was polio in 1954. The existing establishment is so tuned into this great age that they led President Nixon (in 1971) to predict a cure for cancer by 1980. This is merely one of a long list of establishment failures, both in medicine and in many other fields. The truth is that the researchers whom the Government has funded to fight cancer are a group of charlatans and frauds. They want to receive money for fighting cancer, and of course as soon as cancer is cured, the money will stop. Several cancer cures have come along with good evidence, and most of these have been suppressed by our Government (Hoxsey, Essiac, Laetrile, flax seed oil and cottage cheese, apricot kernels, immune stimulating mushrooms, vitamin C). But the cancer establishment continues on using the same treatments (surgery, radiation and chemotherapy) which they used in 1950. The passage of the Health Freedom Act in 1994 was a reduction in Government power, and this resulted in the legalization of melatonin. This is probably the reason for the small drop in cancer deaths since that date.

What is happening in America is a close parallel to what happened in Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s. Barack Obama is a Nazi, who wants to murder people. The Democratic Congressmen who voted for the National Office of Health Information Technology without reading it are the German legislators who voted to make Hitler the dictator of the country.

I am hoping that an uprising of the American people will deliver the Democrats a setback in 2010 and put a stop to this evil, as happened in 1994. Until then, organize and get active.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE WHITE RACE

2009-06-29T02:27:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
6-29-09

On May 27, 2009, Barack Obama made his first nomination to the Supreme Court. I can remember the days when Democrats were, at least nominally, opposed to racism. Martin Luther King said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” These words were barely out of his mouth when the political left openly adopted what they called affirmative action, meaning affirmative action to judge people by the color of their skin. The difference here was that this new racism was motivated by hatred against a person for being white instead of hatred for being black.

This hatred of people for being white now pours in an unstaunched torrent from the Poly Sci departments of most colleges and universities, and it was most explicitly stated in a speech which had been made by the new nominee:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Sonia Sotomayor, 2001 speech at University of California, Berkeley, CA

Of course, everyone has the richness of their experiences, and it is difficult to argue that one person’s experiences are better than any other’s. The job of a judge is to decide which, of two parties, is acting in accord with the law and which is acting against it. To be a judge, one needs a knowledge of the law and the wisdom to apply that general knowledge to the particular case. Being Latina and having Latina and female experiences have no part in it, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Judge Sotomayor was admitting, in advance, that she would rule in favor of Hispanics against other races. In other words, legal decisions would be made by the color of the skins of the various parties.

Every time one looks at Latin America, one finds a horror show. The people there seem to be continually at war with each other. The countries are barely hanging on to democracy. The poverty is appalling. And over the past several centuries of human history, when so many new, good things have been created, the contribution of the Latinos has been close to zero. This is not to pick on the Latinos. The same can be said for pretty much all of Africa, most of Asia and the eastern part of Europe.

There are several reasons for this, and one of them is a complete absence in the minds of those people of the concept of justice. When Moses led the Children of Israel out of Egypt and they were wandering for 40 years in the wilderness, he was their leader. But we do not think of him as a king or president, and this is because what he spent his time doing was judging the people. That is, when two people had a dispute, they would come to Moses for resolution, and he would decide who war right in accordance with the law. The impression he made was such that after his death the leaders of the 12 Israelite tribes were called judges (although they acted as more conventional political leaders).

This idea, that there ought to be a person to resolve disputes in accordance with a body of rules which had been adopted by that society as the law, gradually spread, and it became a naturally accepted function of government that it should contain a judiciary, meaning a group of people who spend their time judging the people, as Moses had done.

What happens to people who do not have a judiciary? They fall to quarreling with each other. Soon the people of that society are fighting with each other. There is no time, energy or resources for constructive activity, and the society cannot unite against an aggressor from the outside. There are two problems in human relations. First, everybody pursues his self interest, and this may sometimes bring him into conflict with those around him. (This is particularly true of those who adopt a philosophy opposed to self interest. Such people merely disguise their interest and pretend that it does not exist.) Second, even in the case of two people who have good will and are earnestly trying to resolve the problem ethically, there will be failures of knowledge. The different people will perceive the situation differently, and each will believe that he is in the right.

History teaches us one overwhelming, incontrovertible fact. Most of human history has been a sad, sad tale. One man’s hand has been turned against the other. Thousands of years have gone by with no progress and no improvement in the human condition. The killer has been glorified, and the creator has been persecuted. The example which keeps coming to my mind was the invention of Greek Fire

Greek Fire was an invention of the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century A.D. It was similar to modern napalm, but its exact composition is unknown. It was used several times by the Byzantines to win dramatic naval victories, including the saving of their capital Constantinople from attack by the Muslims. It was the decisive weapon of the age. Then, after using it for a period of about 50 years, the Byzantines lost the secret of how to make it. We don’t know why it was lost. Probably the inventor died, and no one else knew how.

To a modern person, who cannot imagine a thing which is known becoming unknown, this actually happened. Meanwhile the people of Western Europe at this time were not even able to make comparable discoveries. They just stagnated and killed each other.

Then, in the 17th century, in a little island off the coast of Europe, which had never achieved anything of note in all previous history, the human potential stood up and began to achieve great things: democracy, science, economic growth, mastery of the seas and a great empire upon which the sun never set. It is true that all of the people who achieved this great civilization were of the white (Caucasian) race. But they were only a small fraction of the white race, and the majority of whites remained bogged down in the ignorance and misery of the rest of the world.

In truth, all men are fundamentally equal, in the sense that at birth any man has the ability to achieve even what the greatest humans achieve. The human mind, for example, may differ from individual to individual in terms of genetically determined factors. But these do not seriously contribute to the ability to discover new knowledge. The crucial factor in the discovery of new knowledge is how you use your mind. The second important thing for human achievement is to follow the correct code of ethics. (By this I do not mean what some other human being tells you God has laid down as ethics. Indeed, in our culture the book which is widely considered definitive on what God wants us to do contains directly contradictory advice.) The third important thing for human achievement is to associate with your fellows in a proper form of social organization.

These last two points involve the concept of justice. Most people have been miseducated in Plato’s belief that justice cannot be defined. Justice is the concept that one should act in accord with the law of causality. That is, one should accept the consequences of one’s actions, and one should give others the consequences of their actions. (Give the good man the good consequences of his good actions, and give the evil man the evil consequences of his evil actions, as per Isaiah, Ch. 3, vs. 10-11, King James version.) The individual who achieves the most in his life will be the one who incorporates the concept of justice into his personal life. The society which achieves the most in human affairs will be the one which incorporates the concept of justice into its political life.

For the first point, the most helpful guide I have found is Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand. Miss Rand has solved the problems of how one starts from unproven axioms and arrives at true conclusions. She has correctly identified the fundamental human intellectual problem as properly using abstractions. She defines an abstraction as a mental entity which stands for any of a group of similar objects but is not the same as them. That is, anything which can be proven about the abstraction (concept) is also true of all the concretes which make it up. The proper way to move back and forth between the concrete world in which we live and the abstractions in our minds is the key to the human search for knowledge.

1. In sum, we live in a universe which operates according to the law of causality.
2. Therefore, we must act in accord with the law of causality, i.e., the concept of justice.
3. And finally, we must apply the concept of justice to our social life.

When these three elements are achieved, humanity blossoms forth in a blaze of achievement and success in every field. Most human beings are happy, well-to-do and optimistic. Life is a wonderful thing.

So far in history the benefits of this way of living have been restricted to the Anglo-Saxon peoples and those who imitated them. Most of them have been white, but the success of the Japanese (who imitated the U.S.) proves that no race is inferior to any other. We all have the same human potential – if we live in accord with the principle of justice.

But, as I mentioned, the vast majority of the people on the planet Earth do not live in accord with justice. Indeed, they rise up in righteous indignation and denounce justice (the real concept, not necessarily the word) as evil. Even in our own society, the clear statement by Moses that one should deal with evil by the policy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (i.e., that one should give the evil man the evil consequences of his evil actions) is denounced as wrong. In Mexico, they sing beautiful songs of Jesus and love, and then their drug wars spill over our border. This is most of the world. People are killing each other, as they have done for 5 million years of human existence.

Sonia Sotomayor wants to change the American judicial system so that judges rule for or against certain parties based on their race. A Hispanic judge rules in favor of the Hispanic party. A white judge rules in favor of the white party. A black judge rules in favor of the black party. That is what happened in the O.J. Simpson case. A (largely) black jury acquitted an obviously guilty man because he was of the same race. A little bit of this and the nation breaks down into bitterly quarrelling ethnic or racial groups, and the quarrelling then progresses to killing. America, after all, is composed of diverse ethnic, religious and racial elements. It is the only place on earth where so many diverse peoples can get along. If we throw out the American system of justice to become like the other nations, then we will become like the other nations. And the result will not be pretty.

The political left has been engaged in an outpouring of vicious, hate-filled rhetoric against the white race. Their favorite tactic is to shout a speaker down, yelling: “Dead, while, males.” They are not really against the white race, only that segment of it which follows, to some degree, the principle of justice and the Anglo-Saxon principle of rights. (For example, they have only sympathy for Arab terrorists, such as Al Qaeda and Hamas, who are, of course, white.)

So it is appropriate to point out that (this portion of) the white race has brought mankind some of its proudest accomplishments. And if one accepts the premise of the New York Times, Barack Obama, Sonia Sotomayor and the Democratic majority which will approve her nomination that one judges everything and everyone by race, then it would follow that whites are the superior people in the world.

After all, human slavery existed throughout the world, for all human history. The strong enslaved the weak. After the Reformation a sense developed among western Europeans that slavery was wrong. 17th and 18th century Negro slavery was caused by the fact that it was established practice for the Negro tribes of Africa (who hated each other) to enslave each other. Since it was an established institution, some westerners fell into practicing it. That is, they purchased existing slaves. They did not impose slavery on free men. Even this gnawed on their consciences, and a widespread movement to abolish slavery swept the world in the 19th century.

To condemn, for example, America’s Founding Fathers because some of them practiced slavery is bizarre. They inherited the institution. Social institutions change slowly. Here were men who did more than any other group to increase human freedom. And here they are criticized for not moving rapidly enough – by people who themselves are trying to destroy freedom

Or consider Western prosperity. The Anglo-Saxon countries and their imitators created more wealth in the span of 2 centuries then ever before in human history. The rest of mankind simply remained where they were or experienced small improvements by trading with the west.. This is interpreted by the left as our having stolen our automobiles, our electric devices, our transcontinental railroad system, etc. from those ignorant and vicious people who never had such things.

A favorite target of the left is western imperialism. What is called imperialism is the peoples of the world seeking out western political leadership because the western countries gave so much better government than their own rulers. The British Empire started in the wake of 1689, when the British Parliament enacted the first Bill of Rights. (It ended in 1948, shortly after Britain had adopted the welfare state.)

In short, the white race, and in particular the western European and North American portion of it, is being condemned because for the first time in human history it made possible a human society in which people could be happy, relatively wealthy, secure in their persons and property and confident that they would be treated in accord with justice. For this they have been vilified with hysterical hatred and invective.

The political left is a reactionary force which is masquerading as progressive. It advocates policies which have long failed and which have brought war, misery, ignorance and hate. Whether this is done by ignorance or venality is a debatable question. But the consequences of these policies are not. Much of human history has been a progress to better conditions, but there is one fatal example to the contrary. When the Romans of 410 A.D. gave up their heritage, which had elements of freedom, democracy and justice-under-law, they plunged western Europe into a Dark Age which unleashed every human evil and misery. This is the evil which threatens today with the Administration of Barack Obama.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

STRATEGY FOR VICTORY V

2009-06-22T03:24:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
6-22-09

The weak point of the New Deal is that it is based on a lie. It promises to give the average American something for nothing. The main advantage of social security (to the people who operate it) is to send the average American a check every month. Meanwhile, the money that was taken from him was deducted from his wages. He never felt it in his hand, and it is not real to him. Meanwhile a further portion is taken from his employer. The average worker does not know enough economics to realize that the employers since 1935 have simply deducted that employer contribution to social security from the employee’s wages. The laws of economics require them to pay a certain level of wages (at a minimum the value of the employee’s labor). That they pay whether it is in the form of direct wages or government-required donations to a fund. The total amount the employer pays out (in toto) remains constant (in real terms) for each worker. In this way, the Government convinces the unthinking person that it is giving him something for nothing. In fact, it is taking money from his rear pocket and giving him a part of it
back in his front pocket.

The central reason for the success of the New Deal is that for 76 years its opponents have never raised the public issue to point out that this is a lie.

This goes back to an important point. When one is trying to persuade people, one must pay attention to the ideas in their minds. Ayn Rand used to simply present truth. She was a brilliant person, and most of what she said was true. However, she did not convince people because she did not directly address the key wrong ideas in her audience’s heads. For example, the Objectivist ethics is all based on one vital premise, that there is no heaven. This is a correct premise, but it is rejected by the vast majority of human beings on planet Earth. And in her entire writings, Miss Rand devotes approximately 2 lines to the subject (and does not give credit to the intellectual who did the most to weaken the idea of heaven in Western Culture, John Calvin).

Neither did the libertarians or the conservatives do any better. The libertarians logically deduce their entire philosophy from the non-initiation principle. This principle is better stated as John Locke’s principle of rights. (You should respect the rights of all men and insist that they respect yours.) Americans today do not know what rights are. Look at the attitude toward libertarians in our current society. The attitude is that THEY ARE IRRELEVANT, a group of intellectuals walking around with their heads in the sky.

Why is this? Because the vast majority of Americans have accepted the principle of government by love, which is the central principle behind the welfare state. This principle states that government is a big father who loves his subjects and wants to give them something for nothing, which in turn it does by robbing from the rich to give to the poor. This is the wrong idea in the minds of most Americans and most people in the world, and this is the idea which is destroying freedom. Any movement to restore freedom must focus on this idea.

(The conservatives, following Bill Buckley, have not rejected the philosophy of love. They have merely taken the other side of the coin. They argue that the moral, meaning love, is impractical, and hate (toughness) is preferable because it is practical. These two sides fought each other through the Middle Ages. There was always a party of love and a party of hate. The two parties fought each other for well over a thousand years, and neither side made any progress in convincing the other. This is why “liberal” and conservative are in a 50-50 balance in America today. They have always been in 50-50 balance, and the concept that this is going to change in our lifetimes is foolishness.)

The average American must be told: “The Government is not your father. It does not love you. It does not give you something for nothing. Something for nothing is impossible in this world, and if you want to succeed in life, one of the things you have to do is get this idea completely out of your head. (This, by the way, is why I am hostile to gambling. If people are dumb enough to gamble, with other consenting adults, they should have that right. But those people who choose to gamble show precisely that -something for nothing- attitude which leads them to support the welfare state and violate the rights of others. There is a perfect analogy here. Just as the gambling casino always wins, just as the gambling patron is a sucker and a loser, in politics the power structure always wins, and the blue collar Democratic voter is a sucker and a loser.)

Understanding that they were erecting a gigantic fraud the early New Dealers were very careful in its construction. The purpose of the New Deal was to rob from the common people of America and give to the rich. This was accomplished via the paper money system. Commercial bankers were given the privilege to create money out of nothing (with the aid and backing of the Federal Reserve). The benefits of this were shared with their corporate loan customers and with stock market speculators (via a rise in stock prices). Of course, the wealth which flowed to the banks and Wall Street had to come from somewhere. A large part of it came from the class of retired people, who were hit in two ways. As the Fed created money, the real value of their savings was reduced. Most of these people were too ignorant to know that it was the government which was robbing them and went along with the media in blaming the scapegoat of the day. A second way in which the retired class was hurt was in the lowering of real interest rates. Real interest rates on riskless investments have averaged 0% since the New Deal started in 1933. But the bulk of the gains to Wall Street and the banks came from the employed working man. As the Fed and the private banks created money, it caused the currency to depreciate. The price of goods rose, but the wages of labor lagged behind. (One can see this phenomenon happen over and over in economic history.) Thus the real wages of labor declined. This, caused a massive transfer of wealth from the working people of America to a small group of rich.

In short, F.D.R. was not a traitor to his class. The very first thing he did was to set up a system by which his class of Wall Streeters could rob from the working people of the country. Then this giant system of fraud was covered over with a slight-of-hand. “Look, over here. We are robbing from the rich to give to the poor.” The New Deal enacted a highly progressive income tax precisely to deceive people into thinking the reverse of what was actually happening. Actually, this income tax was riddled with loopholes and existed on paper and for those well-to-do members of the middle class who had not figured out the system. The average member of the upper class since 1933 has just kept his money in stocks and let the Government (i.e., the Federal Reserve) make money for him. He donates to both major parties (but not the Libertarian), and he pays his bribes to the bureaucrats and politicians to ensure preferential treatment.

Meanwhile the media are shouting, “The Democratic Party is the party of the working man. The Republican Party is the party of the rich.” And the average American falls for this line. Indeed, one cannot find any significant opposition group which has publicly opposed this argument for the last 76 years.

Well, it is time for someone to say, “no.” An attack on the fraud of the New Deal will bring down the welfare state and destroy the present alignment of American politics.

Further, here in 2009 we are in an extremely favorable position because the power structure has made a major blunder. The average American feels the pain of the system when prices are advancing rapidly. And that is going to happen in spades over the next 4-5 years.

When Henry Paulson proposed a Wall Street bailout to George Bush, Jr. in Sept. 2009, he was following the tradition of F.D.R. But he had none of F.D.R.’s subtlety. He simply said, let’s rob from the common people (taxpayers) and give to Wall Street and the banks. When the dust had cleared, the Wall Street firm which got most of the money was Henry Paulson’s old company, Goldman Sachs.

E-mail to Congress on the bailout bill was running 100 to 1 against. Here in New Hampshire 3 of our congressmen/senators were up for reelection. The two who opposed the bailout were reelected. The one who supported it was defeated. If you want to see what is going to happen in the next election, study the election of 1832, in which Andrew Jackson defeated Henry Clay by a wide margin. It is the same issue: the common man versus the banks.

The strategy of the power structure is to control both parties.. Notice that both Obama and McCain supported the bailout. This is because both were accepting money from Wall Street, and this money entitled them to recommend economic advisors. When the crisis broke, the candidate, who knew nothing about economics, went to his economic advisor. What a joke. The typical U.S. major party candidate can be convinced of anything by pretty much any advisor. So both candidates were told that without the bailout the U.S. economy would collapse. Why not? Both McCain and Obama were/are so stupid that you could tell them anything. It was rather like trying to convince a 5 year old child. The reality is that now, because of the bailout, the U.S. economy is about to collapse.

I have recently discovered that the Federal Reserve has been lying about the U.S. money supply. The figure is being reported as $1.6 trillion, a 16% advance from a year ago. But it is actually $2.34 trillion, a 70% advance from a year ago. Do you have a concept what will happen in this country if/when prices rise by 70% in one year?

You can see clearly that the doctrine of “don’t waste your vote,” actually means “vote against your own interests.” It means vote for a major party candidate who is bribed by (receives donations from) Wall St. and the banks. What is the chance for the people in 2012? The only chance the people have is to elect Ron Paul. Any Democrat or any other Republican will simply steal their money and give it to Wall Street. Why does Ron Paul have a possible chance at the Republican nomination for 2012? Because 8% of the people voted for him in 2008. Whose vote was wasted, the 8% who voted for Paul or the larger number who voted for McCain?

I can’t give a firm prediction of the rate at which prices will be rising over the next 4-5 years. In theory, the Fed could reverse itself and withdraw from circulation the money it has just created. But then Daddy Warbucks might appear in a UFO and give everyone a billion dollars in gold. The Fed has never made significant reductions in the money supply since it received the money creation power in 1933. A conservative estimate is that prices will be rising by 20%-30% per year over much of this period. The last time anything like this happened was in the late 1970s. Prices rose by 13.3% in 1979. The party in power was defeated in 1980, and there was a mini-political revolution (which was defeated when Reagan broke his own promise to stick to the monetary rule).

But in 1979, people were still taken in by the idea that the welfare state robs from the rich and gives to the poor. (Most of the propaganda for this false idea, by the way, comes from the conservatives. They are the bulwark of the welfare state.) But today the welfare state has thrown away its disguise. It openly said, rob from the American people to bail out the banks and Wall Street. That changes the name of the game and makes a pro-liberty victory possible.

One serious albatross about the neck of the libertarian movement has been libertarian-anarchism. This was the political philosophy of Murray Rothbard. I knew Murray in New York in the 1970s. He was a wonderful, roly-poly person and a great economist. But once he stepped outside his field, he made serious errors.

Jefferson once argued that that government was best that governs least. Henry David Thoreau carried this a step further and argued (incorrectly) that that government was best which governs not at all, thus carrying Jefferson’s limited government philosophy to anarchism.

Thoreau, however, was mistaken, and so was Jefferson. One cannot quantify government. The worst tyrannies came from the personal rule of one man who, like the Queen of Hearts, would get up in a bad mood one day and shout, “Off with their heads.” The uncertainty, never knowing when the strong man would try to murder you, was as bad as the actual murders. To put a stop to this, the Anglo-Saxon people created the rule of law. This required the erection of a formal structure which is very reasonably considered more government. It was more government, and it was good.

The precise statement of the proper amount of government that should exist was made by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, in which he states that government is the institution in society for the protection of people’s rights. Government which protects rights is good. Government which violates rights is a perversion and is evil. End of story.

The anarchists would be able to see this if they studied history. History bears the same relation to political philosophy as experimental evidence to science (which used to be called natural philosophy). Any (valid) intellectual process should go from concrete to abstract and back to concrete again, etc. You look at the facts; this gives you the idea for an abstract theory; then you test your theory against further facts. In science, these facts are provided by experiment. In politics, the facts are provided by history and current events.

If we look at the facts, we find many examples of anarchist societies. The people in them continually fight with each other. They live in abject poverty. Their technology is a joke. They routinely practice torture. Usually they enslave their neighbors and/or eat them.

Rothbard made the mistake of exhibiting medieval Ireland as an example of an anarchist society. Well, libertarian societies are supposed to be bursting with energy and wealth (such as 19th century Britain and America). They are supposed to be a fount of scientific and technological development. They are supposed to be militarily strong but not aggressive. Medieval Ireland did not make it. They were poor as church mice, and they were the doormat of Europe. To this day, the major cities in Ireland were all founded by the Vikings, not by the Celtic Irish.

The libertarian-anarchists are completely mesmerized by the 1930s and assume that what happened at that time is an inevitable tendency in political systems. But a wider study of history would prove that this was not the case. There is no tendency for government to get “bigger” (in the bad sense). From the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 to about 1900, people got freer and freer. We only started to slip backward in the 20th century, and I believe that there are definite signs that this backward period is near an end. On the other side, the late Roman Empire was a totalitarian monstrosity. It fell because the people welcomed the barbarian invaders. (What followed then was a period of near anarchy dominated not so much by the impulse to power as by simple ignorance of what to do.)

Rothbard’s original idea was for an appeal to the left by championing victimless crimes. This has been a complete failure (because what really motivates the left is the philosophy of love and the German welfare state). And the most successful libertarian has been Ron Paul, who must be ranked on the conservative side of the movement. Our best chance, at this time, lies with him. If you listen to the talk shows, any mention of libertarian anarchism drives people wild.

One of the most successful lies by the social democrats has been when they got the conservatives to call them (the social democrats) liberals. A liberal is someone who favors liberty. The term was coined in Spain in the early 19th century, and to this day the Spanish word for liberal is the same as the word for libertarian. This is still true in most of the world today. The party which has the most respect for rights and favors a Lockean concept of government is described as liberal.

The American social democrats do not call themselves by what they are because they are trying to hide the fact that they are (ideological) Germans. People might ask them, “The last time your political philosophy was tried it led to Nazism. How do you know it won’t happen again?”

Every left wing Democrat comes equipped with a laundry list of programs designed to violate the liberty of the people. Such people are not liberals. They are reactionaries (German social democrats), and to call them liberals is to acquiesce in their lie. This is not the way to beat them.

In 2012, the U.S. currency will be depreciating as never before in American history (since the depreciation of the continental in 1776-80). The American people will be enraged. It is our job to connect the effects they are feeling with the true causes. In that way lies a resurgence of liberty in America.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

STRATEGY FOR VICTORY IV

2009-06-16T00:02:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
6-15-09

Well, here we are up to our armpits in practical politics, and we have come up against an issue of morality. We were discussing the issue should one vote for the candidate/issue one believes is right, or should one vote for the candidate/issue one believes is wrong. I am here talking only about the subjective issue. One’s candidate/issue may be either right or wrong in fact, but that is not important at this point. The question is, should one do what is right as one sees it? Overwhelmingly, the answer given by our society to this question is, “No. You ought to do what is wrong (as you see it).”

If you and I were transported back into the days of the Founding Fathers , this question would not be asked. Those men did what they believed to be right. Jefferson once said, “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just” [Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia 1781-85), Ch. 18]. They were fallible human beings, and they made mistakes. But they did great things, things no other age accomplished. And a prerequisite for this was that they were all Calvinists. And what Calvin had taught was to disregard the New Testament and concentrate on the Old Testament.

One can see this issue much more clearly if one studies the history of 17th century England. In the turmoil of the Reformation initiated by King Henry VIII, a small group of people started to read and spread the teachings of John Calvin. Toward the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, these people began to organize. The idea on their minds was democracy. However, Elizabeth was too dearly loved by the people, and no anti-monarchy movement could take root. When Elizabeth died in 1603, the Calvinists (who took the name Puritans) began to agitate for democracy. Although at their greatest power they numbered only about 20% of the population (my estimate), they were able to spread their political ideas. In 1621, a Puritan-influenced Parliament passed a bill in favor of freedom of speech. This was only freedom of speech for members of Parliament while Parliament was in session, but it so angered King James I that he ripped the page out of Parliament’s annals. Gradually the Presbyterian majority came to support Puritan political ideas. When James died, the Parliamentary majority (Puritan plus Presbyterian) went toe-to-toe with his son, King Charles I.

In 1629, Charles dismissed the quarrelsome Parliament. In order to force him to call Parliament back into session, the Puritans advanced the doctrine of “no taxation without representation.” This meant that the King did not have the power to lay taxes without the consent of Parliament. In support of this idea, the Puritans and Presbyterians refused to pay taxes throughout the 1630s. There was a nationwide tax revolt which forced the King to his knees. In 1638, he gave in and summoned another Parliament, dismissed it and summoned it again. The principle was established, no taxation without representation.

The King and the new Parliament (with the Puritans at their height, although still a minority) again went toe-to-toe. In 1642, a war began between the King (representing monarchy) and Parliament (representing democracy).

A Puritan Member of Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, was dissatisfied with the way the pro-democracy forces were fighting. So he formed a special cavalry unit (similar to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders of the Spanish-American War). He had no military experience, and neither did his men, but being radical Calvinists they had enthusiasm. They trained by day and read the Bible by the light of their campfires at night.

The first thing that happened to Cromwell’s unit was that their pro-democracy “friends” betrayed them into a monarchist trap. They fought their way out and established themselves as the number one military unit of the war. They were never beaten. Cromwell was called “Old Ironsides” because his flanks could not be turned (and he is the source of that expression as it appears later in American history). His unit was decisive in winning the key victories (Marston Moor and Naseby) which led to the democratic victory. In 1646, the King was captured, and in 1649 the Puritan Parliament chopped off his head.

The democracy movement did meet with setbacks. They had had no experience with democracy. For example, at one point the Presbyterian majority voted to take away freedom of religion from their Puritan allies. Because of mistakes like this the country turned against the democrats, and the monarchy was restored in 1660. But a second revolution occurred in 1688, and this time Parliament acquired the supreme power in the government. England had become a democracy. A year later it got a bill of rights.

We are so proud of our American heritage of freedom and democracy, but in truth we must acknowledge that we were merely copying the 17th century English. They led the way. We merely carried things a notch farther. We must also acknowledge that it was precisely the other Calvinist countries of the world (Holland, Scotland, Switzerland) which adopted democracy. (Within the U.S. the northern states were dominated by Calvinism to a much greater extent than the southern, and this was the source of the friction which led to the American Civil War.)

We continually find this association between religion and politics. The Romans lost their freedom (and their Empire) in 410 A.D., just 16 years after they adopted Christianity. Shortly prior to the French Revolution an age of enlightenment swept France, and Jansenism (another name for Calvinism) replaced Catholicism as the dominant belief of the people.

What is the essential idea which caused the above facts? Calvinism preaches the Old Testament, and the Old Testament preaches the concept of justice. It says that God (meaning reality) is just. The good will be rewarded, and the evil will be punished. The New Testament, on the other hand, pretty explicitly rejects the concept of justice and argues that God treats good and evil the same (Matthew, Ch. 5, vs. 45). The argument here is that love is opposed to justice, and although this is not true, when Christians preach love (mercy) what they always mean by it is that they want you to act against justice.

How do human beings act when they accept a personal philosophy of justice? Since good is rewarded and evil punished, they are afraid to do evil. The standard of morality rises dramatically (as indeed it did in puritan England). How do human beings act when they reject the idea that the world is just (as expounded through the ideas of love for and forgiveness of evil)? Well, since sins are forgiven, go out and sin and then act contrite and repent. The priest says that your sin is erased from the blackboard of reality. After all, “all men are sinners,” and “God is love,” meaning that he looks kindly on sinners and forgives them. The argument here is that your sins will not have any consequences, i.e., that the law of cause and effect does not operate. The result of these ideas is that the standard of morality falls dramatically.

The historians of our age have hidden from you that the Pilgrim Fathers explicitly refused to celebrate Christmas. And Christmas was hardly celebrated in America until the late 19th century (when Charles Dickens brought it back). Almost immediately thereafter America began t lose her freedom.

On the other side of the argument, the evil we are fighting is the welfare state. These are the people who hate liberty and are trying to eliminate it, and the fundamental impulse for this comes from Germany. It is based on the philosophy of love, and it was described by the politician who first introduced it into the German legislature (Otto von Bismarck, 1880) as his Christian (meaning New Testament) program. The people of Germany then went around for 40 years proclaiming that they were superior to everyone else because they were the country of love. We Americans were “rugged individualists.” (intended as an insult, meaning that we had no compassion because we did not have a welfare state).

Then (during the 1920s) the people of Germany converted from the philosophy of love to the philosophy of hate (Adolf Hitler), tried to make themselves the master race and killed 50 million human beings. This is the evil we are fighting. We cannot accept the ideology of the enemy and hope to defeat him. This is why I began this series with the statement by George Washington:

“If we offer what we ourselves do not approve [i.e., the arguments of our enemies], how will we defend our work?”

I put this question to the lovers of liberty in America today.

The lovers of liberty in mid-20th century America were good people, but they did not understand the nature of their enemy. They were like the 6 blind men who came across an elephant. Each could only perceive a part of the elephant and got a completely wrong idea. The mid-20th century conservatives preached (and still preach) the principle of non-initiation of force. This principle is not wrong (although it would be more precise to state it as Locke’s principle of rights).

The point is that the non-initiation principle is simply not relevant to a welfare statist. The libertarian movement has failed because the reaction of all welfare statists has been “does not compute.” If you want to convince another person, who is in error, you must look into his mind and discover what his wrong thinking is. It is not enough to simply present a correct argument. One must present an argument which precisely addresses the errors that he is making. . What welfare statists are thinking of is love. Look at the expression on a welfare statist politician’s face when he proposes a new spending program:

“Look at me. I am a person of love. I want to help people. This proves that I am a good person.”

And along with this thought comes a glazed expression (which appears on the faces of medieval saints, is known as the beatific smile and was satirized by Mad Magazine with the character of Alfred E. Newman ), and you know that a fog has descended over this person’s mind, and he is immune from any rational argument. Indeed, if you present him with even the simplest rational argument showing him that his proposal is not going to help people but rather hurt them badly, he will viciously turn on you:

“You have been listening to hate radio.”

In his mind, there are two parties, the party of love (the social democrats) and the party of hate (the fascists). That is the beginning and the end of things. Now how are American conservatives going to accomplish anything for liberty when they convert to Catholicism (i.e., Laura Ingraham) and reinterpret Christianity away from its American Calvinist roots? America was literally founded in the battle against the Catholic Church. The Pilgrims left Holland in 1620, not because they had a spirit for adventure, but because they were afraid of being murdered by the Catholics. There was a war going on between Calvinist Holland and Catholic Spain. The Pilgrims had come to Holland during a truce in that war, and the truce was scheduled to end in 1621. If the Spanish had won, then the Pilgrims (who were radical Calvinists) would have been declared heretics and burned alive. One part of the group decided to remain in Leyden and risk a Spanish victory; the other part decided to risk the ocean voyage and the savage Indians. In the 17th century, the Catholics in Quebec used to pay the Indians to kidnap English colonists in New Hampshire and take them up to slavery in Quebec.

