virtues & vices of social security (pt.2)
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"In a few years, wage-earning contributors to SS may become aware that the Surplus Trust Funds were routinely spent as government's general revenue and were not needed to pay SS benefits to the Baby Boom and will neither be available to recompense wage-earner-contributors nor pay SS benefits. Will the evidence of this grand political theft then become a political issue?"TRANSCRIPT
PART II
VIRTUES (Teleology) and VICES (deontology) of
This analysis is a concluding paragraph of PART II:
Had wages in 2001 kept pace with inflation, median wage-earned income
would have been $89,852.00. The 2000 reported median income for white
males (the highest cited income group) is far short of inflation’s pace: it was
$29,696. For white females, it was more anemic: $16,190. And, relatively still
worse for minority races as blacks, Hispanics and Asians. Wage-earners
became a determined economic underclass of the American System’s political
economy: only the mechanist upper-caste of owner-superintendents was
rewarded by the American System’s determinism. These mechanist rewards
distinguish what is commonly referred to as the American Dream.
This political anthology’s selections and analysis, section 250.2, is
from DeYoung’s research document: Our Federal Savings Plan.
By
M. H. DeYoung
All rights reserved
SOCIAL SECURITY: VIRTUES’ & VICES
PART II, TOPICAL GUIDE
FOREWORD 3
PREFACE: critical theses 12
‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles 16
Tautology (revisiting truth and reason’s veracity test) 16
The Federalist Agenda 19
‘Divine right’ dogma 20
‘social usage’ 21
teleology v.s. mechanist empiricism 25
Principles . . .[that] stand in the way of success 27
Whig politics gave America the Gilded Age 32
mercantilism . . . officially reaffirmed 33
250 Is Ontologism embraced or rejected? 38
teleological philosophy 39
St. John . . . named nature’s Creator, LOGOS 39
Teleology opposes mechanism’s paradoxical flaws 41
Capitalism: its propensities for growth (Schumperter) 90
profit-taking that is not entrepreneurial is invalid 97
Validating the proposed critical theses 98
256 Preserving Economic Baby 109
251 Social Security 121
ENDNOTES 161
SS, PART II, FOREWORD
Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, (as the encyclopedia stated) concluded that
only matter exists. Hobbes, therefore, had asserted unitary materialist
causal mechanism in his Leviathan (published in 1651): mechanism then
was orthodox belief, and like belief if a ‘flat earth’ was limited in Plato’s
analysis to apparent visible belief.
Mechanism, i.e., ‘the universe behaves like a big machine,’is pragmatically deduced orthodox causal belief, which consequentially is
without antecedent necessity, therefore, fails as a logically necessary
principle? V. L. Parrington had referred to Hobbes’ asserted fallacy when
he observed America’s cultural return to the sixteenth century from which
the seventeenth was a reaction. Myriad paradoxs are in results of this
return to cultural irrationalism! Not until recent scientific study, was
mechanist determinism’s dragon shown as orthodox fallacy of belief:
Prof. R. C. Weatherford, Univ. of South Florida gave this philosophical
account of determinist mechanism: 1
determinism. It is often taken as the very general thesis about the
world that all events without exception are effects -- events
necessitated by earlier events. Hence any event of any kind is an
effect of a prior series of effects, a causal chain with every link solid.
The thesis is fundamentally simple. The ideas which it contains,
notably those of events and causal connection, are certainly open to
definition. If the thesis cannot be expressed as some part of science
or theory in it, some determinists say, the shortcoming is not in the
thesis.
If the thesis is true,[and materially it appears as being ‘true’]
future events are as fixed and unalterable as the past is fixed and
unalterable. One graphic expression of determinism is in terms of
what William James called ‘the iron block universe’: “those parts of
the universe already laid down,” he wrote, “ appoint and decree
what other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities
hidden in its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with
only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed
from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every unity, an
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES4
iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of
turning.” If this is what the way of the world is, then only what
actually happens in it could possibly have happened. There are no
genuine alternatives to be realized.
Philosophers and scientists have been concerned with the
question of whether determinism conceived in this general and all-
inclusive way is true. The problem is ancient in its origins. The
Homeric Fates were enigmatically described as having power over
the future. Early forms of atomism were more clearly deterministic,
so disturbingly so that Epicures found it necessary to hypothesize an
uncaused ‘swerve’ of the atoms as they fell through the void. Hobbes
and Hume, and many great and not so great philosophers after
them, have been determinists.
But philosophers have been more concerned with what is to
many of us the most compelling part of that general question:
whether we ourselves, persons, are subject to the same sort of
causal necessity. Philosophers have cared less about whether or
not the rest of the universe is determined -- what they have cared
more about is whether or not our lives are determined. Indeed
determinism has often been taken as the more limited thesis that all
our choices, decisions, intentions, other mental events, and our
actions are no more than effects of other equally necessitated events.
The problem of determinism in this second sense is pretty well
identical with the problem of freedom, or the free will problem.
When philosophers have worried about this limited thesis in
the past, they have typically focused on what it would mean for our
concept of moral responsibility. But Strawson led us to see that
more is at stake than that, including many human attitudes such as
resentment [ending in terrorism?] and gratitude. Honderich has
raised the stakes higher. Determinism puts in doubt all “life-hopes,
personal feelings, knowledge, moral responsibility, the rightness of
actions, and the moral standing of persons”. And van Inwagen has
5FOREWORD
suggested that if determinism were known to be true, no one could
ever rationally deliberate about any type of action. Deliberation, it
is said, makes sense only if genuine alternatives are available to us.
If I deliberate about whether or not to raise my arm, my deliberation
is rational only if I am able either to raise it or not to raise it. If
determinism is true, only one course is genuinely open to me. So it
is alleged, my deliberation is irrational.
But, as remarked, the most important issue historically has
been moral responsibility. And what can be said about it applies in a
general way to the other implications of determinism. Typically we
believe that agents are morally responsible only for those acts that
are freely chosen and within the power of the agent to decide. We
are guilty only if we could have done otherwise. But if determinism
is true, then in some sense we never could have done otherwise.
Thus many philosophers have concluded that determinism and
holding people responsible are incompatible. Others have strongly
disagreed. Recently, however, quantum mechanics and relativity theory
have generally displaced Newtonian mechanics, and various proofs of
them have been claimed. Many scientists and not a few philosophers
believe that the dragon of determinism has been slain.
In this determinist causal sense, which always entails paradox for
instance, V. L. Parrington observed the results of economic causal
mechanism, onto which Whigs when in charge of government (mid
seventeenth Century) asserted The American System of Political Economy
loaded with organic loco parentis paternalism, as the official U.S.
economic policy: that paternalistically giving to ‘Peter’ paradoxically also
necessarily took equivalent economic measures from ‘Paul.’ Economist
Joseph Schumperter’s early twentieth century analysis explained
Parrington’s astute observation by showing that private business
mechanisms’ profit-taking upset the nation’s ‘static economic circular
flow.’ Paradoxically, for to ensure private economic success, the
government’s loco parentis grants to private business mechanisms, as aided
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES6
The 3 percent average inflation legally returns as business owned capital.''
by codifications of law, official edict, policy and myriad covert endemism,
public held national resources, along with economic license, for businesses
to manage and exploit for privatized economic gain.
This paternalism, Parrington observed, which privatized economic
gains from mechanized exploitations also determined a counter class of
‘iron caged’ wage-earner Pauls (Who constitutionally had equal rights,
however, lost out economically and paternalistically simply because of
paternal determinist grants, which blessed economic growth: the granted
legalized enuring of inflation endemism that covertly (occultist magic
like) is transformed at points of consumption by accounting to return as''
business capital to originating business owner Peters). Was it because2
economic losses are mechanistically borne by subsistence-based
consumption, that public debt was officially excused, or ignored, as of
lesser importance than loco parentis paternalism? : society’s ‘iron caged’
wage-earning ‘Pauls,’ who by consuming to subsist, routinely
mechanistically recycle much of their paychecks, which by way of
accounting, magically is combined with inflation endemism, which wage-
earning ‘Pauls’ also consume, to return to business owner Peters’ as their
legally enured capital: this recovered private retail business owned capital,
is then available for profit-taking, dividend and bonus pay outs, and
accumulations to underwrite more productions. Average economic growth,
during the twentieth century, was measured at 4 percent, inflation
endemism at 3 percent: the accounting combined returning business capital,
therefore, averaged 7 percent: profits taken, however, averaged closer to
10percent, while wages-earned languished at less than half the average rate
of inflation. Average growth of ‘iron caged’ wage-earner-consumer3
experience was first the negative result of profit-taking from legally enured
capital, as business property, which typically generously exceeded
economy’s 4 percent growth plus inflation’s 3 percent. Wage-earning is a
tethered mongrel class of mechanist business efficiency, which neither can
extort profit-taking nor GNP.
7FOREWORD
A principle, to be ‘true,’ is logically ‘necessary,’ the definition of
which compels coherent ‘trueness’ (is not paradoxical). Whenever ‘logical
coherence’ fails, as the pseudo principles of mechanism routinely fail
wage-earning ‘Pauls’, mechanism asserted as principle, is then of ‘forged’
predicate value: politically, politely, it logically is ‘fallacy’ of U.S. Political
Economy’s irrationalism. Rationally, truly, it is ‘false!’ Polite political
fallacies, which despite orthodox belief, are irrationally deceitful: mortally,
truthfully, they are cultural lies.
Temporally, conceptional deontological duties are different than
cardinal teleological purposes: duties relate to Greek conceived temporal
nomos, in which the de of deon is a preposition meaning the opposite of,
down from, away from, or entirely (as in despoil), plus ontos, i.e.,
deontology, while purposes relate to Greek conceived physis consisting of
telos, i.e., eos (an eternal end goal), i.e., is natural eternal causal teleology.
Deontological duties are of nomos, teleological purposes of physis. The
difference is narrowed greatly, when physis becomes conflated to Unitary
Materialism forms of nomos belief, as shows orthodox paternalist
economic mechanism, which fallaciously asserts temporal as the equal of
eternal, material the equal of essence, and man the equal of God.
Myriad ideological political interests were covertly added to the
American System’s deontological duties, which unitary materialist
mechanism’s endemism deliberately concealed, as inflation for instance. 4
Classical politics, for instance, asserts that deontological duty fulfills
government’s constitutional teleology, as specified in the Constitution’s
Preamble. Government’s purpose, was then irrationally interpreted to
ensure whatever politics asserted, regardless whether rational or irrational.
Classically, irrationally, therefore, government now ensures that legally
enured business profits are business owner’s property [the teleological
constitutional economic purpose ‘to all,’ was changed by enuring (defined
by law, to inure) as the business’ owners’ property]: therefore, the
Bankers’ COLA [the endemic cost for renting the public’s economic utility
(money)], which government creates as a teleological utility to serve ‘all,’
by enuring, paternalistically rewards as bank owners’ property for serving
mechanist economic duties with exchanges of goods and services.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES8
(However, what part of banking fiducial duty, which is physis-based
responsibility, enures as a nomos-based property entitlement?).
Government created ubiquitous money for the teleological purpose
to ease the exchange of goods and services.’ And it regulates political
economy, setting deontological rules of conduct (duties). Government is,
therefore, ultimately responsible for covert inflation’s endemism. And,
unfairly used (misused), money is the nation’s main conduit of inflationary
endemism: if money is fallaciously asserted as a ‘propertied hoard,’ for
instance, then the mechanism-based inflation-endemisms’ economic
paradox, cited by Parrington as giving to ‘Peter’ by taking from ‘Paul,’
greatly ensues. And, acquisitive materialism of privatized business is then
prone to a rational blindness that is related to conflated forms of Unitary
Materialism, which then becomes as uniquely nomos-based as deontology
is, in which reason-based formulas as Einstein’s special relativity, as
representing science cited by Professor Weatherford above, which equates
energy with mass (E = MC ), for instance, as exclusively valued only as an2
equal appendage to economic propertied Unitary Materialism, which while
called ‘intellectual property’ is in most cases of employment, the legally
owned property of the privatized organic economic entity. Acquisitive
materialism-based political economy, as American Whigs asserted, was,
therefore, irrationally philosophically defined. Tautologically, mechanism
is a consequent deduced from human experience, which only can be
asserted as being ‘true,’ but is without necessary antecedence as logically
inferred to human intelligent faculties of reason. And Acquisitive
Materialism’s dogma-based irrational antecedents, as classically asserted
necessary economic principles, were judiciously legalized by the Federalist
orthodoxy primarily for to serve the federalist Unitary Materialism’s
deontological economic duties, paradoxically, idealistically resulting in the
conflating of constitutional teleological purposes.
While tautologically, Federalists have opposed the constitutional
teleological purposes of SS, they officially asserted as authoritative truths,
the Federalist-Whig ideological doctrine. And, the paradoxs of privatized
nomos-based mechanisms,’ which act cumulatively to divide society, were
politically too often also officially affirmed as SS’s antecedent principles.
9FOREWORD
Incoherence, as inflation endemism, show political economy’s Unitary
Materialism’s asserted pseudo principle as orthodoxy, which incorporated
the dogmatic dragons of mechanism:5
materialism n. the belief that all action, thought, and feeling can be
explained by the movement and changes in matter: ‘in the latter half
of the 1800's, materialism severely challenged the traditional
spiritual view of man’ (Science). When the U.S. Constitution was in its formative stage, Europeans were
influenced by the principal Idealists, of which Craig Thomas wrote this:6
[In] prenational Prussia under Frederick the Great. Christian
theology assumed a [unitary] merger with the divine after this life;
Hegel posits such a merger here on earth -- with history and the
collectivity he terms the state.Thomas also wrote about the Idealists of Hegel’s unitary materialist view:
The principal Idealists -- Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel -- sought,
above all else, a unitary explanation of reality, some essence behind
all appearance -- in Kant’s terminology, a ‘common’ and universal
noumenon, and in the poet Hölderlin’s description, the ‘spirit that is
in everything’ [ontologism]. They were [expedient idealist]
systemizers, assuming that there could be discovered some essential
explanation of all experience, knowledge, and reality, and it was
largely on this basis that they objected, Fichte most immediately
and systematically, to Kant’s division between self and the world,
which [they as irrationally contended] for Kant could be no more
than a world of appearances. To achieve the healing of [Kant’s]
dualism the Idealists posited, in Fichte’s theory most succinctly, the
ego as the ‘ground of experience.’ It was not the rational ego of
Kant [Plato and Descartes] nor the passive receptor of the empiricists
but what Fichte describes as the ‘active ego,’ inextricably
intermingled with reality, imposing itself upon the world of
experience, to a degree ‘making’ the world of experience in its own
image. [In this instance, the principle idealists conflated even God’s
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES10
antecedence to comply with the nomos of their Unitary Materialism, to
which Nietzche then cried out, “we have killed God!”] As Fichte claims
in ‘The Vocation of Man’ of 1792, ‘Not to KNOW but to DO, is the
vocation of Man.’ For Fichte (1762- 1814), there were only two
possible responses to the world, that of the realist, or ‘dogmatist’ in
his terminology, and that of the idealist. The philosopher’s
response, more profound than that of the ordinary man, is idealist,
while realism remains the province of non-philosophical response to
an understanding of the world. . . .
Thinking is no longer reflection, it is experience. Also,
because of this, there can be no kind of reality that is distinct or
separated from the ego that experiences it. Whereas empiricism
posits, at least by implication, a ‘real’ world that is experienced, the
Idealists assumed no distinction between the subject of the
experiencing agent and the objective world being experienced. [Which came first, the egg or the chicken, is of no
consequence to this materialist conservative idealism that compounds the
issue rather than finding answers to the question; the dogmatic focus is on
the neatness of confusion.]
Further, Fichte and Schelling assumed that the ego was
innately a moral agent, again contrary to Kant’s conception of the
effort of moral duty for the rational being, the necessity to achieve
the categorical imperative [of ‘do unto others . . .’] in making any
moral decision or taking any moral action. Men are regarded by
the Idealists as innately, though imperfectly, moral in their essential,
nondualistic natures. This leads, as we shall see, to a strangely
Hobbesian view of the State as possessing the right and duty to
perfect the ego’s moral imperfection by the exercise of its authority.
[Note how dogmatic ‘Idealists‘ are blamed for the fallacious philosophical
underpinning of the conservative materialist philosophy]
11FOREWORD
‘Deterministic materialism,’ ‘mechanism,’ and ‘positivism’ is dogmatic
bias of American Federalists and Whigs and also is intrinsic of the
principal Idealists -- Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel’s rationalized
philosophies. The Western World’s orthodox cultural dogmas, the biased
values which influence materialistic ‘conservative’ belief, has proved
unreliable as a fiducial parameter of pure truth. Regarding the causal
moral deterioration of society, are the fallaciously idealistic philosophic
foundations of ‘materialism’ of concern? Do ‘conservative’ assertions
compromise individual accountability? Do they promote the Hobbesian
view of the State?’
Maybe, the only reason that Unitary Materialism has failed to
devastate the American political economy, as happened in Europe with
organic developments of communism and fascism, is the democratic
process, which as a cultural condition for constitutional ratification,
required the physis-based Bill of Rights be appended. These amendments
have preserved Locke’s dualism, which critically has kept the teleological
human essence as an active part of government. We can thank men, as
Jefferson, for having preserved this critically important human essence
from the conflating effects of mechanist materialist laws of government: in
what Jefferson called the ‘firewall of separation’ between mechanist law
and human religious essence.
In Western culture, A. Comte’s dogmatic ‘positivism’ that deals only with
positive facts and phenomena, rejecting abstract speculation, religiously7
was spread as ‘the gospel of reason’ and this dogma remains entrenched in
culture as tautologically fallacious doctrine. Materialism is unproved
theory that rationally tautologically can only be claimed as a natural
consequent of human experience, as ‘flat earth’ orthodoxy also was
claimed. Unfortunately however, when Unitary Materialism is asserted as
principle, on which politically assigned duties of government are its vices,
Adam Smith observed, and Brockway confirmed this:8
“in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost
constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.” And, government’s vices officially became the determined vices of SS.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES12
Immigrations and emigrations are not considered here. They are important'
factors of population and also can be eligible for SS.
PREFACE: critical theses for consideration and proof:
The BabyBoom’s 77 million births, factually recorded between 1946
and 1965, does not and cannot randomly change. Only mortality, at
any age, can reduce the BabyBoom’s natural population (therefore,
mortality necessarily naturally reduces the BabyBoom’s retirement
population). And mortality is routinely quite arcuately estimated.
With SS eligibility shifted to age 67, upwards of seven million persons
are delayed from entering retirement. The BabyBoom’s population of
natural births, over age 67, will peak, for a short period, at 42 million: 31'
million (age 65-4) were counted in 1990, 35 million in 2000.9 10
The Census Bureau’s ratio, as projected and cited in 1983, is ‘fallacy’:11
The ratio of the working age population . . . to the retirement age
population will begin an unprecedented decline. The nation had 5.3
people of working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older. The
ratio is projected to drop to 4.7 in 2000 and to 2.4 in 2080. [more recent facts show the ratio did not drop in 2000]
The only fact of this projected ‘fallacy’ is this: ‘The nation had 5.3 people
of working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older.’ The rest is asserted
fallacy, which had assumed the SS system’s maturity would have no effect
on the worker to retiree ratio (assumed that mutually exclusive conditions
were of no consequence, which, they are). With the SS system, as of the
1970s, now mature, facts show the ratio did not drop in 2000. Rather, it
improved! And shifting retirement eligibility to age sixty-seven, keeps the
ratio at or above 4.39:1, close to the benchmark ratio set in 1982 (5.3:1).