If American lovers of liberty want to employ Washington’s strategy of not offering the arguments of our enemies, then we have to reject the philosophy of love, upon which the welfare state is based. Love is just a simple emotion. It comes to us without our consent. Hate is the same. And the only choice we have in regard to either is to act on it or not. Feeling an emotion is not a moral issue; it is what you do with that feeling which reflects your moral character. A good man asks himself, is this a good emotion? If not, he will not act on it. End of story.

We humans are part of a class of living creatures who feel emotions. If you believe in God, then emotions, as such, have to be good because God created them. If you believe in evolution, then emotions are still good because they are pro-life and give animals which possess them a leg up in the struggle for survival. We humans bond with other animals which have emotions (such as dogs and cats) because, in this regard, they are like us. The only difference is that we have the capacity to recognize right and wrong and can use this moral sense to check an emotion. This does not mean check feeling it. That was the mistake the Germans made. You have to feel the emotion. But if it tells you to do something illegal or immoral, then you do not have to act on it.

For this reason, I strongly support the traditional American practice of not celebrating Christmas.(See, Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, (New York, Capricorn, 1962), p. 82-83.) Christmas tells you to feel “good will toward all men.” Since you cannot turn on an emotion like good will, if you don’t happen to feel it, then Christmas encourages you to lie to yourself. (Besides, it is not right to feel good will toward Hitler or Osama bin Laden, and if Jesus of Nazareth tells you that you should do this [Matthew, Ch. 5, vs. 44], he is a false prophet.)

Many people have espoused a philosophy of love over the past 2000 years. In each and every case, it has been a disaster. You know, the Pope gives a speech about love and peace, and then all the followers of the Pope set about killing each other. The amazing thing is that, although sometimes they kill foreigners, mostly they kill each other. When there is a split between two countries (such as 16th century England and Spain, or a split within a country, such as the 17th century puritans and cavaliers in England, then it is the side least enthusiastic about the philosophy of love which is the most decent and humane. The side most enthusiastic about the philosophy of love is the most brutal and savage.

The point of this series is to target the (wrong) ideas which are really in the minds of our enemies. And it offers a logically consistent program from that point. The failure of both the mid-20th century conservatives and the late 20th century libertarians to make progress toward liberty over the past ¾ of a century is due to these mistakes.

Once the correct strategy is employed, our progress will be rapid, and the pro-liberty movement will be filled with energy. (To be continued.)

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

STRATEGY FOR VICTORY – III

2009-06-08T01:07:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
6-8-09

I have studied the 1930s in a great deal of detail. But one event (or non-event) remains a mystery to me? Why didn’t the conservatives of the day seize upon F.D.R.’s abolition of the gold standard and make it the main issue of the 1936 election? By the way, the definition of an American conservative in the mid-20th century is anyone who opposed the policies of F.D.R. The more general definition of a conservative is someone who opposes change. These two concepts have been fighting with each other as an American conservative of the mid-20th century is actually a liberal.

First, I would like to review the political battles over the gold standard (construed broadly to include all hard vs. soft money issues) in American history because they lead directly to the conclusion that the conservatives were handed a perfect issue and could have won the election of 1936 in a landslide victory.

The first known battle over hard money in American history occurred in the 1780s when several of the state governments issued paper money. You have probably heard of Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. Actually, Dan Shays was not the true leader of the movement. As a mob was assembled by agitators, the true leaders preferred to remain anonymous, and someone pushed Shays forward to be the leader. The Shaysites wanted a program of large scale government spending accompanied by no taxes but a great deal of paper money and tried to seize power by violence. (This was the basic idea of the Kennedy tax cut of 1963 currently held in high esteem by modern conservatives.)

The Shaysites were defeated by Washington’s army. However, the same faction managed to win election in Rhode Island and controlled the state government for several years.

The people we know as the Founding Fathers were against paper money and for a gold/silver standard. But many people of the 1780s favored paper money, and in 1787 it was hard to determine which side would win. Voters in many states (besides Rhode Island) were endorsing limited issues of paper money, and how the matter would go in a general election was not known.

The Founding Fathers chose to resolve the issue by writing a new constitution (the existing one being the Articles of Confederation) which would ban all fiat money permanently. The issue of paper money by the states was banned in the new Constitution by Article I, Section 10. And the issue of paper money by the Federal Government was banned by omission. That is, the basic structure of the Constitution, latter clarified by Amendment 10 of the Bill of Rights, restricted the Federal Government to 17 powers enumerated in Article I, Section 8. The power to issue paper money was omitted from this list. At the Constitutional Convention, an attempt to smuggle in the paper money power (disguised as bills of credit) was defeated 9 states to 2, and the paper money faction left the convention advising their supporters to reject the new constitution.

So when the Founding Fathers attempted to gain ratification for the Constitution in 1788, they faced a difficult battle. But remember Washington’s technique of arguing issues by means of reason. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” They did, and they began to win victory after victory. In some cases, the voters elected an anti-constitution slate to a special convention to consider the issue. The delegates assembled, initially in opposition. But during the debate the pro-Constitution side was more persuasive, and the convention wound up ratifying. In short order, 12 of the 13 states had ratified and the new Government , sans Rhode Island, went into operation. Rhode Island was no longer part of the United States.

Then a hard money faction formed in the southern part of the state (centered in Newport). It threatened to secede from Rhode Island, form its own state and apply for admission. Faced with this threat the paper money faction in the northern part of the state admitted defeat, and Rhode Island ratified the Constitution in convention by a vote of 34-32. The Founding Fathers had won a unanimous victory.

But the candles had barely died after the victory party when hard money faced a new threat. Alexander Hamilton proposed a central bank for the new country. A central bank, as conceived in those days, was not a full abrogation of the gold standard. Rather, it allowed the banks of the country to expand their paper notes to a limited degree. A good analogy would be an elastic gold standard. The banks, guided by the central bank, could issue paper money up to a point and then would be forced to contract their money and credit. Indeed, conventional economists often refer to this as “an elastic currency.”

In Hamilton’s defense, having a central bank was the conventional wisdom of the day. Anyone who studied higher economics in the 1780s would be taught that a central bank was the regular way to go. The American colonists had been under the Bank of England up to 1776. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Continental Congress had established the Bank of North America (whose name indicated the intention to conquer Canada). So when the Constitution was adopted in 1788, proposing an American central bank was just the natural thing to do. Only Thomas Jefferson understood the evils of a central bank. He broke with his friends in the Federalist Party and went into opposition on the issue of abolishing the central bank.

Jefferson organized an opposition movement and ran for President in 1796. He missed by 3 electoral votes. He tried again in 1800 and won an overwhelming victory. But he was unable to repeal the bank because Congress was against him. However, the bank’s charter expired in 1811. At that time, Jefferson’s associate, James Madison, was President, and his veto killed the first Bank of the United States.

But the battle was not over. Soon the nation was involved in the War of 1812. It borrowed money from (some of the) local banks to finance the war. These banks issued too much money and were forced to suspend gold/silver payment. Their bank notes sank to 75¢ on the dollar. This created a chaotic situation, and Madison allowed himself to be talked into supporting a second central bank. This Second Bank of the United States had a 20 year charter (1816-36).

Jefferson, now in retirement in Monticello, was very angry. A young politician, Martin van Buren, visited him, and Jefferson poured out his heart to the man. Van Buren walked away inspired and energized. He formed a second anti-bank movement, recruited war hero Andrew Jackson and formed the Democratic Party. Jackson won a plurality of votes in 1824 (both electoral and popular) but lost when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. In 1828, Jackson won a decisive victory. Again the President was anti-bank, but Congress was pro-bank. (The head of the second bank was bribing congressman.)

Since the bank’s charter expired in 1836, the election of 1832 was crucial. If reelected, Jackson would be able to kill the bank with his veto, as Madison had done. The supporters of the bank raised the issue by bringing forward an early recharter in 1832. Jackson drew a line in the sand. He said that the people could have, “A bank and no Jackson, or no bank and Jackson.” He was reelected in an overwhelming victory. This time the central bank was crushed, and the issue of a bank became death in American politics for the remainder of the 19th century.

Now these battles were hard fought. Nothing was easy. But look what we owe to the gold standard: The Constitution was written and adopted. Jefferson was elected President. The Democratic Party was founded. Andrew Jackson was elected President. And the country was set on a course of hard money which turned it into the economic powerhouse of the world. Each time the people had been asked to decide the issue, they had voted for hard money, often by overwhelming majorities.

Lincoln turned to paper money during the Civil War. There was a stated intent to resume the gold standard after the war, but in 1874 the railroads (who had broken their gold contracts and wanted to repay their debts in paper money) began to agitate for a continuation of paper money. A bill to postpone resumption (of gold) passed both houses of Congress in 1874 and went to President Grant for his signature. Grant intended to sign, but when he sat down and read the bill, he changed his mind and vetoed it instead. Then when Congress recessed for the election of 1874, they found out that their constituents were soundly for gold. They sheepishly returned to D.C. in early 1875 and voted a resumption of the gold standard effective 1879. Again the people had spoken.

But the paper money party had been tempted by the easy profits of the war period, and continual agitation appeared in favor of paper money. You have heard of the populist movement. This is simply another historian’s lie. The populist movement was not for the people, and the people were not for it. It was a cover for the greenbackers, a group who wanted to return to paper money. It is funny that the common people of the late 19th century could see that clearly even though modern day historians cannot.

Gradually the Republicans became the hard money party, and the Democrats became the soft money party. In 1884, there was a Republican scandal, and the Democrats saw their chance for victory (similar to 1976). In order not to blow their chance for a win, the Democrats made certain to nominate a pro-gold member of their party, Grover Cleveland. Cleveland served two (disconnected) terms. But in 1896, the Democrats forgot about practical politics and nominated a soft money man, William Jennings Bryan.

Bryan was a distinguished American political figure, and his softness on the money issue was very minor. He favored expanding the money supply by the remonetization of silver (which was allowed to be money by the Constitution) but had been demonetized in 1873. Bryan was considered a great orator and gave a famous speech at the Democratic nomination convention in which he said:

you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Bryan ran for election 3 times and was defeated decisively each time. The Populist Party was reduced to 0.2% of the vote in 1908.

This period, 1788-1912, gave America the hardest money system in the world. In America, the streets were paved with gold. People from all over the world left their country, their friends, their society and their language and emigrated to America. Freedom was a great concept, but the highest real wages and the highest standard of living in the world clearly motivated a lot of those immigrants. The second place country, Britain, also had a free economy and a gold standard, but it was a gold standard weakened by a central bank.

More to our point, every one of these cases was decided by the people. The battle of the 1830s was particularly bitter. Polling was not in vogue at the time, and the pro-bank party genuinely thought they had a chance to win. It was only when the nation voted in Nov. 1832 that there was a clear resolution. In every one of these battles, the paper money faction was highly vocal and campaigned aggressively. It was only after the votes were counted that people saw how weak they were. If it had not been for the gold standard, then the Constitution might not exist. The Democratic Party definitely would not exist.

Looking back we can see that the Republican Party became the dominant party of the post-Civil War period by capturing the hard money issue. The Democratic Party sunk to minority status by giving up its founding issue.

These are 5 important political battles in American history, the Constitution, the first bank, the second bank, 1874, and 1896. If you want to count Grover Cleveland, this makes it 6. The gold standard won all of them. How then did we leave the gold standard?

The answer is by fraud and deceit. My intention here is not to get on my high horse but to point out the simply truth that the enemies of the gold standard knew they were coming from a position of weakness and did not dare to openly announce their intent. This was the case with F.D.R. in 1932 and Richard Nixon in 1968. Both in fact led voters to believe that they would defend the existing gold standard.

Of course, it is not exactly a surprise that evil men lie to us. What lacks rational explanation is why did the opposition party or faction not take advantage of these events by picking up a winning issue? The Republicans of the 1930s seemed not to know that the country had left the gold standard. The Republicans of the 1970s saw the libertarians walk out but rallied behind Ronald Reagan who adopted the slogan “Thou shalt not speak ill of any Republican” (referring to Nixon and his economic measures of Aug. 15, 1971.) Again Reagan lied to the American people in 1980, running as a sound money (Friedmanite rule) candidate and than doubling the nation’s money supply. When a sound money movement did arise from the people (Ross Perot) in 1992 and ran as a third party, it won an astonishing 19% of the vote and forced President Clinton to completely change his policies and balance the budget.

The technique of the bankers is to donate money to both political parties and thus get to name “advisers” to both major party candidates. These advisers always say pretty much the same thing. Steal from the people and give to the bankers. This is why McCain and Obama agreed upon the Wall St. bailout bill of 2008. McCain lost the election because he put himself out in front for the bailout while Obama hung back. McCain had come from behind and had just moved ahead in the polls when the issue broke. As soon as he put himself forward for the bailout, he started to sink.

Those people who feel they must vote for a major party candidate so as not to “waste” their vote manage to waste their vote every time. Their candidate wins, and their issue is defeated. Both major party candidates are ignorant of the issue and will make their decisions as directed by their (banker nominated) advisers.

We had a long discussion in this blog about the thesis of Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul) that “all men are sinners.” One is expected to do evil. They urge you to do evil. And they magically remove the bad consequences of doing evil. The men of the 18th century paid no attention to Saul of Tarsus. They did good. That is why they achieved great things. (To be continued.)
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STRATEGY FOR VICTORY II

2009-06-01T00:45:00.001-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
6-1-09

Last week we asked the question, since the classical liberal movement of America’s early days was so successful and popular, then why cannot the modern (true) liberal movement be equally popular? In answer, we saw that the Founding Fathers adopted a strategy of reason, and we saw that (true) liberalism remains popular to this day whenever it is put to a test of the people.

One of the factors responsible for the defeat of classical liberal values in our day is a mistake I call the liberty-benevolence split. Starting in the 1920s the idea entered American thought that benevolence was opposed to liberty. (Benevolence is the emotion which results when one identifies with another living creature.) For example, in his first inaugural address, Jefferson said:

“A wise and frugal government…shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Notice that Jefferson thought of his position in favor of low taxes as being for the working man. How different this was from the position of, say, Bob Taft, Sr. (co-author of the Taft-Hartley Act). Taft was also for low taxes, but he was strongly anti-union and was perceived as anti-labor. Somehow in 150 years the low tax (pro-liberty) position had been separated from the pro-labor (pro-benevolence) position.

In the same way, Jefferson and Jackson were for gold/silver money (pro-liberty) and were opposed to the bankers (pro-benevolence). 150 years later the gold standard was routinely attacked as being pro-banker.

But even though the liberty-benevolence split made things very difficult in 20th century America, a close student of politics could see that the American people were still pulled strongly toward both the liberty side and the benevolence side.

For example, in mid-20th century America, the conservatives were closely identified with the balanced budget, a hard money (pro-liberty) position. Meanwhile the “liberals” were closely identified with an anti-war (pro-benevolence) position. It became a cliché for voters to say, “I’m a conservative on economic policy and a liberal on foreign policy.”

America left (what remained of) the gold standard in 1971, but it never voted to do so. Nixon ran on a series of campaign planks which indicated that he would retain the gold standard, balance the budget and keep a free economy. When he proved to have lied about these promises, a segment of activists walked out of the Republican Party and formed the Libertarian Party. When Nixon got into political trouble for something much less severe than many Democratic Presidents had done, these Libertarians and many Republicans sympathetic to them) would not support him, and he was driven from office by almost certain impeachment.

In 1992, an independent citizen, Ross Perot, was outraged by the size of the budget deficit and used his personal wealth to create a third party, which gathered 19% of the vote. This was a wake-up call to Bill Clinton, who wanted re-election in 1996 and needed those votes. Clinton said to his staff, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans, and we’re going to balance the budget.” Clinton reduced the size of the Government, both in terms of real spending and in terms of number of non-military employees.

If we step back and look at the world picture, then in terms of classical liberal values the world hit a low in 1933 with the election of Roosevelt and Hitler. Countries were leaving the gold standard, socialism appeared unstoppable. But sometime around 1980 the world began to shift for the better. A wave of privatization struck Latin America and Europe. The leaders of the Soviet Union lost heart, and the people of Eastern Europe began to agitate for freedom. In 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed, thus ending the Cold War. And in 1992 the Republicans captured control of Congress.

Although America has always been the freest country in the world (since her creation in 1776) she has usually lagged in world trends. For example, the American Revolution was an imitation of the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The American Bill of Rights of 1789 was based on the English Bill of Rights of 1689. And the slogan “no taxation without representation” comes from the English tax rebellion of the 1630s. The nickname “Old Ironsides” comes from the English general (Oliver Cromwell, who won the Civil War for the forces of democracy. This world trend bodes well for the forces of liberty. Indeed, if you could be transported back in time and were to tell a conservative of the 1950s that the Soviet Union would abolish itself (without the need for a world war III), they would refuse to believe it, and you would be the object of ridicule.

In addition to these large scale trends, the mistakes of our enemies vis a vis the events of late 2008 open up a tremendous opportunity – if we can take advantage of it.

One of the most powerful political forces is a sense of identity. In the 1930s, 40s and into the ‘50s, the Democratic Party was known as the party of the working man. The result was that the large majority of the working people voted Democrat. They did not know that the Democratic Party had initiated policies to rob the working man and give to Wall Street and the bankers. Later in the century another political movement started which called itself the woman’s movement. Large numbers of American women voted for the candidate of “the woman’s movement” and in this way elected the first rapist to occupy the position of President of the United States. Indeed, we have come a long way from George Washington.

My point here is that there are large numbers of people who will respond to the following political argument:

I am a member of ABC group.

The P Party is the party of ABC group.

Therefore, I will vote for the P Party.

It was thus a terrible error when the conservatives of the 1930s allowed F.D.R. to claim the mantle of the common man. The only explanation for this is that they did not understand F.D.R.’s strategy.

F.D.R. was a Wall Streeter. He spent the 1920s managing a vulture fund. This is a fund which swoops down on dying companies, buys them for a very low price and tries to make a profit by selling them higher. There is a legitimate place for vulture funds in a free marketplace, however, there is no legitimate place for them in F.D.R.’s stated political philosophy, and it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that F.D.R. spent the ‘20s doing what he believed to be wrong. In short, F.D.R. was the type of person later satirized by the character Gordon Gekko and associated with the phrase “greed is good.” The fact that the very first act of his administration was to give commercial bankers the power to create money out of nothing indicates his real intent. F.D.R. was a member of the upper class. He was on the side of the upper class, and he wanted to make them richer by robbing from the poor and giving to them

F.D.R.’s political program was divided in two parts. In the first part, he robbed from the rich and gave to the poor through a highly progressive income tax (which reached a top rate of 90% of income). This, however, was substantially moderated by a network of loopholes which turned it into the Swiss cheese tax program and sharply undercut its stated intent. In the second part, F.D.R. caused a massive easing of credit and infusion of money by the Federal Reserve, both of which caused a sharp rise in the stock market and a decline in the real wages of the average working man. The stock market rose from a low of DJI 41.22 shortly before F.D.R. was elected to a peak of 194.40 at the end of his first term.

To put this in context, a free market economy does not have a continual rise in stock prices, such as we have become used to. The different companies compete with each other, and this keeps average earnings from rising. Charles Dow was keeping real time stock indexes as far back as 1885. (He created the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896.) His stock indexes show that U.S. stock prices were, on balance, flat from 1885 to 1932. The steady rise in stock prices since 1933 was the direct result of F.D.R.’s taking the country off the gold standard and giving the power to create money to the bankers.

The basic issue of the New Deal was in doubt until 1971 when Richard Nixon declared “I am a Keynesian” and adopted F.D.R.’s program of running budget deficits and printing money. The result of this can be given by 3 numbers: 1) The Dow Jones Industrials went from a low of 600 in 1974 to a high of 14,000 in 2007. 2) The real wages of the average American worker went from $344 per week in 1972 to $276 per week in 2005 (in terms of 1982 dollars). 3) The number of years the average American worker had to work to earn a home went from 3.6 years in 1970 to 7.8 years in 2007.In short, there has been a major transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich over the past generation, completely against the stated intent of the New Deal and as a direct consequences of the policies they introduced.

The problem for lovers of liberty over the past 76 years has been, 1) the American people did not recognize that the New Deal was robbing from the poor to give to the rich, and 2) the pro-liberty movement did not realize it either. Indeed, they allowed themselves to be mouse trapped into acting as defenders of the rich. Ayn Rand’s pamphlet, “Big Business, America’s Persecuted Minority” is a blatant example.

But in 2008, Wall Street blundered badly. As always, they were controlling both horses in the race. They donated to both Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates, and this gave them the inside track for the top advisory positions no matter who won the election. In 2008, the Republican Wall Street advisor was Henry Paulson.

From 2000 to 2004, Alan Greenspan engineered the greatest easing of credit in Fed history – the opposite of everything he said he believed in his early days in the Objectivist movement. This created a housing bubble, and Wall Street firms made billions of dollars by making irresponsible loans to people who could not pay them back. The term Wall Street coined for such loans was NINJA, an acronym for: No Income, No Job or Assets. Although these loans could not be paid back, they were given (fraudulent) AAA ratings. In 2006-07, the entire house of cards collapsed, and today Greenspan goes around the country saying: “It’s not my fault.”

As his Wall Street friends were collapsing, Henry Paulson rushed to President Bush, whose knowledge of economics is down to absolute zero. “The whole financial system is collapsing,” he argued. This was not true literally, but in Paulson’s world it was true. He and his friends are (in his mind) the whole financial system. Bush swallowed everything he said. Paulson proposed a bailout of his Wall Street friends by the Federal Reserve. (In the media this is called a taxpayer bailout although no tax increase was associated with it, and the money given to the banks will be paid for by Fed printing of money, not by an increase in any tax rate.)

As it turned out, most of the Wall Street firms given bailout money just happened to owe large sums to Goldman Sachs, Paulson’s old firm. So the entire program amounts to Henry Paulson robbing the people of America and giving the money to his old buddies.

In the 1930s, when the average American thought that he was a beneficiary of the robbery, he endorsed it. (Of course, the conservatives blundered badly by not exposing what was happening, but they have a good excuse: unbelievable stupidity.)

But there is no issue of stupidity now. The Wall Street bailout was enormously unpopular. Mail from the public was running 100-1 against it. But the Wall Street technique of controlling both parties by picking candidates with no moral convictions or brains and controlling their advisors worked in the emergency atmosphere of 2008. This, however, gives us 4 years to organize. (Note that McCain took the lead supporting the bailout while Obama held back. From precisely that moment, McCain began to drop in the polls and went down to defeat.)

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, politicians genuinely ran on issues. They kept their promises, and they directly appealed to the people in elections. The election of 1832 was decided on the issue of the central bank. The election of 1860 was decided on the issue of slavery. The issue of 1896 was decided on the issue of the gold standard. If one studies the history of that period, it becomes clear that there was no force greater than the people. Newspapers who opposed the will of the people folded. Political candidates who opposed the will of the people were defeated. At that time, no political figure would have dared to lie in an election campaign as George Bush, Sr. did in 1988 with “Read my lips, no new taxes.” He would have been defeated in the next election. (Come to think of it, what did happen to Bush, Sr. in 1992?)

Ron Paul ran a great campaign in 2008. On average, he got about 8% of the vote in the Republican primary. We have now reached the point where the principal argument against us is the wasted vote. Although our “wasted” votes of the past are creating a political revolution which is changing the country, most people are too short range and only look as far as the next election.

But 8%, in a 3 or 4 way race, is very close to the breaking point. There are a lot of people favorably disposed toward Ron. I think that the outrage of the Wall Street bailout can raise Ron’s initial vote from 8% to 15% in a 4 way race. And this is enough to put him within striking distance so that the wasted vote argument dies. Note, the one issue on which I disagreed with Ron in ’08 was the “illegal” aliens issue. Who wound up winning the Republican nomination? It was the one (of the initial 10) candidates who was sympathetic to the “illegal” aliens (McCain). I have my nose to the ground, and I know what people are thinking.

What lovers of liberty have to do is to get their head out of the late 20th century. Study the nuts and bolts politics of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Then the good guys won overwhelming victories. We must study their tactics and method of operation. They were winners. We can be winners too. (To be continued next week.)

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

STRATEGY FOR VICTORY I

2009-05-25T12:55:00.004-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
5-25-09

The events of October-December 2008 create a unique opportunity for the pro-liberty movement in America to win a stunning victory. By way of introduction, I would like to ask a question. The pro-liberty movement in America here in the early 21st century is not essentially different from the pro-liberty movement in the late 18th or early 19th centuries. But those people won, and we cannot seem to punch our way out of a paper bag.

To illustrate the point, let us consider the most popular politician in American history. This gentleman won election as President without a dissenting vote (in the Electoral Collage). His name, of course, is George Washington. For the purpose of this blog, I will not be discussing the issue of whether liberty is right. That will be a given. The question will be, since liberty proved itself so popular in those earlier days, why can’t the liberty party win here in our own age?

An important clue to George Washington’s political strategy was given at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. A critic suggested to Washington that it would be expedient to compromise his beliefs in order to make the Constitution more popular. It might be immoral, but it would be practical. Washington replied:

“If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves do not approve, how will we defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”

Since this argument is made repeatedly in our own day and age, let us study carefully Washington’s rejection as no one can accuse him of not being a winning politician. The key words are: “how will we defend our work.”

That is, Washington completely missed the critic’s point. Washington did not believe in a moral vs. practical dichotomy and had no concept that being moral would be impractical. When his critic brought up the issue of popularity, his reply was, if you want to talk popularity, “how will we defend our work?” In other words, Washington viewed an election or a political debate as a rational argument. His side presented their arguments; the other side presented their arguments. And the people made the decision. Man was a rational animal, and the side which presented the most rational argument would win.

So if Washington’s side got up and tried to defend policies in which they did not believe, they would fall all over themselves. They would look like fools. To Washington, the critic’s advice was a sure way to lose. Speaking as a practical politician Washington saw that the way to win was to “raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair,” meaning to do one’s best. His concluding comment that “the event is in the hand of God” merely meant that human events are uncertain. No one can predict them or calculate them (because other human beings have free will), and therefore the only way to approach the human realm is to do your best and hope that others recognize it. That was always Washington’s policy, and it worked out very well for him.

This policy of doing one’s best became the American way. It was epitomized in the slogan “build a better mousetrap.” One thing that is vividly burned into my mind from the 1950s was that everyone always tried to do his best. This changed in the 1960s, a direct result of the propaganda of the New Left, and I began to hear people argue that the American public was stupid and that it was necessary to dumb things down for them.

Using the political action technique of the Founding Fathers three major movements swept over America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This period is still known in western intellectual history as the Age of Reason. The three movements were, American independence from Britain, the abolition of the central bank and the abolition of Negro slavery.

American independence from Britain brought with it a new breath of freedom. The most important of these were the abolition of Negro slavery in the northern states and the freedom to pay and receive interest in the northern states. This latter freedom led to the creation of banks and corporate bonds, and this led to the institution of saving. The savings of the people were lent to a class of businessmen who built factories and put the newest machines to work increasing the productivity of the people. This is known as the Industrial Revolution. (This same breath of freedom engulfed Britain herself and also led to the abolition of the anti-interest laws and to an industrial revolution. This enabled Britain to win the Napoleonic wars and become the dominant country in Europe for the remainder of the 19th century.)

The interesting thing about these movements is that they swept the country, destroying all opposition. When Sam Adams conceived the idea of making the American colonies independent of Britain (1763), his supporters could have fit inside a telephone booth (if they had had telephone booths in those days). By 1776, a majority of Americans favored the idea. By 1800, you could not find anyone in America who wanted to return to being a British colony. When Jefferson began his opposition to the central bank (1791), he was a political loner, in opposition to even his political friends. By 1800 he had been elected President. The battle over the bank was long and hard. It was abolished in 1811 but came back to life in 1816. This spawned a second political battle led by Martin van Buren and Andrew Jackson. (Jefferson died in 1826.) Jackson won election for President in 1828, and the issue of the second bank dominated his reelection campaign in 1832. Jackson declared that the people could have:

“a bank and no Jackson, or
no bank and Jackson.”

Jackson won a decisive victory. To put it in modern terms and eliminating the 2 minor parties, he received 59% of the vote as compared to 41% for Henry Clay, his principal opponent. The central bank died in 1836 when its charter expired, and a central bank became anathema in American politics for the remainder of the century.

When William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator in 1831, the anti-slavery movement in America was small. By 1865, it had become a majority of the country, and of course today there is no one who favors re-enslaving the black population of the United States.

In contrast with these movements which swept the nation, let us examine the battle over abortion which has gone on in our lifetime. Today there are two sides on the issue, pro-abortion and pro-life. And each has about the strength it had at the time of Rowe v. Wade. Instead of the contest being waged by reason, all we have is two sides shouting at each other, and the result has been absolutely no movement in either direction.

(I should note that my own position on abortion has recently changed. I have always been anti-abortion and rejected the argument that the fetus was not a person. However, I did not place a great deal of importance on the issue. Now with the creation of the Office of Health Information Technology by President Obama it is very clear that there is a larger anti-life movement in this country. The political left is attacking human life at both ends, killing you before you enter and hurrying things up as you leave. Further, several actions of the environmental movement in California are killing human beings on the premise that human life must be sacrificed to plants and animals. There is thus an anti-life movement in this country which is evil and must be opposed, and I erred in not placing enough importance on fighting the abortion issue.)

But here I am interested in the abortion issue because it is a perfect example of how politics is conducted in modern times. Two sides stomp their feet at each other, shout emotive slogans, and there is no attempt to devise a rational argument. The result is that there is absolutely no movement.

This is the German approach to politics. The man who did most to banish reason from the social atmosphere in America was Sigmund Freud. (When I say German, I am talking culturally and am referring to German-speaking Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) Freud declared that human beings were not moved by reason, and this idea is drummed into the heads of most American college students in almost every Social Studies course taught in the country.

What is the supposed proof that man is not rational? Freud never said. He never conducted a scientific experiment. He did not appear to know how. None of his predictions ever worked out, and the people who are following him have established a long record of failure. (As Ayn Rand pointed out, if Freud had adopted a rational approach and tried to prove to us that man was not rational, then he would have been contradicting himself.)

Since I became aware of this issue, I have made it a point of studying the different projects launched in our society under the premise that man is not a rational being. (Freud never did explain how this non-rational creature invented the internal combustion engine, discovered the principles of Newtonian mechanics, invented the airplane and the TV set, and he certainly failed to predict that men would walk on the moon.)

One of the big arguments for Freudian (and other variants of) psychiatry near the beginning of the 20th century was that large numbers of people were walking around with unconscious mental illnesses which were interfering with their happiness and undercutting their productivity. Once psychiatry had lifted this burden, there would be enormous psychological and real benefits. Yet if we look at our Freudian world today, just the opposite has happened. One very obvious example is the large rise in the divorce rate. This has caused an enormous amount of unhappiness, and one has only to compare the sense of life of the characters in the very early movies with movies (especially left-wing movies) of today. Much of this divorce was caused by Freudian (and neo-Freudian and post-Freudian, etc.) marriage counselors, who themselves were divorced.

Are Americans more productive today now that they have all these psychiatrists lifting their unconsciousness burdens and repressions? You would have a hard time proving it. Henry Ford once sold half the automobiles in the world. Today’s U.S. auto companies run to the Government for a bailout.

To come back to politics, I noted in my analysis of the 2008 election that the late 20th century had a very good record of candidates who did a better job fulfilling their opponent’s promises than their own. This is because both sides have lost the Washington formula for winning elections. If one studies the elections of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, one understands that these were passionate men devoted to their political convictions. Even the bad guys were passionate (in a bad cause). Newspapers were founded (and folded). Political parties were formed. Careers were made, and broken.

The conclusion is obvious from a study of this period that political issues are the most dominant force in our society. Time and again the issue swept everything before it. If your newspaper was on the wrong side of the issue which gripped the people, it went belly up. If your candidate was on the wrong side, he went belly up. There was no institution which could stand against the will of the people.

Today, both parties (both lower case ”p” and upper case “P,”) “know” that being moral is impractical. Thus running an election on what they believe to be right means political suicide. So each party can count on the other to soft pedal its issue. The glib meaningless campaign run by Barrack Obama in 2008 is a good example. Consider the issue which cost George Bush, Sr. reelection in 1992, his promise “NO NEW TAXES” in 1988 and his breaking of this promise. The promise was made because it seemed expedient at the time. It was broken because that seemed expedient a few years later. The whole incident could not have happened 100 or 200 years earlier. If Bush had sincerely believed in no new taxes, he would never have broken his promise and, as sitting President, would never have lost to an unknown in ’92.

Or consider Richard Nixon. He went out of his way to fulfill every campaign promise in the Democratic Platforms of 1968 and 1972. In doing so, he lost the support of the active, intelligent conservatives of the day. When Watergate broke, he desperately needed these people (because his campaign to woo the left had been a dismal failure), but by that time they hated his guts.

To take the opposite case, when Ron Paul was a young Congressman, other Congressmen would come up to him and say, “I wish I could vote like you, but in my district they would kill me.” They were being polite. Ron was not elected in a Libertarian district. In fact, it was a Democratic district, and the Democrats expected to win it back easily after his first full term. Just to make sure they threw big money and big names at him. He increased his margin of victory. In 1980, the Texas state legislature was going to gerrymander him out of a seat. But gold bugs all over the nation rose up in protest. The Texas state legislators were faced with the possibility of big out-of-state money coming in to defeat them. This they did not need. They did a 180º reversal and gerrymandered Ron into a safe seat. All the polite Congressmen would have given their right arms for a safe seat.

One thing which becomes clear from a study of the 18th and 19th centuries is that again and again the American people support the twin planks of the classical liberal program: sound money/limited government in domestic affairs and a foreign policy of non-intervention in foreign affairs. (That is, mind your own business and defend your rights in domestic matters, and mind your own business and defend your rights in foreign matters.) So you have to ask, how come we lost on both issues in the 20th century? The answer is that the issue was never put to a vote of the people. Wilson ran against a central bank in 1912 and on a peace plank in 1916. F.D.R. ran as an economy-in-government man in 1932 and as the peace candidate in 1940. L.B.J. was the peace candidate in 1964 and smeared Barry Goldwater as a dangerous radical who would get us into war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon ran as a balanced budget man and an enemy of price and wage controls in 1968.

This must be the key to a new strategy for the pro-liberty movement. The American people want us. They vote for us again and again. But statism keeps advancing because both parties lie to us on issues, and the media misinterprets and spins the results of elections. What they have done is to erect a house of cards. All that is necessary is for us to huff and puff, and it will come tumbling down. (To be continued.)
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

WHERE NOW ECONOMY?

2009-05-17T22:51:00.004-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
2009-05-18

I would like to give an economic review to help you orient yourself and make the proper decisions for your life in the coming years. The situation is far worse than almost anyone recognizes, and almost all believers in the establishment will be economically destroyed.

The first thing to keep in mind is the onion of lies. The intention of the power structure is to steal the wealth which you produce, and since the principle of democracy is deeply ingrained in America, they have chosen the policy of fraud (pioneered by the Fabian Society in Britain). Thus we have the continual manufacture of lies, one on top of the other. As these lies are accepted, more lies are manufactured until there is a solid core of deception which has so permeated the language that it becomes very difficult to enter the public discussion without unintentionally accepting some of these lies. This is the problem with many good conservatives. They discover some error in the prevailing establishment and become energized on this point. Then they fall into accepting all the rest of the onion of lies without thinking about it.

For example, the political left in this country calls itself liberal. This is false. “Liberal” is a Spanish word, coined in the early 19th century by a Spanish political group who admired the French Revolution and America’s Founding Fathers. They believed that the proper function of government was the protection of its citizens’ rights. That is, liberal means pretty much what libertarian means in America today. This is the origin of the word in 19th century Spain, and this is the meaning of the word in most countries in the world to this day. (Indeed, when I ran for U.S. Senate on the Libertarian ticket in Massachusetts in 1982, against Ted Kennedy, I spoke before an all-Spanish speaking group. My major thesis was that the Libertarian Party was the liberal party in America today. This is a proposition which would provoke some opposition among Americans. But I noticed that my translator was rendering “libertarian” and “liberal” by the same Spanish word, reducing my controversial thesis to a tautology.)

What happened was that some of the social democrats of the 1920s-30s did not want to admit that their political philosophy came from Germany. So they made up the lie that they were liberals. Today the “conservatives,” thinking that they are conservative have decided to apologize for torture, because it sounds like the conservative thing to do.

But the essence of any system of domination of one human being by another is economic. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy produced no wealth. Instead it lived off the labor of the average person, who was reduced to the position of a serf. (That is, he had lost the freedom to choose his job.) Today in America we have an aspiring aristocracy who wants to live off our labor but has not yet reduced us to serfdom.

This aspiring aristocracy secured the privilege to counterfeit money in 1933. A group of commercial bankers, working with the Federal Reserve, create money out of nothing. The bankers use this money to make loans. This is in contrast with the old-fashioned saving bank or S&L, which made loans with deposits which it attracted by paying interest.

The extra money created by the Fed/banks causes prices to rise. All of the wage earners of the country watch their wages lag the rise in prices. All of the retired people are stuck on fixed income while the prices for the necessities of life go out of sight. These two groups together constitute 95% of the people of America.

As the bankers win from the interest on their loans, some of this is passed through to their loan customers, principally the nation’s big corporations. These big corporations also gain because the wages they pay do not rise as rapidly as prices. And they further gain because many of them are heavily in debt and can pay their debt in depreciated money (e.g., Donald Trump). In toto, the vast majority o Americans get poorer, and a small group consisting of the bankers, the big corporations and Wall Street, make big fortunes. This is why the gap between rich and poor is getting wider today while it got narrower during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Once they had slipped through the privilege to counterfeit money (March 9, 1933, the first day of the New Deal), the bankers sought for a group of economists who would apologize for their privilege. Such a group existed, the followers of William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings. These men had written a book, The Road to Plenty, in 1928 arguing that paper money was the road to plenty for a society. Wealth, they said, did not have to be created by labor. It could simply be created by printing money.

One difficulty for the bankers was that Fosters and Catchings were known, by the economists of the day, as crackpots. To get around this fact, the bankers were saved by one of the great confidence men of all time, John Maynard Keynes. Keynes plagiarized The Road to Plenty, but he knew how to PR it. He called it the “New Economics” and threw around a lot of mathematical folderol. The bankers then bribed the nation’s top colleges to hire this “new” school of economists to teach their students.

For example, in 1948, the Manhattan Bank (today part of J.P. Morgan) endowed a chair of economics at Harvard on the proviso that John Kenneth Galbraith be appointed. Up to this time, a college being offered an endowment would reply, “We graciously appreciate your offer, but no one has the right to dictate whom we select as our teachers, and if that condition is attached, then we must respectfully decline.” Harvard said, “Hey, we’ll take the money.”

Other colleges imitated the most prestigious ones, and rather quickly the new crackpot school of economics dominated higher education in the United States. This is one good example of why you can not live your life in accord with authority. The bankers (and the remainder of the paper aristocracy) want to steal your wealth. Being a group of anemic wimps they lack the physical courage to use the technique of a common thief; so they need the power of government in order to live off our labor. But to gain the power of government in a democracy they need to deceive millions of people. Their basic technique of deception has been to adopt the guise of the authority figures of our society. Mr. Smith-Jones is the Highly Distinguished Professor of Economics. Therefore, when he says that down is up and rich is poor, you must believe everything he says.

Interestingly, our society has a great deal of experience with authority figures. The central issue for western man for most of the past 2 thousand years has been how to get into heaven. And the authority figures of that time were the priests of the Catholic Church. This, of course, was a completely untestable hypothesis. Nobody ever came back from heaven; so there was no way to know if the priest had gotten you in or not. And indeed, these priests were ignorant semi-pagans who did not even know God’s name. (“Jehovah” is not a real word. It is a composite formed by taking the consonants from God’s name and combining them with the vowels from the Hebrew word “lord.” If God exists and if there is a heaven, then my guess would be that God would not be very inclined to grant favors to people who could not get his name right. The actual name of God used to be pronounced once a year, on the High Holy Day, by my family back in the first millennium B.C., but it was lost when the Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 A.D. And to this day no one knows what it is.)

This is why the Protestants did western society a great service when they said, “question authority, rely on the inner light” (meaning the judgement of your own mind. A great battle had to be fought before this principle was partially established, and much of what western man has accomplished over the past few hundred years has been due to this principle.

The record of modern economists since 1948 (and for most of the 20th century) has been a disaster. The record of the late 18th and 19th century economists was one of great achievement. Adam Smith proved that it was the proper function of government to protect the rights of property and contract, and when a government confined itself to these two tasks, the human benefits were enormous. Adam Smith’s theories were dominant primarily in the English speaking world in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And these countries produced more wealth (by far) than any other society in human history. They also produced a closer distribution of wealth where the gap between rich and poor was narrower than any other society in history. The “egalitarians” of the modern left, who pretend to support the absolute economic equality of all men have now started the pendulum back in the old direction. Since 1972, the real wages of the average American have been on the decline, and since 1982 the wages of the nation’s CEOs have exploded and become an open scandal.

During the period 1944-1971 the Republicans favored the balanced budget. This put a limit on the creation of money by the Fed, and the stealing from the poor to give to the rich was slowed. But after Nixon completed F.D.R.’s job of taking the U.S. off the gold standard (in ’71), the Fed has become the nation’s counterfeiting machine. The great majority of Americans have gotten poorer and the paper aristocracy has gotten richer. The Republicans have given the country massive budget deficits. This takes some time to manifest itself in higher prices because commodities are slow to respond. When the paper money picked up steam under J.F.K. in 1963, commodity prices were stable for 8 years. By 1971, they were quite undervalued, and they tripled over the decade of the 1970s. These high commodity prices fed through into consumer prices in the late ‘70s. By 1980, commodities were overvalued and spent the ‘80s and ‘90s going down. Reagan and Bush printed money like crazy, but this did not cause serious increases in price because at that time commodities were going down. (From 1980 to 1999, the Commodity Research Bureau index fell from 337 to 183.) Now, however, commodities are back on the upside again. They have been rising since 2001. The CRB has gone from 183 to 400. Gold has gone from $254 to $900. This rise in consumer prices was beginning to hit in spring-summer 2008. The high price of food was causing food riots around the world in March 2008, and the government of Haiti fell because of a food riot. By mid-’08, the U.S. consumer price index was advancing at a year-over-year rate of 5.4%, which should be sufficient to alarm the country.

You know that I have a very low opinion of our present society. Well, I over-estimated. because what happened in September-October 2008 was too insane to be believed. Right in the middle of (what will turn out to be) the greatest rise in prices in American history the whole nation went into a state of hysteria in fear of a massive decline in prices. The “respectable” establishment predicted a “recession.” Alarmists shouted that we were in a “depression.” As in any society this had a self-fulfilling aspect. Because people believed that we were in a period of declining prices, they sold goods. This caused a sharp decline in commodities and stocks, which fact was used to justify a Fed policy of massive printing of money. At the present time, the monetary base has more than doubled from its early Sept. 2008 level. And the Fed has promised another trillion dollars to come.

The result is that prices are now very undervalued in terms of fundamentals. Those who listened to the establishment and sold are the losers. The stock market likely made its bottom in early March. Commodities likely made their bottom last December. The declines of July-Dec. will be made up, and those who sold will be out of luck.

We all know that the high prices of midi-2008 were badly hurting the American people. $4.00 gasoline was on every one’s lips. People were restricting their driving and were buying economy cars. Vacations were cut back, and people rode bicycles to work (which was better than the starvation which briefly appeared in some countries). It would therefore seem to be common sense that, when the country received the benefit of (less than) $2.00 gasoline in December there would have been a general sense of relief. This represented a large transfer of wealth from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela and from the oil companies to the American people. Yet hardly a word was heard. The papers were so full of gloom and doom that there was no time for the reporting of any good fact.

It was the same in the early 1930s. Consumption of meat rose from 129 lb per person per year to 144 lbs. People switched from margarine to butter. They gave more to charity. The report that this was a depression was a lie, pure and simple. It was a depression for the bankers and Wall Street. It was a good time for the American people.

To understand the declines of ’08, one must begin by realizing that most everyone has the lies associated with the early 1930s firmly in their minds. They imagine that such contractions come out of nowhere with no cause. They have been fighting this imaginary depression since Sept.

The original “depression” of the 1930s was used by F.D.R. and his banker friends to steal wealth from the American people and give it to the bankers. However, this was carefully disguised to be the opposite. The price decline of 2008 was used by Henry Paulson to steal wealth from the American people and give it to his Wall Street friends and to Goldman Sachs, of which he was the former chief executive. Most of the bailout money went to companies which owed big sums to Goldman and would have been unable to pay on their own.

But Paulson was not as clever as F.D.R. His argument that, if the banks were not bailed out, the whole economy would collapse, went over like a lead balloon. The McCain campaign went down the tubes precisely at the time Paulson announced the bailout and McCain supported it. (Obama supported it as well, but he remained in the background. It was Bush and McCain who led the charge.)

The welfare state enacted a program of robbing the poor to give to the rich, but it was cleverly disguised as its opposite. In 2008, the welfare state came out into the open with a plan to rob the poor and give to the rich openly acknowledged. I do not believe that the American people will stand for this. It is a fatal error. Whichever party adopts a platform of reversing the bailout of 2008 will win the next major election. The money taken from the American people must be returned. The people who took the money must go to jail. Robbing the rich is bad, but robbing the poor is even worse. (By the way, the media reported this as a taxpayer bailout. This is another layer of the onion of lies. The money for the bailout was not taken from a tax increase. There was no such tax increase. The money for the bailout was simply printed by the Federal Reserve, and (as noted) at this writing the U.S. monetary base has more than doubled from its level in the summer of 2008. Thus, the average American will not be injured by seeing his taxes go up. He will be injure by seeing the prices he pays for virtually all goods go up. His pay will buy less, and his standard of living will go down.

America cut its final tie to the gold standard in 1971. The real pay of the average working man topped out in 1972, and this is the first generation of Americans to be poorer than their fathers.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE CURSE OF THE WORKING CLASS

2009-05-11T21:42:00.004-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
5-11-09

In my series of blogs on morality and religion, I managed to make a basic statement of my moral principles. However, except for a few simple examples I did not give you any practical applications.

The people of this society are used to getting their moral principles from authority. Moses gave a list of principles which he said came from God. Jesus gave a (different) set of principles which he said should be accepted because he was the son of God. People in this culture are so confused about the subject of ethics that they do not know that these two sets of principles directly contradict each other on almost every major point.

For example, let us consider capital punishment, a subject which is debated endlessly in our culture, all to no avail. Neither the proponents nor the opponents make any headway. Moses favored capital punishment (under appropriate circumstances). Jesus opposed it in every case. If you believe in a Bible containing the principles of both men, then you can take either side of the issue. You would never do this in mathematics or chemistry or auto mechanics.

So let us begin by asking why human beings, and no other animals, have codes of ethics. Imagine a rational creature from the planet Mars who is visiting Earth. You are his guide, and you are showing him how Earthlings lives their lives. Suddenly he asks:

• Martian: Why did that Earthling put money in that box?
• You: He was giving money to the poor.
• Martian: Why do a thing like that?
• You: He was being ethical, giving charity.
• Martian: What is ethical?
• You: Ethics means self-sacrifice for the sake of others.
• Martian: And you humans have an impulse to do this?
• You: Yes, we do. We are not always completely ethical, but we try.
• Martian: Now I understand. So you humans are not fit for existence.
• You: Untrue. We have a great civilization with many scientific inventions; we fly through the air; we have visited the moon; we talk to each other from opposite sides of the Earth. We are a formidable and competent people.
• Martian: But you sacrifice yourself for the sake of others.
• You: I like to think we do.
• Martian: And you are the only species on your planet who engages in such a practice.
• You: Yes, we are.
• Martian: But if your species has this tendency to sacrifice itself, it cannot survive the struggle for existence.
• You: How so?
• Martian: Every other species is fighting tooth and nail for survival, and you have this tendency for self sacrifice. It’s just obvious. You have got to lose.

Or we could imagine two human beings, one of whom chooses to be ethical and the other chooses to be unethical. The unethical man says, “I demand you sacrifice yourself for me.” What can the ethical man do? If he agrees, he is dead. If he disagrees, he is no longer ethical.

The Martian in the above example is perfectly logical. But there is something in us which says, “No. I don’t want to believe that.” Is this our deficiency for being illogical, or is the Martian somehow wrong?

To complicate the matter, here are dinosaurs, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, fierce creatures without an ounce of ethics, creatures who struggled for survival with tooth and claw and practiced the principle eat or be eaten. And yet we humans, with all our tendency for self sacrifice, have defeated them in the struggle for survival. How could this be?

All this is to bring you back to the questions, what is ethics, and why does man need an ethical code. The key, and the reason that man, of all the different creatures of whom we have knowledge, needs a code of ethics is that man is the animal who perceives reality by means of abstractions.

Remember that we begin almost all discussions by answering the question, what is it. For example, a fish is an animal whose natural habitat is the water and who breathes by means of gills. A snake is a reptile without legs. A monkey is a small-to-medium mammal who is evolved to live in the trees.

Man, as noted, is the animal who perceives reality by means of abstractions. (Some people, when confronted with this definition, bring up the Chimpanzee or the Porpoise. But this is nit picking. If you like, you may add the words “to a significant degree.”) An abstraction is a mental image which contains the essence of a class of entities (that which they have in common) but none of the particularities. If you call up the abstraction tree, then the mental image will contain a trunk, leaves and roots, but it will be fuzzy as to the shape and color of the leaves, the size, the color, the texture, etc. It is only man who has the ability to do this to any significant degree.

Therefore man faces certain questions that no other creature can ask himself, abstract questions. And since what is true for an abstraction is true for all the concretes subsumed under it, information about abstractions is true for an infinite number of possible things. When Pythagoras proved that a triangle (an abstract triangle) contains 180º, he was asserting knowledge of all triangles which had ever existed, all which existed in his day and all triangles which would ever exist in the future. Wow.

Abstractions are powerful stuff.

Now, the most important abstract question you, as a human being, can ask is, what is the nature of the reality in which I live? To bring home the importance of this question, suppose you are going to take a journey from the city in which you live to a neighboring city. You will naturally be very concerned about the environment over which you travel. Will you walk? Will you drive a car? Will you go by boat? Will you fly? If you have to walk, will you go through a jungle, a dessert, a swamp? Your very life might depend on knowing the answer to these questions. Therefore, the more abstract question, what is the nature of reality, has to concern you even more than the nature of one particular part of reality.

There are basically two answers to the question what is the nature of reality. The dominant answer, up to about 1500 B.C., is that reality is composed of animate spirits. When something happens in the world it is because one of these spirits wills it to happen. For example, a volcano erupts because the spirit (or god) of the volcano gets mad. The earth brings forth vegetation because the spirit (goddess) of the earth is bountiful.

The alternative answer, still being debated from 1500 B.C. to our time, is that the universe operates according to the law of cause and effect, except, of course, for we humans, who are the only animate beings.

The animate and the causal views of existence are the only logical points of view, and the irrationalities of modern religion result from the fact that all modern religions try to compromise these two (contradictory) viewpoints. But religion is not inherently illogical. Primitive polytheistic religion is perfectly logical. It just happens to be factually wrong.

All right, come along with me a bit on this one, and say you believe that the universe operates according to the principle of cause and effect. We now come to the second question which a being who thinks in abstractions has to ask. How should one act?

This is not the question, how should I act to get my next meal, or how should I act to get away from my enemy. Those are concrete questions. This is the plain simple question, how should I act. And because human beings can understand abstract truths, you can understand the answer to this question.

Our answer to the question how should one act based on the view that the universe is governed by cause and effect was given to us by Moses. Moses said that one should act in accord with the law of causality. One should expect to receive the consequences of one’s actions. And one should treat others in accord with the principle of cause and effect. That is, one should give the good person the good consequences of his good actions and give the bad person the bad consequences of his bad actions. This is the principle we know as justice. (That is, Isaiah and I know it. Plato doesn’t know it.)

So far so good. Let us keep these two ideas firmly in mind. The universe operates according to the principle of cause and effect. And we human beings should act in accord with the law of cause and effect. Our knowledge is imperfect, and there are many random events which cannot be controlled, but in so far as life is controllable, we will have the best life if we follow the principle upon which the universe is constructed.

Now this is the basic moral principle. But let us consider what other principles might follow from it. Well, since the universe operates according to cause and effect, then the more cause and effect relationships one knows, the more fit one is for existence. Therefore, it is a moral principle that one should study reality and learn as many cause and effect relationships as one can. Of course, no one can know all cause and effect relationships, but the more we know the better.

And since we cannot know all cause and effect relationships, we should cooperate with our fellow humans to each concentrate in a special area, learn as much as we can in our area, and than share our knowledge.

Now let us go back to the Martian. We had a feeling that he was wrong, but we could not quite put our finger on it. Actually, you led the Martian astray when you said, “ethics is self sacrifice for the sake of others.” This is not true ethics. This is a proposition in polytheistic ethics. The people of that time believed in both good and evil spirits (gods). On occasion, some of the evil spirits would go on the rampage. They would threaten one’s town and demand a number of human sacrifices. “Give us a dozen sacrifices, or the whole town goes up in smoke.” This was the nature of the world in which these polytheists imagined they lived.

So the people of this day identified morality with sacrifice. Better to sacrifice 12 than the whole town. This is how morality came to be identified with sacrifice. When those people said sacrifice, they meant it literally.

Now since the evil spirits were viewed as desiring humans to eat (much as we do chickens and cows), it was very strange that the priests (who communicated with the evil spirit) always seemed to demand young female victims, usually virgins. What would happen in fact (since there are no evil spirits) was that the priests themselves would rape the victims and then murder them to cover up their crime. That is how the concept of sacrifice came to be confused with morality in human history.

And this is, of course, why man is the most successful animal on earth. Man is the only animal who has the ability to see reality in terms of abstractions. And since an abstraction gives us knowledge about an infinite number of concretes, we humans have a big advantage over all other creatures. But to achieve these wonderful things we must use our ability to abstract correctly, and when we humans fail to do this, we can commit some whopping big mistakes.

Now if it is a moral imperative to try as hard as we can to learn cause and effect and to use our minds to their full potential, then what can we say of those people who do not use their minds properly? Well, the people who are mentally lazy are bad. But there is a very widespread phenomenon throughout the world whereby people ingest various chemical substances (in our culture alcohol or drugs) for the purpose of interfering with the working of their minds.

If life requires the full use of your mind, if mental laziness falls short of this goal, then deliberately trying to injure your mind, as is the case with alcohol or drugs, is evil, pure and simple.

None of these substances taste good. The human body has the good sense to react very negatively (as when a drunk cannot walk and falls down into his own vomit). Alcohol even has the effect of suppressing the human sex drive (which is not my idea of a good time). No, the motive for this evil is that the person in question does not understand the law of cause and effect. His own description explains what he is doing. “I was feeling no pain.” From this, of course, it is very clear that such a person feels pain most of the time, and his only form of recreation is to put his mental capacity out of operation. That is, their form of recreation is to make themselves unfit for existence. Imagine an eagle who pulls out his claws or a horse who breaks his legs. Such a creature is unfit for existence. The same is true for a human who subverts his ability to use abstractions. If you only do this a few times a year, this may make you better than other people. But reality is not relative. It is absolute. Putting your mind out of operation makes you unfit for existence. A little evil may make you better than others, but it does not make your life a success.

These people accept a false code of morality and consequently their life becomes a succession of boredom, obligation and failure. They go from one “pain” to another. Finally, when they have an opportunity for some recreation, they chose to feel nothing because it is the best state they know. Alcohol dulls their moral sense and allows them to escape the feeling that they are always immoral (which is what they are taught by their conventional moral code). That is its attraction. If you are caught in this pattern, you have to do some serious thinking about right and wrong and make some serious changes if you are going to have very much happiness in this life.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

OPEN LETTER TO RON PAUL

2009-05-04T15:23:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
5-4-09

First, I would like to thank everyone who sent e-mails to Kitco protesting their ban of me on the gay marriage issue. Your e-mails were effective. I received the following e-mail from Bart Kitner, President of Kitco on 4-28-09:

“Please accept my apologies for an e-mail that you received on April 16 from Daniela Cambone of Kitco.
“The message was written by a recently hired employee who is new to our industry and who was assigned the task of managing our commentary section. She wrote and sent the e-mail without any approval and in doing so did not act as a spokesperson of our company.
“Her e-mail does not necessarily represent the policy of Kitco. Please ignore the contents of that message and rest assured that we plan to continue publishing your commentaries on Kitco.com.”

Second, some readers have been asking the question, what can we do? The injustices appear so great and one, as an individual, appears so powerless that things can be very discouraging. The thing to remember is that, while no one can do everything, everyone can do something. And the place to start is where you are right now. When I started political action (in the 1960s), I knew a bit about political theory but very little about putting that theory into practice. I have learned something over the years, and I hope to share that knowledge with you. History teaches that social change takes a very long time. Such rapid social changes as the spread of communism is reported to have been turn out, upon closer inspection, to be outrageous lies. Communism in the 20th century, in fact, spread precisely to those parts of the world (eastern Europe and non-British influenced Asia) where it had already existed. And we found out in 1989 that the larger trend for the abolition of communism (which had started in 15th century England) was still intact. You and I probably won’t live to see the abolition of communism in China and Southeast Asia, but it is on the way as this larger trend unfolds.

I want to put my comments in answer to this question in the form of an open letter to Congressman Ron Paul because he is the person around whom the pro-liberty movement has to coalesce to achieve its maximum gains at this point in time. I worked with Congressman Paul in the late 1970s and early ‘80s in favor of the gold standard, and the American Eagle gold coin was the result of our efforts. He is as fine and honest a person behind the scenes as he appears in public, and no one who supports him will have the problem (as occurs with so many other politicians) of being betrayed.

Dear Ron,

Some of my readers are facing the problem of what they can do to further the cause of liberty, and in answer to this question I think you are a key person. First, you are a fine example of what one person can accomplish. Second, your campaign in the Republican primaries of 2008 makes you the key person around whom the advocates of liberty can unite to achieve the greatest gains in coming years.

Right now all the people in the movement (including myself) are pulling their hair out at what Barrack Obama is doing (trying to do) to the country. However, I am hopeful that little will come from his efforts. If you look at the Clinton Administration, the first two years were spent in a determined effort to achieve socialized medicine. The reaction in the country was impressive. The Republicans swept the congressional elections of 1994. Sixty seats changed hands in the House – all in a pro-gun direction. Clinton did a 180º reversal and declared “The era of big government is over.” He told his staff, “We are Eisenhower Republicans trying to balance the budget.” Welfare was cut back. As bad a man as Bill Clinton was personally, the pro-American movement got more from him than we have gotten from any Republican.

The major issue facing the country at the present time is economics. I don’t mean should be; I mean is. One thing I spend a lot of time doing is talking to average guys. They are not worried about foreign policy. They are worried about the economy. Furthermore, as you are aware, they are going to get more worried. In dealing with the false crisis of last autumn, the Federal Reserve created (in the form of Fed Credit) a trillion dollars, more than doubling the monetary base. On March 18 of this year, the Fed further announced plans to create another trillion dollars. By the time this works its way into the money supply, the amount of money in the United States will have tripled. And this, of course, implies an (approximate) tripling of prices. If you have a sense of the outrage of the American people at $4.00 gas last summer, you can well imagine the reaction to $6.00 or $8.00 gas. If a $254,000 median national home price (in early ’07) made homes too expensive for the average person, what will $600,000 do a few years down the road?

What has happened over the past half year is that the forces of statism in this country HAVE BLUNDERED BADLY AND GIVEN US A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY (pun intended). The New Deal was based on the ideology of robbing from the poor to give to the rich. Sad to say the concept of robbing did not immediately repel all Americans, and the Government was given the new function of redistributing the wealth (a fancy name for robbing).

But when George Bush and Henry Paulson devised a plan to bail out Goldman Sachs and others, they were not as sophisticated as F.D.R. F.D.R. intended to rob from the poor and give to the rich. He actually did rob from the poor and gave to the rich. But he convinced the nation that he was doing just the opposite. He robbed the rich via tax policy, let them escape most of this via loopholes and then gave them back a lot more via stock market (and other) profits caused by the Fed’s easy credit and paper money.

By comparison, Bush/Paulson openly admitted that they were robbing from the common man to give to a group of large banks and Wall Streeters. The important thing from our point of view is that THIS POLICY HAS NEVER BEEN TESTED AT THE POLLS.

The classical liberals scored victory after victory in favor of freedom through the late 18th and 19th centuries. One of their great triumphs was the setting up of a free trade area via the British Commonwealth. This was accomplished by the Anti-Corn Law League, which abolished the tariff on imported grains. When the average citizen saw that a lower tariff on grain meant that he paid a lower price for bread, he supported the concept. That is, the Anti-Corn Law League made the connection between the abstraction of freedom and the concrete of money in your pocket.

Since both Obama and McCain endorsed the policy of robbing from the common man to give to the bankers, the average voter had no way to express his anger over the events of Sept.-Oct. 2008. And quite frankly, the Demopublican Party does not intend to let him. They are hoping that the issue will just go away and it will become accepted in American politics that the Government has the function of bailing out those businesses it deems “too big to fail” by taking money from “the taxpayers.”

This is our chance, and you are our man. Here the bad guys have given us an issue with which we can cut them down to size. And you are the man to do it. We can make a direct appeal to the common man and link his self interest with liberty. When the New Deal said, “Rob the rich to help the poor,” a large number of poor people felt that they were going to benefit. They put money above freedom. But when McCain and Obama said “too big to fail,” the average voter got mad. Nobody I talked to supported this idea. I haven’t seen a poll, but I bet that 80% of the American people are on our side on this issue.

This is what happened when Thomas Jefferson attacked the First Bank of the United States. It is what happened when Andrew Jackson attacked the Second Bank of the United States. The issue of the common man against the bankers proved unstoppable in American politics. After Jackson’s overwhelming victory of 1832, no one dared to champion a central bank until Morgan sneaked it over in 1912 (by pretending it was not a central bank).

Further, for us the battle will be easier. I make a point to keep my ear to the ground. I talk to ordinary, every day Americans, and I listen to what they say. When I bring up the gold standard, immediately their eyes light up. All of a sudden they are interested in politics. This is the reaction I always got when I was campaigning for you in 2008. Then I would say a few words about the gold standard and would walk away knowing that I had made a convert. The gold standard just makes sense to people. It strikes a deep chord.

In this regard, I think that the libertarians have dropped the ball. I am referring to the idea of competing currencies. There is nothing wrong with this idea in itself. But most of them talk of competing currencies as though it were a different idea from a gold standard. Remember what happened in the 1780s when the Continental Congress asked Jefferson to recommend a money for the new country. Jefferson studied the situation and announced that the currencies had finished competing, and the winner was the Spanish thaller (dollar), a silver coin minted in the Spanish colonies. The Congress adopted Jefferson’s recommendation and made the silver dollar (also minted in gold) the unit of account in the United States.

Therefore, when one advocates a gold standard, he is advocating competing currencies. He just recognizes that the competition has already taken place, and the precious metals have won out.

But to the average voter, “competing currencies” does not mean anything. He thinks, “What if I go to the store with British pounds and the store demands Spanish doubloons?” The point is that most voters in most campaigns will not give you the time or attention to explain. If you want to reach the average voter and reach him immediately and intuitively, just say the words “gold standard.”

Say it when you get up in the morning. Say it when you go out to work. Say it to everyone you meet. Say it when you go to bed at night. It will be the greatest vote winner of all time. “Gold standard, gold standard, gold standard.” It just makes common sense.

And if a Democrat says to you, “That is an extreme right-wing position championed by the bankers,” then reply, “You voted to steal the people’s money and give it to the bankers. You are the right-wing crazy. I am for the people. Gold is the money of the people.”

You accomplished a great deal both in your career as a whole and in 2008. Do you remember those other Congressmen back in the ‘70s who came up to you and said, “I wish I could vote like you, but in my district they would kill me?” These Congressmen thought you were going to be clobbered at the next election. But you kept increasing your margin. Now you have a safe seat, and many of them are gone. They underestimated the American people.

In 2008, you took the first step toward acquiring a national constituency. I have been fighting for liberty all of my life, and most of it has been pretty lonely. So when I went up to the Republican debate here in New Hampshire in late 2007, my expectations were low. I was astonished by the size of your crowd, by the number of young people, by their energy and enthusiasm. I walked away re-energized.

Most political campaigns are rough and tumble. But when your campaign was over, everyone on all sides was speaking well of you. You conducted yourself as a gentleman and fought a campaign of ideas. Most astonishing to me was an editorial I saw in the New York Times which sharply criticized every single candidate on both sides. As a gesture to honesty, when they would slam the candidates on an issue, they felt obliged to include the phrase, “except for Ron Paul.” When you raised that big chunk of money, they gave you free publicity. The New York Times giving free publicity to a Republican? Has the world turned upside down?