Inflation’s endemism represents a greater economic concern than
does the BabyBooms’ population. Mechanism causally has made
inflation directly related to profit taking by the nation’s corporate
mechanisms, while otherwise it is unrelated to the circular flow of SS
contributions and benefits. Indexing inflation to SS contributions is
double taxation that exclusively relates to mechanisms taking profits.
13PREFACE: critical theses
Thesis 1) Effectively, the ratio of workers to retirees will remain
higher than statistical experience had registered in 1990.
Thesis 2) Social Security is teleological ‘social usage’ virtue that
mitigates a major paradox (vice) of the mechanist political economy: SS’s
static circular flowing ‘social usage’ ensures sustenance income during the
retired years of each wage-earner’s life. And causally, paying for the
inflation COLAs related to SS benefits is a responsibility related to income
from profits routinely legally granted to be taken from returning capital
from consumed productions of business mechanisms economic circular
flow, which income is not subjected to SS contribution taxes, however, is
rewarded by the fact of the consumed and legally enured capital returns
from inflation endemism.
Thesis 3) Neither were SS bankruptcy charges in the 1980's ‘true‘
nor does the BabyBoom’s retirement benefits’ eligibility, when they come
due, beginning in 2010, endanger SS.
Thesis 4) Inflation’s endemism endangers political economy in a
manner as to also damage Social Security: taking profits that are not the
result of directly related added entrepreneurial value to mechanisms of
political economy, is inflation’s primary cause. All inflation intrinsic of
SS benefit payments that are loaded onto the SS contributions’ taxes
must be recompensed from revenue taxes on income that is not wage-
earned, i. e., is exempted from paying SS contribution taxes?
Thus, exactly as Ricardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there
is no place for profit! [R. L. Heilbroner on Shumperter]
Without entrepreneurial value, profits taken endemically pilfers value from
wage-earned labor. And, because wage-earning does not cause inflation’s
endemism, therefore, inflation’s cost must be recompensed as necessarily
levied on a graduated scale of revenue tax from capital-based, rather than
wage-earned income.
Thesis 5) As explained in thesis 4, the inflation effects on wages
must recompensed. If wages had kept pace with inflation, the median
family wage earned in 2000 would be $60,000, 3.1 times greater than
wages in 1975 ($19,480 white with 1-3 yrs of college ): , 12 13 14
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES14
Thesis 6) Real economic growth (growth sans inflation’s endemism)
is population growth related.
A better teleology for workers that mechanistically (by the determinism of
the ‘iron law of wages’) are made to pay inflation’s bill as applied to SS
benefits, is for Congress to fulfill its constitutional charge: reduce inflation
by restricting the Bankers’ COLA. I suspect the ‘golden ratio’ [Phi (N)],
which early Greeks found had natural application to growth, also naturally
applies to our capitalist economy: to rid it of systemic inflation’s
endemism. Mathematically, ‘the golden rule of consumption,’ in which15
growth in economy equals growth in population (and consumption is
maximized), is nearly in balance when the ‘golden ratio’ [Phi (N)] applies
to economic growth. An irrational number like B, N approximately has the
decimal value of 1.618. If Congress accepted its constitutional teleological
charge and controlled inflation, investments in production and wage-
earning would shift away from the futures, casino like economy into real
economy. A dollar earned would retain its inflation neutral economic
value. And SS contribution rates would be a small fraction of the present
rates.
Thesis 7) Quite surprisingly, however, Adam Smith’s market system
economy is now far more promising than when Smith had proposed it.
Schumpeter’s analysis and conclusions in early twentieth century provided
key necessary principles for continued economic growth: 16
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by Ricardo and
Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed the end of
capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter it was the
beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. . .
Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation of labor or
from the earnings of capital. They were the result of quite another
process. ‘Profits appeared in a static economy when the circular
flow failed to follow its routinized course.’ [And profits routinely
taken, despite entrepreneurial activity, as now is commonly a classical
15PREFACE: critical theses
When, in acquisitive aggrandizements, we subscribe irrationalisms as'
Holmes’ glorious Epicurean Paradox:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its
necessaries’ [which define principles]. Oliver Wendell Holmes
political economy sanctioned (legalized) business right, causes the static
circular flow fail to respect labor’s contribution to producing goods.] . .
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is so
brilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions in
routine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological or
organizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaper
ways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘As
a result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot be
traced either to the contribution of labor or of resourse owners.’. . .
Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and
used it to describe these revolutionists of production. He called
them ‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity
were thus the source of profit in the capitalist system. [Sans
entrepreneurial activity, Schumperter’s analysis showed inflations’
endemism is as paradoxical as is its determined complement, ‘the iron
cage of wages.’]
We must restore and preserve Adam Smith’s ‘economic baby’ by cutting
out all unnecessary paradoxical causes of inflation. Otherwise, Marx
conclusion of an economic end to Smith’s system looms!
Thesis 8) Only in its fundamental spiritual (noumenal) aspect, does
democratic philosophy (Rational Empiricism) diverge from Fascism and
Communism. Therefore, when the noumenally spiritual aspect is conflated
by adopting forms of Unitary Materialism, or by official legal actions or
licensing of privatized mechanisms, which dispense with teleology,
whether by mechanism or more simply by way of willed Epicurean
paradoxical orthodoxy , and instead make deontology our antecedent'
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES16
principle (our king), we no longer can claim logically reasoned noumenally
democratic antecedents as the fundamental principles. 17
‘Rational Empiricism,’ the philosophic basis of democracy, believes
that the world is both material and spiritual. It holds that change
and progress occur by applying reason to experience, and human
nature can be changed and improved by experience. On the basis of
these principles, democracy stresses discussion and the use of reason
as a way of arriving at conclusions. It emphasises the importance of
tolerance and freedom in developing intelligent, loyal citizens.
We should respect the material part of democracy for providing temporal
bounties (when, holistically to all), but also regard Unitary Materialism’s
natural limitations about truth: didn’t Bertrand Russell logically prove that
unitary material truth was nothing but total fallacy?18
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may
be called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in
which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth
and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence a world
of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would
also contain no truth or falsehood.With Unitary Materialism asserted dogmatically as principle, as conflated
by nihilist ‘positivism’ in fascism or communism, cultural failure sans
teleology, leaves only unmeaning of determinist chaos!
Thesis 9) Natural Causal Realities require natural Principle, the
logical keys of which are ‘true’ antecedence, necessity and coherence.
‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
Tautology 19
By a tautology we mean a statement, which has the truth value ‘true’
for all possible truth values of its components. . . .
Compound statements with all truth values ‘true’ are called
tautologies and represent valid argument forms. The implication
17‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
By the author’s definition, each P and Q is a statement that when'
written in the ‘if,’ ‘then,’ compound statement form, the ‘if’ statement
is the antecedent, and the ‘then’ statement is the consequent.
formed by the conjunction of all the premises as the antecedent and
the conclusion as the consequent that form a valid argument form,
will always result in a tautology. Testing compound statements to
see whether they are tautologies is thus equivalent to testing an
argument for validity.'
John N. Fujii gave three classical valid arguments (a, b, and c) and two
invalid arguments (d, and e) in which P = compound premises, Q =
consequent, - = denial, � = therefore.
(a) Modus ponens (b) modus tollens (c) hypothetical syllogism
(a) P 6 Q
P
� Q
(b) P 6 Q
- Q
�- P
(c) P 6 Q
Q 6 R
� P 6 R
(d): invalid classical argument
that ‘affirms the consequent.’
P 6 Q
Q
� P
(e): invalid classical argument
that ‘denies the antecedent.’
P 6 Q
- P
� - Q
(d) Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, and (e) Fallacy of Denying the
Antecedent, Fujii warned, are irrational argument forms. With all
forms of ‘hypothesizing a tautological argument,’ irrational argument
form (d), Affirming Consequents, is the most common form of fallacy.
And, ‘Affirming natural Consequents,’ is a pseudo philosophic proclivity
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES18
The study of mathematics is the study of clear logical reasoning. H. W.'
Turnbull gave this account of the logical test for solving paradoxs: “How to
face these paradoxs is an urgent problem,” he wrote. “[Brouwer traced] the
presence of paradoxs to the use of indirect proofs, or more precisely to what
is called in logic the law of the excluded middle.” And, he concluded, that
which is fallacious is false because it illogically is irrational.
that sophistry makes intrinsic of nomos-based dogmatic belief. The
Federalist Agenda, as Parrington noted, provides an example of ideology-
based irrational sophistry, which St. John said was a form of lying.
Logical tautology is, by applied positivism, which results similarly as
Unitary Materialism, commonly officially denied. Particularly, Federalist
Justice dogmatically fails to test for tautology: as is only briefly mentioned
in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Federalists and Whigs, particularly,
might not have understood tautology’s veracity test of truth and
reason? And had research not made mathematics language
applicable, tautological veracity testing still could not now be
understood. If interested in truth, when paradox is confronted,20
tautological testing is critically important. Opinions, based on belief,'
sans tautological testing, represent sophistries as lying with clear
consciences and straight faces. Politics thrives on this sophistry.
[Hamilton’s] notorious comment -- which the American democrat
has never forgiven him, “the people! -- the people is a great beast!”
-- was charactoristically frank. . . . He was at pains, therefore, as a
practical statesman, to dress his views in a garb more seemly to
plebeian prejudices [irrationally, Hamilton affirmed consequents that
politically fit with dogmatic plebeian biases], and like earlier Tories
he paraded an ethical justification for his Toryism. The current
Federalist dogma of the divine right of justice -- ‘vox justiciae vox
dei’ -- was at hand to serve his purpose and he made free use of it. . .
.
He was frankly a monarchist, and he urged the [fallacious]
monarchical principle with Hobbesian logic. “The principle chiefly
19‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
intended to be established is this -- that there must be a permanent
‘will.” “There ought to be a principle in government capable of
resisting the popular current.” [In ‘Works, Vol. II, p 415] The only
effective way of keeping democratic factionalism within bounds,
Hamilton was convinced, lay in the erection of a powerful chief
magistrate, who “ought to be hereditary, and have so much power.
“ He devoted himself to the business of providing all possible
checks upon the power of the democracy.” [And he hated socialism!]
This Federalist agenda, as Parrington noted, provides an example of this
sophistry that continues to fallaciously influence the U. S. Judiciary: St.
John referred to this sophist proclivity as a form of lying.
Parrington cited the Federalist-Whig proclivity to irrationally,
fallaciously ‘deny antecedents’ and ‘affirm consequents’:21
Massachusetts . . . property interests were as secure as any old
Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of principle and property
were still in control of the state; and if less emphasis was laid on
principle [physis] and more on property [nomos] -- if less regard
seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and more
to assertive self-seeking -- business was no less secure than in the
good old days, and its profits were greater. . . . Provided of course
that the Constitution should follow population and safeguard
business interests against . . .the menace of particularism [in the
sense that the Whig affirmed ‘business interests’ as an asserted principle
legally applied to the nation, democratic particularism that was politically
opposed to the ‘national interest’ was called antinomy, i.e., anti nomos,
showing than Whig asserted principles were clearly of nomos]. . . . In the
hour of peril, principles go by the board. The Whig party was the
lineal heir of the old Federalism, but it denied its philosophical
patrimony. It substituted expediency for the old economic realism,
and began and ended intellectually bankrupt.. . . aside from petty
antagonism to Jackson -- was the vague assumption that the well-
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES20
being of the American people was dependent on governmental
patronage; the belief that each economic group and section must
receive its special favor, and that through tariffs and bonuses and
internal improvements the country as a whole must prosper. Of
this principle of special favors -- a return to the seventeenth
century from which eighteenth century liberalism was a reaction --
the American System of Henry Clay was the chief expression, and it
remains the most significant bequest of the Whig party to our
political history.
‘Divine right’ dogma was imported with the colonization of
America. Along with it, also by fallaciously asserted affirmation, came a
form of nihilism, that Auguste Comte dubbed positivism, that would be
preached religiously as ‘the gospel of reason.’ Particularly, Calvinist
minds were closed to any reasonable deist consideration of the supreme
metaphysical noumenon being that intelligence, which is antecedent to all
that is. This God, religiously, fallaciously supplanted by positivism,
therefore, is the nomos denied natural supreme principle of all that is.
When scripture recorded that God was a jealous God and would have no
other before him, scripture correctly warned of the paradoxical
irrationalism of affirming natural consequents as principle: God is
inalterably the ultimate logical noumenal principle!
While officially the U.S. Constitutional Convention neither
adopted nor rejected nomos-based irrationalism, dogmatized deterministic
mechanist Unitary Materialism (a returning to the sixteenth century from
which the seventeenty century had been freed) eventually returned as the
dominant influence of U.S. legislation and administration: the new nation’s
Operating Plan that Whigs dubbed The American System of Political
Economy. While this Operating Plan is based on absolute dogma, i.e., it is
nomos-based fallacy, the political flux in America is dynamic and flexible,
to at times polarize around the physis-based political flux of human
sovereignty, of ‘we the people.’
The physis-based will of human nature is complex. It is capable to
fallaciously generate dogmatized doctrines and mechanisms of
21‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
deterministic Unitary Materialism but it also looks to ‘social usage,’ as
Roger Williams observed. Williams undoubtedly influenced this
perspective for effective temporal democracy, as Parrington wrote:22
The state, then, is society working consciously through experience
and reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest measure of
freedom and well-being. . . . But if sovereignty inheres in the
majority will, what securities remain for individual and minority
rights? What fields lie apart from the inquisition of the majority, and
by what agencies shall the engrossing of power be thwarted? The
replies to such questions, so fundamental to every democratic
program, he discovers in a variety of principles; to the former in an
adaptation of the spirit of medieval society that restricted political
functions by social usage, and to the latter by the application of local
home rule, the initiative and the referendum, and the recall. His
creative conception was an adaptation of . . . corporation, of a group
of persons voluntarily joining for specific purposes under the law. Mutual Insurance is a form of Williams’ ‘social usage.’ It is uniquely
American and it is democratic, i.e., is physis-based. Social Security is
purer Mutual Insurance and is, therefore, also a ‘social usage’ form.
The U. S. Operating Plan is politics about economics, which
fundamentally is about life’s substantial needs (the positivist argument is
particularly convincing as regards’ life’s substantial needs). It embroils the
paradoxical influences of mind with emotion, values with passions, will
with substance . . .. Irrationalisms (rationalizations), are inevitable.
Aristotle’s spectrum of virtue applies to resulting paradoxs: where reasoned
principle (axiomatic temporal truth is found). *
* Aristotle defined Virtue as the middle ground between the vices: the
mean of excess and deficiency.
Controlling by commanding deterministic material values is at the excess
extreme where the irrational cause of collective and collusive economic
rationalization, which Adam Smith warned posed the greatest threat to
universal benefits of the nature-based, atomistic and independently
constituted ‘market system’: which Smith carefully explicated as the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES22
Wage-earners were not considered by Smith as politically significant.'
foundation of the evolving natural economic revolution. Heilbroner
confirms Adam Smith’s intent: 23
What Smith had meant by ["leave the market alone"] was one thing;
what his proponents made him out to mean was another . . . If he
had any bias it was in favor of the consumer. "Consumption is the
sole end of production," he wrote and then proceeded to castigate
those systems that placed the interest of the producer over that of
the consuming public.
Adam Smith anticipated and strongly castigated Whiggish mechanisms of
the "American System" of political economy.
What Smith is against is the meddling of the government with
the market mechanism. He is against restraints on imports and
bounties on exports, against government laws that shelter industry
from competition [zoning, licensing, and such], and against
government spending for unproductive ends. Notice that these
activities of government all bear against the proper working of the
market system. Smith never faced the problem that was to cause such
intellectual agony for later generations of whether the government is
weakening or strengthening that system when it steps into welfare
legislation. Aside from poor relief, there was virtually no welfare
legislation in Smith's day -- the government [and not Smith] was the
unabashed ally of the governing classes, and the great tussle within
the government was whether it should be the landowning or the
industrial classes who should most benefit. [The great American'
debate about placing organic sovereignty in America, was about
this.] The question of whether the working class should have a
voice in the direction of economic affairs simply did not enter any
respectable person's mind. [Irrational bias of any sort is not democratic!]
23‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
Maybe because of Smith but surely because the revolution was the working
people’s war, working Americans decided the Constitution’s purpose was
to provide for democracy and be the ultimate voice, of, for and by the
people. This fact was made clear when the Constitution’s ratification
was withheld until a Bill of Rights was provided. Mechanist political
influences of American Tory, Federalist, and Whig conservatives (those of
seminal interests in property, position, and commerce) sided with American
Political Economy, and by fostering a conflated Unitary Materialism, had
trampled the public voice. Politics of Commerce and industry is not alone
in this. An underworld of economics, as Heilbroner calls it, points to other
culprits that farther on are presented. While Smith’s observations are
universally evident in the basis of Political Economy, our ‘conservatives’
(Which I call whiggish ‘White Rabbits’ of our wonderland) have not
subscribed to Smith’s warning about economic monopoly. Economic
Determinism, as based on Hobbesian deductive reasoning, has surely
caused economic monopoly and material value concentration. And it also
poses the ultimate cause of systemic economic failure. Deductive
reasoning that tautologically is fallacious (‘false’) is undoubtedly an
amorality form of Heidegger’s irrationalism, as those who rationalize to
engage it neither know truth (about faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty toward
God and humanity) nor virtues of ‘true’ mitigating principle.
While the U.S. Strategic Plan is categorical imperative intensive
and teleologically ethical (of giving of self in the sense of acting together to
secure common values and purposes), the Operating Plan is based on
individually taking and securing what we each want as our own property.
The difference between giving and taking is, of course, diabolical and
paradoxical. While strategy is each individual’s responsibility, about
preserving every individual’s self evident inalienable rights, operationally
speaking, we expect selfishness and we want ‘absolutism’ with ownership,
contracts, and such. Often we confuse inalienable strategic rights with our
absolute material wants. In this, wants often are extreme vices on the
spectrum of virtue: and, intentionally or not, legally nullify others’ physis-
based sovereignty. Our material wants often abuse Natural Law while they
violate no temporal manmade law. Therefore, we need to be clear about
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES24
definition and purpose. Christ may have said it best: man doth not live by
bread only. And with political economy, we especially need clarity and
balance when reasoning to enact laws that define the constitutional
administrations of government, particularly as extended to include licensed
individual and organizational agents, codifications, and regulations.
Particularly, ‘fictitious legal person’ corporations, that official agency of
state governments grant licenses to act as humans must officially be
unbundled from society when forms of mercantilism, for instance, are
implicated. ‘True’ natural differences are critical. Nature’s God did not
endow corporations with inalienable rights, as the right to free speech
(which economically they now command). And, they are not naturally
coeval of government in matters of sovereignty and suffrage. E. K.
Hunt wrote this about Veblen’s ‘property rights’ origins: 24
Private property had its origins in brute coercive force and was
perpetuated both by force and by institutional and ideological
legitimization. [Such irrationalism surely is not ‘truly’ antecedent.]
Hunt, concluded about results of ‘Internal Improvement’-based policies, 25
The passage of the Sherman Act and the establishment of various
government regulatory agencies were ostensibly aimed at controlling
these giant corporations. In practice, however, government tended
to aid these giants in consolidating and stabilizing their massive
empires.With the lawful impunity of states’ rights, corporations engage in
competitive and collusive forms of neo-mercantilism. We should not only
recognize this, we should be concerned that large multinational
corporations are today, larger than our nation was and that as ‘fictitious
legal individuals,’ they represent the greatest threat to nullifying individual
sovereignty. Like nations, they represent Leviathan entities, which are
allowed by license to make their own rules, we might say, with which
humans individually are not allowed and cannot compete:26
Mercantilism was an economic policy pursued by almost all of the
trading nations in the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and early
eighteenth centuries, which aimed at increasing a nation’s wealth
and power by encouraging the export of goods in return for gold.
25‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
Contemplating this cardinal importance resulted in definition research''
called PRINCIPLE. It is an ADDENDUM to this research, about TRUTH.
[’gold’ and ‘wealth’ are not identical value forms]
As part of the mercantilist program, individual governments
promoted large investments in export industries; built high tariff
walls to restrict imports, which could be produced domestically;
restricted exports of domestic raw materials, which could be used by
the domestic industry; interfered with the emigration of skilled
workers; encouraged immigration of skilled workers; and, in several
cases, prohibited sales of precious metals to foreigners. . . . Adam
Smith accused mercantilists of not being able to distinguish
between wealth and what they called treasure, pointing out that the
accumulation of treasure is merely instrumental to the acquisition
of wealth. [Smith’s wealth was ‘usable’ goods]
Not only, should corporate involvement in ‘mercantilism, ‘concern us, we
should also be concerned about their organized involvement in politics, free
speech and political contributions. *
* Whether from foreign countries where they conduct corporate business or
in the sense that they represent something other than human sovereignty,
political contributions from corporations to political interests are foreign, if
not alien. This reasoned sentiment extends to all organizations, particularly
Political Action Committees and religion.
Antecedent teleology v.s. consequential mechanist empiricism
(NATURAL CAUSATION anticipates natural Principle while
affirmed causation irrationally supplants natural principle.)
If a principle is ‘necessary,’ the logical meaning of ‘necessary’ makes
CARDINALLY ANTECEDENT PRINCIPLE INVIOLATE: 27 ''
necessary 3. Logic. that cannot be denied because denial would
entail contradiction of what has already been established.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES26
Unless that principle is systemically ‘coherent,’ it cannot be ‘necessary’28
and is, therefore, falsely considered. Mechanism (‘the universe behaves
like a big machine’) fails as necessary principle: Mechanism is dogmatic
classical theory that fallaciously Thomas Hobbes had affirmed as principle
to his empiricism. Classical determinism, inferred by Mechanism, is
irrational and paradoxical. And, it fits this definition:
Determinism: ‘what happened before determines what happens today; only
the past and present can control the future.’ [However extensive this
fallacious belief, and it is extensive, recidivisim of unlawful acts is
paradoxically condemned rather than excused by orthodox society.]
‘Federalist duty’ (devised as legal springs to catch unwary democrats), was
fallaciously administered officially in highest realms of colonial classical
orthodoxy: Federalists, by fallaciously affirming causal Mechanism,
irrationally displaced logical antecedent principles. ‘Legal springs’
deployed by mechanism act to conflate the noumenal influence in Rational
Empiricism: influence which embraces human rights as being equal to life’s
materialities; Rational Empiricists are ‘true’ democrats.
Ideologies of deontological duty and teleological purpose, are
diabolical poles of Heidegger’s cultural contest between “rationalism and
irrationalism”: Mechanist duty divides society for to be exploitative,
while teleological purpose is holistically aspiring. To contend that
necessary principles block success, infer that irrationalism, as the asserted
principle, logically intends to antecede the rational principle.29
Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlier
age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were
devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles
of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
27‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John
Marshall and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springs to
catch unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting
over their victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work
of placing the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the
English law. An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig,
he reveals in his precise thinking the intimate relations that
everywhere exist between economics, politics, and legal principles.[Fallacious principle asserted by affirmation is
Mechanism’s hallmark]
Mercantilism fits the fallacious ‘overlord ideology,’ as was
practiced by Whigs and Federalists. And as Mercantilism’s irrationally
legal legitimation, such fallacy cannot be oversold. It represents a plethora
of mechanized tenets about manmade unitary materialities as money,
tariffs, taxes, . . ., that, of design, favor home spun industry. Colonials
were particularly aware of England’s mercantilism practices. Mercantilism
contends allot that classically, fallaciously, economists have asserted
affirmatively as attributable to Adam Smith’s economic postulation: for
instance, 30
“in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost
constantly sacrificed to that of the producer” [money is wealth’s
equal?].
In Smith’s view, however, wealth was the goods and services of production,
money, the economic utility that aided wealth’s (goods and services)
circulation to ‘all’: money hoards were treasures, not wealth.
About English mercantilism, Benjamin Franklin was both great and
prolific, expressing and doing what his deliberately ethical conscience
dictated: forty seven years before Adam Smith adopted, and in ‘The
Wealth of Nations,’ reaffirmed, Benjamin Franklin wrote about labor as the
measure of value when he wrote this about mechanisms:31
Manufactures are founded in poverty. It is the number of poor
without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES28
or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture, and
afford it cheap enough to prevent the importation of the same kind
from abroad, and to bear the expense of its own exportation.
In 1769, in his Positions to be Examined concerning National Wealth,
Franklin wrote this:
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The
first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered
neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is
generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way,
wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the
ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God
in his favor.
Parrington’s comments on mercantilism and Franklin continue:
“As a colonial, long familiar with the injustice of Navigation Laws,
Boards of Trade, and other restrictions in favor of British tradesmen,
Franklin agreed with Adam Smith on the principle of free trade; but
with later developments of the laissez-faire school -- its fetish of the
economic man and its iron law of wages -- he would not have32
agreed. . . . In his later speculations he was rather the social
philosopher than the economist, puzzled at the irrationality of society
that chooses to make a pigsty of the world, instead of the garden that
it might be if men would but use the sense that God has given them.
‘The happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of
political society,’ he believed, and a starvation wage-system was the
surest way of destroying that happiness. In one of the most
delightful letters he ever wrote, Franklin commented on the ways of
men thus: ”It is wonderful how preposterously the affairs of the
world are managed. Naturally one would imagine, that the
interests of a few individuals should give way to general interest;
but individuals manage their affairs with so much more
application, industry, and address, than the public do theirs, that
29‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
general interest most commonly gives way to particular. We
assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their
collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at the same time, the
inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices, and private
interests. By the help of these, artful men over power their wisdom
and dupe its possessors; and if we may judge by the acts, arrets, and
edicts, all the world over, for regulating commerce, an assembly of
great men is the greatest fool upon earth? “
Parrington also wrote this:33
The final test of every government Paine found in its concern for
the public affairs or the public good; any government that does not
make [these] its whole and sole object, is not a good government. . . .
It is the injustice of government that creates armies to defend the
earnings of injustice. But every wise government will respect its34
limitations. As a child of the eighteenth century, Paine hated
[Hobbes’] leviathan state as a monster created by a minority to
serve the ends of tyranny. The political state he accepted as a35
present necessity, but he would not have its prestige magnified and
the temptation to tyranny increased by the cult of nationalism. . . .
The maturest elaboration of Paine’s political philosophy is
found in “The Rights of Man.” This extraordinary work, the most
influential English contribution to the revolutionary movement, was
an examination of the English constitution in the light of what Paine
held were the true source and ends of government. It is a brilliant
reply to [Edmund] Burke, who rested his interpretation of the
English Constitution on the legal ground of the common law of
contract. Following the revolution in 1688, Burke had argued, the
English people through their legal representatives, entered into a
solemn contract, binding “themselves, their heirs, and posterity
forever,” to certain express terms; and neither in law nor in equity
were they, of whatever generation, free to change those terms except
by the consent of both parties to the contract. This was an
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES30
elaboration of the theory of the Old Whigs, which derived
government from a perpetual civil contract as opposed the radical
doctrine of a revocable social contract; and in attacking it Paine
allied himself with such thinkers as Price, Priestley, Franklin and
Rousseau. He pointed out the absurdity of carrying over the law of
private property into the high realm of political principle--to seek to
impose the dead past upon the living sovereignty. If sovereignty
inhered in the English people in 1688, it must inhere in the English
people in 1793, unless it had been violently wrested from them; no
parchment terms of another age can bind that sovereignty other
than voluntarily. Over against Burke’s theory of a single, static
contract, Paine set the doctrine of the reaffirmation of natural rights.
Any generation--as the generation of 1866--is competent to deal
with its affairs as it sees fit, but it cannot barter away the rights of
those unborn; such a contract on the face of it is null and void. . . .
Burke’s defense fares even worse when the argument is
examined in the light of expediency. Illogical as the English system
must appear to the political philosopher, can it plead the
justification that it works; that it does well the things it is paid to do;
that it makes the [public affairs or the public good, holistically] its
main concern? The reply to such questions Paine believed, should
be sought in the condition of the national economy; more particularly
by an examination of the account books of the exchequer [i.e., the
nation’s treasury]. The English people paid annually seventeen
millions sterling for the maintenance of government, and what did
they get in return? Nine millions of the total went to pay interest on
old wars, which in the budget was known as the funded debt; of the
remaining eight millions the larger part was spent in new wars and
sinecure pensions; whereas the real needs of England--the true
[public affairs or public good]--were shamelessly neglected. The
English people got little for their money except new debt to justify
31‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
new taxes. The poor were even taxed for the benefit of the great.
Thus my Lord Onslow, who was particularly zealous in the business
of proscribing Paine as “the common enemy of us all,” drew four
thousand pounds from the royal chest in sinecures, which made
him “the principal pauper of the neighborhood, and occasioning a
greater expense than the poor, the aged, and the infirm, for ten
miles around.” Government on the hereditary principle of Burke did
not appear to advantage in the light of such facts.Both in England and in America, Burke’s writings about government
substantially contributed to traditional conservatism’s classical
philosophy. About Adam Smith’s system of economy, Burke is listed as a
‘classical liberal’ with note that ‘traditional conservatism’ is
particularly protective of business and markets of commerce: to allow
them to regulate themselves (put the fox in charge of the henhouse, critics
always observe). Parrington commented about the Whiggishly36
conservative American System of Political Economy:37
Horace Greeley and Henry Carey were only straws in the wind that
during the Gilded Age was blowing the doctrine of paternalism about
the land. A Colonel Sellers was to be found at every fireside talking
the same blowsy doctrine. Infectious in their optimism, naive in their
faith that something would be turned up for them by the government if
they made known their wants, they were hoping for dollars to be put
in their pockets by a generous administration at Washington.
Congress had rich gifts to bestow -- in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors
of all sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to
the reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn
the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be. A
huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited . . ..
It was a splendid feast. If the waiters saw to it that the choicest
portions were served to favored guests, they were not unmindful of
their numerous homespun constituencies and they loudly proclaimed
the fine democratic principle that what belongs to the people should
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES32
be enjoyed by the people -- not with petty bureaucratic restrictions,
not as a social body, but as individuals, each free citizen using what
came to hand for his own private ends, with no questions asked. . . .
how differently rich and poor fared at the democratic feast, is
suggested by the contrast between the Homestead Act and the
Union Pacific land-grant . . . By the terms of the former the
homesteader got his hundred and sixty acres at a price of $1.25 an
acre; by the terms of the latter the promoters got a vast empire for
nothing . . . In the tumultuous decades that followed there was not
bargaining with corporations for the use of what the public gave;
they took what they wanted and no impertinent questions were
asked . . . There were hard headed men in the world of Beriah
Sellers who knew how easy it was to overreach the simple, and it was
they who got the most from the common pot. We may call them
buccaneers if we choose, and speak of the great barbecue as a
democratic debauch. But why single out a few, when all were
drunk? . . .Whig politics gave America the Gilded Age. This political
Whiggamore (as Schumperter wrote, ‘the way in which capitalism
develops its propensities for growth’) drives the privatized economic
growth of the American system of political economy. Capitalism’s
propensities shamelessly favor privatized profits, as officially patronized by
a paternal government that necessarily must ‘take from Paul to give to
Peter’, the capitalists. As Parrington observed, Congress had rich gifts38
to bestow -- in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all sorts. And
government, for political contributions engaged the contest of auctioning
legislative influence, and outright gifts: Political parties became the
enterprises of government’s pork barrel paternalism? Whigs succeeded
to metamorphose rational democracy into serving as the official agent of
privatized profit taking from economic exploitations.
Philosophically, democracy embraces both spiritual and material
human aspects. What separates democracy from other political
philosophies is its custodianship of human spirituality. When this is lost,
33‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
democracy is lost! Still, democracy coequally embraces life’s materiality.
Therefore, democrats neither can nor should apologize for embracing
equally Whiggish political paternalism. Democrats, not necessarily Party
Democrats, have disdain for capitalism, communism and fascism’s
ideological unitary materialism: which dogmatically assert that life’s
materialities, are antecedent to spirituality. In fact, when democracy’s
spiritual aspects are conflated to dogmatic Unitary Materialism, democracy
is then not distinguishable from all other Unitary Materialism sympathetic
philosophies. The pure philosophical argument, therefore, is about
teleological wholeness that requires logical antecedent principles of reason
and truth: natural principles are of either human side, spiritual or material,
cannot be ignored, or denied as mechanistically invariably happens when
government unequally grants paternalistic license to some.
Following Lincoln’s death, Whigs of the GOP officially
reasserted mercantilism’s irrationalities: The American System of
Political Economy was installed. In the policy name of ‘internal
improvements,’ as Parrington recorded, government became the ‘fairy
godmother’ to business interests. 39
Democrat and Whig no longer faced each other conscious of the
different ends they sought. The great party of Jefferson and Jackson
was prostrate, borne down by the odium of slavery and secession . . .
The Whig Republican was still Hamiltonian paternalistic, and the
Democrat Republican was still Jeffersonian laissez faire, and until it
was determined which wing should control the party councils there
would be only confusion. The politicians were fertile in compromises
but in nominating Lincoln and Johnson the party ventured to get
astride two horses that would not run together. To attempt to make
yoke-fellows of democratic leveling and capitalistic paternalism was
prophetic of rifts and schisms that only the passions of reconstruction
days could hold in check.
In 1865 the Republican party [the GOP] was no other than a
war machine that had accomplished its purpose. It was a political
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES34
mongrel, without logical cohesion, and it seemed doomed to break
up as the Whig Party had broken up and the Federalist Party had
broken up. But fate was now on the side of the Whigs as it had not
been earlier. The democratic forces had lost strength from the war,
and democratic principles were in ill repute. The drift to
centralization, the enormous development of capitalism, the spirit of
exploitation, were prophetic of a changing temper that was
preparing to exalt the doctrine of manifest destiny which the40
Whig party stood sponsor for. The practical problem of the moment
was to transform the mongrel Republican party into a strong
cohesive instrument, and to accomplish that it was necessary to
hold the loyalty of its Democratic voters amongst the farmers and
working-classes whilst putting into effect its Whig program.
Under normal conditions the thing would have been
impossible, but the times were wrought up and blindly passionate and
the politicians skillful [in words that Plato would use, ‘their truth -- if
truth at all -- was of ‘opinion,’ not ‘reason’]. . . The rebellion of the
Independent Republicans under Horace Greeley in 1872 was brought
to nothing by the skillful use of Grant's military prestige, and the
party passed definitely under the control of capitalism, and became
such an instrument for exploitation as Henry Clay dreamed of but
could not perfect. Under the nominal leadership of the easy-going
Grant a loose rein was given to Whiggish ambitions and the
Republican party became a political instrument worthy of the
Gilded Age.
Philosophically, our nation’s administration was returned to the Hobbesian
view from which Locke’s rational democratic view had reacted:
irrationalism was officially returned by this illogic: 41
post hoc, ergo propter hoc. ‘After this, therefore because of this.’
Strictly, the fallacy of inferring that one event is caused by another
merely because it comes after it. More loosely, the fallacy
35‘True’ Causal Reality requires necessary Principles
To ‘know’ is to logically distinguish what is ‘true’ from what is ‘false.’'
(characteristic of superstitious beliefs) of assuming too readily that
an event that follows another is caused by it without considering
factors such as counter-evidence or the possibility of a common
cause. (Causality.) The name appears to derive from Aristotle’s
Rhetoric (1401 29-34).Dr. Penelope Mackie
As a pseudo principle of belief, determinist mechanism is common
fallacious, paradoxical dogma. The dogmatic value predicates of belief,
shuns logically rational metaphysical principles. And such irrationalism
has become hateful calumnious conservative orthodoxy: that incidentally is
true of Islam also. Confronting metaphysical evidences, humans choose
between rationalism and irrationalism: Rationalists logically pursue
truthful inferences by the ‘scientific method.’ Designing Brahminists
irrationally assert dogmatic idealism, or they are sycophants that blindly
follow the classical orthodox ‘dogmatic beliefs.’ In this, the critical
thinking is left to the scientists and the philosophers whose inate interest is
to ‘know.’ True Science, until logical coherence is reasonable, remains'
inconclusive. Dogma eschews and calumniously exploits this natural
scientific enigmatic uncertainty. And, the appeal of absolutism is strong.
Blindly following absolute ‘dogmatic beliefs’ is the popular alternative that
abides as classical cultural orthodoxy (under religious banners and
sponsorship, that include Christianity and Islam).
If virtue exists in blindly following cultural dogma, it belongs to
religious belief that universally teaches a form of ‘divine right’: ‘God tells
you to follow me, for God has appointed me to lead you’? About such
dogma, I suspect, prompted L. C. Allison, to write this:42
Man is given free will and his first conscious act is to make himself
into God. [That is exactly what dogma is designed to do]
Like truth, hope of religious virtue can be ‘true’ or ‘false.’
True hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings; kings it makes
gods, and meaner creatures kings. Shakespeare
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES36
Religious hope converts fear into comfort and assurance.
We speak of hope; but is not hope only a more gentle name for fear?L. E. Landon
And, hope can be medicine that cures.
Hope -- of all ills that men endure. The only cheap and universal
cure; the captive’s freedom, and the sick man’s health, the lover’s
victory, and the beggar’s wealth. Abraham Cowley
We are never beneath hope, while above hell; nor above hope, while
beneath heaven. The miserable hath no other medicine but only
hope.
Shakespeare
On the ‘false’ side of hope,
The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.Italian Proverb
Patrick Henry, in his Give me Liberty Address, said:43
It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to
shut our eyes against a painful truth, . . .Emily Dickinson captured in poetry the simple comforts of hope.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all--
And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird--
That kept so many warm--
I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet, never, in Extremity--
It asked a crumb--of Me.Others also captured hope’s essence.
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
37 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face
Lighting a little Hour or two--is gone. Rubaiyat
What I admire in Columbus is not his having discovered a world, but his
having gone to search for it on the faith of an opinion.
[faith of opinion, rather than reason, aptly defines hope] anon
Some men see things as they are and say: why? I dream things as
they never were and say: why not? R. F. Kennedy
Deontology is the science of human duty. Teleology concerns St.
Paul’s faith-based hope that reaches for reasoned coherent purposes:44
‘But faith is a Basis of things hoped for, a Conviction of things
unseen’ [From an original Greek translation]
Thought is of noumenon (Kant’s word-choice to distinguish things of mind
and spirit) from which human perceptions of duty (deontology) or purpose
(teleology) are distinguished: as when Socrates, in prison, said to Crito who
had offered to help Socrates escape, ‘Leave me Crito, for I must follow
God.’ This showed how far afield of Greek orthodox duty to the many
gods of Greek mythology, Socrates’ teleological perception of his reasoned
coherent truth of God, had become: truth with coherent end purposes rather
than mere duty to Greek mythology? Socrates demonstrated his truth’s
necessary principles: with teleological purposes that far transcended the
dogmatic belief-based deontological duty.