In the 2008 Republican primary campaign, you received, I believe, almost 10% of the vote. As you know, the problem libertarians face is getting a crucial mass. Once you can demonstrate a certain number of votes (say in a poll), then moderate voters know that they will not be “wasting” their vote by casting it for you. It is hard to say exactly where that number is, but 10% is close to it. At this point, the Republican race for 2012 is wide open, and almost anything can happen. By campaign season 2012, prices may be racing skyward because of the money being created by the Fed right now.

It is also the case that, in any multi-candidate race, the one candidate who stands out has a considerable advantage. In 2008, McCain was the one Republican (out of 10 I believe) who was sympathetic to the right of immigration. Suppose that Republican primary voters split 2-1 against McCain on this issue and that everyone voted on the issue. McCain would win with 33% of the vote. Each of the other 9 would have 7% of the vote. Being in a minority is a real advantage in a multi-candidate race. And if you decide to run on the gold standard, this would give you, not 33% of the vote, but 70%-80% of the vote (if American history is any guide) with the other 20%-30% to be divided several ways.

As noted, most pro-liberty people are tearing their hair out about the first days of the Obama Administration. And yet, if you look at the big picture, you see a larger, slower trend toward liberty. For example, when I lived in Manhattan in the 1970s, I knew activists from the Socialist Workers Party (one of many left-wing minor parties of the time). Recently I discovered that in 2008 the SWP had ceased publication of its national paper and closed down its headquarters.. This is important because it is the minor parties which push the major parties in the right or wrong direction. In 1976, there were 5 left-wing minor parties. In the 2008 election, there were only 2 left-wing parties (Nader and the Greens); together they barely outpolled the two libertarian parties (Libertarian and Constitutionalist), and they only achieved this much because Nader has high name recognition.

We are the true liberals. We are really for the common man. These are winning positions in American history, and they can win for us in 2012.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE CONSERVATIVES

2009-04-27T13:37:00.004-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
4-27-09

Many people, observing the extreme irrationality of the political left, think that the solution is to be found in the conservative movement. My argument here is going to be that this is a false alternative and that both left and right are paths to disaster.

Mark Levin is currently number one on the best seller list with a conservative manifesto entitled, Liberty and Tyranny. His very first sentence is:

“There is simply no scientific or mathematical formula that defines conservatism.”

Liberty and Tyranny, by Mark R. Levin, (New York,
Threshold Editions, 2009), p. 1.

So right at the beginning I must part company with Mr. Levin. If you can’t define what you are talking about, then all your knowledge is intuitive. And intuitive knowledge cannot be proven. (Intuitive knowledge can sometimes be true. You can try it out and see if it works. But you are never completely sure. It may work in a few cases and not work in others.)

It is fundamental to my method of thinking (and I owe this to Ayn Rand) to begin any subject by asking the question, what is it. If one adopts this technique, then one must acquire the skill of defining, and this takes a bit of work, but the effort is well worth the results.

The conservatives in America are a group of people who formed in the 1930s in opposition to F.D.R.’s New Deal. That is, conservatives are not for anything. They are only against. The movement, thus, is amorphous and cannot be defined by a set of principles such as nominalist, secessionist or astrologist. Indeed, the conservative movement in America has changed over my lifetime

When I became a conservative, in the 1950s, the principal conservative position was support for a balanced budget. There was also support for the right of property and opposition to socialism. At that time, there were two branches of the conservative movement, one led by Bob Taft, Sr. and the other led by William Buckley. Buckley was against Communism, but he meant this only in international terms. He was spoiling for a fight with the U.S.S.R. and showed very little interest in fighting attempts to introduce socialism domestically into the United States. Taft, on the other hand, dismissed foreign affairs as “globalony” and wanted to concentrate on fighting communist principles when an attempt was made to introduce them into American life. For example, his major piece of legislation, the Taft-Hartley bill, put a stop to the growth of the union movement in America

Bob Taft was very narrowly defeated for the Republican nomination for President in 1952. Indeed, the election was stolen from him. The legitimate pro-Taft delegates in several states were challenged by rump Eisenhower delegates, and key (biased) rulings were made by the Party establishment which allowed Eisenhower to win.

Ike was not a bad guy. He was a likeable guy, and he had played the key role in the victory over Germany in WWII. But politically he was a child. His election was the country saying, “Thank you Ike for a good job winning the war.” Had Taft been nominated, then he would probably have defeated Stevenson, and the ‘50s would have been a replay of the 1920s (with the war measures being repealed and the currency being returned to its pre-war value). The history of America may well have been very different.

What America needed at that time was a PRO-AMERICA movement. The principles set down by the Founding Fathers created the greatest government in human history. The standard and quality of life in America was the highest of any country in the world. Although Americans did not value militarism and did not fight many wars, when they did, their armies were unbeatable.

What happened was that the conservative movement of the 1940s and ‘50s was split in two. The Buckley movement was focused on military supremacy and kept hoping to involve the U.S. in continual wars. It was not an American movement at all but was based on the European right.

In retrospect, the Cold War was a joke. The U.S. won the Cold War because the Soviet Union lost its confidence in communism. This had nothing to do with Ronald Reagan and was in fact caused by Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev visited America in 1959. Like all the Soviet leaders he was scared to death of American military power. So he made a peace overture. He proposed that the competition between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. be turned into a peaceful competition to see which system could produce the most economic goods for its people.

In conclusion, because he was afraid that his speech might be interpreted as coming from weakness and because he had a boisterous side to his personality, Khrushchev ended with a challenge: “We will bury you.” In context, he meant that we (the U.S.S.R) will bury the U.S. in this peaceful competition.

The American media took these final words of his speech out of context and interpreted them to the American public in a military sense. But the full speech was published and read carefully in Moscow among the top Communists. Khrushchev promised that the U.S.S.R. would overtake the U.S.A. in 25 years.

Prior to this time, the Communists had repeatedly bragged that Communism would over take free enterprise, and they had continually fallen short. In the 1930s, 8 million kulaks had starved to death because Stalin would not admit that Communism had failed and ask the world community for aid. In the 1940s, there was the excuse of the war. The gap between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. was growing, not shrinking, and nobody knew this better than the top Communist leadership in Moscow.

Khrushchev’s speech bolstered their hopes. “This time we’ll do it.” In 25 years (from 1959), we will pass the U.S.A. economically. 25 + 1959 = 1984. And of course, in 1984 the U.S.S.R. was further than ever behind the U.S. As this reality dawned on the Communist leaders, they began to lose faith in communism. The period 1984-89 was the time when the top Soviet leaders lost their belief in communism. The Cold War ended in 1989.

Communism (along with feudalism) was the economic system of the agricultural world up to the 14th century. (I realize that this is totally against what is taught in all universities today. The professional intellectuals are wrong. I present the factual evidence in a book, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, which I hope to have in print in a year or two. For now you will just have to suspend judgement as the evidence is too extensive for one blog.)

England started the abolition of communism in the 15th century. It proceeded slowly and was pretty much complete by the end of the 18th century. When the Pilgrims sailed for Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, their financial backers forced them to organize communistically. As a result, they starved for the first 2 years. But in the spring of 1623, they divided the common land into private property and brought in a large crop, which saved them from starvation. They celebrated this harvest at the very end of July 1623 by proclaiming a day of thanksgiving. And this was the origin of our modern holiday of Thanksgiving. (Read William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation with special attention to March 1623 and late July 1623.)

The French abolished communism in 1793. Napoleon’s armies spread the new system of private property when they conquered other parts of Europe. Communism was abolished and private property instituted in Trier, Germany, Karl Marx’s birthplace, in 1815, 3 years before he was born. During the 19th century private property spread through central and eastern Europe. Finally, in 1906 the Czar of Russia opened the door to private property by allowing individual villages to vote the conversion, and from 1906-1917 Russian villages amounting to 25% of total agricultural production abandoned communism. (These, by the way, were the kulaks whom Stalin murdered in the 1930s.)

So you see that Lenin’s victory in 1917 was not so surprising. He knew that about ¾ of the Russian people were on his side. Russian communism in the 20th century was not a “great experiment.” It was the last defense of a dying order. Reagan did not spend the Soviets into defeat. He just claimed credit for everything good that happened on his watch and ducked the blame for everything bad (such as a stock market crash bigger than Herbert Hoover).

In the 1950s and ‘60s, it became a cliché for people to say, “I am a conservative on fiscal policy and a liberal on foreign policy.” That is, the sound money, balanced budget conservative economic policy was popular with the American people, and the militant pro-war conservative foreign policy was unpopular. As Ike put it, “Peace and prosperity.”

A major change occurred starting in the Nixon Administration and getting a big boost with Reagan. The conservatives abandoned their policy of balancing the budget and financed the government by a massive printing of money, which has continued to this day. This is the first generation in American history to have suffered a decline in its real wages. The nation’s massive trade deficit started early in the Reagan Administration. And today we maintain a lower (but still high by world standards) standard of living by borrowing from countries like China and Japan.

Having totally abandoned the American economic policy (gold standard and balanced budget), today’s conservative movement is obsessed with foreign policy. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, there is no country in the world that remotely can be considered a worthy enemy. The conservatives are reduced to screaming about Iran and other two-bit countries which could not last a month in a serious war with the U.S.

The only threat on the horizon to Americans today is Al Qaeda. And this is a perfect example of the folly of ignoring the wisdom of the Founding Fathers. They warned “no entangling alliances.” Instead of heeding this warning, American Presidents in the latter 20th century kept meddling in crisis after crisis. The rule for that is simple. When you stick your nose into a quarrel between two countries, you usually get both of them mad at you. Osama bin Laden is not a very nice man. But he really hates the government of Saudi Arabia. He would not be our enemy if we had not interfered in that part of the world.

Has anyone asked why the World Trade Center (an office building) was singled out for attack? It was because this was the Rockefeller building. It was built by the Port Authority of NY & NJ as a result of political manipulation by David Rockefeller. Rockefeller spent his life manipulating U.S. foreign policy via his control of the CIA. Exactly what Rockefeller did that got bin Laden mad I do not know. But the Constitution requires that U.S. foreign policy be conducted openly (so that the people know what is being done in their name). The CIA’s purpose is to flout this constitutional requirement, and the result was 9-11-01. (For those who claim that the CIA is a spy agency, the U.S. has several dozen spy agencies. But these do their real job of spying. The last thing that the U.S. needed in the 1940s was another spy agency.)

Bin Laden is now hiding in Pakistan. It was a serious failure of the Bush Administration that they became so pre-occupied with Iraq that they would not go into Pakistan to get Al Qaeda. What we need to do now is to send troops into the Al Qaeda controlled areas of Pakistan and inflict a great deal of pain.

That will teach the bad guys of the world not to mess with the United States of America. At the same time, if we simply mind our own business and restrict our foreign policy to defending our rights, we should not have any repeats of 9-11-01.

Another horrific conservative change of policy is their recent endorsement of Bush Administration detention of people without trial and use of torture. A foreigner who takes up arms against Americans is either an enemy combatant or a criminal. If the former, he has to be treated as a prisoner of war; if the latter, he has to be proven guilty before a court of law. There is no third category where he can be deprived of his liberty without due process of law.

The greatest empire in world history is the British Empire, and it is the British who have the most experience in dealing with strange cultures all over the world. How did the British acquire their large empire? Did they raise large armies and set out upon campaigns of conquest? Not exactly. When England conquered India, she did not raise an army. She did not spend any money. And she did not know that she was conquering India.

What happened was that some Englishmen went to India to buy tea and sell it back in England. One day an Indian Rajah, with a professional army of 40,000 men, attacked the British tea company, consisting of 2,000 clerks with little military experience. The 2,000 English clerks defeated the 40,000 man Indian army. This basic sequence kept repeating and soon the tea company had conquered India.

Why did the tea company conquer India? Because in 1689, the English had adopted the Bill of Rights (the ancestor of the U.S. Bill of Rights). In the 18th century, it became part of British culture to respect other people’s rights. As a result, the Indians wanted to be ruled by the British. In a word, the British won their empire by being nice. They didn’t win it by being tough. They didn’t win it by making people afraid of them. They won it by being decent.

Plenty of people have played the game of international politics by being tough. Their bones litter the pages of history. The conservatives simply do not want to learn. Another example which shows the nature of the conservative movement is what happened when they took control of Congress in the 1994 election. National Public Radio is staffed by crazy people from the extreme left. If there really were two opposing parties, left and right, then in 1995 the Republicans, now on control of NPR funding, would have kicked out the leftists and replaced them by rightists. But no, the Republicans in Congress were just as happy with the left-wing crazies as the Democrats had been.

What America needs is a return to the principles of the Founding Fathers. To be forced to make a choice between a party of love and a party of hate is the path followed by 4th century Rome. That way lies destruction.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net

THE RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE

2009-04-20T00:23:00.003-04:00

By Howard S. Katz
4-20-09

As you know, I consider myself to be cynical about modern society and have a negative view about many of the institutions of our time. However, I have recently been reading the works of Dr. Sherry Rogers, and she has absolutely knocked me off my haunches with a discussion of taking aspirin to prevent heart attack. As it happens, I am not cynical enough.

As you know, taking a daily aspirin to prevent heart attacks is now the standard recommendation among American cardiologists. It has almost universal approval and is widely practiced. Dr. Rogers is very knowledgeable about the scientific literature on the subject. She reports that taking a daily aspirin doubles one’s risk of having a stroke and increases one’s risk of several cancers. There are a collection of studies which show that, on balance, aspirin does more harm than good.

How could this be? From where did the study come indicating that it is a good idea to take aspirin? The answer is that this study was funded by Bayer Aspirin, and Bufferin was the medication used in the study. Bufferin is simply aspirin which is buffered by adding magnesium, and magnesium has been proven many times to reduce one’s risk of heart attack. (I have been taking magnesium for some time as a preventive.)

In words of one syllable, the Bufferin study succeeded because magnesium lowers your risk of heart attack. All of the other studies together show that aspirin itself has a harmful, not a beneficial, effect. When the Bufferin study was completed, Bayer promoted the results via a slick PR campaign which omitted mention of the magnesium and stressed the idea that aspirin prevented heart attack. It is sad to say that the nation’s cardiologists are so careless and incompetent that this lie sailed completely by them, and as a result the health of millions of people is being endangered. (See, The High Blood Pressure Hoax, by Sherry A. Rogers, M.D., [Sarasota, FL, Sand Key Co., 2005], pp. 35-37, also The Cholesterol Hoax, Ibid., pp. 66-68.)

There are similar discoveries which I have made in the past (but few quite so shocking). The implications you can draw from this concerning the competence and ethical standard of your cardiologist are, unfortunately, confirmed by many additional facts. For example, the scientific evidence on the heart bypass operation says that it does not work. Heart attack victims, who are recommended for a bypass, are divided into two groups: one group turns the operation down; the other group accepts it. At the end of 11 years, the two groups are surveyed. The percentage alive in each group is the same. Going through the trauma of the operation has done nothing to extend their lives. (See, Heart Frauds, by Charles T. McGee, M.D., Coeur d’Alene, ID, MediPress, 1993), pp. 24-30.) Yet, your cardiologist will swear that the bypass operation he recommends is essential to save your life. (And you probably won’t dare to ask him for the scientific evidence for his opinion.)

On the other hand, it has been proven in study after study that the simple taking of 400 I.U. of vitamin E (in the form of d-alpha tocopherol) reduces one’s risk of a heart attack by 40%. 400 I.U. of vitamin E costs 50¢ per day. A bypass operation costs $70,000. Yet modern medicine overwhelmingly recommends the bypass, and most cardiologists will not recommend vitamin E. (That is, most cardiologists will not recommend vitamin E to you; however, studies have shown that most of them take it themselves.)

Indeed, there are a series of fraudulent studies intended to discredit vitamin E. The technique is usually the same. Instead of using d-alpha tocopherol, the study will use d-l-alpha tocopherol. The d form is the right-handed form of the molecule; the l form is left handed. It is only the right-handed form which is effective, and mixing in the left handed sharply reduces the good effect of the medication. If a researcher wants to discredit vitamin E, he simply does his experiment with the d-l form and uses a small dose. Then he finds that the benefits are nil. The results of this experiment are then PRed in such a way as to imply that vitamin E does not work.

To add insult to injury, it has recently been discovered that d-alpha tocopherol works better when combined with 3 sister nutrients (beta, gamma and delta tocopherol) and that these work better when combined with 4 cousins called alpha, beta, gamma and delta tocotrienol. The most advanced doctors now regard vitamin E as all 8 nutrients together, and this is the way to get the best results. However, among establishment cardiologists the other 7 nutrients do not exist.

Given that vitamin E (d-alpha tocopherol) saves the lives of 40% of the people who take it and that some 600,000 people die each year from heart disease, this is a total of 250,000 people whose lives could be saved each year. This is the story of one nutrient and one disease. How many people die from this kind of incompetence in toto is unknown, but the number must be enormous.

The standard explanation on the part of people knowledgeable about nutrition is that the cause of this outrageous waste of human life is money. The nation’s cardiologists concentrate on treatments which are very expensive, and even though a cheaper treatment may be better for the patient, they will not prescribe it. To save themselves from guilt, they make sure to remain ignorant about all of these less expensive treatments.

However, the desire for money (or, in non-money societies, wealth, or in very primitive societies, just plain self interest) is universal. And yet the United States, prior to 1965, had the best health care system in the world. I remember the conquest of polio and the sense of hope and confidence that swept the nation. Americans of the 19th and early 20th century were motivated by their self interest just as much as every other group of people in the human race. But they did not achieve their self interest by hurting each other. Rather they cooperated with each other in the creation of wealth and to make life better.

For medicine this meant that there was an intense desire on the part of doctors (or those in the field of health) to do good for people. The first doctor to discover the cure for a given disease would become famous. His career would be made, and he would become wealthy. This created a strong motive for exploration and discovery, for doing the best work one could do. And America led the world in medicine (and in most other fields).

All this changed in 1965. At that point, the government stepped in and started to provide health care for those above age 65 and below a certain income. Since the Government officials who doled out the money did not care how much they spent, the amount of money flowing into health care exploded. Doctors (and other health care professionals), instead of devoting their energies to curing more diseases, devoted their energies to inventing more and more expensive medicines (and procedures), in particular for the elderly. Then they sent the bill to the Government, and the Government paid.

Notice the effect of religion on this aspect of our lives. Nobody debates religion. It is off limits. But pretty much all of the people who voted Democrat in 1964 believed that “money is the root of all evil.” They wanted to remove the influence of money from medicine. Now instead of money motivating doctors to do good, it motivates them to squeeze money out of stupid and unethical patients, who themselves think that they are squeezing money out of “the system.”

Note also that, when this issue is discussed, it is framed in terms of selfishness versus unselfishness. Selfishness is the sacrifice of another person’s interests to one’s own. Unselfishness is the sacrifice of one’s own interests to another.

Now when Henry Ford sold cars which were good but inexpensive, so that the average person could afford them, was he being selfish? He certainly made millions of dollars. But he also made millions of people very happy because now they could afford to own a car. Nobody’s interests were sacrificed, and everyone (who dealt with Ford) was better off. The same is true for all of the great American producers of that age. What is the word for that in our culture? Henry Ford was not selfish (because he did not hurt others), and he was not unselfish (because he made millions). OUR SOCIETY DOES NOT EVEN HAVE A WORD FOR THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR IN WHICH BOTH PARTIES TO AN AGREEMENT COME OUT AHEAD.

I have had this argument many times with people on the political left. They are incapable of imagining a situation where both parties to an arrangement benefit. Millions of examples of this go on every day. They themselves benefit when they get their paycheck from their employer, buy food at the farm stand, purchase clothing, books, vacations, etc. All of this goes right over their head. They “know” that it must be impossible because Christianity teaches them that men’s interests must be opposed to each other, and therefore either you must sacrifice your interests to the other guy or his interests to yours. And if religion does not get discussed, our society is never going to get to the bottom of things.

Note that America’s founding fathers, who had Calvinist upbringings, set up a political system in which people would be rewarded (get money) for improving other people’s lives. That is, they set up a system based on justice. Reward the good; punish the evil. We are now changing back to the system of the Middle Ages, based on Catholic Christianity, which preaches love.

There are a large body of decent people who see the outrageous things which go on in current day American medicine. For example, pregnant women are pressured into using a fetal monitor during delivery. The monitor gives a great many false signals, each one triggering a Caesarian section. From 1970 to 1990 the percentage of live births which were done by Caesarian went from 5% to 25%. The doctors and hospitals made a lot of money (via health insurance), but the results, for both mother and child, were worse than before the fetal monitor came into use.

These decent people do what they can. Some of them are alternative doctors (who put the well being of their patients above their profits and treat primarily with herbs and nutrients). Some operate health food stores. But almost all of them make the mistake of thinking that the problem is the desire for money. Since they cannot abolish the desire for money, they are at a loss as to how to proceed. AND THE FACT THAT 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURY AMERICANS WERE WELL KNOWN FOR BEING A MONEY-DRIVEN SOCIETY AND YET HELPED EACH OTHER IN NUMEROUS WAYS, CREATING THE MOST GENEROUS AND SUCCESSFUL SOCIETY THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN, HAS TODAY BEEN FORGOTTEN.

The (health care) system used to work. It worked when I was a child. It stopped working when the people of this country voted (in 1964) that money was evil and that medicine should be taken out of the sphere of money. I predicted then what would happen. Today it happens routinely. Think about it. Almost 2,000 Americans die every day from heart disease. Yet third world societies, where the people run around in loin cloths and do not have a written language and where their treatment for disease is from medicine men, do not have heart disease. Why can’t the leading cardiologists of our modern, scientific society do as good as job of curing/preventing heart disease as the primitive medicine men?

The logic which is operating is as follows: 1) Money is evil. 2) Government bureaucrats are somehow not motivated by money (“public servant” is the phrase). Therefore, giving more power to the government must be the solution. It was this logic which led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. Strangely, almost everyone in the alternative medicine movement is aware of the evil of the FDA. The FDA has overthrown the First Amendment to the Constitution and outlawed free speech for the manufacturers of nutrients and herbs.

Drugs are patentable products. Nutrients and herbs are not patentable, and anyone can go into the business of making them. In almost every area of the American economy, non-patentable products compete vigorously with patentable. The non-patentable are cheaper, and the patentable claim to be better. The consumer hears the arguments of both sides and makes his choice. But in medicine the consumer is not allowed to hear the arguments of the nutrient/herb producers (because of FDA regulations). Thus a patient with a given disease is not aware that there are medications which are both cheaper and better than the one his doctor prescribes. Indeed, because the insurance is paying, many patients (the most stupid) want the high priced medicine because they are thinking, “I beat the system. The highest priced must be the best.” This way of thinking is a one-way ticket to the graveyard.

The idea that people have a right to medical care is wrong. A right is a freedom of action. People have a natural right to those freedoms of action which they would have in a state of nature. They do not have a right to those economic goods which are produced by the labor of other human beings. The false belief in a right to medical care comes from Germany, which got it from Russia. The history of these two countries shows a brutal and evil contempt for human life. Stalin killed 8 million kulaks by starvation. Hitler killed 12 million people in the Holocaust. During WWII, Stalin sent out no-retreat orders and established death squads to kill his own soldiers if they tried to retreat. He also killed almost all of his old comrades who helped him make the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and he worked millions more to death in the Gulag Archipelago.

These people know nothing of rights, and they know nothing of politics. Those Americans who follow them are the worst people in our society. The human cost of the “right” to health care has already been millions of lives. With President Obama’s establishment of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, that total will mount, and our society’s contempt for human life will become more blatant.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE

2009-04-13T10:12:00.002-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
4-14-09

I have been a bit frustrated, in one sense, with the discussion on religion because there are so many important political issues which desperately need comment. But from the nature of your questions and comments, it has been a very fruitful and necessary discussion. Religion deals with crucially important issues of philosophy and, in particular, morality. Indeed, hardly anyone in our present society can discuss morality without going immediately into religion, and the main reason that the country is divided into two political groups which can make absolutely no progress in convincing each other is that, while the nation throws itself enthusiastically into the subject of politics, there is an agreed-upon ban on subjects of morality/religion. It is like trying to reach a conclusion in geometry or logic without stating one’s first premises.

And yet, history shows a very nice correlation between changes in religion and corresponding changes in politics. Rome became (Catholic) Christian in 394 A.D. and fell in 410 A.D. We all know about the English Reformation of 1533-35 A.D. This was followed by the growth of a democracy movement around 1600 A.D., the English Civil War of 1642-46 A.D. (a failed attempt to convert England into a democracy) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (in which England finally became a democracy). There was also John Calvin’s teaching in Switzerland, which led to Swiss democracy. The ideas had further influence in Holland and Britain.

We are now living in an era which might be called the counter-Reformation (in a larger sense). It began in Germany in the mid-19th century (when the forces of democracy appeared to be unstoppable). The German aristocrats were desperately searching for a defense against the democratic/liberal forces, which had crossed to the continent of Europe via the French Revolution in 1789. Napoleon’s victories had shown that monarchy could no longer be imposed by force, and a series of European revolutions (1830, 1848, 1871) gave practical import to this conclusion.

The response came from religion, specifically Jesus of Nazareth’s teaching that one had a moral obligation to feel the emotion of love. In 1875, a movement, called social democracy, started in the new country of Germany (which had been founded in 1866) to form a government based on love. This was in direct conflict with the American concept of government as the institution in society dedicated to the protection of people’s rights. The German theory was that government was a big father, who loved his subjects and would give them something for nothing. To implement this idea that government gives people something for nothing, the German government, starting in 1881, enacted socialized medicine, and this was followed by accident insurance, unemployment insurance and social security. From 1880 to 1920, Germans walked around with their noses in the air and boasted that they lived in a country of love. Americans, by contrast, were rugged individualists (meaning that they were deficient in love and did not have human concern for their fellow man).

It is interesting to note that, when Otto von Bismarck, the German Chancellor, introduced his socialized medicine bill in 1881, he referred to it as Christian government. I think he was accurate in this as socialized medicine is based on Jesus of Nazareth’s doctrine of love.

As the Germans paraded around in the late 19th and early 20th centuries boasting that they were full of love, the fundamentals of the philosophy of love began to come out. As I have noted, no one can control his emotions, and a person who commits himself to a philosophy of love does not feel any more love than anyone else. Initially, we humans have exactly the same amount and intensity of love and hate as dogs (or other animals), who do not spin philosophies about their emotions but merely feel them. What happens to adherents of the philosophy of love when something causes them to feel hate, is that they characteristically pretend the hate does not exist. Since the hate is not acknowledged, it cannot be discharged, and it builds up. The characteristic of such a country is that large numbers of people are full of hate and are pretending to feel love. I have cited the medieval priest, who has arranged for the heretic to be burned alive, but who publicly prays for the soul of the heretic (to show his great love). This perfectly expresses the emotions of love and hate in such a society. To take a more modern example, one occasionally sees bumper stickers today with the message: “I survived Catholic school.”

These messages, of course, are not promoted by Jews or Protestants. They are promoted by Catholics. Why do the Catholic nuns provoke such hatred among their own charges as to cause this reaction? The answer is that they are people with a philosophy of love and a great deal of hate in their hearts. They therefore become expert at injuring their charges (who are largely in their power) while pretending to be acting for the latter’s good.

Suffice it to say that, by 1920, Germany contained a large number of people who, in outer form, were people of love but who were actually walking around with large amounts of hate inside them.

Looking from the vantage point of 1925, a patriotic German might well have said, “Gee, our country has had an awful lot of bad luck.” We are generally acknowledged to be the leading country in Europe. But we lost the war. Our social security system went bankrupt. From 1914-23, our currency lost virtually all of its value destroying the savings of the middle class. A communist revolution almost seized power. A wave of political assassinations has swept the country, and the police don’t seem to be able to put a stop to it.”

Adolf Hitler had the explanation for this run of “bad luck,” an explanation he got from Benito Mussolini. Germany had been too good. Germany had tried to run its affairs by means of love. That was the cause of its misfortune. But love doesn’t work. Hitler could have inferred this from his personal life. Up to the age of 29, he was a bleeding heart. He lived in poverty trying to create great works of art to spiritually uplift the world. He was a vegetarian. (:”Love animals; don’t eat them.”) That, he reasoned, was the problem. Being good got you nothing but trouble. The solution was to be evil. What Germany needed was leadership by evil. That was the policy he preached from 1919 (when he joined the Nazi Party) to 1933, when he was voted dictator. (Contrary to prevailing American opinion Hitler was very popular through most of the 1930s. He did not receive an absolute majority in the election of 1933 because Germany was a multi-party state. There were 5 parties with 8% or more of the vote, and it was virtually impossible for any one of them to get a majority. The Nazis received 44% of the vote. They were joined by the Nationalist Party and the Catholic Centre Party, who received a combined vote of 19%, in passing the Enabling Act, which made Hitler dictator.)

You would not know it from a study of the 1930s, but in the early 1920s Germany was very much a left-wing country. I have already mentioned the communist revolution of 1919. From 1919 to 1933, Germany went from the political left to the political right. The question is, how did this happen?

The answer is that during the 1920s (or more precisely what is called the Weimar period, which was 1919-1933) Germany was plagued by a series of left-wing political movements which threw the country into turmoil and drove the average German up a wall. The Germany of that day was the home of Modern Art. Next door, in Austria, was Sigmund Freud saying that little children have sexual desires. And there were widespread movements in favor of homosexual activity and cross dressing. The term “transvestite” was coined in Germany at about this time. (We now know that Freud’s theory that 5-year old children have sexual desires is wrong because there is no testosterone in their blood.)

It is crystal-clear what was going on in Hitler’s mind through this period. All of Germany’s troubles came from being good. You know how, here in America, the left is insufferably superior. They walk around with their noses in the air and, while proclaiming that moral propositions cannot be proven, also proclaim that the left always hold the morally superior position. Thus, it was accepted as a given at that time that tolerance of the homosexual lifestyle (and all of the other crazy left-wing movements) was good.

What was Germany’s solution? Since being good had gotten her into so much trouble, the solution was obvious. Germany had to follow a path of evil. And the more evil the better. The more evil Germany was the more successful she would be.

Readers should recognize that this argument did not begin with Mussolini. The first record we have of this argument was from Saul of Tarsus (St. Paul). He proclaimed that, “All men are sinners.” And indeed, when his movement had converted all of the Roman Empire to Christianity, very few of the new Christians made much of an effort to practice the good, as defined by Jesus of Nazareth. After all, they believed in a God of Forgiveness. They practiced a ritual whereby, if they admitted their sins to a designated holy person, then the sin would be erased. Reward and punishment for good and evil acts were transferred to an imaginary world after one was dead, a world completely controlled by the Church. And the Church was more likely to reward or punish based on its bureaucratic requirements here on earth.

The very important historical fact is that, after Hitler became dictator in 1933, the political left collapsed. If you pay any attention to politics in general, you know that whenever any group wins a victory, its supporters relax and its opponents’ energy is redoubled. (Note the increased energy in the American conservative movement after the inauguration of Obama.) But that did not happen in Germany. Rather, the political left collapsed. With the exception of a very small number of people (who deserve our admiration), the German left ceased to exist. If you stand back and look at the big picture, it is obvious that the reason for the succession of left-wing movements was to put across the idea that morality does not work, that morality is impractical, and the only sensible way to act was the path of immorality.

That is, the left was trying to achieve the political victory of the right. And when they achieved it, they could relax. This was what they had been trying to do.

This also explains why, although the left wins many local victories in many countries and times in history, it always loses in the long run. A good example is the Czar of Russia. The title “Czar” is an obvious corruption of “Caesar.” And indeed Roman Emperors were all called Caesars. But the Russian Czar is known as a right-wing tyrant, as were most of the Roman Caesars. And Julius Caesar himself was a left-wing politician, a member of the People’s Party of ancient Rome. How did this come to be? Where was the great betrayal? The answer is that, try as you may, you cannot find it. Left shaded into right so gradually and subtly that we can not tell when it happened.

The answer is that left and right are as closely tied as Jesus of Nazareth and Saul of Tarsus. The first provides the irrational code of morality (which does not work), and the second rejects morality and champions evil on the grounds that it is practical. This is one world-view, a world-view which probably began with various pagan religions, which divides in two parts and pretends to fight itself.

The pro-homosexual movement in American at the present time is directly modeled on the corresponding movement in Weimar Germany. It is intended to drive the American people over to the far right and get them to vote for some future Hitler.