Humans’ free will allows them to embrace or reject ontologism
Ontologism is intuitive communication, as intuition perceived
when in the presence of another. Ontologism describes the intuitive
knowledge of God, which knowledge is the source of all knowledge. In
this intuitive sense, ontologism must be dogmatic, as Kant expressed in his
Critique of Pure Reason: Principle that has no other proof than ‘true’
coherent logic, i.e., systemic necessity and coherence!
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES38
If a principle is a ‘necessary’ something, the logical meaning of
‘necessary’ makes that principle something:
that cannot be denied because denial would entail contradiction of
what already has been established.Unless a principle has systemic ‘coherence,’ it cannot be ‘necessary’ and is,
therefore, falsely considered. If, therefore, the LOGOS of God is the
supreme antecedent ontological principle, God’s LOGOS is axiomatically
antecedent to all that is. The Song of Moses, and I John, provided
testimony to this reasonable axiomatic nature of God.
The Teleological Argument for the existence of God is both of
human ontological reason and experience based. The Ontological45
Argument is ‘a priori’ reason-based. When by dogmatic belief, humans46
turn ontologism off, simply by denial, logical ‘a priori’ reasoning is turned
off. Thereby a mechanist conservative Positivist might never engage pure
‘a priori’ thought: might discount altogether the Teleological Argument;
and, because a Positivist believes dogma that annihilates, as unreal, ‘a
priori’ thoughts, the Ontological Argument of God’s existence also fails for
him? : does the rich man of Christ’s parable fit this observation?
Christ recognized the ‘unknowing’ plight of mechanist conservatism-based
deontology that had entrapped and prosecuted him, when He plead:
Forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen. Heb. 11:1
Positivist’s religion, like Abraham’s ‘faith,’ does not transcend hope. And
as Kierkegaard observed:
[Abraham] was not a thinker, he felt no need of getting beyond [his
hope of] faith. Kierkegaard
The teleology of faith was lost in translation. Teleology concerns St. Paul’s
faith that reaches for reasonably coherent purposes:47
‘But faith is a Basis of things hoped for, a Conviction of things
unseen’ [From an original Greek translation]
39 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
To take faith beyond hope, pure thought about metaphysics is essential and
‘a priori’ reasoning and syllogism must be engaged (ontologism must be
invited and systemic coherence applied). To think about the substances
and evidences of St. Paul’s definition of faith is to ponder the eternal,
universal nature of things which are naturally teleological before any
possible human experience entered in. And early Greeks, rather than
Christians, gave order to teleological philosophy: Cosmology is the
universe, Ontology [< Greek Ón, `ntos being + -logi� -logy] the nature of
reality (being). Greek (d©on, -ontos duty) makes Deontology the nature of
duty.
Deontology [< Greek d©on, -ontos duty + English -logy] fails to emphasize
the Greek’s accent [`ntos (being)]: science of duty or moral obligation is
more often than not metamorphosed to manmade temporal duties.
Whereas, in the pure sense, Ontology (including ontologism) is about pure
‘a priori’ noumenal reality: it is teleological!
Logically, as principle, noumena, is naturally antecedent to phenomena:
The provence of noumena is where answers to unanserable temporal
questions are found (as, which came first, the chicken or the egg?). Still of
the LOGOS of nature, the source of all noumena, intelligence, spirit or
energy, Ontologism is the natural relationship, or communication, of man
with his maker. St. John understood this metaphysics as the spiritual reality
of his faith: in fact, he named nature’s Creator LOGOS. He understood48
Ontology, Deontology and Teleology and the promise of an abiding
noumenal companionship with God as predicated on a humans’
understanding of Ontologism: W. R. Inge’s,
‘Either the world shows a teleology or it does not,’ suggests: that to choose ‘mechanism’ shows unbelief in ‘teleology.’ Inge
infers that: when deontologists choose mechanism, they have their intuitive
(Plato’s pure thought) ontologism switch turned off and, their choice to say
no, or deny the natural principles, make’s them unbelievers in the
teleologies of God (St. John said that to not walk in the light of the truth of
God, makes us liars). When humans fallaciously determine causal
‘mechanisms,’ they deny Teleology. (And they deny God)
About the philosophy of mechanism, Brockway wrote this:49
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES40
We find mankind liberated from spooks and spirits, from lords and
priests, by becoming mechanized. Once the universe was running like
a clock, there was nothing for it but to fit us to a wheel in the works --
perhaps a greater thing than a cog, but mechanical nevertheless. For
us to be fit for this function, psychology had to subject us to
mechanical controls. Or, as J. W. Miller said, we had first to lose
our souls, then our minds; and finally, with the behaviorists,
consciousness. Economic man is a prime example of this remarkable
servomechanism.
Robert Heilbroner endorsing Brockway’s book, said this:
“George Brockway is a master at demystifying the science whose
curse is not that it is dismal, but that it has become incomprehensible.
In Brockway’s hands economics becomes entirely understandable,
sometimes amusing, and often infuriating.”
The book’s cover gives this summary:
Economic man, the imaginary monster from whose supposedly
rational behavior the “laws” of contemporary economics are
deduced, is selfishness incarnate [mechanist irrationalism incarnate].
He has brought us a long way, but, this multifaceted book suggests,
he has gone about as far as he can go. If we do not dethrone him,
our world (like the Pharaonic, Roman, Medieval, and Mandarin
worlds) will slip into a long and bumpy decline.
In support of this thesis, George Brockway shows how the
principal assumptions of contemporary economics lead to an
exaltation of ‘things’ -- the gross national product, the bottom line --
over ‘human beings.’ When this balance is corrected, economics
takes on a wholly new and more friendly aspect. The law of supply
and demand is reformulated; saving and investment are redefined;
production and speculation are seen in conflict, as are wages and
interest rates (but not profits);the labor theory of value is supplanted
41 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
by the labor theory of right; ‘productivity’ is revealed as a question-
begging question; high interest rates [the mechanist “Bankers’
COLA”] are exposed as a prime cause of inflation; and mores,
morals, and morale become important economic concerns.
I had deliberately put Brockway’s book on the shelf until my own
research was settled for writing this section’s final comments. Brockway’s
references and examples about inflation, mercantilism and mechanism
furnish critical information to all who would venture to improve the
deontological mechanist Political Economy to achieve teleological
constitutional purposes. I interpret ‘The End of Economic Man,’ to mean,
the adoption of teleology to mitigate political economy’s classical
deontology. And this can only be done by finding, then applying the
natural antecedent principles that mitigate the paradoxical idealist
deontologies of myriad mechanisms spawned by political economy.
Teleology opposes (overcomes) mechanism’s flaws
World Book Encycolpedia explained it this way:50
Mechanism is one of the two great philosophical theories of cause
and effect in the universe. Opposed to the theory of mechanism is the
theory of teleology. Any thing that grows and develops can be
explained in two ways. Mechanism explains it from behind, in terms
of its [material] origins. Teleology explains it from the front, in terms
of the goal [noumenal purpose] it is seeking.Life forms are distinguished in this contrast: or, we should say intelligence
of one sort or another has causal patterns that are unrelated to duties
intrinsic of mechanism: inert v.s. organic. Hesiod (700s BC) had
distinguished human intelligence from among the life forms, And Hesiod
had cited, what is today called deontology, as aggravated by the temporal
world’s paradoxical nomos (of Plato’s visible reality).51
. . . The word ‘nomos’ is as old as the epic poets, and seems
originally to have been used to denote the ways of behavior
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES42
characteristic of any group of living beings, whether men or wild
beasts. Thus Hesiod uses it in ‘Works and Days:’
The Son of Cronos has ordained this ‘nomos’ for men. Fishes
and beasts and winged fowl devour one another, for right is
not in them; but to mankind he gave ‘right,’ which proves far
the best (Evelyn-White’s translation).
In later days ‘nomos’ was applied only to human ways of behavior;
but it never lost its original meaning of custom, nor its association
with justice. [Hesiod found nomos irrationally tyrannous]
In Works and Days, Hesiod also wrote about the ‘fall of man,’ because
of Pandora’s curiosities, which undoubtedly revealed the paradoxs.52
It describes the deterioration of the world through five stages: the
Age of Gold; the Silver Age; the Bronze Age; the age of Heros, and
the Age of Iron in which Hesiod liv [eHde. siod believed that his Age was last]
Would man regress to lose the rational noumenal intelligence, which
Evelyn White interpreted as ‘right’? In many ways and reasons, this
question still puzzles to day. But Hesiod’s human distinction is critically
important. Human ‘rights and responsibilities,’ ‘duties and purposes,’
either apply or they do not. Unless logically principled, paradoxs of
manmade mechanist idealistic irrationalist designs are endemic to life:
when logically beneficient principles are ignored, God is ignored!
A critical lack of logically beneficent principles is evident, both organically
and legally. Did the supreme intelligence, God, which created life in
temporal environs, strategically conceive mechanisms’ paradoxs and
entrapments: Which endemically are both irrationally fallacious and wrong?
Deists, generally, express their lack of faith in this mechanist creative
scenario!
Mechanisms do not qualify as ‘necessary’ principle, and Hesiod’s nomos
suggests what is wrong! : mechanisms are conceived to entrap beneficence
rather than stand sponsor for its principles. Parrington captured evidence of
this classical conservative conceived deontological duty, which contend that
beneficent principles block ideological success, affirming instead
materialist irrationalisms of their belief as necessity.53
43 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlier
age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were
devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles
of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John
Marshall and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springs
to catch unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were
shouting over their victories at the polls, he was engaged in the
strategic work of placing the Constitution under the narrow
custodianship of the English law. An ardent Federalist and later
an equally ardent Whig, he reveals in his precise thinking the
intimate relations that everywhere exist between economics, politics,
and legal principles. [Unitary materialist conservatism deliberately puts
aside all rational logical reviews of its belief-based dogma: affirming
irrational fallacy as principle is thereby Mechanism’s endemic hallmark]
Only democracy (Rational Empiricism) holds noumenal reality temporally
equal to phenomenal reality. It is the only logical rationally principled
political form of organic order. And unless teleological principles are
sought, and lived by, humans cannot know what is wrong. Worse, we are
party to Allison’s suggestion when he introduced The Bible.54
Man is given free will and his first conscious act is to make himself
into God. (His second act, when caught, is to blame someone else) [St. John, says in this we live a form of lying]55
We justify acquisitiveness by rationalizing idealist deontologies of our
mechanist creations. And, otherwise, in acquisitive aggrandizements, we
subscribe irrationalisms as Holmes’ glorious Epicurean Paradox:
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES44
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’Oliver Wendell Holmes
Because nomos-based paradoxs prolifrate with irrationalism, organic forms
of mitigating irrationalism by rationalism is necessary for to redress life’s
‘necessities,’ i.e., to counter with organic systems that are based on ‘true’
antecedent principles. For instance, because conservative orthodoxy of the
American System of Political Economy organically, mechanistically reward
‘property’ and ‘affluence,’ this official organic paternalism, which must
‘take,’ in order to ‘give’ paternalistically, must also, therefore, be the
mechanist determining cause of impoverished classes in capitalism: Social
Security is an example of ‘necessary’ beneficent social usage insurance that
redresses the mechanism caused economic impoverishment: expressly of
former workers that due to age are no longer as fitted to earn a paycheck in
capitalist orthodoxy. Logical reason justifies the ‘necessity’ of Social
Security. For to confirm the antecedent principles of Social Security, four
situations are cited: to also confirm the contrast of rational teleology with
irrational deontology.
Situation one (Mechanisms’ Paradoxs that spring up to
discriminate against privacy rights): credit card solicitations and fee-based
offers to consolidate personal debts are unnecessary consequences of the
licensed banking and finance industry’s mechanist deontologies. Both
industries take advantage of their paternalist license to gain ‘profits’ from
mechanism-based economic determinism in what G. P. Brockway dubbed
‘the banker’s COLA.’ This economic determinism affirms that political
economy’s license, as granted to administer money’s accounting, which is
the ‘standard of economic exchange’ utility, has because it can in the
mechanist deontology, metamorphose into an equivalence to ‘owning’ a
money hoard as treasure, it has and does do this.
Money’s metamorphism originated with systemic assertions that
money earned for exchanging goods and services was also ‘possessed, i.e.,
is equivalent to ‘owning’ the money earned. Adam Smith had apparently
failed to convince us that wealth and money are not one and the same: to
Smith, money is the nation’s common utility of ‘wealth’: goods and
services produced and consumed by all. Without consuming goods and
45 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
services, money ‘owned’ to Smith is a hoarded treasure, and is not,
therefore, intrinsic of a nation’s wealth.56
For the market system is not just a means of exchanging goods; ‘it is
a mechanism for sustaining and maintaining an entire society.’ . . .
It is not [Smith’s] aim to espouse the interests of any class. He is
concerned with promoting the wealth of the entire nation. And
wealth, to Adam Smith, consists of the goods that ‘all’ the people of
society consume; note ‘all’-- this is a democratic, and hence radical,
philosophy of wealth. Gone is the notion of gold, treasures, kingly
hoards; gone the prerogatives of merchants or farmers or working
guilds. We are in the modern world, where the flow of goods and
services consumed by everyone constitutes the ultimate aim and end
of economic life. [The contrast between a nation’s GNP profit as an exploitation of
consumption (the working classes only means of subsiding), and Smith’s
beneficent purpose to distribute goods and services to all, exposes organic
deontology that Adam Smith neither had anticipated nor hypothisized.]
To the wage-earner, ‘money’ is, by his subsistence needs, earned value for
the exchange of goods and services. To the banker, ‘money’ is
government’s fiat-based commodity, which it licensed to bankers for to
store, rent out, and collect a rate of interest on (Brockway’s “banker’s
COLA”). To organic government, ‘money’ is an authorized utility
provision for the capitalist political economy’s endemic ubiquitousness:
providing a bonded national value for the free exchange of goods and57
services. And, with two thirds of our national economy, which is wage-
earner consumption related, and one third investment related to the capital
side of economy, ‘money’ is the catalyst which plays a fundamentally
divergent, i.e., paradoxical role. In the one instance, it represents
governments ubiquitous constitutional organic intent, in the other it acts as
the custodian for accumulated money hoards called capital. And when
truck loads (literally $ trillions) of foreign U.S. money hoards and gold turn
up at the boarder points in attempts to flee the conflict, as happened in the
aftermath of our waging war with Iraq, should be cause to wonder about the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES46
accounting and custody paradox of the nation’s ubiquitous fiat created
utility which had metamorphosed into a commodity: what is the money trail
(how much of it now feeds covert political intrigue)? * 58
* In terrorism, money plays greatly: is foreign terrorism controllable by
putting tighter controls on money hoards? , Tighter rules for the exchange
of currencies? Are all foreign exchanges of goods and services required to
first register their domestic exchange of currencies? If they are not, they
should be: all foreign exchanges must officially be registered because they
all represent money hoarding rather than utilities. Commodity Exchanges
representing contraband, drugs, oil and such require that official records be
kept of the monetary transactions. Officially licensed acquisitive banking
interests are targets of illegal collusion involved with money laundering and
because of this are often caught in taking profits from the illegal money
traffic for which they are licensed as the necessary legal function through
which the illegal money sources. Without such licensed complicities,
terrorism purchased in one country for delivery in another is surely more
difficult to transport. Whether the Press is liberal or conservative, both
questions and silence abound: little, if anything, changes! Until, when an
Arab nation proposes to buy control of our nation’s waterway ports, should
tell us something about the grand circular flow of American fiat currency
hoarding that has resulted from our near total dependence on foreign
produced oil. As with the truck loads of U.S. currency in Iraq, indicates
that our hoarded fiat-currency in foreign hands has only the limited
circulation outlet: which is either U.S. goods and services, the federal
instruments of its deficit spending, or as the above proposal to buy
administrative control of port authority. And, we suddenly become aware
that the G. W. Bush administration has been financing our vastly growing
national debt with foreign investments in our deficit spending? , Mostly
from China.
Brockway’s “banker’s COLA” is a substantial part of inflation’s legal side,
but causal inflation’s illegal side is also very bad:59
Banks wash billions in dirty laundry
Washington -- The failure of U.S. banks and regulators to track
transactions with foreign banks enables criminals to route billions of
47 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
dollars from drug sales, internet gambling, tax evasion or other
illegal activities into the United States each year, a new Senate
subcommittee report concludes.
Although regulators have prodded U.S. banks in recent
years to bolster their efforts to control money laundering through
individual accounts, the Senate permanent subcommittee on
investigations found banks an regulators have been lax in applying
similar standards to correspondent banking, in which foreign banks
use U.S. banks to perform wire transfers and other transactions.
The subcommittee’s report, which concludes a year long
investigation, will be made public today. Regulators and bankers
familiar with the inquiry say it’s the first comprehensive look at this
aspect of banking and how it facilitates money laundering.
“Inattention and disinterest by U.S. banks in screening the
foreign banks they take in as clients have allowed rogue foreign
banks and their criminal clients to carry on money laundering and
other criminal activity in the United States and to benefit from the
protections afforded by the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking
industry,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on
the subcommittee.
The subcommittee launched its investigation after a Russian
money-laundering scandal erupted at Bank of New York 18 months
ago. It examined a number of giant, well known banks, including
Bank of America, Citygroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. And First
Union. . . .
Money laundering, which the Clinton administration declared
a national security threat, is the act of concealing the source of funds
obtained from an illegal activity. An estimated $1 trillion is
laundered each year -- about half of it, or $500 billion , through the
United States, according to the rep[Boyrt .o t.h .e r wise legal banking of course!]
Since the ‘iron cage’ of wage-earned money is controlled by payroll
accounting and individual wage-earner checking accounts the nation’s legal
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES48
inflationary pressures stem mostly now from interest charged of consumer
loans, stock and futures investments, and foreign exchanges. Licenced
paternalism’s inflation is, therefore, government’s problem, the primary
burden of which rests on wage-earned consumption. Wage-earning,
however, is not causally related to inflation from governments
paternalist grants and licensing. Inflation stemming from stocks and
futures markets is directly beneficial to the investors, whose money hoards
also are at risk to economic loss as well as usual gains.
When SS contribution taxes are paid, the identification numbers
assigned for administrative purposes, are often used by banking and others.
This assigned number identifies individuals and their financial transactions.
When applying for a mortgage, a loan, an auto or marriage license, this
personal identification is required. But frauds from personal identity theft
and counterfeiting, has caused government and legal business to protect
individual privacy and stop identity theft frauds from occurring. Laws now
require businesses to not only respect each individual’s right to privacy, but
are now responsible for protecting it.
Still, diabolically, business interests now assert that licensing gave
them rights to use personal identities for maintaining ‘black lists’ and such,
for protecting business interests. And while Privacy Policies make
businesses fiducially responsible for individuals’ private information
entrusted to them, each licensed corporate mechanisms,’ as are legally
licensed has contractual tentacles that reach almost everywhere and are
considered as being legally proprietary, which is the diabolical antecedent
to each individual’s privacy rights. Individual financial information is
anything but a personally, private right (The American Political Economy
System is now a legally interconnected mechanist Leviathan): is
certainly not a utility as money, personal information or identity, which are
not for misuse, sale, exchange, or sharing. Regardless, constitutional
personal rights protected by the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are routinely,
politically and legally compromised by government licensed, organic
business practices.
49 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Aping commonly prosecuted cases in courts of law, businesses
have incorporated mechanistically and preemptively to be their own court,
acting first to discriminate by isolating who is punishable. *
* As, when MSNBC and CNBC fired Don Imus (his talk show) in April of
2007 for a slanderous comment about a girls college sports team, they acted
as both judge and jury in the matter: he was never legally indicted or
convicted; that he on air personally apologized for the incident and all team
members forgave him had no effect in the matter.
Financial businesses seeking the highest possible profits from money they
loaned, despite the security pledged, take note and advantage of personal
financial adversities. This preemptive discriminatory personal information
is not a paternal grant of business license and should not be allowed? : Still,
licensed economic mechanisms are allowed to enforce self serving
deontological duties onto personal identities that are private?
Sadly, legalized deontology does not offer beneficient answers. About
teleology as should apply to the administrations of law, to fulfill a hollow
semblance of beneficience, words of the Lord’s Prayer and an Emerson
quote come to mind:
Lead us not into temptation (forgive us as we forgive) . . . , and
That which we each all the while do . . ..
Civil authorities solicit and receive generous political donations for
licensing civil corruption but shun responsibility for deontological duty-
based prosecutions by mechanist laws ($6 million in political donations by
the tobacco industry influenced a $50 million tax reduction; similar
generous political donations to local political offices buy substantial
influence there?): ‘For profit’ businesses (tobacco, drugs, liquor, gambling,
prostitution, usury-based financial services, . . .) thrive and generously
contribute to candidates for local government offices. Laws originate and
otherwise are administered by these office-holders. And ‘sinners,’ so
called, as are ‘caught’ by the prosecutorial mechanisms, are adjudged by the
nomos-jaded authorities that either excuse their own acts or enjoy
paternalist granted immunity from the effects of law.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES50
And, individually we are concerned only when we ourselves stand
accused: until then, we either trust that laws are constitutional and
teleologically ethical, or we take advantage whenever we can to gain
personal advantages. And, always, we are rudely enlightened when
entrapped ourselves by the legal deontological duty-based mechanisms. We
disdain the realists who are skeptical. And mostly realists also are also
duty-based. ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’: ‘The deadliest sin,’ said
Carlyle, ‘is no consciousness of sin.’ In contrast, Jessica Williams,
despaired by having driven the car that killed teenagers that were where
civil authorities had put them, bunched up, for garbage detail, expressed
that her life was dedicated to those who lost theirs that day. Civil
authorities were not prosecuted, and were silent on why the youngsters were
there. Civil authorities, in this, represent Carlyle’s deadliest sin.
Despite the Constitution, laws in America are mostly formulated to
serve the deontological mechanisms (witness Parrington’s account of
spiteful Federalist deontology ‘to devise legal springs’ to entrap democrats
and their constitutional teleologies).60
Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlier
age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were
devoted to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles
of law and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition
days of New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall
and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springs to catch
unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over
their victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of
placing the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the
51 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
English law. An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig,
he reveals in his precise thinking the intimate relations that
everywhere exis [tA blel t‘wfaelelanc ieocuosn porminiccips,le ps’o lsihtoicusl,d abned u nletigead lm percihnacnipislteicsa. lly]
Paradoxical entrapments ensnare many who by processes of indictment are
caught in the ever expanding litany of legal mechanisms: Many of society’s
prescribed pill takers would test positive for a controlled substance in their
blood, but until prosecutors are given a reason to indict, they are ‘good’
citizens; similarly, many drink, smoke, gamble, or flirt with smut. But
legally entrapped, then prosecuted, freedom is no longer their inalienable
right (as happened with public disclosure that William Bennett, the noted
moralist, was a gambling addict that had lost $ millions). ‘Sinners’ have
not changed. They act and do the same day in and day out. But when
caught, betrayed, or indicted, selectively rather than consistently, they are
prosecuted. Indeed, the whole of society is implicated in life’s paradoxs
and because at times we fail to ‘walk the line’ of virtue and principle, we all
commit ‘sins’ if not crime: We are ‘tempters’ and ‘sinners,’ all! St. Paul
candidly admitted this:61
For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but
what I hate, that I do.
And maybe worse than those indicted, are the deontological duty-based
concupiscent sins of unholy sanctimony authoritatively feigned: pride,
arrogance, conceit: indigenous of caste, fraternity, clubs, gangs, politics, . .
. , sinful undercurrents, that also embroil students in pursuit of knowledge,
where paradoxs also thrive: the common value predicates of sin are both
mechanist and retributive in nature: where ‘snitches,’ ‘moles,’ and
entrapments are employed for to avert civic disasters. The hypocrisies of
mechanisms blur consistently virtuous principle teleologies.
In Nevada, for instance, not paying a gambling marker, then when caught in
a traffic violation, can land you in jail. Politics there has made civil
authority the collector of gambling debts, which are electronically flagged
as a violation of law calling for an arrest and prosecutorial procedure.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES52
Virtues or teleological principles have only a narrowing mean
existence in the middle range or spectrum of paradoxical behavior. And
when justice fails to espouse beneficent teleology (to without deontological
bias consider ‘innocence’ until guilt has been proven, for instance, and
when guilt is legally proven and forgiveness is beneficial to society, the
legal penalty is mittigated), however, justice as the dutiful agent of
deontological mechanism, is, therefore, an accomplice, if not itself, sinful
or criminal: surely is not an ally to Christ’s admonition as made to those
ready to stone the woman caught in adultery:
‘those without sin, should throw the stones’ :
was the teleologic principle of this admonition? Dutiful prosecution, which
has become far too creative with mechanist entrapments and jurists armed
with retributive ethics and, unfortunately, effects of mechanism-based, but
legalized irrationalism has made‘ legal penalties and imprisonments
exclusively of unitary materialist nomos (teleologically, ‘imprisonment’ is a
false decision whenever a person, posing no threat to society, is incarcerated
*). That our prisons are now so over crowded, that older lesser penalties
must be excused, is evidence that society is officially irrational, i.e., of
unitary materialist belief, that is deontological in nature, rather than
beneficial.
About this, on Chris Mathew’s Hardball, June 26, 2007, Ann
Coulter was asked her reaction to Cristopher Hitchens recent atheistic
statement that religion was responsible for the paradoxical circumstance of
cultural society (my crude interpretation): her answer blithely shifted this
responsibility onto God, the Creator of all, which answer confirmed to me
that Coulter’s belief is of the irrational unitary materialist religious form:
which variation of belief is very close to Hitchens’ belief denial. An athiest
of great logical distinction said this about materialist belief:
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may be
called facts, it would not contain any truth, in the sense in which truths are
things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth and falsehood are
properties of beliefs and statements: hence a world of mere matter, since it
53 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
would contain no beliefs of statements, would also contain not truth or
falsehood. Bertrand Russell
* The cozy relationship between government and commerce, called
Political Economy, is undeniable; in the value predicates wreckage of this
relationship is where Roger Williams’ theory of state, as a compact was
found. Clearly, compact theory was foremost in the minds of Colonials
when, only after the Bill of Rights was promised, they ratified the
Constitution. When sifting through the materialist wreckage hoping to find
answers to subdue increasing amorality (as kids intentionally shooting
kids), we should constantly remind ourselves of the radically pure moral
value predicates which Roger William’s natural-law-based theory provided
to American colonial culture: don’t we now prosecute ‘Martha Stewarts’
while $billions of securities fraud is not prosecuted? 62
The state is society organized, government is the state
functioning -- it is the political machinery devised by the sovereign
people to effect definite ends. And since the single end and purpose
for which the body of citizens erect the state is the furtherance of the
communal well-being, the government becomes a convenient
instrument to serve the common weal, responsible to the sovereign
people and strictly limited by the terms of the social agreement. . . .
The state, then, is society working consciously through
experience and reason, to secure for the individual citizen the largest
measure of freedom and well-being. It is armed with a potential
power of coercion, but only to secure justice. . . . But if sovereignty
inheres in the majority will [which now is overpowered by corporate
treasure], what securities remain for the individual and minority
rights?
William’s reasoned, Society (and not standing laws) is the constitutional
organum: our Constitution is effected only by consented individual
sovereignty and not by legislation, administration or legal reviews of law.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES54
The government paternalism to business and the reciprocal control of
government by business, i.e., The American System of Political Economy,
has by Roger William’s definition, evolved, and by mechanization now is
the most dominant political ‘state’ of the United States. And like the
fictions rationalized to support it, deontologists of the Federalist-Whigg
genre refuse to acknowledge the teleology (the state is society organized,
government the state functioning -- it is the political machinery devised by
the sovereign people to effect definite ends). Morally ‘bankrupted,’ our
elected deontologist representatives affirmed Hamilton’s fallacious unitary
materialist property-based political prescription for suffrage, and thereby
carpetbagged mercantilism and materialism’s return to America, from
which sixteenth century America reacted, as Parrington observed.63
Prime interest rates are made available only to preferred borrowers:
a form of economic discrimination, which must encroach on human privacy
rights. And the low initial mechanist range of interest rates has expanded
greatly since the high interest rates of the 1980s: making usury a norm for
those that must borrow in order to subsist. This deontology is naturally
paradoxical and it embroils human rights.
Privacy infringements: during April 2001 my insurance company
sent this explanation of its new Privacy Policy:
A new federal law permits banks, investment companies, and
insurance companies to provide financial services. This same law
requires [that we] share in writing our attached Notice of Privacy
policy. This federal law does not apply to our efforts to market
products or services to you . . .. The Policy included these provisions:
• We do not sell customer information.
• We do not provide customer information to persons or
organizations outside our family of companies.
• We contractually require any person or organization
providing products or services to customers on our behalf to protect
the confidentiality of company information.
55 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
• We do not share customer medical information with anyone
within the family of companies, unless you expressly authorize it, or
unless your insurance policy contract with us permits us.
[What medical information should be in the underwriting
files of a company that insures property? : whether or not the
company also offers medical insurance?]
• We afford prospective and former customers the same
protections as existing customers with respect to the use of personal
information.
Until recently, insurance officially was held separate from banking.
Banking and Insurance were then considered the twin pillars of financial
services. With the new ‘financial services’ concept, banks are now allowed
to own and operate insurance companies. And, reciprocally, insurance
companies are now allowed to own and operate banks. For a half century
or more, Congressman Wright Patman, alone it seemed, opposed and held
this organic economic merger at bay. ‘Because,’ he maintained, that
‘separately they were huge but together they posed unhealthy behemoth
economic control’ of human identities and inalienable rights.
Privacy issues also embroil in scientific advances to understand the
human genetic makeup. Political economy’s organic entities conceptually
must discriminate necessarily in such advances (Parrington observed that
the paradoxical ‘fly in Whiggish honey’ was political economy’s proclivity
to paternalistically give to some by taking from others): a state or nation’s
economy is a holistic concept. It includes all, not some or a preferred
some! However, political economy’s mechanisms were designed with
favor to some. Therefore, to discriminate, they seek private information on
which to do this.
Responsibilities to respect privacy rights have increased
exponentially, making privacy a far more important issue as government
politically loosens its regulatory responsibility with interconnected private
sector business mechanisms: for instance, legal complaints directed to MSN
are responded to by Dun & Bradstreet, correspondence to Smith Barney is
responded to by Citibank, the real estate business of the largest builder of
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES56
homes (Pardee), in matters of mortgage loans, is interrelated with Wells
Fargo’s banking. The credit bureau reporting mechanisms installed to serve
the financial service companies are designed to enforce the mechanisms own
brand of justice: for instance, credit bureaus adjudge collected reports as
legal facts, without legally required due processes.
The advances in electronic and wireless media require far stricter
enforcements of privacy laws. As paradoxs of this convergence are
considered, principles that mitigate the irrational effects on those, whose
rights are impugned are a fresh critically important democratic issue. And
when rational principles are considered, each mechanism’s lack in
teleological purposes must be considered: licensed public utilities, as
Banking and Insurance, must apply holistically to all: because both
extraordinarily characterize ‘the public interest.’ Therefore, unless privacy
issues prevail over fallaciously affirmed and hierarchically mechanized
private business duties (for which licensed dogmatic organic duties are
unsuited), the ranks of society’s discriminated class must continually get
larger. And constitutional ‘minority rights’ issues are routinely politically
neglected by the growing lack of common interest that is due to the
Epicurean nature of orthodox irrationalism:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’Oliver Wendell Holmes
What government edict or policy will ever protect ‘minority human rights’
from the licensed politically affirmed deontologies of our legalized fictitious
business leviathan: organic fictional mechanisms that organically are
fallaciously licensed to conduct economy’s extra private affairs?
For the fiducial management of risk, the Financial Services Industry
needs critical customer information. But the Financial Services Industry
wants more than rightfully they should be licensed for to discriminate.
Instead of consolidating to discriminate and thereby more greatly
compromise individual rights, Roger Williams ‘social usage’ (mutual
reinsurance) is available to mitigate the ill effects of all organic forms of
financial business. Organic rejection of this efficient option is because the
deontological acquisitive mentality prefers to blame irrationally by installing
reporting mechanisms for to tabulate adverse personal information in order
57 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
to justify service fees and usury rates of interest, which will return greater
profits to them. Causes of repayment lateness and delinquencies -- as losing
employment, getting ill, . . . , that at times, more often now it seems, quite
naturally befalls humans -- is summarily excused as collateral personal
responsibility, which legally has usually not been causally linked to
business: so which has sovereign antecedence business or humans? The
deontological value predicates of mechanisms designed to collect adverse
consumer reports electronically, are also irrationally amoral, and truthfully
are of ‘false’ value: the effected humans must monitor these reports and pay
fees for the service to purge errors and mitigating circumstances. This fact,
also denies business’ causal responsibility, which had ordered this service to
business creation.
Irrationally, with privacy rights, only consumers are held responsible
and must pay to monitor and purge inaccurate and fraudulent reports of
record, or live with them as they often erroneously are reported. Like
lawyers, who are keenly aware of legal entrapments in real property laws that
eventually will occur when unawares individuals needing mortgages are
confronted by a lien filed against their property. Individuals are then are
coerced either to pay off the liens so to clear the record that should not have
occurred excepting that legal favor was given to lawyers that wish to
covertly rather than overtly use the law. (An interesting study that has never
been made involves the number and cost involved with covert law that
overtly would never have been filed.) Recently, identity fraud that emanated
from financial institutions’ reporting mechanisms, had withdrawn $billions
from reported individuals’ bank accounts:. ‘insider fraud,’ like a staph
disease in hospitals, had corrupted fiducial integrity of reporting
mechanisms. And because of this incidental spreading of privacy
responsibility, reporting mechanisms should be closed for to preserve
individual privacy.
Insurance companies have, for years, wrestled with the fact of
underwriting risks that, when extreme losses had occurred, they could not
pay the loss claims from insurance funds (for instance, as Katrina has shown,
that all private insurance failed miserably to perform as contractually
agreed). Potentially, catastrophic losses can and do bankrupt insurance
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES58
companies. Insurers have partially solved this dilemma without putting any
burden onto the consumers of insurance: Their solution was to reinsure the
portions of risk that potentially threatened business solvency. This ‘social
usage’ business principle is mentioned to suggest that the same non intrusive
procedure is available to the Financial Services Industry, thereby replacing
the onerously burdensome antitrust busting centralized reporting that has led
to myriad law suits, and potentially must lead to eventual expensive class
actions.
Financial Services is critically important as a utility service to
society: Financial Services must, therefore, be regulated for society’s benefit,
rather than, as now has been metamorphosed to, the Financial Services
benefit. Government’s licensing and reciprocal regulatory responsibility is
accountable for this irrational transmutation.
situation two: federal education grants
In May 2001, Headline News disclosed that the G. W. Bush’ Administration
acted to more strictly apply the 1998 law regarding education grants: A
question on the application form asked whether or not the applicant had been
convicted of a drug charge. If they had, they were not eligible for the grant.
During 1999 the Clinton Administration had overlooked applications that
ignored this question. The Bush administration’s more strict enforcement
then canceled many grants: denying education grants to the applicants. In
the news, November 2006, there were now fewer college graduates. And,
the growing ranks of illegal imegres were glad to fill the low end wage-
earning employments.
situation three: the $ 1.35 trillion revenue tax reduction Bill
approved by the Senate in May 2001 provides another example of political
paradox, which levies duty without principle, deontology without teleology.
While pondering to comprehend the effects of this tax proposal, my wife
handed me Readers Digest’s May issue to enjoy with her this humor that had
caused both of us to laugh aloud: and this humorous quip provided situation
four. The quip was this:
59 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
To act as you would will others in the same situation to act.'
One day my wife and I came home to find a message from a friend of
hers on our phone machine. She said she had applied for a job and
needed a character reference -- basically someone to verify she was
honest and trustworthy -- and had given the interviewer my wife’s
name. . . . Also, she said. There was a form for my wife to sign. “But
I couldn’t find you,” the friend concluded, “so I forged your
signature.”This quip dramatized the practical difference between deontology and
teleology. J. S. Mill had stated teleology’s practical utilitarianism: The
greatest good of the greatest number should be the purpose of human
conduct (dictionary, 2153). 64
Mill defends utilitarianism, a form of teleological ethics [for instance,
Kant’s categorical imperative ], against more rule bound deontological'
systems. ‘Teleology’ is from the Greek ‘telos’ which means ‘end’ or
‘goal.’ That is, the standard of right or wrong action for the
teleologists is the comparative consequences of the available actions.
That act is right which produces the best consequences. Whereas the
deontologist is concerned only with the rightness of the act itself, the
teleologist assert that there is no such thing as an act having intrinsic
worth. While there is something intrinsically bad with lying for the
deontologist, the only thing wrong with lying for the teleologist is the
bad consequences it produces. If you can reasonably calculate that a
lie will do even slightly more good than telling the truth, you have an
obligation to lie.
Mill’s definition of teleology has found no appeal with deontologists, whose
interest is in the immediate performance of deontological duties and results.
The four cited situations can be sorted into categories, as to serving
teleological ‘purpose’ or mechanist deontological ‘duty.’
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES60
Teleology always adds mitigating principle to empirical paradox,
which exists only on the deontological range or spectrum: deontological duty
is always produced by fallacious ideological dogmatic belief that is affirmed
as principle, therefore, logically is ‘false,’ and fails to impress responsibly of
necessity onto deontologists thoughts and actions. Ann Coulter’s high level
of intelligence provides a prime example of those who without conscience,
enjoy castigating necessary logical rationality, and represents her hate as
being consistent with her convenient religious belief: her unitary materialist
Hobbism belief. is Federalist dogmatic! (President Reagan’s Teflon nature
and President G. W. Bush’s justification of preemptive war remind of such
fallacious deontological affirmations.)
Pausing now to distinguish teleology
Abiding teleology for ‘situation one' (Paradox that discriminates
against privacy rights) founders because a deontological persuaded
Congress’ has failed to fulfill its constitutional role to provide for specified
teleological, constitutional responsibility. Deontological placebos as the
song ‘America, the Beautiful’ expresses hope but fails to inspire resolve to
satisfy constitutional teleology (holistic purposes).
‘America, God shed his grace on thee, And crown thy good with
brotherhood from Sea to shining Sea’Sends shivers of patriotism that make one feel good but in voids of
unfulfilled constitutional responsibilities remain to appal rationality.
Roger Sherman’s ‘A Caveat Against Injustice’ is on my desk reminding of
myriad evil ideological deontologies allowed by the fluctuating values of our
Exchange Mediums. Sherman thought he had afforded that only non
fluctuating value standards were constitutional: the specific charge to
Congress is contained in Article I Section 8:
. . . to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,
and fix the standards of weights and measures.