Therefore for us to go over to the right in anger against the repugnant and immoral actions of the political left would be a dreadful mistake. That is what they want of us.

Our inspiration here should be the Founding Fathers, who had no moral vs. practical dichotomy at all. They approached the science of politics from the attitude of reason and did not divide into left and right.

Finally, let us consider what is a proper attitude toward homosexuality, beginning with the basic question, what is it? A homosexual is a person who feels a sexual attraction to the same (not the opposite) sex.

Given this definition it is virtually impossible for homosexuals to exist because of the theory of evolution. If there has ever appeared a homosexual gene in all of the hundreds of millions of years of the history of life on earth, then it was at a very great disadvantage to reproduce itself (especially a male homosexual gene). The odds that such a gene could survive for even a few generations are infinitesimal.

This conclusion corresponds nicely to my experience living on the fringe of Greenwich Village, Manhattan for about 15 years. I kept meeting homosexuals who, as it would turn out, did indeed have a sexual desire for the opposite sex. And I came up with the rule-of-thumb, all homosexuals are liars.

There is, in each of us, a strong repugnance to the thought of relations with the same sex. Again evolution places this in us to assist the survival and propagation of the species. However, it is possible to exert one’s will and overcome this repugnance. There is material from ancient societies about human beings who have sexual relations with animals (e.g., the Minotaur). I think that the major explanation for same-sex activity at the current time. is the desire, on the part of certain males, for uncomplicated sex which does not require the wooing and attention that the normal female demands. Lesbianism, on the other hand, is always associated with a very strong hatred of men. (If homosexuality were caused by a gene, it would be a million-to-one shot for this gene to invariably be associated with this anti-male ideology.)

Thus what is called homosexuality is nothing more than a perversion, that is, a decision to engage in a form of sexual activity which directly involves this repugnance and which chooses to override it.

What should our attitude toward homosexuals be? Well, since marriage is a contract involving sex, and homosexuals cannot, strictly speaking, perform the sex act (with each other), homosexual marriage is an impossibility (like flying by flapping one’s arms). The movement for homosexual marriage is simply another attempt to fill us with anger and drive us over to a Hitler-like political figure. The proper attitude toward homosexuals, as all perverts, is contempt. Other than that they have the right to live their lives (as long as they do not violate the rights of others). The political attempt to legitimize this perversion, i.e., make an official statement that such perversion is good, is imposing their (corrupt) morality on the public and violates the 1st Amendment.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

SADDUCEE PHILOSOPHY (CONT.)

2009-04-06T19:47:00.001-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
4-6-09

A reader has come up with a series of 11 questions on the Sadducee philosophy. I think these are good questions and will help further the discussion.

1 Do you believe the God of the Bible or Torah exists and is the Creator of the world?

1 I do not believe in the God of the Bible, or any god. Any god or spirit (other than the human spirit) is incompatible with the law of causality. You might call me an atheist, but the term leads to certain misunderstandings because of association with 18th-20th century atheists, and these people could not answer the question, how should one act? This is the big difference between Moses and the modern atheist. “How should one act” was the first question in Moses’ mind, and this led him to a completely new theory of ethics. To the 18th-20th century atheist, ethics was the sphere of religion. Therefore he left it completely alone and effectively had no code of ethics. (Or, more precisely, he simply followed the ethical code he had been taught as a child and could not justify his ethics rationally. When questioned on this point, such atheists defended themselves by pointing out that they were as ethical as the average person. Actually, they were more ethical for the simple reason that the doctrine of forgiveness and the nature of the teachings of Jesus make a person very unethical.)

You might call me a causalist (one who believes the law of causality governs the universe). I think that Moses had the same view. The causality movement in ancient Egypt made a tactical decision (probably before Moses was born) to compromise and present to the public the idea of one God rather than no gods, and it was this compromise which won the support of Akhenaton. Moses taught that God:

• had no shape;
• had no place (being both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular);
• had no name;

At the burning bush (Exodus, Ch. 3, vs. 13-14), Moses asks God his name. This is an
important question because Moses was not an Israelite (or if you believe the Bible story
did not at this time know that he was an Israelite). He was a member of the oppressor
class. How could he prove to the Children of Israel that he was fit to lead them out of
Egypt if he did not even know the name of their god?

God answers Moses’ very reasonable question by saying, “I am that I am.” That is, God
is saying he has no name. This answer makes no sense in terms of the narrative and must
have been there to make an ideological point.

• did not do anything;

What God does, according to Moses, is to give you the consequences of your actions.
That is, He gives you what you would have gotten if He didn’t exist.

Now what kind of an entity has no shape, no place, no name and does not do anything? The kind which does not exist. It seems clear to me that Moses intended to take this final step but was prevented by his death.

2 Do you believe either the Bible or Torah/Pentateuch is the literal Word Of GOD?

2 I do not believe that the Bible is the literal word of God. Certainly the Bible does not claim to be the word of God. Rather it attributes its authorship to human beings (“the five books of Moses,’ “the book of Jeremiah,” “the book of Isaiah,” etc.).

The (Jewish) Bible is the great literature of the Children of Israel. One might collect the great literature of the Greek people from the 8th to the 3rd centuries B.C. (Hesiod, Thales, Aristotle, Euclid, etc.) or the British people from the 16th to the 18th centuries A. D. (Newton, Locke, Smith, etc.) The difference is that the Israelites were focused on the question, how should one act, and this is why their writings have such appeal to all peoples at all times and why the Bible is the consistent leader of the best seller list. To impose the dichotomy that either it comes from God and is sacred or it is false is not realistic. It comes from human beings and must be judged in that light.

The word “Bible” comes from the Greek “biblos” meaning book. Effectively, the Bible was THE BOOK. The people who came up with this name were saying, if there is one book you are going to read, then this is the book. It is the most important book.

People who believe that the Bible is the word of God do not seem to know that there are 3 Bibles (in our culture). The Jewish Bible is the smallest. The Catholic Bible is the largest. And the Protestant Bible is in the middle. So here are 3 different groups of human beings who cannot agree on what is the word of God. If I had the authority to identify a Sadducee Bible (which of course I don’t), I would make it smaller still (taking out Isaiah II and the Book of Job).

The bottom line is that you are a human being, and you must decide what is true using the judgement of your own mind. There is no other way. Here are 3 groups of other people trying to badger you into accepting their (different) beliefs by telling you they come from God. Shame on you if you believe that.

3 If not, then why do you quote a book you don’t believe as a source of fact?

3 I treat the Bible as I treat any other of the literature written by human beings which I respect as great. I might quote the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” from the Declaration of Independence. I quote the Bible (those parts of it with which I agree) in the same sense.

4 If men are not referred to as sinners in the Bible then why is the word sin used 198 times in reference to mankind in the Torah or fist five books of the Bible?

4 It just seems to me common sense and was the view of Moses that mankind has free will. Man has the capacity to sin, and he has the capacity to be good. Some men choose the one; some choose the other. But there is nothing inherent in human nature predisposing people to sin. If you do sin, then today is the first day of the rest of your life. That sin cannot be erased, and you can not avoid the bad consequences. Simply go ahead and live as good a life as you can from that point.1

5 Reading from either the Torah or the bible can you explain the practice of the “sin” offering as commanded in Leviticus 16. With special explanation centering on 16:6-10 and 16:20-23.

5 You are correct that these passages are totally opposed to the main theme of the Torah. One cannot put off one’s sin onto a goat (or another person, etc.). But we have to interpret the books ascribed to Moses realistically. At the time of the Exodus, the Hebrews did not have a written language. The Bible was first written down about 1,000 B.C., some 250 years after Moses died. The teachings of Moses were preserved in an oral tradition whereby certain scholars committed them to memory and taught them to the next generation, etc. We have only to compare this situation with our own time whereby many of the teachings of the Founding Fathers have been forgotten, misinterpreted and confused with older, wrong ideas despite the fact that they were preserved in writing from the first and that they are backed up by supporting documentation.

6 Are you asserting in your article that men set the standard of ethical conduct (values) by mutual agreement based on need, and that it is not set by God in the Bible?

6 Neither alternative is correct. The standard of ethical conduct was DISCOVERED by certain great men (Moses and his disciples) not set by mutual agreement. Ethics is a science, and its truths must be discovered by the method similar to chemistry, archeology, astronomy, mathematics, etc. In none of these fields is the standard of truth mutual agreement.

7 Christians believe that God created Adam and Eve. God created them sinless. God also created them with a free will. Because they had a free will they had the ability to chose to do right or wrong. They chose to disobey God (sin), God did not make them disobey. So, why do you twist the teachings of Christianity and at the same time contradict yourself by saying that John Calvin was one of the greatest men in history when he taught the very things I mentioned?

7 First disobedience is not a sin. Morality does not consist of obedience to authority. (In 1933, the Germans swore complete disobedience to their Leader.) Second, the book of Genesis was not written by Moses and represents a summation of the Israelite pre-monotheistic beliefs. (In the Hebrew version of Genesis, the word for God appears in the plural.) Third, Christians have traditionally argued that the sin of Adam and Eve was passed on to their descendents (i.e., everybody in the world). If I were inclined to believe in God, then the idea that he was holding me responsible for a sin I did not commit a sin which occurred even before I was born, would be a deal breaker for sure. As for Calvin, the gentle, loving Christians of his day used to burn people alive and bury them alive for disagreeing with them on the most obscure points. To survive and have a chance of getting his philosophy across, he gave lip service to a lot of things he did not believe. Look at what happened to the Calvinists in Holland late in the 16th century when they disagreed with King Charles.

8 How many sects of Jews are there? Do they all believe the same thing? I’ll answer that for you. NO! Then why do you lump all Christians into the same category?

8 A Christian is someone who believes in the divinity of (the man known as) Christ. It logically follows from this that they believe that his moral teachings are correct. I usually use “Christian” to refer to people who believe both of these things. These are the true Christians. I also acknowledge that certain Protestant sects do not adhere to Jesus’ moral teachings, although they believe in his divinity. Low Protestant Calvinists, such as the Puritans and the Pilgrims, are a good example of this, and I consider such people quasi-Christians.

9 If we all can’t agree then how do you know who’s right? I suggest we go to the source, the Bible.

9 See my answer to 2, 3 and 6.

10 If we can’t agree that the Bible is God’s Word and the standard of right and wrong set by God, then everything is mere opinion and your view of good is no better than my view of good and you can’t say that what I’m doing is wrong or vice versa. It’s all relative. That’s a recipe for chaos.

10 Was Galileo’s view of physics (that the heavier weight would fall at the same speed as the lighter weight) no better than his opponents’ view of physics? Galileo said that his opponents were wrong, and he proved it via the method of science. To the contrary, it is the belief in a God which is the recipe for chaos. Your Bible says that, when the evil man comes to harm you, then you should both turn the other cheek and give him an eye for an eye. That is chaos. Your Bible says, in the Song of Solomon, that sex is a beautiful thing and in the New Testament that it is a shameful thing. Your Bible tells its followers to be fruitful but also to take no thought for tomorrow, what ye shall eat or what ye shall wear.

In reality, the Catholic Church was trying to form one religion by compromising a great many religions which existed in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. Like any compromise the result was full of contradictions (with the dispute over iconoclasm or the dispute between the Arians and the Trinitarians two good examples). The Catholic solution to this was to kill everyone who disagreed with them and pretend there was no disagreement at all. This is why the Bible can be interpreted in a thousand different ways by a thousand different sects. The original Jewish Bible, meaning the teachings of Moses and his disciples, was not intended to be all things to all men. It was intended to teach a specific way of life. The children of Tzadok have been practicing that way of life for 3 millennia

11 But wait we can have government tell us what’s right or wrong and vote on it by majority, because we all have mutual needs. Everything will work out trust us. Has that worked so far?

11 No, and on this point you are right. But for this we have to go to the philosophy of John Locke, and of this my ancestors had no knowledge (although their intuition was pretty good in the Book of Samuel when they told the people that God did not want them to have a king.

I should also point out that many of the well-known quotations from the New Testament are either mistranslations or lies. In the statement by Isaiah that “a virgin shall conceive…” (which supposedly predicts the birth of Jesus) the actual Hebrew says “young woman;” it does not say “virgin.” And the quote, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” actually says “Love thy friend, for he is another self.” Since loving your friend is natural and automatic this is not telling you to make yourself feel an emotion. In fact, it is the opposite of Jesus’ injunction, “Love thine enemy.” I am sure that, if we could go back in time and talk to Moses, he would say, “Hate thine enemy.” And I would agree.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net

OVERVIEW

2009-03-31T02:23:00.002-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
3-30-09

I want to thank those people who have e-mailed their comments. There are too many for me to answer individually, but they give me a good sense of what you are thinking. I think that the discussion is on a high level. Human actions are determined by the ideas in our heads. If we have the wrong ideas, then our actions will be inappropriate, and we will not achieve the results we seek. Further, we often accept (false) ideas as true and then forget we have done so. These bad ideas continue to operate in our minds and lead to false conclusions.

A good example of this is the conservative criticism of Obama’s economic policies. The policies are bad, but the conservatives are arguing that the proof of this is the recent decline in the stock market. They have the idea that Obama is trying to rob from the rich to give to the poor, i.e., that he is moral but impractical. Their phrase for such people is “do gooder.”

I am getting pretty strong signals that the stock market is about to turn up. Neither Obama nor any other New Dealer has really believed in robbing from the rich to give to the poor, although they try hard to give that impression. The New Deal understood that it was the rich who gave campaign donations which in turn financed the ads which won the votes of the poor. They pretended to rob the rich, and their tax policy reflects this. But their economic policy was the exact opposite. It ran budget deficits, which were the trigger for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and print money. This brought large amounts of wealth to Wall St. and the bankers, and this far offset the effect of the graduated income tax.

When interest rates are lowered and money is created, the stock market goes up, and for this reason the conservative prediction that the stock market will continue down is going to blow up in their face. FDR immediately began the policy of lowering interest rates and printing money. The stock market (DJI) almost doubled during his first year in office and doubled again over 4 years. He was definitely not a traitor to his class.

Where did the conservatives get this idea that the problem with the world was a large number of people who are too moral and have no practical sense? They got it from the Christian religion, which teaches that the spiritual universe is separate from and contradictory to the materialistic universe. In other words, they see things in terms of the body-soul dichotomy. This idea was taught to them in childhood as part of their religion, and it remains in their minds clouding their view of reality. The stock market has gone down for two months under the new Obama Administration. It will probably now turn and go up for several years, and the 2000 DJI point decline will be quickly forgotten.

The conservatives can’t win elections because they are repeatedly wrong. They are wrong because they can’t see reality as it is. And they can’t see reality because they have accepted a key wrong idea from Christianity which colors their thinking and brings them to wrong conclusions. Over more than 2000 years of the body side and the soul side fighting each other, neither side has been able to win a victory. I see similar wrong conclusions in the minds of my friends and the people around me, and these cause failures in their personal lives which lead to much pain and suffering.

Rather than try to address a few of these questions one-by-one, I think it will be better to give an overview. This will give you a better sense of what I am trying to say.

The greatest event in history (actually about 1000 years before history started with Herodotus) was the formation in ancient Egypt circa 1400 B.C. of an intellectual movement which rejected animism and correctly saw that events occurred because of the law of cause and effect. Since all the gods of that time were an expression of animism, this movement was atheistic. However, it soon learned that it was too big a step to ask people to completely give up the idea of animate gods (who moved the world and made events happen). So this movement compromised and said that there was one god. It called this god Aton, and this compromise won the support of the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaton (the spirit of the sun) and imposed the belief in one god on the people of Egypt.

Sadly, Akhenaton was ahead of his time. An anti-monotheist movement arose. It probably poisoned King Tut (Akhenaton’s nephew) and seized power during the turmoil which ensued. Moses was a prince of Egypt in the province of Gosen (Goshen), which is in the northeast corner of Egypt by the Red Sea. He was a follower of the causality movement, and when he saw the victory of the polytheists, he conceived a plan. He took the nomads (apiru in Egyptian, hence Hebrew) living in Gosen, led them out of Egypt and taught them Akhenaton’s religion of one god. It is significant that the Hebrew word for Lord is Adonoi, and this is substituted for the name of God when Jewish prayers are spoken, even to this day. “Adonoi” is a slight variation of “Aton.” (“d” and “t” are similar sounds and substitute for each other in many languages. “oi” is a Hebrew ending.)

The key idea that Moses taught to the Children of Israel was the idea of justice. Since the inanimate universe obeys the law of cause and effect, how should we animate beings behave? We have free will and are free to violate the law of cause and effect, but the principle of justices tells us, in the most emphatic terms, not to do so. Try to live in harmony with the law of cause and effect. Expect to receive the effects of your causes. Give the good man the good effects of his good causes, and give the evil man the bad effects of his bad causes.

The job which Moses had set for himself was too big for one man’s lifetime. But after his death, the prophets arose to continue his message. Over many centuries, the basic idea got through. If you want to understand the character of the Jewish people, it is that they incorporate the idea of justice into their personal lives, but due to a tragic error (described in detail in the First Book of Samuel) they do not apply it to politics. From precisely this time (the elevation of Saul as King), Jewish politics begins to deteriorate and ceases to operate by the principle of justice. The result is disaster after disaster until the Jewish state is destroyed (135 A.D.). Meanwhile the Jewish people prosper in their personal lives in many different countries over many centuries.

As the Children of Israel interacted with their neighbors, the ideas of justice and monotheism spread to surrounding cultures. You all know that, in the 6th century B.C. the people of Greece, led by the city of Athens, rose to greatness and astonished the world by the breadth of her accomplishments. What you don’t know is that the ideas that entered the heads of the 6th century B.C. Greeks were those of the poet Hesiod. Hesiod has reinterpreted the religion of Homer. He redefines Zeus on the model of the God of the Old Testament (with the Homeric gods playing a very subordinate role). At the siege of Troy, gods were believed to appear as men on the field of battle and engage in hand-to-hand combat. Not so in the Age of Pericles. Further, Hesiod makes Zeus into a god of justice, a god who rewards the good and punishes the evil.

The great age of classical Greece fades into the Roman era, and when Rome falls, mankind shrinks back into hateful, petty, stupid, savage creatures for over half a millennium. My explanation for this is that Plato’s attack on justice had been successful. Plato (in The Republic) argued against the idea that justice was giving people what they deserved. He claimed that the concept of being deserved was undefinable. But as I have noted, Isaiah defined it (Ch. 3, vs. 10-11) as the fruit of one’s doing or the reward of one’s hand, that is, the consequences of one’s actions.

Rome had become great because she took the Greek idea of democracy and advanced it further creating a republic with checks and balances and a system of law based on justice. But as neo-Platonic philosophies became popular in Rome in the first few centuries A.D., she began to drift away from the ideas which had made her great.

Christianity was one of these neo-Platonic movements. The Jewish Essenes of the first century A.D. accepted Plato’s teaching that the world was divided into a spiritual universe and a materialistic universe (body-soul dichotomy) and drew from it the idea that justice, being a moral concept, had to be in the spiritual realm. Since these two realms were mutually exclusive and exhaustive, this meant that justice had nothing to do with the materialistic world, i.e., the world of everyday life. Moses, of course, had meant no such thing. Man’s mind, which is the basis for everything these superstitious people call spiritual, is meant to serve his everyday needs. Archeology shows that the human brain (i.e., the human consciousness) kept getting bigger from about 10 million B.C. to the present. Those individuals who had bigger brains and smarter consciousnesses were more likely to survive and so evolved into modern man. The concept of justice works; it works in the “materialistic” world and in the “spiritual” world. Those people who practice it are simply more successful in life.

Jesus of Nazareth was one of these Jewish Essenes. Like many of them he turned into a Zealot and tried to foment a revolution. The central false idea which Jesus taught, as I have noted, was the philosophy of love. I have to emphasize “philosophy” because some of you are interpreting me as being against love.

Quite simply, an emotion is that which moves one. Emotions come over us because of events in our lives and urge us to act in certain directions. Being moral beings we do not have to act when we feel a given emotion. But if we decide to, then the emotion gives force to our action and makes it more powerful. Emotions in and of themselves are not good or evil. Only actions can be good or evil. In other words, you are responsible for what you do, not what you feel.

To take an example here, in the 1930s an evil man came to power in central Europe. The “good” (i.e., good by Christian standards) political leaders of Europe did not hate him. They could not deal with him. They treated him by the policy of “turn the other cheek.” Step by step, he became more and more powerful. But one man, Winston Churchill, stood up against this evil man. Churchill preached hate and violence. He roused up the world against Hitler and destroyed him.

Why were the Dark Ages such a terrible time? Because when earlier day Hitlers arose amidst the rubble of the fallen Roman Empire, people tried to deal with them by the timid policies that the European statesmen used against Hitler. If they had been brought up on the principle of an eye for an eye, the history of Europe would have been far better.

Love is sometimes good and sometimes bad. It is good when it is in accord with justice and bad when it is opposed to justice. The same thing is true for hate. It is sometimes good and sometimes bad. It is good when it is in accord with justice and bad when it is opposed to justice.

If we apply the idea of justice to economics, we discover the principle of private property. Consider two farmers who work adjoining fields. According to justice each should receive the consequences of his actions, meaning the crop he has raised. If one is industrious and the other lazy, then the industrious farmer should get the large crop and the lazy farmer the small crop. The idea of dividing the field in two separate parts and assigning one to each farmer is precisely to see who has produced what. On the other hand; if you force the farmers to work the same field, so that we cannot tell whose labor produced what wealth, then the lazy will benefit at the expense of the industrious. This is why communism is evil. It violates justice.

As Platonic and Christian ideas advanced in the early centuries A.D., private property gave way to communism. It is not taught today (due to a massive failure of modern historians) but the medieval economic system was not pure feudalism. It was a dual system (based on the body-soul dichotomy). Body-type property was feudalism. Soul-type property was communism. Through the Middle Ages about 2/3 of the arable land was farmed communally and owned by the village collective. 1/3 of the arable land was farmed feudally, owned (in theory) by the king and administered by the feudal lord.

We know that the Jewish Essenes of the first century A.D. lived communally and called themselves “The Poor” because new members were required to donate all their personal wealth to the community when they joined. This puts Jesus’ statement, “Take all thou hast and give to the poor” in a new light. It should probably be” “Take all thou hast and give to The Poor. [meaning Jesus’ group]” To this day, Christian monasteries (held up as the ideal) practice communism. Atheistic communism started in 1842 with Marx and Engels and was a fraud right from the start. It was intended to give scientific respectability to what had always been a religious movement.

Jesus’ attack on the money lenders reflects the same left-wing lunacy we see in leftist circles today. The money lenders were businessmen who changed currencies for the convenience of the people of the time, exactly as they do today. As the Christians came to power in the 4th century, money was banned, and Rome reverted to barter. The wealth of the Roman world collapsed, and millions of people died of plague, war, famine, etc. This was the result of the doctrine that money is evil.

When the world emerged from the evil of the Middle Ages, one has to give credit to the Calvinist countries, Switzerland, Holland and Britain. These people were inspired by the Old Testament. Indeed, William Bradford, the second governor of the Pilgrims, had mastered the Hebrew language and was so proficient in it that he kept a diary in that language. When Calvin told them that they could not get into Heaven by anything that they did, they lost interest in the New Testament. The accomplishments of these people were amazing. Over the course of the 17th century, they brought democracy and the concept of rights to Britain. They created a scientific revolution. They made Britain and America the wealthiest countries in the world. One finds them at the forefront of every social advance of that age.

Note that these people, when they got the power, abolished Christmas (the holiday which celebrates the philosophy of love). You can find William Bradford’s argument against celebrating Christmas in Of Plimoth Plantation circa Dec. 25, 1620 or 1621. Christmas made a comeback due to Charles Dickens in the late 19th century, and that was the beginning of the loss of liberty in America.

Wherever you look in human history, the story is the same. If a people adopt the concept of justice and try to live in accordance with it, they are successful and happy. If they disregard justice, they fail and are wretched, miserable and ignorant. This universe in which we live operates in accord with the law of cause and effect. Those who recognize that truth are more likely to succeed. Those who do not usually fail.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

MORE ON THE SADDUCEE PHILOSOPHY

2009-03-24T02:09:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
3-23-09

A reader writes in and gives me the philosophy of Saul of Tarsus to the effect that all men are sinners. This is a good point to take off on a number of subjects.

If a person only associates with his own kind of people, then he never discovers that any different kind exists. He has no basis to judge what the world is like or what human nature is like.

As a young boy, I was always very good. I almost certainly got this from my father, who was a good man, and he in turn got it from my grandfather. It is natural for children to imitate their parents, and this is not something which is usually taught via words.

As I came of age and began to think philosophically, the very first philosophical question I asked myself was, what is the good? I was already ahead of my college professors because some years later, when I entered college, they taught me that this question could not be answered. Saying something was bad or good, they taught, was like saying “boo” or “hurrah.” That is, it was expressing an emotion.

I have since learned that this comes from the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas held that all reality was divided into two realms, the realm of faith and the realm of reason. These were mutually exclusive and exhaustive. Later followers of Aquinas decided that economics, the study of nature, politics and the question of how man acquires knowledge were all in the domain of reason. But history, art, the study of human nature and ethics were all matters of faith. Since ethics was in the realm of faith, it was not open to reason, and it therefore followed that nothing in the subject of ethics could be proven true or false.

It so happened that all of my professors postured as secular humanists and never missed an opportunity to sneer at religion. But here they were basing an important part of their philosophy on a Catholic Saint. (I have a lot of respect for Thomas Aquinas. He helped to break down the Middle Ages, and western man lived in a much better way because of his philosophy. However, he was wrong on this point. Faith is not a realm. It is just what ignorant people say when they do not want to change.)

I found the answer to my question a few years out of college when I began to study the philosophy of Ayn Rand (like myself a Sadducee Jew). Humans (and all living beings) have needs. Having needs, they must have values. (A value is that which satisfies a need.) But in addition to having needs, humans have consciousness, the ability to act and free will. Rand defined morality as a code of values accepted by choice.

Because humans have the ability to think in terms of abstractions, they can ask the question what is the good. A dog can ask, where is my next meal coming from, is master taking me out for a walk, is that big dog coming to bite me? But the dog is always thinking in the concrete. The human being can ask the same questions in the abstract, and the answer, given in the abstract, leads to an ethical principle.

Let us take the last of the dog’s questions, about the big dog coming to bite him. The corresponding human question is, what do I do when the bad man comes to harm me? There are two answers to this question which are popular in western culture: 1) turn the other cheek and 2) an eye for an eye. Thus the human being can develop a general policy to deal with this question while a dog can only respond on a case-by-case basis. A general principle which tells one how to act to achieve the values necessary for life is a moral principle. Or, as Moses put it:

“I have set before thee this day life and good and death and evil….I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live:”
Deuteronomy, Ch. 30, vs. 15, 19.

Simply put, the good is that which is pro-life. If you do what is good, then you stand a better chance of living a happy and successful life. If you do evil, then chances are that you will lead a miserable, unhappy and short life. (There are other factors which can affect this. Some events are random. Further, if a man lives in an evil society, he may be persecuted for being good. But in the larger scale people receive the consequences of their actions because we do live in a universe governed by the law of cause and effect.)

When Saul of Tarsus said that all men are sinners, he was denying human free will. It is a fundamental that morality depends on free will. For example, it is widely recognized that, if you kill a man in what is a genuine accident, then no moral blame attaches to you. On the other hand, if you kill a man willfully, then (if there are no extenuating circumstances, such as a just war or self defense, etc.) you are guilty of murder. On the one hand, Saul of Tarsus says that you ought to do good (as per the teachings of Jesus), but you have an inherent quality which makes you unable to. What is the point here? Why urge people to do what they cannot do? And why blame them for not doing what they can’t?

To put things in their terms, if God created man to be a sinner and to be unable to follow the moral code, then what right does God have to blame man for this? If man is a sinner by nature, then this is God’s fault, and God has no one to blame but himself.

It is well known that the person who follows the teachings of Jesus continually suffers. He cannot defend himself against evil. He cannot prosper economically. He cannot have guiltless sex. He cannot even feel the emotion of pride. For a long time I took this as absolute proof that the teachings of Jesus were false. They did not lead to life.

But Christians do not regard this fact, that Jesus’ teachings do not work, as proof that they are wrong. Just the opposite, the fact that Jesus’ teachings do not work convinced them that these teachings apply to the spiritual world (world of Dionysus) and not to the materialistic world (world of the Titans). In short, they have made up a completely false universe, and the fact that these teachings do not work is taken as proof that they are true. It is sort of a reverse scientific experiment where the experiment which fails is hailed as true and that which succeeds is considered false.

Some time back I did a piece on the xenophobic conservatives who describe Mexicans who come to this country to find work as illegal, carry on at great length using ethnic slurs and proposing the most absurd penalties. There is nothing like this in American history. From the time of the Founding Fathers and for about a hundred years after, it was assumed that every human being had a right of liberty and could come to this country, so long as he did so peacefully and respected the rights of others. (Indeed, Texas was settled by illegal aliens from the U.S. who refused to obey the Spanish law to become Catholic. If human beings do not have the right of liberty to cross a national border, then by rights we would have to give Texas back to Mexico. But I do not hear any conservatives making this proposal.)

There are in the Constitution seventeen powers given to the U.S. Government plus a clear statement (the Tenth Amendment) that any power omitted from this list is not possessed by the Government. The power to prohibit immigration is omitted from this list; hence there are no immigration laws, and no one can speak of illegal immigrants.

So where did this conservative xenophobic movement come from? Somebody in the conservative movement got the idea that, since people are evil and full of hate, if we give them a hate object, then we can get a lot of votes. Who taught the conservatives that people were this way? It was Saul of Tarsus. All men are sinners. All through the Middle Ages people acted in this way. They preached a philosophy of love, and they were full of hate.

In any human society most people are persecuted by the rich and powerful. The poor and weak don’t persecute anyone, not because they are nice people but because they can’t. All through the Middle Ages people were persecuted by the rich and powerful, and they responded by taking out their frustration and anger on the poor and weak.

Now turning the other cheek to the people who are oppressing you and picking on people who are not does nothing to deter oppression. So all through the Middle Ages the aristocracy learned that they could oppress the common people, and these would not fight back. This changed in the 17th century. A group of Englishmen, called Puritans, organized to fight for democracy. Although they were only about 20% of the country, they defeated the King, and by 1689 had made England into a democracy.

Along with this attitude of toughness toward the aristocrats and the king there was an attitude of kindness and tolerance toward people below them on the social scale. One finds the same combination at the time of the American Revolution. The Founding Fathers were not afraid to stand up to the King of England, head of the greatest empire in the world at that time, and they were generous and helpful toward the kind of people who were down and out.

Modern conservatives have broken with that tradition, and in truth they are not Americans. More importantly, they can never be free. One’s freedom, in any society, in any age, is always most in danger from those with more power. And if one only turns his hatred against those with less power, then one cannot deter tyranny. This is why that small percentage of western man who rejected Christianity for the teachings of John Calvin brought democracy to the modern world.

The exact opposite happened shortly after Rome converted to Christianity (394 A.D.). The new Christians were attacked by hostile barbarians in 406 A.D. Instead of sending an army to fight the hostile barbarians, they formed a savage mob and murdered the wives and children of the friendly barbarians who were serving in the Roman army. Saul of Tarsus said that all men are sinners, but the truth is that it is (pretty much all) Christians who are sinners.

The New Testament was written in the years after the First Jewish Revolt Against Rome (66 A.D. to 73 A.D.). The authors disgraced themselves by an attempt to curry favor with the Romans and blame the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus. This was used for centuries to justify Christian anti-Semitism, but the torturing of facts in this accusation is so evil that it is absolutely staggering.

In fact, the Jews were persuaded to rise in rebellion against the Romans by Zealots such as Jesus of Nazareth, who kept goading them and pyramiding small acts of violence until they (the Zealots) got their war. Then, in good part because of the bad behavior of the Zealots, the revolution failed. In the Gospels, the revolutionary party turns and blames the Jewish majority (which took their advice) and absolves the Romans (who were their sworn enemies). To make matters worse, they singled out for special criticism the one group of Jews (the Sadducees) who were genuinely in favor of peace and did not support the war.

Modern people who are brought up in the Christian religion are taught the teachings of Jesus, such as the Sermon on the Mount. The essential characteristic of the teachings of Jesus is that they cannot be practiced. Some of them are very hard to practice because their consequences are so drastic. (E.g., “Take all thou hast and give to the poor.”) But some cannot be practiced at all. One cannot “love thine enemy” because he would not be your enemy if you did not hate him. One cannot prevent looking upon an attractive member of the opposite sex with lust (to use the example that Jimmy Carter made famous). One can feel the lust and not act on it, but one cannot prevent one’s self from feeling it.

So, to be a Christian is to sin. And it immediately follows that all Christians feel guilt as a dominant emotion and are incapable of feeling pride. Pride, which is condemned as a deadly sin by Christianity, is the emotion one feels when one has done something good. If you study hard and get an A on the test, you feel pride. If you catch the winning pass in the football game, you feel pride. If you get into the college of your choice, you feel pride. Pride is the emotion you feel when you do good. What kind of a philosophy is it which makes it impossible for you to feel pride?

Since Christians walk around all the time with a sense of guilt (as well as fear and self-loathing), in their rare instances of celebration they immediately turn to alcoholic drinks. These drinks have two functions. They interfere with the higher centers of consciousness, such as the conscience. And they blot out most sensations and emotions, as in the expression “I was feeling no pain.”

On a gut level, I have never been able to understand why people in this culture ingest alcohol when they are trying to have fun. This is especially true given the fact that fun usually involves an attractive member of the opposite sex, and alcohol makes a male unable to perform sexually. But I now understand it intellectually. These people live their life in pain. Almost all of their life is pain (their word). And this is why they look forward to “feeling no pain.” This alcohol can do. Note that, when England converted from Catholicism to low Protestantism, the level of alcohol consumption fell sharply.

Now I am feeling no pain most of my life. I wake up in the morning with a sense of anticipation. When I accomplish something, I feel pride. I like my friends, my neighbors and my activities. I feel good about myself and happy with whom I am.. When I go out to have fun, I ask myself, why dull my senses? I want to be especially alert and aware for this fun evening. When I see a person acting drunk or regurgitating their last meal, it does nothing to win me over to their way of life.

To live a decent life, one must have the sense that one is a good person. One cannot do this if one accepts a moral code which is impossible to practice. The science of ethics is no different from the science of mathematics, of chemistry or of physics. There is much to be learned, and there can be honest disagreement about right and wrong. But such disagreement can be resolved by a study of the facts. People who believe that they are sinners are evil and dangerous, and they have to be deterred by a strict policy of an eye for an eye.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE VOICE OF THE SADDUCEE

2009-03-16T01:44:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
3-16-09

I am getting more questions about my views of Jesus of Nazareth than about any other subject. And while it may seem strange to be more interested in the events of 2000 years ago than the terrible things that are happening in our own age, I tend to agree with the writers that this is indeed a very important subject.

First, I think it is important to tell you from where I am coming. I am a Sadducee Jew. The Sadducees are the descendents of and the followers of Tzadek, who was the high priest of the temple in the days of King David and King Solomon. Tzadek was also a direct descendent of Aaron, the brother of Moses. He best understood what Moses had been trying to teach the children of Israel, and the party that formed around him best understood the Mosaic law.

Moses had been part of a movement in ancient Egypt in the 14th century B.C. which recognized that the universe operated according to the law of causality. Everything that happened had its cause. Every cause had to have its effect. The only entity who could cause events to happen via his will was man himself. This was in opposition to the view which prevailed, not only in 14 century B.C. Egypt, but among every primitive people in human history. This prevailing view was animism, meaning that events happened because everything (even inanimate objects) had a spirit, and the spirit willed the event to happen. For example, an animist would say that storms occurred because there was a spirit (god) of the sky who got mad, and the storm represented his anger. The earth brought forth vegetation because there was a spirit (goddess) of the earth who was bountiful. The polytheism of ancient Greece and ancient Egypt was a variant of this animism.

Strictly speaking, the concept that the universe operates according to cause and effect implies that there are no gods and is atheist. But the causality movement in 14th century B.C. Egypt found this a bit much for people to take. So they proposed a compromise. They proposed a single god, whom they named Aton, who was distant and removed from human affairs and who allowed the law of causality to operate. In this form, the movement won the support of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaton. Akhenaton is the first monotheist known to history. He abolished the ancient Egyptian polytheism and imposed his religion of one god on the country. Akhenaton’s successors (one of whom was King Tut) were weak, and a rebel movement arose which took over the country and reimposed the old polytheism. It was at this time that Moses, to save Akhenaton’s ideas, led the Hebrews out of Gosen (Goshen) and taught them the belief in one God.

The key idea that Moses taught was the idea of justice. Justice is simply the reasonable way to act if you live in a universe based on cause and effect. Expect to receive the consequences of your actions. Organize your human society so that people receive the consequences of their actions. Give the good man the good consequences of his good actions and the evil man the evil consequences of his evil actions.. This idea energized the children of Israel. Over a period of 300 years they rose from a group of former slaves to the great empire of Solomon. Then, as I have noted, the idea of justice traveled to Greece (probably via the Philistines) and from there to Rome. Continual offshoots kept appearing in one country after the other (Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India) until today the word of the Lord has gone forth from Zion and most of the world believes (in some sense) in one god.

Unfortunately, this road to progress was not smooth. The great enemy of the concept of justice was the philosopher Plato. Plato pretended to be for justice, but he attacked it from behind. Plato claimed that he could not find the definition of justice. As I have noted, Isaiah gave a very beautiful definition of justice (Ch. 3, vs. 10-11) some 500 years before Plato was born. If Plato did not know what justice was, then he should have gone back to school as almost all the Greeks of his day understood the concept.

But Plato argued that, if I can’t find the definition, then the definition must not exist. This, of course, is not a valid inference. But it has been used as an argument against justice for more than 2000 years.

In the first century A.D., there arose two groups among the Jewish people who believed Plato’s argument against justice. They are known as the Essenes and Zealots. They had a very pronounced body-soul dichotomy (which, as I have noted, comes from the pagan myth of Dionysus and the Titans and which plays a key role in Plato’s philosophy). The Essenes created their own, anti-Mosaic, moral code according to which everything that was moral was impossible to practice. They went around preaching about love, peace and non violence, and then they turned into the exact opposite. They turned into Zealots, who preached violent revolution against Roman authority. (Ancient Judea had fallen under Roman rule in a series of steps in the late first century B.C. The Romans entered as friends and then stayed to rule.)

To get a sense of things, Americans should think of the flower children of the early 1960s, preaching love and peace, who then turned into the violent radicals of the late 1960s who were trashing cars and constructing bombs. That exactly describes the Essenes/Zealots of the first century A.D. If you want a real picture of what Jesus of Nazareth was like in his day and age, take a look at Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, or Jim Jones.

What happened to Jesus and his group was that their first attempt to turn Zealot was a disastrous failure. They went out late at night, armed and picked a fight with followers of the high priest (who were Sadducees). Some of my ancestors might have been in that group. I can tell you that, had I lived at that time, I might well have been among them because 19½ centuries later (1968) I took an active role trying to prevent the leftist student takeover of N.Y.U.

But the attempt at violence failed, and Jesus was captured. Since it was well known that Zealots were going out at night to stir up violence, hoping that it would lead to a general revolution, and the Zealots did not make any distinction between the Romans and the Sadducee Jews (who were counseling moderation), it was obvious that this was another Zealot attempt at revolution. This is why Jesus was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate.

If one studies the history of the age, then one cannot help having sympathy for Pilate. The Zealots kept stirring the pot and pushing the country to the edge of violence until, in 66 A.D., it erupted into a savage and brutal war.

Now wars are sometimes necessary in human affairs. But this was not a war of which anyone on the Jewish side can be proud. The Zealots showed a complete contempt for human life (their own lives included). In the middle of the war, the Romans had to pull out of the country because of the internal Roman political situation. When they returned, they found that the Jews had divided into three factions and were fighting each other. In the process, they had burned the food that they needed to withstand the Roman siege. The Romans were competent, professional soldiers. They did their job, and it was not very pretty.

With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that Pilate was trying to prevent just this war. He failed because of the fanatics. But Jesus of Nazareth was one of those fanatics.

I often wonder why Christians, who profess to admire Jesus, do not want to know the background of his day and age. What was the historical context in which he lived? What kind of a human being was he to the people of his time? This makes no sense. Americans learn all they can about the historical context of the American Revolution. It is the most natural thing in the world to want to know as much as possible about the men you admire.

Another important issue of the day concerns the Messiah. Two centuries prior to these events the Jews fought another revolution, this one against the Syrian Empire and successful. The hero of this revolution was Judah Maccabee. He had the political charisma to attract men to follow him, and he had the military savvy to defeat the Syrian army. Two centuries later, when the Zealots were planning their war against Rome, they concluded that what they needed was another man like Judah Maccabee. This man they called the anointed one or the messiah (in Greek, Christos).

The Zealots clearly understood that the Messiah was a man of war (like Judah Maccabee). And pretty much everyone living in Judea in the first century A.D. knew that the Messiah was a man of war. Indeed, the man who came closest to being awarded the title was Simon Bar Kochba, the Jewish general in the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome (132-135 A.D.) Bar Kochba defeated the Roman armies over and over. He was finally worn down by overwhelming Roman manpower and lost the last battle. Rabbi Akiba, the intellectual leader of the Jewish people at that time, had the opinion that Bar Kochba would turn out to be the Messiah.

So when Jesus put himself forward as the Messiah, it meant to everyone in the first century A D. that he intended to lead a Jewish army against Roman authority, i.e., that he was a man of violence, not of peace. The concept that their leader would return to life after he had been crucified and lead a peaceful revolution against Roman authority was a lie made up by the followers of Jesus to keep their world view from collapsing. There was no way that the Romans were going to give up their rule without a fight.

After 135 A.D., the country of Judea was abolished, and the Jewish people were dispersed around the different countries of the Roman Empire. At this time, their very bad politics ceased to be a factor, and their very successful personal lives made an important impression on their neighbors. You find this over and over in Jewish history. It is true in the United States today. It was true in countries throughout the Middle Ages. And it was true in 2nd and 3rd century Rome. A movement began among the Roman pagans to convert to Judaism. See, in this regard, the 3rd century Emperor, Alexander Severus, who was called “the head of the synagogue” by his critics because they felt he was too pro-Jewish.

But Judaism by this time was too bound up with the history of one people. It was no longer just the universal vision of Moses (which applies to all men). It had particular holidays and customs which would not appeal to those not brought up in the tradition. Further, the pagans had their own customs and beliefs, to which they were attached. Along came Christianity as a compromise between Judaism and paganism. To many 3rd century A.D. pagans, it appeared an ideal compromise.

Unfortunately, it was a tragic mistake. What made the Jews so successful, even 1500 years after the time of Moses, was that they had incorporated the ideas of a causal universe and justice into their personal lives. But Jesus had abandoned the ideas of Moses. In particular, he followed Plato and opposed the concept of justice.

I remember as I came of age and first began to meet Christians. I was in shock. They were so immoral. I could not believe it. Now I understand. Christians believe in a God of forgiveness. Forgiveness means that you let the evil guy off the hook. Moses said, no way. Give him an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and a life for a life. So I made sure not to do evil.. But my Christian friends went out and sinned. Then they turned contrite and tried to manipulate God in the same way that a naughty 5-year old tries to manipulate a soft-hearted parent. They believed in a God of forgiveness. Sin. Be forgiven. And then go out and sin again.

So when you people say that we all worship the same God, that’s garbage. You are living back in the 3rd century with your pagan ancestors, who brought in the concept of their pagan gods and gave these attributes to the Jewish God (whose name they got wrong).

It was one long agony. Christian Rome abolished private property and adopted communism. Christian Rome gave up money and reverted to a self-sufficient economy. The economy collapsed, and millions of people died. Between 200 A.D. and 600 A.D. the population of what is today France fell from 6.5 million to 4.5 million. Between 200 A.D. and 800 A.D. the population of Southern Europe (Spain, Italy and the Balkans) fell from 19 million to 10 million. (See, Atlas of World Population History, [New York, Facts on File, 1975], pp. 28, 57.) When I hear these same sentiments voiced today (about money being evil and communism being good), I feel a chill in my bones.

Christian mobs had gone on rampages during the 4th century A.D. murdering intellectuals, and this snuffed out the intellectual life of classical Rome. These intellectuals were guilty of what Augustine called “the lust of the eyes.” Even Christian historians call this period the Dark Ages. No wealth. No intellectual life. No literacy. No medical or technical progress. No peace. No safety. No justice. No democracy. Just unremitting savagery and barbarism, all practiced by the followers of “The Prince of Peace.”

Now I realize that most of you today are Calvinists. Calvin kicked out the New Testament and brought his followers back to the Old Testament. He was trying to destroy Christianity, and he did a pretty good job. But he was unable to go all the way and had to pretend to be a Christian because, when Calvin lived, it was the standard Christian practice to take everyone who disagreed with them (on the most obscure and technical point) and burn them to death. It wasn’t enough that they killed you. They had to torture you as you went. This is because these were people who had a philosophy of love.

Well, my ancestors lost out. They were telling the truth and not what people wanted to hear. Jesus, on the other hand, was telling those ignorant pagans what they already believed.

But this is a new generation, and you have a new choice. Do you want to hear the truth, or do you want to hear what you already believe served up to you on a silver plate? With one small exception (the Calvinist countries from 1600 to 1900/1950 A.D.) human life has been pretty wretched over the past 2 millennia. If you want to believe the same thing, you can achieve the same result.

Today’s political left pretends to be anti-religious. This is a fraud. The political left has always based itself on the teachings of Jesus (love, pacifism and communism). By 1842, that had worn thin. It was the evil genius of Marx and Engels to adopt a scientific disguise. But what these people want is the same. They want to return to the Dark Ages. They want to kill millions of people. They preach love, and they are full of hate. Listen to the voice of the Sadducee.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE FAILURE OF THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT

2009-03-09T11:34:00.003-04:00

by Howard S. Katz
3-9-2009

In the present crisis, the conservative movement is turning out to be no help at all. I have still not discovered a leading conservative personality who knows that the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology has been created with the assignment of saving money by murdering people expensive to treat.

Indeed, the whole thing seems to be beyond their ken. The whole movement seems to be made up of people who have chosen the practical over the moral. They pound away at the impracticality of the social democrats (whom they mistakenly call “liberals”). Their view of Barrack Obama is that he is muddleheaded and weak of will and that he does not possess the toughness required to get things done. They cannot wrap their minds around the fact that he is a Nazi and that he has already smuggled over legislation to murder innocent people.

The technique of the Social Democrats in Germany during the 1920s was to advance a series of absurd proposals. Each of them, precisely because it did not work, was regarded as highly moralistic. Their assumption was that, because it was impractical, therefore it had to be moral. Modern art and architecture dates from this period. Sigmund Freud was around with his teaching that 5 year old children had sexual drives. There was a movement which created what it called poems by cutting words out of a dictionary, letting them fall to the floor and gluing them where they fell. Homosexuality and cross dressing were rife.

The clearest reflections of this in modern America are the movements to ban flag burning and for homosexual “marriage.” The sum of these leftist activities has the effect of scratching their fingernails on the blackboard of the public consciousness. After a decade of this, large numbers of Germans decided that, if this was morality, then they were in favor of immorality.

What the German leftists were doing was driving the country over to the right. In 1919, Germany was a largely left-wing country. Indeed, in that year the world communist revolution, which had made its bid in Russia in 1917, threatened to sweep Europe. Communist revolutions occurred in Germany and Italy and were narrowly suppressed. But 14 years later, the majority of Germans voted for Adolf Hitler. (Remember that Germany at the time was a multi-party country, and no candidate ever got an absolute majority. The Nazis received 44% of the vote, and two other pro-Hitler parties, the Nationalists and the Catholic Center, provided the majority and later cast their votes to make Hitler dictator of the country.)

What happened in Germany through the 1920s? The answer is that the left so outraged and offended the German public that millions of people were driven over to the extreme right. The left acted as though it had a death wish. Then, after it had suffered a resounding defeat, it had no regrets. There was no Monday morning quarterbacking. The German left, which was so strong in 1919, simply disappeared.

Viewing this period (called the Weimar period in German history because its capital was in the city of Weimar) from a distance it looks as though the left was trying to bring about the victory of the right. Major figures who are known in history as being on the extreme right (such as Mussolini and Hitler) crossed over to the extreme left (usually in a few days time) and then established a right-wing reputation by beating up their former compatriots in street brawls.

If there is one thing which this period teaches, it is that right and left are the same political philosophy, and usually it was the same individuals who made up both sides. Mussolini’s switch from socialist to fascist in 1914 is particularly important because he is the father of the fascist movement and was widely imitated throughout Europe.

Mussolini’s switch from socialist to (what he called) fascist occurred on one issue. Should Italy give up her neutrality and enter WWI on the side of the Allies? The Socialists, favoring peace, said no. Mussolini split with his fellow Socialists and formed a new movement which said yes. This new movement held the same economic views as the Socialists.

A logical person not familiar with the period might say, “Socialism is a purely economic doctrine. Logically a socialist might be pro-war or anti-war or have different opinions on different wars.” But such a view would have been rejected by every European socialist in the first part of the 20th century. Every socialist had to be anti-war, and when Mussolini became pro-war, he felt that this meant he was no longer a socialist. Where did this idea come from? Certainly not from Marx and Engels, who were imperialists.

Let us ask, what ideology espouses both socialism and pacifism and was sufficiently widely known at the time to have dominated the European socialist movement. The answer is simplicity itself. Who is it who declares both, “Take all thou hast and give to the poor.” and “Turn the other cheek?” Of course, it is Jesus of Nazareth. He was the true leader of the early 20th century socialist movement. Marx and Engels merely provided scientific covering.

Remember our previous discussions of the body-soul dichotomy. It starts with the pagan myth of Dionysus and the Titans. Dionysus is the good guy, moral but impractical. The Titans are the bad guys, practical but immoral. The two fight, and mankind is formed from the ashes. Thus humans are a mixture of these irreconcilable elements. Some men are more on the practical side, and some are more on the moral side. But basically we live in a reality in which to be practical, a thing must be immoral, and to be moral it must be impractical.

The conservative movement is made up of people who believe this and who have chosen the practical over the moral. They derogate their enemies as too good (and hence impractical). They even use the phrase “do-gooder” as an insult instead of the compliment which in fact it is.

The reality is that neither Dionysus nor the Titans ever existed, and the world is not divided into a mutually exclusive and exhaustive moral part vs. practical part. The central fact which leads to the science of morality is the fact that human being can grasp reality in terms of abstractions. Whereas, a dog may ask the question, “Where am I going to find food today,” a human can think, “What is the source of food” in the abstract. Or he can think, “How am I going to find wealth?” Or, in the most abstract terms, he can ask the question, “How should I live.” A set of abstract principles to answer the question, how should I live is a code of ethics.

It follows immediately that an ethical person will be successful in practical reality for the simple reason that he knows the answer to the question how should I live. This is in fact the reason that the peoples of Europe and North and South America are Christian. The history is as follows: In the second century A.D., the Jews fought a second revolution against Roman authority, were defeated and scattered throughout the empire. Gradually Roman pagans began to realize that their Jewish neighbors were more successful. They were drawn toward Judaism, and a movement to convert to Judaism swept the Roman world at this time. (See, the Emperor Alexander Severus who was criticized by his enemies as being the “head of the synagogue.”)

At this time, Christianity entered the lists as a variant of Judaism which was more familiar to and sympathetic to the basic pagan beliefs. Its leading character was born of a virgin and a god, just like Romulus. It had a touching mother-and-child scene, just like Isis and Horus. It had a Pope, just like the religion of Mithras. And it had a body-soul dichotomy, just like the typical pagan religions of the day.

The point was that Judaism worked in practice, and it worked because its moral principles are correct. Christianity, on the other hand, was not looking for moral principles which actually teach you to live life. It was looking for moral principles which fail and hence are impractical. Thus, when dealing with an evil man, Moses taught, “An eye for an eye.” In the same situation, Jesus taught, “Turn the other cheek.”

Christians quickly learned (or already knew) that being moral just got you beat up. Being moral was impractical. That made perfect sense to them because the moral and the practical were opposites. So they easily violated their own moral principles and then (in their own minds) were forgiven. So they went out and sinned again, etc.

We have discussed that, shortly after Rome was converted to Christianity, she began a xenophobic movement against the friendly barbarians. A wild Christian mob ran amok murdering the wives and families of the barbarian soldiers in the Roman Army. That began the process which led to the fall of Rome.

Was it any different in the 20th century? The people on the soul side (socialists) went over to the body side (fascists) and ran amok murdering people.

The socialists are desperate to deny these facts, and if you read a history of the rise of fascism, written by a socialist, then every effort will be made to deny the fact that the leaders of the fascist movement came from the political left. These people will say or try to suggest that the fascists were people who had loved violence from an early age and been on the political right. But the German right was traditional and did not like Hitler. The German army (which was conservative) hated him and were the only Germans who tried to assassinate him.

The pattern, for all those who follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, is to start out with love, peace and non-violence and end with war, hate and violence. It has been happening for the past 2000 years. The problem with Barrack Obama is not that he is a namby-pamby Jimmy Carter type who is afraid to get anything done. The problem with Barrack Obama is that he has crossed the line which Mussolini crossed in 1914 and Hitler crossed in 1919. He has gone from love to hate and is starting to murder people.

If one studies America’s founding fathers, there is no hint of a body-soul dichotomy. One cannot divide them into a political left vs. right. The division at the time was liberals (those who favored liberty) and conservatives (those who did not want to change). Read through The Federalist Papers. One is impressed by the high quality of the writing and the great knowledge demonstrated by the authors. And note that these papers were written to win an election (ratification of the Constitution by New York State) and appeared in a local paper as political advertisements. Compare them with the political ads one sees today.

Note that this was a society which succeeded in almost everything it tried. It largely kept out of war, but it won the wars in which it did engage. It explored and brought civilization to a continent. It created more wealth than any other society in human history and brought the benefits of science to the common man. It maintained an extremely high intellectual level.

This lesson is driven home by history, again and again. Those human societies who live in accord with justice succeed and prosper. Start with Moses, who taught the concept of justice to the ancient Hebrews. Within 300 years, they rose from a group of slaves to a powerful country (under Solomon). At this day, most of the religions of the world are copied in some form from these original Hebrews. Then the concept of justice was introduced into Greek society by the poet Hesiod. (There was direct contact between the Israelites and the Greeks via the Philistines, who were originally from Greece.) All of a sudden, Greece flowered, and we still wonder at the achievements of this people. The Romans then absorbed the ideas of Greece and applied them to the science of law. Other nations wanted to live under Roman law and thus made sure to lose their wars with Rome.

The concept of justice was destroyed in the ancient world by Plato, who taught people that justice could not be defined. This stupid argument is still around today. Actually, justice had been defined by Isaiah (Ch. 3, vs. 10-11) 500 years before Plato lived. Justice is the law of causality applied to human action. Inanimate objects do not have free will. They have to obey the law of causality. If you drop a heavier-than-air object in the vicinity of planet Earth, it will fall toward the earth. It has no choice. But human beings have free will and can act in any way they please. For example, a law of economics says that price moves up or down with supply and demand. But an individual businessman has the free will to violate this law. If demand is greater than supply, it would make sense for him to raise his price, but he has the freedom to be stubborn and lower it. He has the freedom to violate the law of cause and effect, but he does not have the freedom to escape the consequences. Thus the principle of justice says that a human being should act in accord with the law of causality. He should expect to receive the effects of his causes (the consequences of his actions). And therefore he should create good causes in order to have good effects. He should treat other people in terms of cause and effect. He should reward the good people and punish the evil people. (One implication of this is that a person should spend a great deal of time studying the relations of cause and effect, i.e., discovering the causes of events, so that he may have control over his environment. (For example, the discovery that germs were the cause of a large number of the diseases of the time by Louis Pasteur gave the people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries enormous control over their environment.)

The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were a direct attack on the concept of justice. When these teachings were accepted as the general philosophy of the Roman Empire (394 A.D.), Rome collapsed, and the western world plunged into a period of savagery, poverty, war, ignorance and disease called the Dark Age.

Fortunately western civilization was rescued by John Calvin, who convinced his followers to disregard the New Testament and to return to the Old Testament. The Anglo-Saxon peoples (who were foremost in taking Calvin’s advice) then created a new period in human history which surpassed ancient Greece or Rome. That great advance is under attack today, and we know what will happen if our society follows the path of 5th century Rome.

This return to the past is led by people who call themselves progressives. The Conservative movement pretends to be the opposition, but it is the opposite side of the same coin. America was literally created by the fight against the Catholic Church. (The Catholics were scheduled to invade Holland in 1621 and would have burned the Pilgrims as heretics, and this was the reason for the voyage of the May flower in 1620.)

Today’s conservatives openly support the return of torture and the imprisonment of people not proven guilty by any court. They vent their hatred against foreigners because they are loaded up to the gills with hate, and it feels good to take out their aggression against those who cannot fight back. They still don’t know that Barrack Obama is a Nazi and has set up the murder bureau of government. Right now things are looking very bad for America.

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

2009-03-02T13:46:00.003-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
3-2-09

Well people, we now live in a society where the government has a bureau for the specific purpose of murdering (undeniably) innocent people.

We have studied societies based on the philosophy of love, and we have noted that, in every case known to history, the society based on love turns into a society based on hate. The result is widespread violence.

In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the philosophy of love (as actualized by the welfare state) into America. If we use the setting up of a government institution devoted to murdering people as the dividing line, then it took Germany 50 years (1880-1930) to cross that line. Here in the U.S. it has taken 76 years.

What is different about the American experience is that there was no public discussion of such a measure, and the vast majority of Americans do not have the slightest idea that it exists. But of course there are many people who have made it clear that they would support such a thing (the “right” to die movement). However, by this time it is too much to hope that the silence in the media is due to ignorance. This is the most important news item of the century. It cannot be that not a single newspaper in the country has failed to become aware of this. The reason for the lack of publicity is simple. Those papers who are aware of it favor the measure, and they have joined with President Obama’s strategy for sneaking it over on the American public.

There is a good precedent for this. The Federal Reserve was not slipped over without publicity. But at the time it was loudly denied that this institution was a central bank. At that time, the vast majority of Americans were opposed to a central bank. Things went along for about 40 years this way and then it was grudgingly admitted that the Fed was a central bank. Today the average young American learns that we have a central bank and assumes that we have always had a central bank, and his natural inclination to resist change leads him to support the institution. A similar thing happened with the abolition of the gold standard in 1933.

The 10 Commandments say, THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT MURDER. Barrack Obama says (to doctors), THOU SHALT COMMIT MURDER (or lose thy license to practice). This was the dividing line in German history which separated the country of love from the country of hate. The Social Democrats, the party of love (aka bleeding hearts), dominated the first period (1880-1930). The Nazis, the party of hate, dominated the second period (1930-1945).

What happens to a person who adopts a philosophy of love is as follows: Normal incidents occur in his life which arouse the emotion of hate If you observe a dog (who has no philosophy) or a human who does not hold a philosophy of love, then such incidents cause strong anger. This anger is useful if the dog is to defend his home or the person is to defend his rights. It gives him the energy required. But this hate is transient; it soon passes. However, in the person with a philosophy of love the anger is never admitted. “I am a person of love. I cannot be feeling hate. I feel good will toward all men. Hate is evil, and love is good.” So he never admits the hate into (what Freudians call) the conscious mind. (One of the errors that the Freudians make here is to assume that this act of not admitting one’s hate is something automatic and cannot be helped. In fact, it is deliberate.) In such a person, the hate is not dissipated and remains.

For a while nothing happens. Then another similar incident occurs, then another. Each time the hate is aroused, but it is not admitted. After perhaps 10-20 years of this, the person is a walking cauldron of hate whose lips are speaking the philosophy of love. After WWI, Germany was filled with a great many such people. (Another of Freud’s big mistakes was in thinking that such denial (which he called repression) was a characteristic of human nature. This is not true. It is only characteristic of people who adopt a conscious philosophy of love.)

One of these people was a young man named Adolf Hitler. The young Hitler was a starving artist who lived in the Bohemian section of the big city (Vienna) struggling to ennoble the world by bringing it great works of art. He was a vegetarian. (“Love animals; don’t eat them.”) In politics, he was a Social Democrat (the party of love), hence left of center. There are many such people in the United States today in New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. They are uniformly praised as idealists and held up as examples for the rest of us to follow. Jim Jones was another left-wing activist who turned into a fascist murderer.)

In one week in the year 1919, Hitler went from the party of love to the party of hate (i.e., from being a Social Democrat to being a Nazi). He spent the next decade converting the German people, and by 1933 Germany was completely committed to hate.

It is very useful to compare Germany and Italy during this period because the leader of the European fascist movement was an Italian socialist named Benito Mussolini. Mussolini broke with the Italian socialists over their commitment to peace (meaning neutrality in WWI) and founded a party with the exact same socialist economic platform but with a commitment to war. That is, Mussolini crossed the line between love, peace and non-violence on the one hand and war and violence on the other. A handful of German Social Democrats decided to imitate Mussolini and founded a new political party, the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. It soon became known by the initial letters of the first two words in its name, Na-Zi. Hitler gradually became the dominant person in the Nazi Party and spent the decade of the 1920s converting Germany from the country of love to the country of hate. (Notice that in the conventional political spectrum, which stretches from extreme left to extreme right, there is no place for people who believe that human beings have rights.)

The bleeding hearts in the American Democratic Party have always admired Germany. Their advocacy of the welfare state and such programs as social security and socialized medicine are directly in imitation of what was first done in Germany. German socialized medicine gradually became more and more expensive for the government to maintain, and there was an urgent need to save money. The solution to this need was to kill those people who were expensive to treat. Remember this system was being operated by people who had built up an enormous reservoir of hate inside them. Consequently, the killing was continually expanded. Limits were continually exceeded by killing more and more people. Finally, Hitler decided to throw some of his political enemies into this killing machine. Hey, this was fun. Let’s kill some more people. What followed was the German Holocaust.

It should be noted that one of the reasons that American socialized medicine is expensive today was that, when Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare/Medicaid into law, he declared that America was a rich country and did not have to worry about economy in health care. American Democrats have been telling us that for the past generation. If that has turned out to be false (by their own admission), then how do they justify the original program?

It is important to note that no similar event occurred in Italian history. Since German fascism was in direct imitation of Italian fascism, we have to ask why. The answer is very obvious. THERE WAS NO CORRESPONDING PERIOD IN ITALIAN HISTORY WHEN ITALY CONSIDERED ITSELF THE COUNTRY OF LOVE. Therefore, there was no build-up of hate and no Italian Holocaust.

Alright, what can you and I do? America has just taken the step which, in the history of Germany, crossed the line between love and hate. It is important to understand that the Germans of that day loved Hitler. In 1933, he won an astounding 44% of the vote in a multi-party election. (There were two minor parties whose platforms were almost identical to that of the Nazis and who later voted to make Hitler dictator of the country. These were the Nationalist Party and the Catholic Center Party. Adding their votes to those of the Nazis, they had a majority.)

The comparison between Germans and Italians is useful in another respect. The Germans became, for their first time in their history since Otto the Great, highly competent warriors. The Italian army, quite unlike the legions of Rome, was a joke. The reason is simple. The Italians hated Mussolini, and the Germans loved Hitler. They loved Hitler so much that they fought to the death for him. This is why the Germans were so difficult for the technologically superior British and Americans to defeat and why they rolled over all the rest of Europe. Simply compare French vs. German armies in the Napoleonic Wars versus WWII. Even when Germany was defeated and Allied troops occupied her cities in April 1945, there was a fanatic core who preferred to fight to the death.

Why did the Germans love Hitler? Because Hitler gave them a satisfaction that no one else had. Hitler let them kill people. Hitler let them gratify that hate that had been festering in their hearts for so long. Killing people was so much fun.

Unfortunately, today there is no America to save the world from Nazism. Today America has gone Nazi. What is to be done?

All my life I had been told that political action involved self sacrifice. This was drummed into my head. Whenever I read a story about the Founding Fathers, it was emphasized how they had sacrificed to bring us freedom. The effect on all of us was to make us think, “Let somebody else do it. The guy who fights for freedom suffers.” But at a certain point in my life I was mad enough to fight anyway. Let me tell you the story.

In the 1960s, I wrote a financial letter (an earlier version of the One-handed Economist) called the Speculator. At a certain point, the Securities and Exchange Commission sent out a notice that it was levying a number of fees on all individuals and institutions under its regulatory authority. I read this and said, “Wait a minute. A fee is a tax, and under the American system of government, all taxes have to be approved by the legislative branch. The executive branch cannot tax. That is what the principle ‘no taxation without representation’ means.” I went to my congressman (Ed Koch, later mayor of New York City) and asked him to find me the legal basis for such a fee.