To satisfy this charge, Congress must find and provide teleological principle
that mitigates the myriad fluctuating Financial Services’ paradoxs: When the
Fed. determines a discount rate of interest, a narrow range of legally
61 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
enforced interest rates must eliminate corrupt gauging that is exercised in
the name of competitive private business as licensed by government. Now
that banking and insurance industries are integrated. All financial service
businesses can avail reinsurance to insure their financial results.
Bankruptcies represent a greater amorality problem that not necessarily is
only a consumer problem. Nefarious business practices must also account,
particularly since the practices of Enron and WorldCom are now shown as
common business practice. Anyway, business loss patterns due to personal
bankruptcies are statistically stable enough to make reinsurance a rational
solution.
And don’t ever sell business intel short on smarts: my guess is that
reinsurance already applies to business loses due to customer failures: at 2%
of the business portfolio, the reinsurance cost is nominal and what
government allowes them to charge customers beyond this represents
tyrannous breaches of public trust [G. P. Brockway named government’s
paternal permissive interest rates’ license the bankers’ COLA, for to specify
it as inflation’s greatest source]: Congress and businesses’ lack of teleology
are to blame for heaping rationalized mechanist deontological duties and
service fees onto wage-earners whose mechanist political economy duty it is
to borrow for to consume to subsist.
Competitive Financial Service should be more concerned with its quality of
service, than with variable high rates excused by credit reports by a cabalist
business association as based on performance reports collected and adjudged
by the business association, which sans individual sovereign consent, in fact,
encroaches on government’s consented authority and should itself, in each
instance of assigning an evaluation, be subjected to the due process provision
of justice. As water naturally flows in channels of least resistance, credit
reports have found a popular political following, particularly by licensed
insurers that persue deontological Leviathan duty like authority, as now
commonly shows in government mandated auto insurance. Despite
confidentiality laws, more auto insurers now use credit reports to charge
increased premiums. Akin to unconstitutional ‘redlining’ practice, a recent
news article reported that 90 percent of auto insurers nationwide engage in
this illegal rate setting practice. So despite their confidentiality notices,65
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES62
Banks, Finance companies, and Insurers (with their agents), now have online
access to credit reports that violate individual customer privacy. So, as to
public purpose, which is teleological, where are the public’ defenders,
Insurance Commissioners, for instance? Why the isolatation from privacy
issues? : are they aligned with the deontological foxes of government
license, ‘together in the henhouse’?
About ‘situation two’ (federal education grants)
If the holistic teleology, for the ‘good’ or beneficence of society, is to
educate everyone with a capability to learn, then deontologies to
mechanistically sort out drug users act to favor the economically privileged
of political hierarchy, as mercantilism also does. The situation mentioned,
cited a young lady stopped for a traffic violation and the car she was driving
was then randomly searched. A heroine pipe she said she knew nothing
about was found and she was ticketed on a drug charge. She was honest
when answering the application’s question. In results of her honesty, she
lost her education grant. What message is registered here? Surely, by
denying the grant, neither ‘being truthful’ is reinforced, nor is society
bettered by having not educating her, even if as a drug user?
And situation three (the $1.35 trillion tax return bill).
The American System of Political Economy’s deontological politics has
divided society into economic castes, for instance, on which this tax return
was based. Hobbesian, which is Machiavellian, political deontology’s
effectiveness was confirmed. The ‘greed’ of the paternal mechanism favored
segment, which qualified by their high income, showed in the support for the
tax return. But where is teleology, the holistic public ‘good’ or beneficence,
found in this? : and where is constitutional responsibility to balance
government’s receipts with expenditures? We must know what results will
be, but, as the Epicurean Paradox had cited, do we care about this fiscal
responsibility? And about the political opprobrium of returned taxes to those
without need, for how long and what holistic benefit, will the returned taxes
last? : will prescription drug costs for the elderly be abated? , Or the
uninsured’s medical costs, or the increasing gasoline price be abated?
63 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Does not this the deontological politics remind of politics, which in
1984 [short years following the Carter administrations SS review (in ‘78)
which declared SS sound for the forseeable future] had clamored for
increasing SS contribution taxation to provide SS surplus funds because, it
was claimed, SS was bankrupt? : and since has systemically spent these SS
surplus funds as general revenue. No answers are given as for accumulating
funding, which was legislated to pay for future SS benefits. As Congress
routinely spends the SS surplus as general revenue, who can honestly claim
that SS contributions differ from general revenue taxes? And, who are the
dupes of this systemic tax fraud? : has politics now proved J. S. Mill’s
rational ownership principle, as regards government’s unfunded IOUs to SS
tax payers and retirees? 66
But . . . the laws of economics have nothing to do with distribution.
Once we have produced wealth [As with Adam Smith’s concept of
wealth, Mill also concieves of wealth as goods and services produced] as
best we can, we can do with it as we like. “The things once there,”
says Mill, “mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as
they please, and on whatever terms. . . . Even what a person has
produced by his individual toil, unaided by anyone, he cannot keep,
unless by the permission of society. Not only can society take it from
him, but individuals could and would take it from him, if society . . .
did not . . . employ and pay people for the purpose of preventing him
from being disturbed in [his] possession. The distribution of wealth,
therefore, depends on the laws and customs of society.
[Government as consented, can, without conscience, reprise, or need,
take from ‘Paul’ to give to ‘Peter,’ for to ‘grow’ economy, and
otherwise retake from ‘Peter’ for to restore ‘Paul,’ as regards life’s
causal need: subsistence, health care, etc.] As Kant had reasoned, Politics more easily can summons public support for
deontological idealiam, although systemically society’s noumenal
‘birthright’ is then replaced by unitary materialist ‘pottage.’ Teleological
proposals, as surplus funding for future SS benefits, is far less popular in any
immediate sense and can only hope to gain governments noumenal promise,
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES64
Maybe President Bush’s advocacy for his 2001 tax return, “it’s your'
money!”, represents his greatest political irrationalism? : Money created by
government, for the utility of exchanging goods and services, teleologically,
is the whole of society’s that had authorized the government to create it.
as a treaty of sorts, backed by the government’s accounting of IOUs along
with compounding interest to eventually provide funds for SS benefits.
Why, you might ask is this so? : money is a utility created by government to
ease the exchange wealth, as defined by Smith and Mill. But, mostly, no
‘good’ fiducial (safe) reality exists, for which to invest the accumulating
surplus contributions of SS. (In 2000) this accounted debt to SS reached to
more than $3 trillion and by 2010 is projected to reach past $10 trillion.
And, how does this huge amount, which was spent as general revenue, relate
to the nation’s accumulating national deficit? :The Clinton Administration
had endeavored to reduce dependence on foreign investments in the federal
deficit, by replacing foreign investments with actual SS surplus
contributions, which unique teleological policy has not otherwise occurred,
particularly by deontological politics.
A politically run government is vulnerable to political raiding on
future society’s real obligations by a mortgaging process, which acts to
defers debt for future generations to repay, even as monarchical government
is vulnerable to raiding by the Monarch and his cronies, or as privileged only
to a monarchical class, and particularly by means of the mechanist
deontologically caused inflation endemism, which also is inherent to the
U.S. political economy. The G. W. Bush Administration’s 2001Tax Bill,
while appearing as successful deontology, has effectively aborted the
intended bipartisan teleology of the 1984 SS Tax law. '
Idealist political deontologists openly eschew Mill’s economic
analysis, and still they reinforce, by the mechanism caused experience, his
truth: they enjoy the causal means of making the nation’s goods’-based
wealth into their own private treasures. Parrington cited this Federalist-
Whig affinity of ‘denying antecedents’ and ‘affirming consequents’:67
65 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Massachusetts . . . property interests were as secure as any old
Federalist could have wished. Gentlemen of principle and property
were still in control of the state; and if less emphasis was laid on
principle [physis] and more on property [nomos] -- if less regard
seemed to be paid to gentlemen of breeding and manners, and more
to assertive self-seeking -- business was no less secure than in the
good old days, and its profits were greater. . . . Provided of course
that the Constitution should follow population and safeguard
business interests against . . .the menace of particularism
Situation four: Readers Digest May issue’s humorous quip, requires
no explanation. Teleologists excuse the forgery as ‘power of attorney’
reasonably assumed. Deontologists contend that a criminal act was
committed. But where are the damages? Should character be a concern, the
employer could follow up with the friend whose name was forged. As Bill
Leer observed of the officiousness and bureaucratic deontology tendencies
which had invaded his business organization: he said this: “If I were now to
apply for a job here, I could not qualify.” To overcome present bureaucratic
officiousness, it now takes ‘gutspa’ and creative, often collusion, and
embellished qualifications to get hired. This applicant was teleological in
her approach of an irrational situation. The Practicality of teleological
ethics was emphasized, humorously.
Pausing to compare teleology to specified deontology now ends.
. . .
Ignorance gives a sort of eternity to prejudice, and perpetuity to error.Robert Hall
Human illusion, which Hall calls ignorance, has a compelling influence on
politics: both illusion and belief represent ‘contingent’ forms of truth that
often paradoxically have both ‘true’ and ‘false’ truth value. And both forms
irrationally are popular in temporal life. Therefore, they are of life’s reality,
but paradoxically. About which Eldredge Cleaver observed this:
If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.
As Plato reasoned, both visual forms are truth-based, but the predicate-truth-
value can be both ‘true’ and ‘false.’ When the assertion “it is ‘true,” is
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES66
made, for instance, this assertion intends to say that pure necessary
antecedent meanings have been distinguished from the commonly impure
understandings, which mostly bear a mixture of ‘true-false’ truth values.
However, Knowledge must be necessary, Plato reasoned! In this instance,
Truth-based, means to say that its predicate truth-value is purely ‘true.’
Unfortunately, what is commonly believed as knowledge, when carefully
examined, often is impure and partly ‘false’ (As, Descartes’ ‘truthful’
philosophical example portrayed *)
* Rene Descartes explained his experience with transcending to necessary
truth. And in doing this he described the depths to which he went to find
reasonable bedrock in temporal life, i.e, necessary principles on which to
found his necessary truths. I suspect that it was this philosophical
foundation, which gained for him this just recognition: ‘the father of
modern philosophy.’ Descartes wrote this:68
Several years have now passed since I first realized how many were
the false opinions that in my youth I took to be true, and thus how
doubtful were all the things that I subsequently built upon these
opinions. From the time I became aware of this, I realized that for
once I had to raze everything in my life, down to the very bottom, so as
to begin again from the first foundations, if I wanted to establish
anything firm and lasting.
Finding necessary ‘truth’ in ethics, invariably requires that the gamut
of vice and virtue be run. And, Aristotle's contribution to a philosophy of
virtue retains great respect. Aristotle wrote this: 69
There are then three dispositions, two being vices, namely excess and
deficiency, and one virtue, which is the mean between them; and they
are all in a sense mutually opposed. The extremes are opposed both
to the mean and to each other, and the mean is opposed to the
extremes. . . . The liberal man appears extravagant compared with
the stingy man but stingy compared with the spendthrift. The result
is that the extremes each denounce the mean as belonging to the
67 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
LIFE’S OMNIPRESENT SPIRITUAL QUANDARY is a piece I wrote to''
myself following having attended a presentation of Man of La Mancha: as an
Addendum to truth, which is included separately, it fits here.
other extreme; the coward calls the brave man foolhardy and the
foolhardy man ca[lTlsh ihs inmic celoyw daersdcrlyib;e as nthde svoi rotune. found in temporal politics!]
And I expect, the paradoxical ideological political conflict among the masses
becomes heightened as virtue necessarily takes the objective path of
outward-turned logical reason. The politics of virtue -- if such politics ever
is competetive (political human nature, being attuned to the subjective
inward-turned orthodox popularity) -- must, it appears, be as the brave
virtuous man of Aristotle’s virtue: dedicated to achieving and abiding the
political mean by some grand magic of courting the popular extreme
dispositions -- which Aristotle called vises of deficiency and excess --
without becoming attuned to either vise. And this might be impossible in
the long run of being ellected in the democratic political process. Achieving
politics of virtue, in any event, is as great a step in temporal transcendence as
the most extreme visions in liberal truth seeking minds can be. It is indeed a
lonely endeavor as the ethical dispositions of ignorant, profligate, brutish
society will embrace the extreme vices, rather abide the mean virtue. ''
Temporal transcendent truth is then purer reasoned truth, as was
expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The value and enjoyment of
purer truth is only found by temporally abiding in its knowledge.
Ignorance [Heidegger’s irrationalism cited in part 1] gives a sort of
eternity to prejudice, and perpetuity to error. Robert Hall
But, is Hall’s assertion knowledge-based? : Hall believes that his perception
is ‘true’: but, is it purely ‘true,’ or ‘partly true, partly false’? : and of what
truth-value are asserted ignorance, prejudice or error? : As the extremes,
which Ann Coulter practices with a popular following?
With knowledge, the perception of truth’s object must be accurate
and when perception fails to correctly, ‘truly,’ depict the realities of truth’s
object, pure truth simply cannot and does not exist. Perception is then an
illusion that, as for truth’s predicate value, is ‘false.’ It is ignorance, that
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES68
expressed, is only an opinion, the truth-value of which is mostly ‘false.’
‘False’ perception never is stable enough in temporal life to fit with
consistent, let alone eternal knowledge.
Illusions are idealistically conjured by undisciplined minds whereas
knowledge is exclusively the disciplined product of one’s own virtuous will,
which chooses trueness as the principal value predicate of one’s rational
faculties. Undisciplined illusion is always selfishly inward-turned.
Disciplined knowledge spurns selfish considerations to focus perception
outwardly onto ontologies (objectively logical realities). Truth -- the
ontologically accurate perception of independent objects of noumena or
phenomena -- is neither ethical nor moral: while the exercise of self-
discipline, involves both ethics and morality, and is, therefore, a personal
requirement to realize virtuous truth and to give fiducial custody to it.
Truth is as much a matter of experience as of speculation.-- An honest
man will generally find it: above all, must live in it. -- Then it becomes
vital to his spirit:-- a part of his being. R. Turnbull
There are three parts in truth: first the inquiry, which is the wooing of
it; secondly, the knowledge of it, which is the [essential] presence of it;
and thirdly, the belief, which is the enjoyment of it. Bacon
Why are wage-earning Americans devoted to SS’s practical
teleological purpose (is holistic socially, and is necessary)? And of greater
concern, why are deontological disposed idealists, SSs arch enemies? : does
the teleology of SS spoil the carefully crafted and mechanized ideologically
conflated unitary materialist ‘carrot and stick’ economic and Calvinist
religious duties, which dogmatically philosophically are the basis of
fallacious Whig-asserted and affirmed pseudo principles of the American
System of Political Economy’s unitary materialism-based organic
mechanism? Does SS, which draws upon the purer noumenal part of
democratic philosophy (which defines Rational Empiricism), which
specifies the mutual necessity of human dualism (both spiritual and
material being), therefore, incite the reactive orthodox dogmatic unitary
materialist politics? As perception is spread politically and has become
standardized, the split in public mind’s predicate values is nearly even
69 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
between paradoxical half truth of dogmatic mechanism, which belief in
unitary materialism conflates human noumenon, and natural human
dualism’s reasonable balancing of the spiritual and material aspects which
confront organic Rational Empiricism?*
* Our elected representatives and political appointees act with consented
sovereign organic authority that either fosters mechanism-based unitary
materialist political predicate values, or they understand that their consented
authority represents John Locke’s individual ‘property of person’ intent for
rationally balanced representation of the collective, all not some, human
body and spirit’s dualism.
Mechanist deontological organic authority, which conflates the
human spirit to unitary materialist forms, is fraudulent representation
because it constrains the constitutional purposes as were consented to when
the Constitution was ratified: individual inalienable sovereignty is thereby
denied. Organic authorities then are irrational, which by asserting the
Constitution is a contract and a permanent ‘rule of law’ has supplanted
organic authority’s (necessary) principle of sovereign consent.
The Supreme Court has often sided with this unitary materialist
political assertion: when, for instance, giving Fourteenth Amendment
constitutional ‘rights’ protection to ‘fictitious person’ corporations: as if the
legally asserted ‘fictitious person’ corporations were as naturally coeval of
inalienable rights as humans were. Then the Supreme Court decided that
corporate capital, when spent to advertize products or influence politics,
were forms of ‘free speech,’ therefore had constitutional rights, which
transcended those of humans. These legal decisions bother because their
truth-value is ‘false.’ they promote deontological Duty sans teleological
purpose (unitary materiality sans human essence). Giving ‘human rights’ to
business entities is equivalent to asserting that materiality is antecedent to
human faculties of reason: asserting that fiction is as real as human reason is,
and, therefore, Heidegger’s irrationalism is made the antecedent of
rationalism: patent asserted irrationalism that concerns only empowerment
and control that is devoid of human inalienably rational principles and rights.
As if Russell didn’t prove materiality had no truth?70
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES70
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may be
called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in which
truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth and
falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence a world of
mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would
also contain no truth or falsehood. Bertrand Russell
Asserted dogmatic belief in unitary materialism and, thereby, deduced
nihilist ‘positivism,’ had destined both fascism and communism’s failure.
Without noumenal teleology and ontologism, truth there isn’t, only facts!
The political flap over gerrymandering political districts as occurred
in Texas and temporarily was thwarted by legislators’ absenteeism, is an
example of a deontological power grab that only collusive absenteeism could
impede: only the organic absenteeism was teleological. And when politics
of reason is muted by unitary materialist irrationality, isn’t our nation’s
consented authority then hijacked, philosophically, making it fascist rather
than democratic?
The power grab in 2003 for California’s gubernatorial authority was
equally fascist in nature. California voters had recalled Gray Davis, and
then elected a new governor in which only by 49 percent of eligible voters
participated. This result, which empowered the new governor was deficient
as the vote which had recalled Davis also was. Whatever abstract organic
authority had designed this recall election, faithful democratic principles
were ignored. Therefore, the recall of Davis was expressly conducted to
result in a gerrymandered form of a political power grabbing.
Politics must yield to reason if the state or nation is to benefit from
purer truth-based knowledge. And society cannot progress beneficially until
a body-politic is imbued with reason-based knowledge: the only source of
which is intrinsic of the express consent of John Locke’s sovereign
individual ‘property of person’ When power and authority of government
are manipulated politically, organic perceptions are adversely affected by
materialist bias: perceptions of this toward reality then starkly diverge from
the teleological expectations inherent of human rights? Organic duties
71 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
contrived as values, which as fictitiously sponsor government’s economic
paternalism to legally licensed fictitious person mechanisms’ is therefore the
U.S. Constitution’s enemy # one. 71
In U.S. distrust is deep, Nearly four of 10 Americans believe the
federal government threatens their freedom, according to a recent poll
by CNN and USA Today. Only one out of 10 has faith in the
government, according to the Yankelovich Monitor. With no independent cognition, the public mind is destined to
remain affected by a temporal world’s material nature, which St. John had
observed is passing and cannot therefore, because of subjective inward-
turned materialist illusions that irrationally dominate objective outward-
turned truth, be ‘true.’ Laws and constitutions, in the evolving world, must
depend on the individual disciplines involved with actualizing virtuous purer
truth-based knowledge. Finding Truth that is ‘true’ is a constant,
confronting challenge to each individual, each new generation, and each
organic state or nation: all, are, therefore, destined to sort out the
paradoxically irrational imperfections to celebrate natural cognitive faculties
that allow the freedoms of reason-based truth.
Laws and constitutions are essential to any society, and must
preserve order and assure the foundations of objective-based beneficial
results, or, they are not teleological: which provides foundation to W. R.