Mr. Koch was very helpful. The SEC’s basis for the fees was an obscure law passed by Congress many years before allowing executive bureaus to charge for things of value. The law simply meant that, if a bureau issued a pamphlet, it had the authority to charge for the pamphlet, etc. It was an entirely reasonable law which the SEC had misinterpreted to justify stealing our money. I refused to pay my fee and asked what thing of value the SEC had provided to me. Their answer was, “regulatory supervision and oversight.” I sued the SEC.

The SEC pointed out, in its brief that another case, very similar to mine, involving a utility and its regulatory agency, had just gone to the Supreme Court, and the Court’s ruling in this case would be definitive in mine. It suggested that the (lower) court wait until the Supreme Court had issued a ruling.

When the ruling came down, it was in my (i.e., the utility company’s) favor. The SEC was hoist by its own petard. Unfortunately, my lawyer moved slowly. The SEC moved quickly. It rescinded all the fees which applied to newsletter writers like myself but retained the fees (just as illegal) paid by mutual funds and brokerage houses. I had won. But I had lost. I had won freedom for myself and my fellow newsletter writers. But, lacking to sue, I had not won freedom for the whole class affected by the fees. About a decade later, I was in Washington, D.C. and attended a speech in the course of which reference was made to these fees. I realized that the mutual funds and brokerage houses, all capable of affording top legal talent, WERE STILL PAYING THE FEES. They did not know about the precedent set by Katz vs. SEC (or the utility company vs. its regulatory agency). They were a bunch of wimps. Somebody had placed a yoke on their necks, and they were pulling the plow.

This was the story of my life experience as a political activist. Whenever I attacked, hoping to win a big victory and bring down the system, the establishment gave in to me. I won my freedom, but I did not bring down the system. The system continued to feed off of the people who were not courageous enough to fight it.

I realized that everything I had been taught was a lie. Those people who fought for their own freedom were not self sacrificial. The establishment was afraid of them and left them alone. It was the mild and meek, the vast majority of the population, the people who did not fight, who became its slaves.

This applies very clearly to a government program to kill those expensive to treat. If you don’t accept Medicare or Medicaid, if you don’t go to a conventional doctor who makes his money via the insurance companies, then you are not likely to come under the aegis of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.

Better yet, if you start to fight this thing when it is small, you will acquire a reputation as a fighter, and this will be a deterrent to the establishment. If you can join with others in such a fight, then you will have additional support if you ever need it.

The great majority of Americans will not fight the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology. They will not even know that it exists. These people will go to their deaths not even putting up the resistance of a group of cows being herded into the slaughterhouse.

I plan to try to visit my congressman (who voted for the “stimulus” bill). I want to look him in the eye and ask him why he voted for a measure (without reading it) to kill people. A similar question might be asked of all newspaper editors. Why was this measure not given 2 inch headlines on page 1?

Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

HOLOCAUST (AGAIN)

2009-02-24T17:18:00.004-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
2-23-09

The establishment in the United States of a department of government officially empowered to murder people marks a turning point in American history. The medieval philosophy always begins with love, and it always ends with hate. Sometimes the dividing line is so subtle that one cannot declare the exact point where things changed. You may have discussed politics with a left-wing historical type. He will continually deplore the fact that often the left succeeds in winning power but then the leaders of the left “betray the revolution.”

What he means is that the left-wing leaders, who rose to power on a philosophy of love, once in power decide on a program of hate. They do this in such a subtle and gradual manner that it is often impossible to fix the turning point.

A good example would be Stalin. The Bolsheviks were opposed to the tyranny of the Czar. Lenin had “proven” that (what the Communists called) capitalism was the cause of war. A typical communist at the time of the Russian Revolution was absolutely certain that, once the Revolution had been won, war would be at an end; human beings would live in harmony.

But Stalin turned, not only against the Russian people, murdering them by the millions, he turned against his own Bolshevik comrades. Indeed, the word “comrade” illustrates the doctrine of love upon which the Bolshevik revolution was based, very similar to the Christian practice (among monks and nuns) of calling each other “brother” and “sister.” By the 1930s, Stalin had killed almost all of the original Bolsheviks who had made the Revolution with him.

One of the bizarre things about this orgy of blood was that people seemed almost to be going to their death voluntarily. For example, Stalin used the secret police to kill (and torture) many of the old Bolsheviks. But he also replaced, meaning killed, several secret police chiefs. Surely these people, expert in inter-party politics and in techniques of murder and very sensitive to the twists and turns of Stalin’s mind, must have had a sense that they were next on the list. Here they were, in charge of a huge killing machine, knowing that they were soon to be the next victim. Why did not any of them kill Stalin before he killed them? But one by one all of these old Bolsheviks went to their deaths. It was as though killing had become an end in itself.

A second bizarre aspect of this occurred during Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. Here the last of the old Bolsheviks were hauled up before a kangaroo court. All of them had obviously been tortured, and as a result many of them were mentally incoherent. Then they “confessed” their crimes against the Communist Party and were sentenced to death. These trials were open to the world press, and indeed Stalin made a big effort to publicize them. The attendees were mostly the kind of left-wing journalists who would go to great lengths to apologize for the Soviet system. But it was so obvious that the confessions were obtained by torture that even these dupes could see the truth. The worldwide Communist movement was destroyed then and there in the mind of world opinion.

(A comment in reference to my criticism of the Catholic Church stated that most of the burnings for heresy were done by Protestants. This is badly wrong. Burning for heresy was the official policy of the Church and went on extensively. The Protestants did not have a concept that free speech was heresy, and I have not found a single burning attributed to them.)

But I want to pick up on my final comment of last week about withholding treatment from a person when you have stolen from him the money he would need to buy treatment for himself. This point is correct, and it certainly cannot be debated by an advocate of the right to health care. If the patient has a right to health care and you deny him health care, then you have violated his rights.

But this is a legalistic argument, and what is going on has to be understood PSYCHOLOGICALLY not legally. Indeed, one of the phrases in the law (“meaningful users”) has no fixed meaning and can be changed by unelected bureaucrats at will. The point which must be understood is that people who have lived with a philosophy of love for many years have built up an enormous amount of hate inside them. They do not admit that this hate exists, but it motivates their actions.

These people have an incredible talent for devising actions which, in their own minds, can be represented as helping people and showing love but which in actual practice hurt people. We can see that, when such people start doing their killing, they get such an emotional release from it that they quickly escalate. In a word, killing (to them) is fun.

The advocates of such killing (known as the right-to-die movement) have been doing everything they can to blur the distinction between murdering someone and refusing to help him live. In the situations created by the right-to-die movement, the actual solution is always very simple. If a sick person decides that he does not want treatment and kills himself, it is suicide. If you kill him, it is murder. But the right-to-die advocates have deliberately obfuscated this by postulating people who are in a coma or are otherwise unable to give informed consent. (In a better age than this, it was easily understood that, if there were any doubts, one assumed that the sick person wanted to live.)

As far as denying treatment goes, there have already been many cases where a person in a coma is denied treatment (pulling the plug) and does not die. If a doctor is ordered by the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology to deny treatment to certain patients, and thus save money, but the patient lives, then what does the doctor do? His life and his license to practice medicine are at stake. You know what will happen. He will cross the line between withholding treatment and active murder. In studying the history of Germany, just when this line was crossed is not even recorded. In studying the various European welfare states (plus Canada), we cannot find out whether they have crossed this line or not. It is a lead pipe cinch that, when we cross this same line here in the United States, you will not hear about it.

One thing that might halt this program in its tracks is as follows: If the Republicans make a big issue of it and declare in their 2012 platform that the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology is committing murder and is illegal (because unconstitutional) and that the employees of such agency will be punished according to the principle of an eye for an eye and a life for a life, then the deterrent effect of this position might stop the killing. In the same way, the Republican balanced budget position from WWII to 1971 put a limit on the creation of paper money and saved the American economy for that generation.

The defeat of the Clinton health care bill in 1993 put a stop to the left-wing program of the Clinton Administration. It declared , “the era of big government is over” and began to cut both (non-military) government spending and (non-military) government employees. It brought the budget into balance (as conventionally defined). I have to put in those last 3 qualifying words because it was not an actual balance, but it was close. And the nagging of conservatives, who had supported Reagan and Bush deficits, at this tiny deficit goes down hard.

The Obama approach has been just the opposite. If the American public does not want socialized medicine, then ram it down their throats. It is important to note that the phrase socialized medicine is inaccurate here. The Obama administration has crossed over from being (closer to) socialist to being (closer to) fascist. They have passed the line between socialist and Nazi. And unless something is done rapidly, the routine murder of old and sick people by their doctors will become part of the American political system. The rules have been changed. Instead of “Thou shalt NOT commit murder,” they have become, “Thou shalt commit murder” (or lose thy license to practice).

At this point, there is still hope. The question is what will be the reaction of the American public when they find out? For me this is a decisive point. I cannot support anyone who, at this crucial time, supported this measure. I know that most representatives did not read the bill before they voted. But of course, THEY DID NOT WANT TO READ THE BILL. They voted for leadership in the House and Senate who would not let them have enough time to read the bill. (There were only 5 written copies available in the House and I believe the same number in the Senate.)

No one can force a Congressman to vote for legislation he has not read. At the least, they can vote “no.” If the bill is good, its proponents can reintroduce it for another vote.

The practice of rushing legislation through so quickly that no one has a chance to read it is well entrenched in American politics. It started on the first day of the New Deal. When the bill was passed (March 9, 1933) which took the country off the gold standard no written copies were available in the House. It was not reported in the papers, and many people in the country do not know to this day that we are off the gold standard. The congressmen of that time acquiesced in this because, quite frankly, they often vote for legislation which is against their stated principles. This bothers their consciences, and to avoid such unpleasantness, they do not want to read the legislation.

The absurd extreme to which this has gone on was brought home to me in 1994. I was in Washington lobbying for the Health Freedom Act (which passed), but the Balanced Budget Amendment (to the Constitution) was coming up for a vote in a short while. Every time I went into a congressman’s office to discuss the health bill, I asked for a copy of the Balanced Budget Amendment. NOT ONE CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE HAD A COPY.

I finally got so angry that I decided to walk the few blocks to the Government Printing Office and pick up a copy. (None of the congressmen had sent an aide to do this on what was a 30 minute errand.) It was 3 pages, big type, large spaces between lines – not much to read. When I started reading the bill, I was for it. Then I noticed that the bill would legalize undeclared wars (which were and are unconstitutional). That turned me against the bill.

The amendment failed by just a few votes. It was straight “liberal” vs. conservative. I doubt if one single conservative who voted for it knew that he was voting to legalize undeclared wars. The same thing was true for the newspaper editorialists and columnists. They did not read this (3 page) bill either. The “liberal” papers just repeated the “liberal” press release opposed to the amendment; the conservative papers just repeated the conservative press release in favor.

If you go back and read The Federalist Papers and study the other documents of the Founding Fathers, you will realize what is possible to human beings and what a degraded age we live in. How can anyone call this a democracy when the elected representatives of the people do not even read the legislation for which they vote?

Right now the big question for most of the American people is, are you going to find out about this when they pull your plug and kill you, or are you going to find out about it in advance? If you find out in advance, then there are some things you can do

The passage of Medicare/Medicaid was a disaster for American medicine. Doctors (meaning most doctors) began looking for more and more expensive treatments. They quickly shifted over from (a substantial amount of) herbs and nutrients to drugs and invasive, complex procedures (like the bypass operation) which appealed to the desire (on the part of the ignorant) to get something for nothing (because these procedures are expensive). There was no intent to kill people, but when an effective treatment was in competition with an expensive treatment, the effective treatment naturally lost out.

This was well illustrated by the Los Angeles doctor’s strike of 1976 (to protest higher malpractice insurance fees). For the 7 weeks in 1971-75 which corresponded to the strike weeks of ’76, deaths in Los Angeles averaged about 20 per 100,000 For those same weeks in ’76 (when the doctors were on strike) deaths declined from 20 per 100,000 to 12 per 100,000. (See, Rare Earths, Forbidden Cures by Joel D. Wallach & Ma Lan, [Bonita, CA, Double Happiness Publishing Co., 1994], p. 237.) The Los Angeles doctors had thought that deaths would go up and that this would pressure the public into forcing a cut in fees by the insurance companies. When deaths declined, the doctors were shocked – they had believed their own PR – and they quickly ended the strike before the public caught on.

Fortunately, the past generation has seen the development of the free radical theory of aging. This is a major scientific breakthrough which is producing large numbers of cures for a great many illnesses. Interestingly, the free radical theory is scientifically validating many of the traditional cures which had been known in folk medicine (both in our own and other cultures) but had not been scientifically proven. These treatments are resisted by establishment medicine because they are inexpensive, but they are employed by a minority of health care professionals (who put the well-being of their patients above their pocketbooks). My advice is to find one of these doctors in your area and make him/her your own.

Heart disease increased in America through much of the 20th century, into the 1960s. Jogging does not cost anything, but at that time books recommending jogging convinced many Americans to start aerobic exercise, and the rate of heart disease turned down. The diet eaten by the people of the island of Crete (the Mediterranean diet), involving olive oil, garlic and whole-rather-than-refined grains seems to work wonders. Between jogging and the Mediterranean diet the rate of heart disease in this country has turned down (for people who read).

Cancer was a tougher customer. It kept increasing from the time (1937) that the Federal Government established an agency (the Center for Disease Control) to fight it right up through the early 1990s. Cancer cures invented by the American people (like Hoxsey and laetrile) were brutally suppressed by the F.D.A. In 1994, the Health Freedom Act (above) passed and took away some of the power of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA realized that it had to backtrack and give up power (lest it be abolished completely). It legalized several (harmless) natural substances. One of these was melatonin (a sleep aid and life extender) which has proven anti-cancer effects, and the cancer rate began to decline.

Meanwhile, please visit your own congressman (and take some friends with you if you can). Point out the Nazi character of the bill for which he has just voted. Also, contact your local paper (letter to the editor) and make them aware of the issue. They are setting up a system to murder you, and to walk peacefully into their ovens is beneath contempt.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

HOLOCAUST II

2009-02-15T05:34:00.002-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
2-15-09

I want to thank Betsy McCaughey and Edwin Mudge for alerting me to a very important issue. Miss McCaughey posted an opinion piece on www.bloomberg.com (New York, Feb. 11, 2009, 18:25) entitled, “Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan.”

If I may summarize the gist of the McCaughey article, it is that hidden in the Obama so-called economic stimulus bill are provisions which would set up a program to control (continually rising) health care costs by murdering (or forcing doctors to murder) those expensive to treat.

First, let us review some of the points covered by previous blogs. Socialized medicine was invented (among western nations) in Germany in 1880. The German Social Democrats had invented a new concept of government, government based on love. (Bismarck called it “Christian government” when he stole part of their program and presented it to the German legislature in that year.) According to this new concept of government, government was a big father who loved his subjects and wanted to give them something for nothing. The first such something was free medical care.

As a child could tell you, if people are legally entitled to free anything, they are going to want more…and better…and more still. Doctors, seeing that patients suddenly had no price resistance, began to devise more and more expensive treatments. Gradually health care became more and more expensive, and it became a bigger and bigger portion of the national budget.

Finally, circa 1930 the Germans decided that they had had enough. They had to do something. Does this mean that they rescinded socialized medicine? Oh, no. Germans had prided themselves as the country of love since 1880. They were not prepared to give that up. No, they decided to control costs.

Of course, we in America have been trying to control health care costs since 1965. During that time health care has gone from 5% of GDP to 17% of GDP. Controlling the costs of a socialized health care system is not easy. As we will see, most of the doctors and medical care providers are working, like little moles within the system, to make health care more expensive. But the Germans were determined, and they came up with a forceful plan. THE PLAN WAS TO KILL THOSE PEOPLE WHO WERE EXPENSIVE TO TREAT.

Since Germany was the country of love, then this had to be killing for love, and it was therefore called mercy killing. (Although in fact it was plain old killing based on hate.) This program of “mercy” killing went on through the 1930s.

Second, let us examine what has happened to the American health care system since Lyndon Johnson pushed through Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. As noted, total health costs rose from 5% of GDP to 17% of GDP. But the character of American health care changed as well. There are now two kinds of health care practitioners in the U.S. The first kind treat you with drugs and are mostly geared to accepting payment via health insurance. The second kind treat you with herbs and nutrients, are much less expensive and usually charge cash.

The difference here is based on the fact that drugs, not occurring in nature, are patentable while herbs and nutrients, being natural products, are not patentable. The patent protection gives a drug company a monopoly on its drug (for a defined period which I believe is 28 years). The drug company then uses this monopoly to sharply raise the price of the drug. If a nutrient or herb manufacturer, tried to raise the price of his product by too much, then a competitor would come in and undersell him. Thus, as a general rule, herbs and nutrients are much less expensive than drugs.

There is nothing unusual about this. It is very common in the field of economics to have two goods competing with each other, one of which has patent protection and one which does not. The protected good has a higher price and sells a smaller quantity, and the unprotected good has a lower price but makes up for it in volume. Enter, however, the government.

The Food and Drug Administration has enacted a regulation which says that the manufacturers of nutrients and herbs cannot make health claims for their products, even if these claims are true. For example, in 1993 the New England Journal of Medicine published two studies on vitamin E. Both showed that the administration of vitamin E reduced the incidence of heart attacks by 40%. Since heart disease is the number one killer in America, this information would naturally be a strong incentive for people to take vitamin E. (I take vitamin E on a regular basis and suggest that all of you do the same.) However, the FDA regulation prevents the manufacturers of vitamin E from informing the public of this fact. Order of magnitude 200,000 to 250,000 Americans die each year whose lives could have been saved if this information were not suppressed.

The suppression of such kinds of information has given a tremendous commercial advantage to the drug companies and has contributed to the belief, among the general population, that herbs and nutrients do not work. (The big difference in health among various sections of the American population is due to the fact that this FDA regulation only affects advertisements and not books. The book reading public is therefore aware of the benefits of a natural approach to medicine and is in better health than the non-readers.) Prior to 1965, American medicine relied largely on nutrients and herbs. It is only since 1965 that doctors have switched over primarily to reliance on drugs.

These drugs, quite frankly, have a terrible record. Every drug is a completely new substance never before existing on planet earth. The human body, which is a very delicate chemical factory, has not had anywhere near enough time to evolve a protection against any of its bad aspects. Since the drugs are not tested for bad side effects before they are released on the general public, there is a history of bad side effects showing up a few years (or 5 or 10) after the drug is released to the public. I know of one case where a drug used to prevent morning sickness in pregnant women caused sterility and cancer in the unborn babies, and this effect did not show up until these fetuses were adults circa 30 years old.

When the FDA was created, there was a “small” omission in the legislation which created it. Bribery of FDA officials was not made illegal. Such bribery is today commonplace. What happens is that a drug company offers an FDA official a job. (So far, sounds OK.) The official was making $50,000/year, but the drug company offers him $250,000/year. “Nice pay, what do I have to do.” “Oh, you will be our drug company’s representative to the FDA. You stay in Washington and pal around with your old buddies.” That is, the FDA official gets $250,000/year for doing no work. He shows his old co-workers his Cadillac and his yacht. His “job” is to serve as an example of how you too can be bribed by a drug company. Because almost all FDA officials are desperately trying to please the drug companies drugs are routinely approved which do not work and which have horrific side effects.

Another method of drug company control over the FDA consists of campaign contributions to important congressmen and senators who hold key positions on the committees which regulate the FDA. This also is bribery, but it is not generally recognized as such in our society.

Now classical liberals, such as myself, ask, how can it be said that government loves us when in fact it tries to kill us? In truth (leaving aside the touchy issue of sex) the only people who love (or have loved) you are your parents, and the relation of parent to child is a unique relationship among living things and cannot be duplicated by any social arrangement. In short, the social democrats can say that they have a government based on love as many times as they like; but that will not make it true.

As long as we are on the subject of heart disease, I would like to say a word about the heart bypass operation. Heart bypass was not done in this country until 1967 (2 years after the passage of Medicare/Medicaid). At that time, it was imported from England. No studies were done to see if it worked. Doctors just started doing it. It had a lot of high tech gadgets associated with it. Doctors loved it because they made a big chunk of money with each operation. (I read back in the mid-1990s that a typical bypass surgeon made $500,000 per year.) Patients loved it because they got this very expensive operation for free. (The Government or some insurance company was paying.)

Finally, some researcher got around to doing a study on the bypass to see if it worked. He took two large groups of patients who had been recommended for a bypass. One group selected the operation; the other group turned it down. The two groups were followed for 11 years. At the end of that time the proportion of patients still alive in both groups was the same. Having had the operation did nothing for a person in terms of extending his life.

Gee, here was this very expensive operation, and it didn’t do any good. The bypass surgeons looked up from counting their income for a minute and said, “how about that.” Then they continued doing their operations. The attention paid to this study in the medical community was zero. Later two similar studies were done as follow-ups. The second showed the same result as the first – none. The third showed a slight positive result for the bypass group. However, all three studies had shown the bypass patients sinking rapidly through the 10th and 11th years. It was clear that, had the studies been extended to 15-20 years, the bypass patients would have had a shorter lifespan. Bypass does not work.

Since 1965, American medicine has split along the lines of the body-soul dichotomy. There are the good doctors (a small minority), who treat according to what is best for the patient and hence who use mostly herbs and nutrients. And there are the bad doctors, who treat with drugs and are mostly interested in how much money they can make.

American medicine has now gotten to the point that German medicine reached in 1930. There is an overwhelming need to control costs, or the system will become unworkable. The solution is the same as it was in Germany at that time. KILL THOSE PEOPLE WHO ARE EXPENSIVE TO TREAT.

Betsy McCaughey writes in relation to Obama’s “stimulus” bill:

“Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system….One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective.”

Betsy McCaughey, “Ruin Your Health With the Obama
Stimulus Plan,” www.bloomberg.com, 2-11-09, 18:25 (my
emphasis)

These provisions in the “stimulus” bill are the work of Tom Daschle (Obama’s nominee to head Health and Human Services). McCaughey continues:

“Hospitals and doctors that are not ‘meaningful users’ of the new system will face penalties. ‘Meaningful user’ isn’t defined in the bill. That will be left to the HHS secretary [i.e., Daschle], who will be empowered to impose ‘more stringent measures of meaningful use over time.’”

“In his book, Daschle proposed an appointed body with vast powers to make the ‘tough’ decisions elected politicians won’t make….The goal, Daschle’s book explained, is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs.”

Ibid.

By the time Hitler got to the late 1930s, he had come up with some political enemies (and other people he did not like). Here was this well-organized killing machine being operated by the German government. It was a simple matter to throw these undesirables into the machine, and this is the event which is known to history as the Holocaust.

Hitler may have been persuaded to do this by George Bernard Shaw (a Nazi admirer but someone considered on the far left in Anglo-Saxon politics) who wrote an article for an American magazine named (of all things) Liberty in 1938 defending Mussolini and Hitler and suggesting:

“it should be possible to get rid of anybody who is a nuisance….everybody should be called on every five years or so to justify their existence. There are many people in the world who ought to be liquidated.”

George Bernard Shaw, “DICTATORS – Let us have more
of them,” Liberty Magazine, Sept. 10, 1938, p. 7.

The big mistake that Hitler made in history was that he openly admitted (after 1919) being for hate. The Catholic Church kept organizing mass murder for more than a thousand years, but they never provoked the public reaction that Hitler provoked because they kept pretending to be for love. The symbol of the Middle Ages is the Catholic priest praying for the soul of the heretic whom the Church is having burned at the stake. This is what is going on in the European countries and Canada who have adopted socialized medicine. They are following the German program of killing those expensive to treat, but they are not as honest as Hitler was, and they cling to the façade of love. For example, denying a sick person treatment is not murder. But in a government imposed medical system where the money he could have used to purchase treatment has been stolen from him on the promise of such treatment, then this denial is murder.

Note: I am overwhelmed with e-mails. I usually manage to read them all but can only answer a few. If you want an answer, provide your e-mail address and keep your fingers crossed.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

PEACE

2009-02-09T11:08:00.003-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
2-9-09

There is a continual complaint from those who study history: What is the cause of man’s inhumanity to man? And certainly we find much in history to justify such an attitude. But in analyzing this position it is better to begin with the opposite, the cynic who says that war is in human nature, that men have always fought with each other and always will. Therefore, we have to accept the hard reality and make sure we are not the ones on the losing end of the war. (Those who have been following my series on Christianity will recognize that this is a variant of St. Paul’s position: all men are sinners.)

Most animals do not make war against their own kind. The major inter-species fighting which occurs is among males competing for females, and this is not usually to the death. But both humans and our chimpanzee ancestors do fight to the death with their own kind. A little theorizing will give us the reason.

The predator-pray relationship appears to be very harsh. But in fact there is an aspect to it which is not generally appreciated. Most prey animals would multiply and overgraze their land, and then many of them would die of starvation. By keeping their numbers in check the predator does a service to the prey animal.

However, chimpanzees and humans are too smart to be preyed upon on a routine basis. The result is that they act as their own predators. Humans and chimpanzees keep their numbers in check by killing their own kind – which in the case of humans we call war.

So far this seems to justify the cynic. And we observe precisely this relationship between all primitive peoples. They war with each other over hunting grounds and thus keep the human population down to the level which can be supported by their economy. If this article were written 300 years ago, such a conclusion would seem reasonable.

But after the economic revolution which may be dated at 1787 (the year Jeremy Bentham’s “Defense of Usury” was written) we know this argument to be false. During the 19th century the economies of Britain, America and several other countries made more progress than had been made in the previous 3000 years, indeed than had been made since the beginning of the human race. We found out that the human capacity for producing wealth, if properly organized and harnessed, is so amazingly large that economics does not have to serve as a limit on the human population. This refutes the argument that war is necessary to keep the population in check. To take one simple example, when the American settlers reached the Great Plains, they found the land infertile. The soil was so tough that the type of plough needed to turn it was so heavy that it could not be pulled by a team of oxen. Enter John Deere. Mr. Deere invented a plow that was strong enough to break this soil but light enough to be pulled by a team of oxen. Today the Great Plains are the breadbasket of the world.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his Essay on Population in which he argued that population expanded faster than the food supply thus leading inevitably to famine and disaster. His timing could not have been worse. All history up to that point seemed to support him. All history since he wrote has served to refute him. During the 20th century the world’s population multiplied by a factor of 4 times, but the food supply multiplied by a factor of 5 times. With the same amount of arable land in cultivation, the average farmer was able to grow 5 times as much food. To prevent the extra grain from going to waste, it was fed to meat animals, and more humans were able to eat meat. (In 1928, the Republicans bragged that they had put “a chicken in every pot,” meaning that they had made it possible for just about every American to eat meat every day.)

Clearly this economic revolution removes the economic reason for war. However, this revolution occurred only once in human history. There are over a hundred different human societies on earth in every generation. Going back 300 generations to the invention of agriculture this gives us over 30,000 different societies. Only one, the Age of Reason which occurred in the Anglo-Saxon world in the 18th century, gave us such a revolution. Quite clearly, it is not a type of thing that humans are likely to stumble upon by accident. It represents a unique achievement, and the men responsible for it are some of the greatest geniuses in human history. When other countries adopted the same policies, it was because they were imitating the Anglo-Saxons. They copied but did not originate.

There are, of course, other reasons for war besides the economic. But the fear of starvation which faced primitive man and motivated him to expand his hunting ground at the expense of his neighbor was a primary. Once war had become necessary for economic reasons, human society molded itself to this reality. The warrior was glorified. Positions of status and authority were built up based on war, and it was strongly felt that these had to be defended. Hatreds increased. (For example, a historian will glorify a great conqueror like Alexander the Great, and this will inspire another man to try to imitate him for personal glory.)

Yet, all of these other reasons for war are secondary. Once the primary economic reason is removed, then given enough time these other reasons will fade away. Indeed, there are positive forces in this direction. Take America, for example; America is composed of a large diversity of ethnic and racial groups. Back in their home countries these peoples have fought with each other for centuries and have long histories of hate: French vs. German, Japanese vs. Chinese, Muslim vs. Hindu, etc. But here in America the same peoples can get along. They hire each other for jobs. They shop in each other’s stores. They form partnerships and joint stock companies. When people discover that they can benefit themselves economically by cooperating with the (formerly) hated rival, then the hatred disappears.

I noted that out of some 30,000 different societies in human history only one discovered that it was possible for man to get along without making war on his own kind. This was the Anglo-Saxon society of the 18th century. It behooves us to study this society and see what it was that they did which was different and which had such beneficial results. (Of course, I realize that the Anglo-Saxon societies of the 19th and 20th centuries did fight wars. But it takes a long time for humans to make fundamental changes in their behavior. The point is that it was Anglo-Saxon society which figured out the answer to the cynic in the above debate. How is it possible for humans to live in close proximity without letting the competition for food throw them into a continual state of war?)

The Anglo-Saxon thinker who did the most to solve this problem was John Locke. Locke wrote a treatise in defense of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which was the Revolution which made England into a democracy. Locke argued that, if we are to understand man in society, we must begin by considering man outside of society, and this condition of being outside of human society Locke called a state of nature. A short while later, Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe to give people a clear concept of what is meant by a state of nature. Quite simply, it is the state of being apart from other men. When America’s Founding Fathers sat down in Philadelphia in 1787 to deliberately form a society, they had this concept of man outside of society clearly in their minds.

Locke said, quite simply, that the best society would be one which guaranteed its members, as a minimum, what they would have in a state of nature (apart from other men) and then allowed them to make any arrangements (by mutual consent) with others in the society for mutual benefit.

The values which a human being has in a state of nature are of 4 kinds:

• LIFE: There is no other human being around to kill him.
• LIBERTY: He can go where he wants and do what he wants, and there is no one to stop him.
• PERSON: There is no other human being to violate his person (e.g., assault, torture, rape, etc.).
• PROPERTY: He can keep for himself the product of his own labor.

Thus in a Lockean society all men are guaranteed the rights of life, liberty, person and property. And they are further guaranteed the right of association, the right to make agreements with other men by mutual consent. In such a society, human beings are no threat to each other; indeed, the addition of a new person to a group is usually a positive benefit. Just to keep this clear in our minds, let us imagine 3 types of society:

1. First is the society of the savage or of the lion. In this society there is a fixed amount of food. For the lion, it is the given herd of zebra. For the savage, it is the given supply of game animals and vegetation. In this society, every new individual who enters takes away some of the food supply from those who were there before. In this society, men’s interests are in conflict. Every new person who enters takes away from the others.
2. Second is the society of the self-sufficient farmer. This is the society which existed at many points in the early history of America. The Pilgrims were in a self-sufficient economy immediately after abolishing communism in 1623-24. In this kind of society, everybody does everything for himself: grows his own food, builds his own house, makes his own clothes, etc. If a new individual enters, he is no threat to the rest of the society. He just gets some land, grows his food, builds his house, etc. In this kind of society, there is no competition among individuals but neither is there any cooperation. Human relations are not hostile, but neither are they positive.
3. Third is the society based on cooperation. Shortly after the New England Calvinists set up their self-sufficient farms, they began to discover ways in which they could cooperate. One man had a talent for making shoes. He started making only shoes and trading them with the other members of the society for food, clothing, etc. All of a sudden, all of the other people have a positive benefit from this one man because he can make them better shoes than they can make themselves. And he has a positive benefit from them because they are his customers. As this idea spreads, the members of the society think of all sorts of ways that they can benefit each other. The standard of living rises dramatically. I first experienced the change in attitude which this implies for human relations when, as a young person, I was taught the principle of, you can never tell.

If you meet a new person, it was explained to me, then you can never tell:

• when he might become a customer for your store or business;
• when you might be applying to him for a job;
• when he might come up with a great idea to make money and give you a chance to get aboard;
• when he might be in a position to lend you money you need;
• with a great many etceteras.

The conclusion here being that it is a good idea to be nice to everybody (unless you have a very specific reason to the contrary) because you can never tell when an opportunity for cooperation may arise.

Locke’s ideas were partially realized in Britain. They were adopted by the whigs (later liberals) and opposed by the conservatives; the result was a compromise. His ideas were even more influential in America because the Founding Fathers were very impressed with them and used them to frame the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The success of these two countries over the 19th and 20th centuries stands out as a unique event in human history. Never before had mankind accomplished so much. Never had so many people populated the earth and (Malthus to the contrary notwithstanding) lived so well. Clearly if the cynic was right, the 19th and 20th centuries could not have happened.

So while a naïve view might declare the cynic correct in thinking that human beings have to compete with each other for a limited supply of the earth’s resources, the past 3 centuries show us that there is a way of organizing society which gives people an incentive to cooperate with each other and paves the way for people to live in peace at the same time enjoying a bounty beyond the wildest dreams of all previous societies.

My description of the idealist and the cynic in the first paragraph above is easily recognizable as the “liberal” and conservative of today’s politics. I find this incredible. How is it possible that the political debate goes on in America today with no knowledge of John Locke’s philosophy, with no understanding of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution? If a man of the future looks back on the early 21st century, he will be astonished that the political knowledge contained in the Federalist Papers has simply disappeared.

And what is there to be said of the peace party? What of the people who ask the question with which I began this article? What is the cause of man’s inhumanity to man? Why can’t we just get along? Well, we can get along. The 19th century proved that, for the most part, we did get along. But the only way for human beings to get along is by following the advice of John Locke and establishing a society where everyone’s natural rights are respected.

But tune in to any “liberal” organ: a New York Times editorial, a PBS special, a news magazine or TV program. What you find is an outpouring of hatred toward America and a complete ignorance of the Constitution and of American history. Barrack Obama, for example, took office immediately following (more than) a doubling of the money supply by the nation’s (third) central bank. His first announcement was to declare a continuation of that policy. He does not know that the Democratic Party was founded (in 1828) to abolish the central bank

One small freedom, achieved by Noah Webster (the legalization of paying and charging interest), was responsible for the industrial revolution and a massive increase in the human standard of living and the degree of human cooperation. Yet look at the unashamed hatred of “liberals” toward the industrial revolution. All our society is doing is reenacting the conflict between the Essenes and Zealots of 1st century A.D. Judea. Those people (whose conflict was only on the surface) destroyed their society.

And a historian of the year 3,000 A.D. (if the people of that age are civilized enough to write history) will look back on both ages and say: same cause, same effect.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

BANK BAILOUT (MORE)

2009-02-02T02:53:00.002-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
2-2-09

Here in New Hampshire two of our representatives voted for the Wall Street bailout bill of Oct. 3, 2008, and two voted against it. The two supporters were our 2 senators. One of these faced reelection in November and was defeated. The second senator, Judd Gregg, will face the people in 2010, and he is obviously running scared because on Jan. 16, 2009 he sent a letter to constituents trying to justify his vote. This past week I answered his letter, and I would like to share it with you as follows:

Sen. Judd Gregg
Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510-2904

Dear Sen. Gregg:

I recently received your letter of Jan. 16, 2009 explaining your support for the Emergency Stabilization Act (more commonly called the Wall Street bailout bill) enacted Oct. 3, 2008.

Economics is my field. I am a researcher for the Gerbino Gold Group, one of the leading money managers in the country, and I am editor/publisher of the One-handed Economist. (My record from the turn of the millennium to Jan. 2, 2009 shows an increase in capital from $100,000 to $139,955. Over the same period, the average U.S. mutual fund went from $100,000 down to $77,673.)

So I know my economics, and I can tell you quite frankly that the economic theories you use in your letter to justify your vote for the bailout bill are doubletalk. I named my newsletter the One-handed Economist after Harry Truman. He was getting the same kind of doubletalk from his economic advisors. “On the one hand…but on the other hand.” Truman had common sense, and he said, “What this country needs is a good one-handed economist.”

Truman, later followed by Eisenhower, balanced the budget and did not print money. Between them they gave the country a period from the late ‘40s to the early ‘60s when prices were stable. Today we look back on this period as “Happy Days.”

When I read your letter, all I see are a lot of pretty words: “back on track,” “stave off a systemic collapse,” “stability,” Economic Stabilization.” But I know that, in economics as in life, one does not listen to the words a person speaks. HE LOOKS AT THE ACTIONS THE PERSON TAKES.

What are the actions taken by the supporters of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act? They have begun a massive campaign of printing money. Since September, Federal Reserve Credit (the first step in money creation) increased by 2½ times. In the same time frame, the monetary base (the second step in money creation) doubled. The increase in the money supply proper (the third step) takes a little longer. I estimate that in a period of 1-2 years the American money supply will have doubled. And two years after that, average prices in America will be double what they are today.

This is not, Sen. Gregg, economic stability.

How are the working people of New Hampshire going to pay those higher prices? While the bankers who received that bailout money are passing out bonuses and living like millionaires, the average working person in New Hampshire will have to tighten his belt and reduce his standard of living. Was that the right thing for you to do?

Sen. Gregg, you have forgotten what America is all about. The people who founded this country set it on the right course with some pretty good principles:

• Everybody has the right to the property created by his own labor.
• Money has to be based on either gold or silver.
• Paper money is forbidden by the Constitution and is illegal. When the government issues paper money, it is counterfeiting just as much as a private person who does the same thing.

Republicans used to be known for balancing the budget. No more, Sen. Gregg. The last President to balance the budget was Bill Clinton. The last 5 Republican Presidents have not only failed to balance the budget; they have increased the deficit they inherited. You have to balance the budget, Sen. Gregg. That is just common sense.

America was founded to protect the property rights of the average person. You voted to rob the average person to give to the banks and Wall Street. There is an economic crisis in this country, Sen. Gregg, but it consists of people like you who want to rob from the common man to give to Wall Street.

You have lost your moorings, Sen. Gregg. You have been too long in Washington. You have forgotten the common people who pay your salary and whom you have sworn to represent. It is time for you to go.

Sincerely,

Howard S. Katz

A reader writes that he refuses to subscribe to an economic letter from someone who is self-educated. This is the type of person I am describing when I say, “You are going to die.” Human life requires that you rely on the judgement of your own mind. You can rely on experts, but someone who claims expertise must first prove to you that he does indeed have superior knowledge or ability. And this is not done by a group of people who form a closed circle and give each other titles.

I have had my go-round with the establishment. I went to Harvard in the late 1950s, and I was shocked by the ignorance of the Harvard Department of Economics. I resolved to take no economics courses, and I learned my economics by studying on my own after college.

As a result, I learned real economics. What do I mean by real economics? Well, the proof that something is true is that it works. Suppose there are 10 auto mechanics in your town with fancy degrees. But every time you take your car to one of them, it comes back worse than when you brought it in. And there is one auto mechanic who fixes your car every time but has no degree. Who is the real mechanic, and who has the real knowledge? Obviously, it is the guy who does the job, not the guys with the pretty certificates on their walls.

Economists, unlike mechanics, construction workers or singers, don’t do anything. Like a weather man all they do is predict. But a real economist, like a real weather man, will make correct predictions, or at least he will do this more often than not. When I began to study real economics after I was out of Harvard, I came to the conclusion (based on Von Mises’ regression theorem) that the price of gold – which was then $35/oz. – was way too low, and gold therefore had to make a major rise in price. I therefore became a gold bug and predicted a large rise in gold. I was one of the radicals of the day.

I was astonished by the hostility which the great majority of economists of that time demonstrated toward the small group of gold bugs. But I knew that one man plus the truth is an army. And I knew that we had the truth. I assumed that, when gold made its big move, these people would have to admit that we were right.

Well, gold went from $35 in 1970 to $875 in 1980, a multiple of 25 times. This was even beyond what the radicals like myself had predicted. The economic establishment, some of whom had predicted a fall in gold from $35 to $6 or $8 per ounce was humiliated. The people who followed their advice and bought “good, sound stocks for the long pull” were economically destroyed. (The real DJI lost over 70% of its value from 1966 to 1982.)

But what happened next caught me by surprise. The establishment dealt with this situation by simply shrugging it off and pretending that it had never happened. Indeed, there have been a long list of wrong establishment predictions, many of them followed (to their economic doom) by large numbers of people. They failed to predict (what they call) the Great Depression of the 1930s while Ludwig von Mises predicted it in the late ‘20s. Then the establishment tried to make up for this by forecasting a depression for the late 1940s. John Kenneth Galbraith forecast a 1929-style crash in stocks in 1955. It never happened; instead stocks turned and moved sharply to the upside for the next 11 years. In 1982, establishment guru Henry Kaufman was all over the newspapers with his bearish predictions. That was the exact bottom of what is, so far, a 25 year bull market. Then in 1997, Robert Morton and Myron Scholes won what is falsely called the Nobel Prize in Economics. In 1998, the hedge fund which followed their theories and employed them lost $4 billion and went belly up.

Adam Smith never had a degree in economics. Neither of the Wright brothers ever received their high school diplomas. Most of the people who follow economic authority die economically. Many of the people who follow authority in more important fields (such as medicine) die literally. The period in western history when most people followed (the) authority (of the Catholic Church) was a period when human beings died in great numbers, and the population of the western world shrank dramatically.

But I am now tired of waiting for people like the above reader to wake up to reality. To see reality as it is is hard mental work. To follow authority is much easier. They will just have to die because I cannot save them. But maybe I can save some of the rest of you.

Another, more rational, reader writes: “I have understood that we need not only increased money supply, but an increase in the ‘velocity of money’ in order for us to realize inflation in prices.” This idea is being promoted by the Wall Street Journal to justify the huge creation of money by the Fed in the 4th quarter of 2008. The Journal got the idea of velocity of money from Irving Fisher, who was one of the people who persuaded Roosevelt to abolish the gold standard in 1933. Fisher was losing money on his stocks and understood that, if the central bank printed money, it would put stock prices up and allow him to make back his losses.

Velocity of money is the speed with which an average piece of money changes hands. I like to measure velocity as GDP divided by the money supply. It should be clear that most money changes hands when economic goods are create/consumed. You go to work; you produce goods, and you are paid at the end of the week. You go to a restaurant; you order a meal, and you pay money. The only exceptions to this are gambling and speculation.

It should be obvious that people’s production and consumption of goods does not change very dramatically in a few months. Thus velocity is pretty steady for long periods. I believe that the only thing that makes it change at all is speculation. But the amount of speculation in a society does not produce goods and does not affect the price of goods.

The Journal’s assertion that velocity of money fell rapidly in this country in September 2008 (making it necessary for the Fed to dramatically increase the money supply) was an outrageous statement. They presented no evidence that this occurred. As I measure it, velocity hardly changed at all, and if the Wall St. Journal measures it in some other way, then they have an obligation to explain this to their readers and present their evidence. Actually, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz did a study of U.S. prices vs. money supply from the 1860s to the 1960s. Prices moved exactly in step with the per capita money supply (minor exception after 1970 due to the commodity pendulum). When per capita money supply increased, prices went up by very nearly the same percent; when it decreased, prices went down. When money was stable, prices were stable. It must have been the case that velocity did not change for a hundred years. This makes it hard to believe that it suddenly fell in half in September 2008.

In short, velocity is what is known in the intellectual world as a fudge factor. A fudge factor is a concept which a pseudo-intellectual makes up and sticks into his equation or his writing. Whenever he does not like the answer he is getting, he simply adjusts the fudge factor to get the answer he wants. The Wall St. Journal wanted to support the Fed’s massive printing of money; so they made up the lie that velocity was collapsing. And these people tell us that they are for the free market.

I believe that the establishment made a massive political blunder with the bailout bill. Every time I talk to people I get the sense that the vast majority are on our side. If you want to write your congressman, then a senator’s address is: Senator ______ ______, Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20510. A congressman’s address is Mr. ______ ______, House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515. Be polite.

When George III tried to destroy freedom in America in the 1770s, it was a scary time. But the American people rebelled and fought their way to a better future. Maybe we can do the same thing in our own day.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

THE HISTORIC MOMENT

2009-01-26T11:20:00.003-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
1-26-09

When I survey current events, I often have to pinch myself. I have a sense that “this cannot be happening” for the simple reason that people cannot be this stupid. But it is happening. I am talking here about the public reaction to the inauguration of Barrack Obama.

In fairness to President Obama, I must distinguish between the man himself and the public reaction to him. I was very suspicious when Obama started getting large votes in the Democratic primaries. He had none of the qualities usually required for successful politicking in America. He had no name recognition. Hillary Clinton, for example, had been in the public eye since 1992. People saw TV reports on her and read her name in the newspapers. No matter what policies you advocate that is a very good start to get a large number of people to vote for you in an American election.

Neither did Barrack Obama have an issue. He had a record which put him on the extreme left of the Democratic Party, and he ran a campaign based on meaningless clichés. “Change,” as he used the term, had no meaning, and all the people echoing it could not point to specific policies. What was it that Barrack Obama wanted to change from, and what did he want to change to? So no strong constituency was voting for him because of an issue (such as the right to own guns or homosexual marriage).

All of this became clear in the period leading up to the inauguration. The top media in the country could not contain their joy. Time magazine expressed this by a cover showing Obama in the pose of F.D.R. (riding in the back seat of a convertible smoking a cigar). In the minds of the editors of Time, this was a high compliment. They still do not know that F.D.R. was a Wall Streeter whose goal was to enrich his old buddies at the expense of the working people of the country. The enormous rise in stock prices since his election and the decline in the real wages of the average American since 1972 are the fruit of his policies.

The message that came through, again and again, was, “We are so happy. We are relieved of our white guilt.” The background to this is that for most of my life a continual stream of hate has come from the intellectual left directed against America. A fellow alumnus of mine put it well in the title of his book: “Harvard Hates America.” It was true and remains true today.

Now none of this directly has anything to do with race. Harvard and the intellectual left hate America because they are (ideological) Germans. And all this dates from central Europe in the year 1875. In that year, a party based on love was founded in the new country of Germany. This party was called the Social Democrats. They argued that the government should be like a big father who loved his subjects and gave them something for nothing. The Social Democrats became more and more powerful. In 1880, they forced the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to institute a part of their program, socialized medicine, and, circa 1890, came up with a fraudulent retirement program we today call social security. In 1912, the Social Democrats became the largest party in Germany and took control of the German legislature. They did not formally control the government because Germany was still, officially, a monarchy. But the Social Democratic politicians were much smarter than the Kaiser or his officials and effectively controlled the German government. In 1914, they plunged the world into war by supporting Austria’s aggression against little Serbia and attacking neutral Belgium.

After being defeated in this first test of strength, Germany was unrepentant, acting like a spoiled child. You have probably heard about the issue of how the mean Allies imposed reparations on defeated Germany after the war and how unfair this was. This is pro-German propaganda. You have probably never read that a victorious Germany imposed reparations upon France after the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, and these reparations were speedily paid without complaint. After World War I, the U.S. lent Germany the money to make her reparations payments, and these loans were never paid back.

After World War I, Germany transited from the country of love to the country of hate. A Social Democrat named Adolf Hitler led this movement toward hate, and by 1933 he had won the allegiance of the majority of Germans. (Pro-German propaganda in this country makes much of the fact that Hitler did not get an absolute majority in the 1933 election. But Germany, as every other European country, was a multi-party country, and it was virtually impossible for any one party to get an absolute majority. In reality, the party with the largest plurality would form a government, and in 1933 the Nazis got 44% of the vote. This was a very, very large plurality. Further, there were two smaller parties, the Catholic Party and the nationalist party who, a few months after the election, voted with the Nazis to abolish democracy in Germany and make Hitler dictator. These parties had programs very similar to that of the Nazis. They simply had cultural or religious attachments which led them to express their support for Hitler in a different way.)

Those people who have complained about my attack on the philosophy of love have to deal with this case. It is a textbook perfect example. A country was converted to an explicit government based on love. (When Bismarck adopted the Social Democratic program in 1880, he called it his Christian program.) In a little over 50 years, it turned from the country of love into the country of hate. Then it went on a rampage and murdered 50 million human beings.

A similar thing happened when Rome became Christian in 394 A.D. And a similar thing happened with Jesus of Nazareth himself. The history of brutality and destruction which constitute the Middle Ages are simply variations on this theme.

This long and sorry period (more than a thousand years of ignorance, poverty and savagery) came to an end when John Calvin taught people that nothing one could do on earth could get one into Heaven. However irrational this idea may appear, it led the followers of Calvin to disregard the philosophy of Jesus (the motivation for which was admission to Heaven via the Catholic Church). The Calvinists started paying attention to the Old Testament instead of the New. They reinvented democracy and became the first people in modern times to say that human beings had rights. They founded many of the modern sciences. They created wealth beyond the imagination of previous generations. They cured diseases, introduced romantic love and created a society where the average person did not have to live in fear of his fellow man.

As the Calvinist countries (America, Britain, Holland and Switzerland) began to spread freedom and democracy around the world, a key event was the French Revolution. The French Revolution gets a bad press, and there are certain aspects of it fit for criticism. But on the whole this was a period when the French were adopting the (American) ideas of freedom and democracy. The bad in the French Revolution came from the fact that no society changes its social institutions instantaneously. The change from the evil society of the Middle Ages to the good society of the 19th century took several hundred years, and to judge the French harshly because they could not do the equivalent in 2-3 years is being unfair.

The French Revolution threw Europe into turmoil. French armies defeated the greatest powers of Europe. The French were energized by freedom. It was a new world. But the people of central Europe set their face against this new world. They hated freedom and democracy. In 1866, they formed themselves into the new country of Germany, and, as noted, in 1880 they founded the welfare state. In 1933, they chose Adolf Hitler to be their leader. In 1939, they set out to make themselves the master race, and, as noted, from 1939-1945 they killed 50 million human beings.

To bring this back to President Obama, in the 1930s the apostles of love came from Germany to America, and they infiltrated the teaching of (what they called) the social sciences. They managed to get rid of the real professors of history, psychology and economics and started teaching their package of lies to American students. (Traditional education from the end of the Middle Ages through the 19th century consisted of the sciences and the humanities; there was no such thing as social science.) Part of this package is a set of lies deliberately intended to slander America, and the only reason race plays a part is that ethnic hatreds are so intense in central Europe that the Germans thought it would be easy to stir them up in America.

For example, it is routinely argued that the Anglo-Saxon colonists starting in the 17th century began a campaign of eradication against the American Indians. (I don’t call them native Americans. A native is a person who was born in the place he is native to. I am a native American. Most of the readers of this blog are native Americans. The Mongoloid peoples who inhabited what is today the United States are native Americans, but this phrase does not distinguish them from any of the other native Americans of our time.)

To make the case that the European settlers eradicated the Indians, one should, logically, start out with the population of Indians in the land area which is today the U.S. in the year 1620. The best estimate I have seen here is 800,000. The next question is how many Indians are there in this same land area today? There is a difficulty here because basically what happened to the Indians is that they intermarried with the white population. Thus there are today a great many half Indians, quarter Indians, eighth Indians, etc. The only valid way to calculate the Indian blood in the U.S. today is to take half Indians and divide by 2, quarter Indians and divide by 4, etc. The only figures I have seen on this show upwards of 5,000,000 (genetic) Indians in the U.S. today. These modern Indians live in houses, not teepees. They drive cars. They have central heating and hot and cold running water. They watch TV and may even read this blog on their personal computer. Any fair assessment of the situation would have to say that it was a good day for the Indians when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

Another left-wing lie intended to raise racial hatreds refers to the old institution of Negro slavery and its aftermath. At the time of the American Revolution, the revolutionary party made major advances in human liberty, and they succeeded in abolishing slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line. But as noted, social advance cannot occur in just a few years. It is unrealistic to expect another age to come complete with the institutions of our age. We owe those (good) institutions to the good work of many great men who struggled for them through history.

Slavery was a human institution pretty much going back to the dawn of history. One of the few good things to happen in the Middle Ages was the abolition of slavery (meaning that Europeans did not enslave each other and were too weak to enslave more distant nations). However, slavery returned to European society in 1453 when it was sanctioned by the Pope. The Pope of that day was angry at the Muslims because they had conquered Constantinople, and he sanctioned the enslavement of a Muslim by a Christian.

It turned out to be too hard for Europeans to enslave Muslims; so they adopted the easier alternative of buying Negro slaves from the east African coast (where the various tribes would fight with and enslave each other). This was how slavery got its start in the British colonies of America.

The American South at that time was populated mostly by Cavaliers (less Calvinist than the Puritans in New England). These people were reluctant to change and did not understand economics. Their argument at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that the economy of the South depended on slavery was intellectually destroyed over the period 1788-1860 as the North, using free labor, far surpassed the South in economic growth.

The Civil War is a painful period in American history, mostly because of several important mistakes by Abraham Lincoln (whose only claim to greatness was that he was assassinated). But it was part of the larger march toward freedom which was enveloping the world at that age. While slavery was unequivocally wrong, judging America as a whole and in comparison with other nations, she has much to be proud of and has to be rated as the finest nation in the history of the world.

The South, angered by its defeat, was unable to blame Lincoln, who was now the martyred hero. So they directed their hatred against the former slaves. This is the origin of that racial bigotry which disgraced America from the end of the Civil War to the age of Martin Luther King. (To return to my theme of Christianity and love, please note that it was the most Christian part of the country which was the heart of this period of bigotry.)

That period is now over. If we judge America by the standard of other nations, then Americans have a great deal of which to be proud and very little of which to be ashamed. America is the greatest nation on the earth, the greatest nation that is now and the greatest that ever was. Slavery was a blight upon mankind and existed through all previous ages, and the freedom movement, which got its great impetus from the American Revolution, abolished that blight. America is the land of freedom and democracy. It is the land of private property and freedom of enterprise. Americans took this land and turned it from a place of scarcity to a place of the greatest bounty in human history. By the early 20th century, it seemed that Americans could do anything: build the Panama Canal, defeat Hitler, cure polio.

When Bill Clinton’s disgraceful treatment of women became public in the late 1990s, the political left (refusing to apologize for having supported him) propagated an old slander against Thomas Jefferson, saying that he had had a child by one of his Negro slaves. (The idea here was that everybody, or every President, does it.) This allegation completely failed of proof and belongs in the gossip columns. Jefferson tried to get slavery abolished in Virginia (but failed), and he condemned the slave trade in the Declaration of Independence. (He was unable to free his own slaves because of Virginia law; had he done so they simply would have gone into slavery with another, unknown, owner.)

The neo-Germans on the political left hate the Declaration of Independence and everything to do with America. They still want to go back to the Middle Ages, where we were all ruled by a king and most of the people were serfs. They don’t dare to say this openly, but they have spent most of the past generation slandering America, and evidently Time, Newsweek and a large part of the population has fallen for their lies.

Martin Luther King’s message was to judge a man not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character. But the modern left is telling us that all whites in America are guilty of the sin of a few southern aristocrats of 2 centuries ago in owning slaves. That is, we are guilty because our skin is white (even though many northerners fought and died to free those slaves). This is the same bigotry that persecuted Negroes from 1865-1964. Only its object has been changed. But then hate is hate, and love is love, and there is not as much difference between them as most people think.
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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.

WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT

2009-01-19T23:53:00.003-05:00

by Howard S. Katz
1-19-09

In this blog, I want to present an overview of my philosophy in the hope that it will help readers understand my comments on specific issues. Man is the animal who perceives reality by means of abstractions. A principle is a statement about abstractions. Therefore, it is very important for each of us to understand the correct principles if we want to achieve the good things of life.

The first question that every human being addresses when he enters life is what kind of a world is this in which I find myself? And this is the most important question he will ever consider because almost all other questions depend on the answer to this one. Further, as per paragraph 1, the answer to this question must be framed in terms of principle.

The first explanation of the world which human beings accepted was animism. This is the view that events happen because every object has an animate spirit, and the spirit wills the event to happen. For example, why does a volcano erupt? There are two explanations.

• The volcano is an animate being. This volcano spirit gets mad, and the volcano erupts.
• Deep under the earth’s surface is very hot rock in a semi-solid, semi-liquid form called magma. Occasionally this magma breaks through a weak point in the earth’s crust, and the result is an eruption.

You are familiar with these two ideas as the religious world view and the scientific world view. However, the issue goes deeper than that.

The form of animism we meet in the very earliest reports of human society is called polytheism. Here the inanimate object is associated with but distinct from the spirit, which is usually represented as a human being or an animal. For example, the spirit, or god, of the sun is conceived as a charioteer who pulls the sun across the heavens. The reason that the sun rises and sets so regularly is because the god of the sun is very reliable in his habits.. The god of the sea is given to fits of temper, which is why there are storms at sea. The goddess of the earth is kindly and bountiful, which is why the earth brings forth food.

About 1500 B.C., a radical movement arose in ancient Egypt which rejected animism and declared that events happened because of cause and effect. We say today that lightening does not strike because Zeus is angry and is hurling thunderbolts; rather, the rapid movement of the clouds causes friction, which creates static electricity (much as happens when you shuffle across a rug or rub your comb against certain fabrics. The lightening bolt is simply the discharge of this static electricity and is similar to the spark which jumped from your finger to the electric light switch. in the old-fashioned wall-to-wall carpeting.

This ancient Egyptian movement was what we would call atheist. It argued that events happened because of cause and effect not because of the will of a spirit or god. However, this atheist movement found it too difficult to persuade people of the radical idea that there were no gods. So it compromised and argued that there was just one god. In this form, it was successful, and the Egyptian pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, converted to this new monotheism and became a worshiper of Aton, the god of the sun. In line with this, he changed his name to Akhenaten (spirit of the sun)

Akhenaten’s reign is a bright spot in ancient Egyptian history. There is an artistic revolution as the human figure is depicted realistically. His writings show that he was deeply in love with his wife. The preoccupation with war and conquest is gone.

But Akhenaten’s revolution did not last. His nephews who succeeded him (the second of which was King Tut) were weak. The old polytheist priests organized a revolution and reestablished polytheism.

Moses was a prince of Egypt in the province of Gosen (Goshen) in northeast Egypt. He was a believer in Akhenaten’s monotheism and probably understood the more radical atheistic position. Just at the time when the old polytheists were victorious, he devised a plan for political action.

The English “Moses” is derived from the Hebrew “Moishe,” which in turn is derived from the Egyptian “mose.” “Mose” was a name fragment, meaning son of (similar to “mac” in Scottish names). So undoubtedly, Moses had a long Egyptian name which the Hebrews could not pronounce and shortened to (the equivalent of) “Mac.” I prefer to think of Moses as Mac because religious people today have reinterpreted these events from the view of a body-soul dichotomy, which distorts the character of what happened.

As you know, Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt. They invaded the land of Canaan. (:It wasn’t called “Palestine” until 1400 years later when the Romans made up that name to establish the fiction that the Jewish people had never lived there.) Monotheism then spread through most of the world from Judea/Israel, and most of the people in the world today owe their basic world view (which they value above anything else) to these events.

Thus far, I have described Moses’ and Akhenaten’s causal view of the world in terms similar to the conflict between science and religion of the past few centuries. This is partly accurate, but it does not fully state the enormous change in human thinking which occurred at this time.

For example, when Moses sought to teach his new causal view of the world to the Hebrews, his first thought was to explain to them how to act. This is perhaps the second most important question of human existence. Since we are living in a world governed by the law of causality, the way we must act is in accord with the law of causality.

• The law of causality says (with regard to inanimate entities) that every event must follow from its cause, and every cause must have its effect.
• The correct principle of action in a causal universe is that you must live in accord with the law of causality. You must expect to receive the consequences of your actions (the effects of their causes), and you must treat other people by giving them the consequences of their actions. This was later called (by the Greeks) the idea of justice.

Let us go back to my favorite example of the lazy farmer and the industrious farmer. The lazy farmer produces a small crop. The industrious farmer produces a large crop. But the lazy farmer wants to escape the consequences of his laziness (starvation). So he steals the crop of the industrious farmer. Thus we see that the moral principle, thou shalt not steal, follows directly from the principle of justice, which itself follows from the causal view of reality.

Notice that the law of causality is immutable. We cannot prevent each cause from having its effect. But the principle of justice is not immutable. We human beings have free will and can choose to act in accord with justice or against it. Any human society is free to establish the principle thou shalt not steal or the principle thou shalt not resist the thief who comes to rob you. But in this case, the principle of justice operates on a higher level. Once stealing is legalized (e.g., the bank bailout bill of last October), then the people of that society give up the hard work of producing wealth and concentrate on stealing from others. The victims of the robberies then simply give up and stop producing. Indeed, they too may become thieves. (This was a common event in the 4th century A.D. when the new Christian Roman Government pretty much outlawed most productive activity and abolished property rights.)

A modern person who identifies with and supports the law of causality immediately applies it to physical objects (mechanics). But Moses and the ancient Hebrews immediately applied the law of causality to the science of morality and developed the concept of justice.

Further, Moses added to the concept of monotheism some ideas of his own which indicated that he had in mind the original idea of the causality movement – to do away with the idea of gods or spirits altogether. The god that Moses taught to the Hebrews had no place. Every other god had a place. (The Greek gods lived on Mount Olympus.) Further, the god of Moses had no physical shape. (Later it was said that man is made in the image of God. This is a contradiction, but most people are not bothered by it.) Now something that isn’t anywhere and doesn’t have any shape doesn’t really exist, does it?

There is a passage in Exodus which is very relevant here. Moses meets God at the burning bush, and God tells Moses to bring forth the children of Israel from Egypt. Moses at this point still thinks of himself as an Egyptian prince. He belongs to the group which is oppressing the children of Israel. If he announces to them that he is their leader in a project to bring them out of Egypt, they are not at all likely to believe him. Maybe he is just a nasty Egyptian trying to lure them into making a break for freedom intending to turn them over to the authorities. How can he prove to them that he is sincere and get them to follow him?

Moses decides that, since he has spoken to God face to face, he can prove that he is sincere by telling them God’s name. So he asks God:

“Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?”

Exodus, Ch. 3, vs. 13.

A reasonable question. But God’s answer has puzzled biblical scholars right up to the present day.

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”

Exodus, Ch. 3 vs. 14.

What is God saying here? He is saying that he does not have a name. He has no place. He has no shape. And he has no name.

And to top it off, he asks you to do what you would do if he did not exist (act in accord with the law of cause and effect). It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Moses was trying to gently ease the children of Israel into the idea that there was no god (were no gods).

As a result of this idea (that God has no name), the Jewish religion, to this day, has a lot of confusion about the name of God. Modern Jews believe:

• God has a name, and it may be written, but it must not be spoken (except by the High Priest in the olden days on very special holidays.
• When a modern Jew comes to the name of God written in a prayer, he substitutes “Adonoi” (the Hebrew form of Aton, the god of Akhenaten).
• Since Hebrew does not use vowels (except for children and beginning students of the language), the name of God is written only with the consonants, which are YY (or YHYH, where the two H’s are silent).

Since the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, the name of God has not been pronounced; hence the vowels have been lost. When the Roman pagans converted to Christianity and decided to worship the Jewish God, they tried to learn His name. They went to prayer books written for children. But due to the rule that what was supposed to be pronounced was “Adonoi”, the vowels were those for that word rather than for God’s name. Thus, the early Christians, not having much of an idea of what they were doing, put together the consonants from “YHYH” and the vowels from “Adonoi” and got a nonsense word, “Jehovah. (The first Y was changed to J and the second to V.)

Whenever the idea of justice entered a human society, it caused a burst of energy. This idea was brought from the Israelites to the Greeks by the poet Hesiod in the 8th century B.C. This caused the flowering of classical Greece in the 6th century B.C. Rome was an offshoot of Greek culture, and the Roman empire resulted from the fact that the Romans focused almost entirely on politics and are the first nation in history to declare that human beings had rights.

Plato hated the idea of justice, and his supposed search for justice in The Republic led to the belief that justice could not be defined. Actually Isaiah had an excellent definition of the concept of justice in Ch. 3, vs. 10 and 11 (500 years before Plato was born). All Plato’s followers had the right to say was that they did not know how to define justice. But this ignorance was somehow twisted into a kind of knowledge. As Platonism became more and more influential in ancient civilization, Plato’s attack on justice undermined the concept of Roman law and led to the collapse of Rome.

Christianity was one of these neo-Platonist movements which mounted an attack on the idea of justice. Jesus’ argument about love said that love was opposed to and superior to justice. (Today you will hear people advocate justice tempered with (meaning compromised with) mercy. When the Roman people adopted Christianity in 394 A.D., they immediately declined into an orgy of hate, cowardice and violence. Civilization then collapsed in western Europe, and every measure of human values declined for 500-600 years.

John Calvin revived the concept of justice by teaching people that the Old Testament should be elevated in importance above the New (because you can’t get to heaven). The 17th century English Calvinists carefully studied the Old Testament and many of them were literate in Hebrew. (William Bradford, the second governor of the Pilgrims and their historian, could read and write Hebrew and kept a Hebrew diary.) In the 17th century, they began a movement for democracy, which succeeded in 1689 with the passage (by Parliament) of the English Bill of Rights (the ancestor of the American Bill of Rights a century later). The American Revolution of 1775-83 was simply an imitation of this English democratic movement carried to a more consistent conclusion. Today a neo-Platonist attack on justice is destroying democracy and freedom in America with results which will be devastating to all of our lives.

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Howard S. Katz can be visited at http://www.thegoldbug.net.