Inge’s, Either the world shows a teleology or it does not.
Teleology’s counter causal theory is the popular materialist
orthodoxy called mechanism. Patterned on the Ten Commandments,
mechanism is retributive, not beneficent. In teleology, however,
Categorical Imperative fulfills naturally paradoxical retribution: as Christ
had declared! Christ’s Gospel is beneficent principle and, therefore, in
Heidegger’s analogy, Christ provided rationalist action that fulfills the
organic retributive irrationalism:72
“St. Paul,” says Dean Inge in one of his ‘Outspoken Essays,’
“understood what most Christians never realize, namely, that the
Gospel of Christ is not a religion, but religion itself in its most
universal and deepest significance.”
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES72
Ed Firmage, Jr. wrote this in the November 29, 2006 Salt Lake Tribune:'
In my Bible, Jesus’ injunction “love your enemies” has no escape clause in
fine print that says “unless he’s trying to kill you,” or “unless you’re an
American and he’s an al-Qaida thug.” . . .
Deists, are teleologists, because mostly, they live this way. Deontologists do
not! Maybe because their focus is on the tree rather than the forest.
Particularly, Calvinist mechanist duty-based religious hierarchies fail to
recognize Christ’s religion’s universal and deepest significance.
American Christianity was taught a pure teleological lesson by the
Amish Mennonites, when in 2006 several young women students were73
assaulted and murdered: then when economic sympathies were offered, their
condition of acceptance required that the family of the accused also be
included in the sympathy: this was purer Christianity. Contrarily, in our hate
of acts of crime or terror, we fail to recognize that the actor’s family and
associates are as innocent as we are. Deontology casts hate dutifully and
broadly.'
We divide into groups by our thoughts and actions: as we choose to reason
deliberately in the pursuit of truth that is ‘true‘, or we do not. The groups so
defined are not pure. Only in relative terms are the groups distinguished by
knowledge (wisdom that has the truth predicate, ‘is true’) in the first
instance, and by ignorance (the resident illusions spawned by the
concupiscence of pride, status, will, prejudice and such) in the second. In
fact, we all possess a mix of both -- too little knowledge if we trust those
who stand tall among us. For instance, our celebrated twentieth century
philosopher reasoned he had achieved little knowledge: Bertrand Russell's
Epilogue declared this:74
I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know
why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean
power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this but
not much, I have achieved.*
* Russell surely would have enjoyed James Gleick's book on Chaos?75
73 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
So, what is important to distinguish the knowledge-ignorance
groups, involves mind sets, demeanor that Dean Inge observed was the
fundamental practice of religion, as Christ had said:
Suffer little children, and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such
is the Kingdom of Heaven.More than quantities or proportions of the knowledge-mix, Christ
emphasized the importance of attitude in one's quest to know and practice
Christ's pure truth-based Categorical Imperative. While this says little76
about perceptions, decisions and actions, it says a lot: the better demeanor is
tuned to a carefully disciplined openness and reception of truth, the more
sure are ‘true’ predicate values of one’s reasoned cognition.
Goethe’s ‘outward-turned,’ is used here to describe an essential
attitude or discipline of thought required to reason deliberately and
truthfully. And particularly, this quality should be a requirement for those
who would legislate laws for society or aspire to hold the consented organic
reigns of democratic cardinal sovereignty (probity and honor is what John
Locke called for). Rene Descartes' What then am I? provides an example77
of essential attitude: a philosophical starting point. Descartes had reached78
for the essential objective reality of self, thereby providing an example of
necessary thought discipline in pursuit of truth.
What then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that
doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, and which also
imagines and knows.Descartes chose deliberately uncommon words to describe his thought
processes: Unique words that are not listed in the computerized thesaurus
being utilized here. The thesaurus lists these ‘positive’ words, which show,
therefore, the effectiveness of August Compte’s ‘positivism’ on Western
cultural thought: inculcated as ‘the gospel of reason’: consider,
contemplate, meditate, ponder, reflect, recall, recollect, remember,
conclude, judge, presume, reason, suppose, conceive, create, envision,
imagine, and invent are the orthodox stand-ins for think.
Descartes chose these negative words: doubt, denial, refusal, and will.
They are not listed for think in my Thesaurus. And I expect in few others.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES74
Why did Descartes choose uncommon ‘appositives’ deliberately to attest that
deliberate human thought must possess both positive and negative
responsibility, capability and demeanor (and while words connote meaning,
they have no cognitive inalienability)? Acclaimed for his super great
accomplishments, Descartes’ precise manner of thinking and writing was
unique. For this alone, his intent must not be dismissed for any lack of only
‘positive’ meaning. And Descartes’ choice of words to describe his personal
property, his thing that thinks, must carefully and respectfully be considered
for to find his end purpose (i.e., what to me is Inga’s Christian teleology). *
* Long before Descartes, St. Thomas’ epistle had been dismissed from
inclusion in the Bible. St. Thomas’ ‘doubting’ nature was then as now
considered undesirable. And, isn’t it strange that St. Thomas’ Gnosticism
was, back then as now, deliberately considered the only way of finding ‘true’
gospel knowledge?
As Descartes, himself, was the truth object of his philosophical
inquiry: his very carefully chosen words are predicates that describe the
critical aspects of thought required to discern facts and things of self that
represent truth that is purely ‘true’ (has no opposites).
By reasoning the results of doubting his own existence, he actualized to
himself, as truth, that the thing in him that thinks exists: One cannot doubt
doubt, he reasoned.
As focus is put onto the discerning processes of thought required to
filter out impure from the pure facts and things; doubt, denial, and refusal
are indeed crucially important although these represent self-discipline that
disturbs inculcated dogma of society’s classical entrenchments. Descartes'
chose will just as carefully to describe the discipline ‘necessary’ to
deliberately restrict necessary thought actions of doubting, denying, and
refusing the thoughts and influences which have no reasonable bearing on
the object of inquiry: to fully cognize an understanding of the object’s
independent reality.79
Will (is defined) as the power of the mind to decide and do; deliberate
control over thought and action.
75 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Knowing is acquired only as individuals’ reason deliberately until full
comprehension occurs. Goethe had mentioned this :80
What is not fully understood is not possessed.
To fully comprehend an event, a state of affairs, or some other
intangible object, requires individual’s to think objectively. In other words,
one's thoughts of an object (whether the object is non material, as thoughts
of the subject-self, as in Descartes' case, or a thing of materiality, totally
separated) must be sufficiently insulated from myriad biases of self that
intrude or are invited to cohabit thoughts in our minds. It was, I believe,
Rene Descartes keen sense of biases that led him to list doubt, denial, and
refusal as coequals with more commonly used words for thinking. About
the hold biases have on each of us, another Russell-statement is recalled:81
The [person] who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life
imprisoned in prejudices derived from common sense, from the
habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which
have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his
deliberate reason.Subjective comprehension is and always will be a reality of temporal life.
And, comprehension that embraces another’s opinion with all its biased
baggage, rather than reason deliberately, which is objectively critical, gives
foundation to conflated noumenal unitary materialist nihilism, which
logically reasoned philosophy rejects because of its dogmatism.’*
* Nihilistic philosophy, in the sense that deliberate reason is utilized here,
only adds to the enigma of life while proffering few, if any, truthful
resolutions to the enigma. Since pure truth by definition requires
objectivity, nihilism, which is subjective, denies what purely is truth.
But mostly, subjective comprehension is illusion and since this is not
knowledge, it is Heidegger’s ignorant irrationalism. John Locke, as he
meditated this contrast, expressed this sentiment:82
Truth, whether in or out of fashion, is the measure of knowledge, and
the business of the understanding; whatsoever is beside that, however
authorized by consent, or recommended by rarity, is nothing but
ignorance, or something worse.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES76
To comprehend objectively requires outward-turned thoughts and
actions as well the purging of one’s subjective influences. [And this process
has parallels with fasting -- as Christ reportedly did for forty days -- to purge
his soul from worldly influence, to put the focus on noumenal (spiritual)
realities]. No one thinks outwardly always. And indeed more unfortunate
for society -- than for each individual -- is that most avenues to outward-
turned thinking are denied for society’s impoverished individuals, in which
causal effects of mechanism is most impressed.
As poverty increases, the extent and quality of objective thinking must
decline. And, in turn, the relative size of those failing to reason deliberately
increases, making Society an inevitable loser. This says only that one's
objective focus on, outward-turned thought is disabled (maybe is impossible)
when one's survival instinct dominates outward-turned thoughts and actions.
E. K. Hunt gave these as Capitalism’s deontological mechanism’s
determined essentials: 83
Capitalism is defined by . . . [irrationally asserted, therefore, a logical
misnomer] essential features that are always present in a capitalist
economy.
---- First is the ubiquity of monetary exchange. For the vast
majority of people in capitalism, one can get the things one wants and
needs only if one has money with which to buy these things in the
market.
---- Second, capitalism always has at least four clearly identifiable
socioeconomic classes: the class of wealthy capitalists, the class of
small businesspeople and independent professionals, the class of
working people and the class of destitute persons who live by various
welfare programs or by theft, prostitution, or whatever means are
available. . . . [These class identities, of American Capitalism, also make
American democracy a misnomer]
The working class has no significant access to or ownership of
productive resources. Individuals in this class must sell control of
77 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
their power to labor (i.e., get a job) as their only means to escape
sinking to the destitute class. . . .[T. R. Malthus and Max Weber observed ‘the iron cage of wages,’ as
befitting this mechanist determined working class caste]
Income from ownership and the wages of workers are
considered to be the only socially respectable sources of income. The
destitute class must depend on the somewhat “less than respectable”
sources of income, such as welfare, charity, or the fruits of quasi legal
or illegal activities in order to get by. The stigma that attaches to
members of this class motivates all propertyless individuals to try very
hard to secure employment even if working conditions and wages are
poor.Clearly Hunt wrote here about The American System of Political Economy’s
Capitalism. American Whigs, contemporaries of Lincoln, had achieved to
conflate American democracy’s unique spiritual values to a unitary
materialist economic form in order to establish the causal mechanisms of
this political American System (to an extent, resulting in a circumstance
similar to that which C. Thomas had found regarding Hegel’s Unitary
Materialism, called Dialectical Materialism, which philosophically is found
in both fascism and communism. *).
* Whenever society acts to mortgage progress repaid by taxation, society
mechanistically puts tax burden onto those guys who are to be. And
politically, this only can happen by interpreting our Constitution to accord
with Whiggish conservatives’ classical ‘fixed contract’ doctrine. Edmund
Burke gave definition to this conservative doctrine. And Federalist-Whig
politics, as deduced from this conservative doctrine fosters and persuades
American government to operate according to this irrationally asserted
economic principle. While rational evidence supports suspicions of this, the
irrationalism is at least equally strong. Showing that an awareness that
conflated Unitary Materialism had led to the mechanist concept of state,
which Craig Thomas wrote about: (One still is left to speculate whether they
were aware of their deliberately irrational assertions):84
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES78
In this, the principle idealists conflated even God’s antecedence, to which'
Nietzche cried out, “we have killed God!”.
. . . to be precise, not even Germany but prenational Prussia under
Frederick the Great. Christian theology assumed a [unitary] merger with
the divine after this life; Hegel posits such a merger here on earth -- with
history and the collectivity he terms the state.
Thomas also wrote this about idealists who collaborated in Hegel’s unitary
materialist view (Hegel declared he wasn’t a materialist!):
The principal Idealists -- Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel -- sought, above all
else, a unitary explanation of reality, some essence behind all appearance
-- in Kant’s terminology, a ‘common’ and universal noumenon, and in the
poet Hölderlin’s description, the ‘spirit that is in everything’ [ontologism].
They were [expedient idealist] systemizers, assuming that there could be
discovered some essential explanation of all experience, knowledge, and
reality, and it was largely on this basis that they objected, Fichte most
immediately and systematically, to Kant’s division between self and the
world, which [they as irrationally contended] for Kant could be no more than
a world of appearances. To achieve the healing of that dualism the Idealists
posited, in Fichte’s theory most succinctly, the ego as the ‘ground of
experience.’ It was not the rational ego of Kant [Plato and Descartes] nor
the passive receptor of the empiricists but what Fichte describes as the
‘active ego,’ inextricably intermingled with reality, imposing itself upon
the world of experience, to a degree ‘making’ the world of experience in its
own image. As Fichte claims in ‘The Vocation of Man’ of 1792, ‘Not to
KNOW but to DO, is the vocation of Man.’ For Fichte (1762- 1814),'
there were only two possible responses to the world, that of the realist, or
‘dogmatist’ in his terminology, and that of the idealist. The philosopher’s
response, more profound than that of the ordinary man, is idealist, while
realism remains the province of non-philosophical response to an
understanding of the world. . . .
Thinking is no longer reflection, it is experience. Also, because of
this, there can be no kind of reality that is distinct or separated from the
79 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
ego that experiences it. Whereas empiricism posits, at least by implication,
a ‘real’ world that is experienced, the Idealists assumed no distinction
between the subject of the experiencing agent and the objective world
being experienced. [Which came first, the egg or the chicken, is of no
consequence to this materialist conservative idealism that compounds the
issue rather than finding answers to the question; the dogmatic focus is on
the neatness of confusion.]
Further, Fichte and Schelling assumed that the ego was innately a
moral agent, again contrary to Kant’s conception of the effort of moral
duty for the rational being, the necessity to achieve the categorical
imperative [of ‘do unto others . . .’] in making any moral decision or
taking any moral action. Men are regarded by the Idealists as innately,
though imperfectly, moral in their essential, nondualistic natures. This
leads, as we shall see, to a strangely Hobbesian view of the State as
possessing the right and duty to perfect the ego’s moral imperfection by
the exercise of its authority. [Note how irrationally dogmatic ‘Idealists‘
are blameworthy for the fallacious philosophical underpinning of
conservative’s materialist philosophy]
While Hunt’s account of the politically privatized American economic
organic development is starkly presented, the prescriptive intentions of
America’s political system neither considered nor accommodated the
fundamental antecedent principle necessities of democracy: as ‘inalienable
human rights,’ for instance. Only as amorality filled in the paradoxical voids
of unitary materialist mechanist deontological duties,’ which failed to
accommodate human desiderata, were human necessities then scantily
accommodated. Economy’s mechanisms, by affirmation, persist in
supplanting empirical dogma for naturally antecedent immutable laws:85
The eternal and immutable laws of justice and of morality are
paramount to all human legislation. The violation of those laws is
certainly within the power, but it is not among the rights of nations.
The power of a nation is the collected power of all the individuals
which compose it. . . . If, therefore, a majority . . . are bound by no
law, human or divine, and have no other rule but their sovereign will
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES80
and pleasure to direct them, what possible security can any citizen of
the nation have for the protection of his unalienable rights? [Cardinal
Sovereignty, like life, is not transferable; nations have no consented
authority to grant license to private businesses to violate inalienable human
rights]
A great problem of denying natural antecedence rests with those of
society who simply choose not to reason objectively; ‘positive’ thinking, for
instance, suppresses, by affirmation or denial, the unapparent essential
reality. At times we all are guilty of this common nihilism. *
* In Western Europe, nihilism meant a denial of objective truths and values.
The philosopher Friedreich Nietzsche, referring to himself, said he was a
nihilist. Tautologically, nihilism is either the fallacious denial of natural86
antecedent principles or it is the irrational affirmation of logical
consequents, which in either effect is, as Heidegger concluded, irrationalism:
for instance, ‘guns do not kill!’ Is a sample of nihilist denial (only when
bullets fail to cause death will guns that propel them not be the implemented
cause to kill?) ; when organically assigning responsibility for causing death,
however, only humans are naturally capable of this responsibility.
Nietzsche’s existential philosophy (about the human Id) arguably failed to
affect the mass ignorance of Hitler’s Germany. Existentialism, as any
philosophy, is open to rational and irrational thoughts and debate.
Nietzsche's philosophical persuasions had a great and negative (irrational)
influence on Hitler and Nazism. Id is always each individual’s own
responsibility.
Self disciplining the mind is critically important to one's cognizance and
transcendence into knowledge. And again, such transcendence can only be
gained individually. Society gains or loses as individuals gain or do not gain
outward-turned knowledge based on pure truth.87
The problems of inward-turning were sketched long ago by Goethe,
speaking to Eckermann. "Epochs which are regressive, and in the
process of dissolution, are always subjective, whereas the trend in all
progressive epochs were all objective in nature . . . Every truly
excellent endeavor turns from within toward the world, as you see in
81 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
the great epochs which were truly in progression and aspiration, and
which were all obje[cGtivoee tihne n’sa rteumrea.r"k distinguishes Heidegger’s rationalism]
R. L. Heilbroner wrote this about economist Joseph Schumpeter: 88
But now comes the Schumpeterian contradiction: capitalism may be
an economic success, but it is not a sociological success. This is
because . . . the economic base of capitalism creates its [illogically
fallacious] ideological superstructure . . .. In the end, this capitalist
mentality, brings down the system. [Is terrorism, a precursor of this end?]
“Capitalism creates a critical frame of mind which, after
having destroyed the moral authority of so many other institutions, in
the end turns against its own; the bourgeois finds to its amazement
that the [fallaciously irrational] rationalist attitude does not stop at the
credentials of kings and popes but goes on to attack private property
and the whole scheme of bourgeois values.” The SS System provides a mending example of Schumperter’s reference to
capitalism’s failed sociological success, which has resulted from paternalist
mechanism-based giving of profit to private capitalists (both individually
and organicly), which holistically has no source other than from wage-earned
production. And, since the fickle American democratic body politic might
never again be graced with teleological purpose to the extent that it was
during the great depression, the beneficence of Social Security, as
beneficence generally, must either be lawfully sustained, or it rests on
fragile, vacillating politics: unless objectively rational political persuasions
effectively counter Capitalism’s political irrationalism, the irrationalism
could eventually succeed to politically dismantle the SS system. The
political implosions of Federalist, Whig, and now neo-con policies, brightens
the outlook for nation and Social Security, however.
The rational necessity of SS is logically apparent. And logically,
rationalism is constantly assailed by popular irrationalism, as Heidegger
observed. So, ultimately, SS’s vitality depends on society’s devotion to
Social Security’s social beneficence: those, who reason logically so to
understand ‘true’ facts, must actively be diligent to cogently leaven with
truth the fallacious mechanisms of popular orthodox irrationalism.*
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES82
* The three ladies honored with Time’s ‘man of the year (2002)’award
shows that political rationalism, at times, finds liberal honorees. Or, when
before, has our capitalist society celebrated ‘whistle blowers’? Classically,
capitalism prevails to oppress ‘whistle blowing’: fired, exiled or martyred for
not performing ‘dutifully’ conventionally is capitalism’s prescribed fate.
That ‘Time’ celebrated these three ladies is not only evidence of
Schumperter’s observation, but also that capitalism’s irrationalism has now
become more transparent.
The general facts, of inflation, population growth, and SS
contribution-tax rates, are now presented. Each fact resulted from our
market-system-based capitalist, i.e., determinist mechanism-based Political
Economy. And each greatly influences adversely the sociological
perceptions: the politics of SS, as the public filter of truth, makes Eldredge
Cleaver’s political observation appurtenant:
If you are not part of the solution,
then you are part of the problem!The increasing population of workers (compared with the retirement
population) is indicated in the following table and has provided to
government greatly increased Social Security contribution-tax revenue. The
numbers represent population projections of age groups rather than the actual
counts of workers or retirees. The badly faulted projection -- which
eventually will be proved as an illusion rather than fact -- on which the 1984
contribution-tax law became the political reality, is explained.
The 1978 Statistical Abstract of the U. S. provided these facts and
projections. It was government’s last published issue, (The U. S. printing89
office was then disbanded). What is critically important is that births of
all BabyBoom years’ are facts, which change naturally only by
83 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
mortality: mortality is estimated only to conclude the 65-4 age group.
And with the shift to age 67, nearly seven million persons are delayed
from entering retirement.
Facts, as
the
following
released
as 1992
conclude
d,
provided
evidence
that a
secondary
birth
wave is
in the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES84
making: The Census Bureau now predicts an 80 percent population increase
by 2050.
It's Common Census: More Americans Now 90
WASHINGTON -- Today ( January 1, 1993) there should be an
estimated 256,561,239 Americans, says the Census Bureau.
Since 1990, the U.S. population has risen 7.9 million.
During 1992, 4.1 million Americans were born, 2.2 million died,
846,000 immigrants showed up, and 129,000 citizens living abroad
came home.Projected group populations for the ages’ 18-64, for the years ‘85
and later, are estimates, not population facts: They include birth estimates
that occured following 1976.
ESTIMATED AND PROJECTED POPULATIONS
(millions)
YEAR AGES: 18 TO 64 65-4 RESPECTIVE INDICES
1950 92.6 12.4 --- base = 1.00 ---
1960 99.5 16.7 1.07 1.34
1985* 123.7 27.3 1.34 2.2
2000* 159.6 31.8 1.72 2.56
2025-* 154.5 48.6 1.67 3.92
4 symbolizes ‘to life's end’ ; * symbolizes ‘that rather than facts, these are
anticipated projections of the late '70s’: projections are not facts.
The 67- 4 population of deminished natural births might approach 42
milion, but will not reach 48.6 as this projection (not a fact) for 2025 had
estimated. And, worse, 80 million that commonly politically is touted, is
no more than rhetoric that is based on a published error that willfully
this fallacious politics perpetuates.
The median age is an important aspect of this research, however:
30.2 in 1950, it drops to 29 in ‘76, then with anticipated birth dynamics of
projected ‘zero growth’-based analysis, rises to 38.4 in 2025, and 38.9 in
2050. The fertility rates of ‘zero growth’ (the assumed scenario as affirmed
in this projection) would need be much lower than presently factually they
are. With this Conclusion! : While fertility remains high, ‘zero growth’
85 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
This argument holds ‘true’ if the rates of mortality are relatively stable,'
which life insurance has consistently offered premiums that bet they are.
cannot occur: the group population of ages 18-64 will, in reality, mecessarily
be much higher, with the factual median age substantially lower than 38.
Fertility, as contemporary reality proves, confirms my population model, and
it debunks the ‘zero-based’ projection , which in 2025, projected that only
two individuals of working age will exist for each individual over age 65.
But, the following age groups, of the ‘zero growth’ scenario, show a
necessary trend of the holistic nature of median populations.
Yr 0-4 5-17 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-64 65-4
1950 10.8 20.2 10.6 15.8 14.2 20.3 8.1
1976 7.1 23.2 13.1 14.9 10.7 20.3 10.7
2050 6.5 16.9 9 12.7 12.5 23.4 19
In 1950, four factual Birth-Boom-years are in the 0-4 age range. In 1976,
the peak (the 4.26 million births of ‘57) are included in the 18-24 range.
And in 2050, all survivors of the birth-boom are in the 65-4 range. Percent
of population mirrors percentages of economy: when more is put into one
range means that less necessarilly must be in another. If in 2050, for
instance, the population of births, ages 0-4, comprise 10.8 percent of the
population, as was the fact in 1950 (instead of 6.5 projected for 2050), the
population’s percent of retired 65-4 must surely be lower than projected by
as much as 4.3 percent (14.7 instead of 19). The Census Bureau’s biased'
assumption that the fertility rate was declining to the anticipated ‘zero
growth’ scenario, as this ‘78 projection analysis shows, was clearly fallacy.
In reality, fertility has remained stable if not as strong, partly because
population increase mostly involved women of childbearing ages in which
promiscuous cultural freedoms probably were also at play. Anyway, the
demographics have made not resulted in a declining proportion of workers to
retirees: demographics are not, therefore, the greatest problem for SS as
regards retiring the Babyboom.
Because inflation discriminates (giving to one economic class by
taking from another), and population decreases indiscriminately only by
mortality, which holistically statistically is quite stable (While births are
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES86
analogous to ocean waves, mortality is analogous to ocean level) the
economic amalgam of mechanism-based taxation and mortality-based SS
populations is an incomparable admixture: mechanism-based inflation,
which discriminates, is incomparable to the effects of natural mortality,
which does not discriminate: And, anyway, SS is not an inflation cause!
Social Security’s greatest problem is inflation, not population
dynamics. And inflation is the nation’s problem: is not related to Social
Security’s ‘social usage’ form of insurance? : inflation intrinsic of benefits
paid to the retired population is the nation’s problem since the nation
administratively has unconstitutionally allowed inflation to effect consumer
costs! Wage-earners must mechanistically buy goods and services, as all
others of society must also. Wage-earners are a different economic class
than the others, however: to additionally pile inflation’s cost effects onto SS
contribution taxes puts a double inflation burden onto wage-earners
conscripted also to pay the SS contribution tax, from which the SS
retirement benefits are paid. Added to this idealism determined economic
reality, is the different sources of income, as related to economic
productions: wage-earners are consumers that must subsist by their wages-
earned. Those, whose income are from sources other than wages, from
ownership interests in productions for instance, and are not conscripted to
pay contributions to SS, benefit from inflation in the legal fact that the
mechanist economy returns consumed inflation to ‘owners of productions’ as
‘enured’ capital that includes the real production costs. This sentence from
the FOREWORD now has its idealist foundation:
The average economic growth, during the twentieth century, was measured
at 4 percent, inflation endemism at 3 percent: resulting in business capital
returns in excess of 7 percent while wages languished below the 3 percent
inflation endemism : the average ‘iron caged’ wage-earner-consumer91
experienced the average economic growth as the negative result of business
profit-taking, which typically as a percentage of the GNP exceeded the sum
of economy’s 4 percent growth plus inflation’s 3 percent.
CONSUMER PRICE INDICES 92
YEAR ALL ITEMS MEDICAL CARE
1950 base = 1.00 base = 1.00
87 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
1960 1.23 1.47
1970 1.61 2.25
1977 2.52 3.77
1980 3.43 4.98
1984 4.31 7.07
1988 5.00 NA
Comments about inflation endemism’s causes, as applied to CPI, also apply
to the ‘social usage’ insurance systems of medical care, flood, whether
related crop damage, etc. Profits taken are undoubtedly a primary cause of
disparity with private insurance systems. For instance, the extent that health
care insurance is unavailable, a greater health care expense must be put onto
those with insurance. As of 2003 the uninsured count rose to 44 million.
SOCIAL SECURITY TAX RATES -------- RATES ------- WAGE CAP MAXIMUM
(PERCENT OF WAGES) INCREASE
TOTAL OASDI HI (IN DOLLARS) (INDEX)
1950 3 3 - $ 3,000 base = 1.00
1955 4 4 - 4,200 1.87
1960 6 6 - 4,800 3.2
1965 7.25 7.25 - 4,800 3.87
1970 9.6 8.4 1.2 7,800 8.32
1971 10.4 9.2 1.2 7,800 9.01
1972 10.4 9.2 1.2 9,000 10.
1973 11.7 9.7 2 10,800 14.04
1974 11.7 9.9 1.8 13,200 17.16
1975 no rate change 14,100 18.33
-------- RATES ------- WAGE CAP MAXIMUM
(PERCENT OF WAGES) INCREASE
TOTAL OASDI HI (IN DOLLARS) (INDEX)
1976 " " " 15,300 19.89
1977 " " " 16,500 21.45
1978 12.1 10.1 2 17,700 23.8
1979 12.26 10.16 2.1 22,900 31.19
1980 no rate change 25,900 35.28
1981 13.3 10.7 2.6 29,700 43.89
1982 13.4 10.8 2.6 32,400 48.24
1983 no rate change 35,700 53.15
1984 14 11.4 2.6 37,800 58.8
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES88
1985 14.1 11.4 2.7 39,600 62.04
1986 14.3 11.4 2.9 42,000 66.73
1987 no rate change 43,800 69.59
1988 15.02 12.12 2.9 45,000 75.1
1990 15.3 12.4 2.9 45,000 76.5*
* The SS contributions’ tax maximum increase is 76.5 times the
base, which was reset in 1950. Contributions began in 1935.
Medical costs have increased faster than the CPI. And Medical Insurance is
an influence, if not a cause, of inflation’s economic paradox, which
thoughtful observers will undoubtedly consider. Inflation’s paradoxical
economic effect is allied with Heidegger’s irrationalism that deductively
feeds political paradox as, for example, affirmation’s that corporate
dividends should be free of revenue taxation since ‘businesses already have
paid the revenue tax.’ This common affirmation is analogous to arguments,
which claim this: because I work for Joe and Joe pays taxes, I, therefore,
should not pay taxes on earnings that Joe pays me for work, which benefits
him. In rational reality, however, double taxation in SS’s contribution
tax collections is far more irrational than the double charging in any of
the above examples or in corporate dividend collections. Why? Because
the SS contribution taxes are directly related to the inflation effects on SS
benefits that are paid directly from SS contributions. And, in this contrast to
those of dividends from investments, they are recipients of inflation
consumed that mechanistically legally has enured as returning capital to
businesses. For this fundamental reason, inflation’s economic cost to SS
benefits should rationally be fully charged to graduated general revenue
and not to SS contributions taxation.
Because of idealist capitalist mechanist theoretical economic
determinism, which politically paternalistically acts in the manner that
Parrington described as (a curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow
and divide the milk among those who supervised the milking), median
wage-earned income is maintained below the SS tax cap. As median income
rises, the wage cap is increased, making SS contributions’ tax revenue near
directly indexed to the median rise in wages. Compounding inflation
endemic of median and lower wage increases is directly taxed (‘72-’73 law
made SS benefit COLAs automatic ). Therefore, a compounding load of93
89 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Compounding interest on personal debt generally doubles according to the'
rule of 72: at 3 percent in 36 years, at 6 percent in 12 years, and at 12 percent
in 6 years. Debt repaid over time is surely inflation intensive and public
bonded debt is a great culprit of inflation endemism, which progress, so called,
feeds!
inflation is made intrinsic of SS contribution taxes each time the law adjusts
the SS contributions’ cap to assure that wage-earner contributions, not
general revenue taxes, pay for the inflation-COLA-adjusted SS benefits.
Wages subjected to SS contributions taxation, until the wage cap is
exceeded, are additionally subjected to general revenue taxation. Therefore,
because SS has no causal economic inflation effect, indexing contribution’s
taxes to inflation is a logically fallacious politically endemic corollary that
should signal great wage-earner political alarm.
That causally, inflation is intrinsic of government’s political
paternalist economy (giving to some by taking from others), makes the SS
contributions’ taxation irrational: since political economy, not SS, is the
causal source of inflation (as G. P. Brockway’s End of Economic Man found,
inflation’s source is the government’s covertly endemic political economy’s
paternal grants, as the Banker’s COLA for instance ). The COLA-related'
SS benefits’ cost should be fully paid from general revenue taxes,
instead of SS contribution taxes. Those, whose income is not and was not
subject to SS contribution taxes, have by government’s paternalism, been
granted an entitled economic advantage from their inflation related income
that legally is enured capital returns from subsistence related consumption,
but also, by lawful fact that in 1984, surplus SS contributions have been
collected and spent as government’s general revenue.
Idealogically deontological designed economic paradoxs that entice
investors to gain from political economy’s fluctuating mediums of exchange
(of pseudo government-run exchanges) also greatly cause inflation that
covertly is intrinsic of all economic transactions. And, while government’s
transaction-based debt plus interest is intended to be repaid by general
revenues, the privatized investment gains have resulted in this quip: we
privatize profit and socialize debt. Which tells it all about the cozy and
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES90
irrational relationship between government’s official functions and its
privatized political economy, paternalism induced, grants.
As, when funding for a sports stadium, for instance, is secured by public
bonds, privatized profits are then paid as the construction project is
completed while the bonds, along with compounding interest, are over time
retired by tax revenues. Touting progress, or by threats of moving to another
city, the public is quite usually conned to approve the inflation cost
consumed, which often equals the construction cost, to retire the bonds.
However, controlling inflation requires that progress must be moderate.
However, irrational acquisitive political rhetoric is difficult if possible to
subdue and seemingly always wins the debate, causing public debt to
increase exponentially along with repayment of bonded interest.
Capitalism’s propensities for growth 94
‘The Theory of Economic Development’ sounds like an analysis of
what we have come to call the underdeveloped world. But in 1912 the
special economic status and problems of that “world” had not yet
come into existence -- this was still the unabashed colonialism [Whigs
while in charge of the government’s Gilded Age officially by then had
installed the privatized American System of Political economy with its
government administered pork barrel ‘internal improvement’ paternalism].
Schumperter’s book was about another kind of development -- the
way in which capitalism develops its propensities for growth.
Scholarly in tone and tedious in style (a lite from time to time with
lightning flashes), the book would not strike the casual reader as being
of much political importance. Yet this academic treatise was destined
to become the basis for one of the most influential interpretations of
capitalism ever written.
The exposition begins in Schumpeter’s contradictory way. It is
a book about capitalist growth and dynamics, but it opens with a
depiction of a capitalist economy in which growth is totally absent.
Schumpeter’s initial portrait describes a capitalism that lacks the very
91 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
ingredient that brought growth into the worlds of Smith and Mill and
Marx and Keynes -- namely, the accumulation of capital. Schumpeter
describes instead a capitalism sans accumulation -- a capitalism
whose flow of production is perfectly static and changeless,
reproducing itself in a “circular flow” that never alters or expands its
creation of wealth.
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by
Ricardo and Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed
the end of capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter it
was the beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. Because
the system has no momentum, inertia is the rule of its economic life:
“All knowledge and habit, once acquired,” writes Schumpeter,
“becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in
the earth.” Thus having found by trial and error the economic course
that is most advantageous for ourselves, we repeat it by routine.
Economic life may have originally been a challenge; it becomes a
habit.
More important, in this changeless flow competition will have
removed all earnings that exceed the value of anyone’s contribution
to output. This means that competition among employers will force
them to pay their workers the full value of the product they create, and
that owners of land or other natural wealth will likewise receive as
rents whatever value their resources contribute. So workers and
landowners will get their shares in the circular flow. And
capitalists? Another surprise. Capitalists will receive nothing, except
their wages as management. That is because any contribution to the
value of output that was derived from capital goods they owned would
be entirely absorbed by the value of labor that went into making those
goods plus the value of resources they contained. Thus, exactly as
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES92
Ricardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there is no place for
profit!
Why does Schumpeter present us with such a strange -- not to
say strained -- image of the system? Perhaps we have already divined
the purpose behind his method: the model of a static capitalism is an
attempt to answer the question of where profits come from.
The source of profits is a question that has been gingerly
handled by most economists. Smith wavered between viewing profit as
a deduction from the value created by labor and as a kind of
independent return located in capital itself. If profits were a
deduction, of course, the explanation implied that labor was
shortchanged; and if they were a contribution of capital, one would
have to explain why the profits went to the owner of the machine, not
to its inventor or user. Mill suggested that profits were the reward for
the “abstinence” of capitalists, but he did not explain why capitalists
were entitled to a reward for an activity that was clearly in their own
interest. Still other economists described profits as the earnings of
“capital,” speaking as if the shovel itself were paid for its contribution
to output. Marx, of course, said that Smith was right in the first place
though he didn’t know it -- that profits were a deduction from the
actual value created by the working man. But that was part of the
labor theory of value which everyone knew to be wrong and therefore
did not have to be reckoned with.
Schumpeter now came forward with a brilliant answer to this
vexing question. Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation of
labor or from the earnings of capital. They were the result of quite
another process. ‘Profits appeared in a static economy when the
circular flow failed to follow its routinized course.’ [And profits routinely taken, despite entrepreneurial activity,
as now is commonly a classical paternal political economy sanctioned
business right, causes the static circular flow fail to respect labor’s
economic contribution.]
93 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is so
brilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions in
routine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological or
organizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaper
ways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘As a
result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot be
traced either to the contribution of labor or of resource owners.’ A
new process enables an innovating capitalist to produce the same
goods as his competitors, but at a cheaper cost, exactly as a favorably
located piece of land enables its owner to produce crops more cheaply
than less well situated fellow landlords. Again, exactly like the
fortunate landlord, the innovating capitalist now receives a “rent”
from the differential in his cost. But this rent is not derived from God-
given advantages in location or fertility. It springs from the will and
intelligence of the innovator, and it will disappear as soon as other
capitalists learn the tricks of the pioneer. The new flow is not
therefore a more or less permanent rent. It is a wholly transient
profit.
An innovation implies an innovator -- someone who is
responsible for combining the factors of production in new ways. This
is obviously not a “normal” businessman, following established
routines. The person who introduces change into economic life is a
representative of another class -- or more accurately, another group,
because innovators do not necessarily come from any social class.
Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and used it to
describe these revolutionists of production. He called them
‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity were
thus the source of profit in the capitalist system. [Sans
entrepreneurial activity, Schumperter’s analysis bared inflations’
endemism as paradoxically as its complement, ‘the iron cage of
wages.’]
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES94
R. L. Heibroner’s comment about the nature of Smiths market
system is now better understood as a static circular flowing system. And
Heilbroner’s analysis of Adam Smith’s economic system applies also, more
directly, to classical tenets of natural conservatism:95
In a sense his system presupposes that eighteenth-century England will
remain unchanged forever. Only in quantity will it grow: more
people, more goods, more wealth; its quality will remain unchanged.
His are the dynamics of a static community; it grows but it never
matures.Schumpeter’s Static economic circular flow presents the core holistic
view of Smith’s economy. And, important is that taking profit from the
static system, cause trade offs, of taking from other parts of the system.
Parrington noted this as taking from ‘Paul’ to give to ‘Peter’, which he
described as the fly in Whiggish honey? Parrington also described how
politics was adapted to sponsor business interests, as Eric Hoffer also
observed, to make politics a profitable enterprise:96
Citizens had saved the government in the trying days that were past; it
was only fair in return that government should aid the patriotic citizen
in the necessary work of developing national resources. It was
paternalism as understood by speculators and subsidy-hunters, but
was it not a part of the great American System that was to make the
country rich and self-sufficient? The American System had been
talked of for forty years; it had slowly got on its feet in pre-war days
despite the stubborn planter opposition; now at last it had fairly come
into it own. The time was ripe for the Republican party to become a
fairy godmother to the millions of Beriah Sellerses throughout the
North and the West.
[Whigs’ paternal political pork barrel was installed]
Despite the evolution which gave our nation deterministic paternalism via
‘The American System of Economy,’ truth about ‘shadows instead of reality’
remains in our dogma, as parrington reported:
95 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
However, if Schumpeter’s analysis is ‘true’ (others, as Ricardo and Malthus verified'
that it is) taking profits without providing valued entrepreneurial advantages that
directly justify the profits, irrationally robs value from the production of goods and
services.
However attractive the disguises it may assume, it is in essence the
logical creed of the profit philosophy. It is the expression in'
politics of the acquisitive instinct and it assumes as the greatest good
the shaping of public policy to promote private interests. It asserts
that it is a duty of the state to help its citizens to make money, and it
conceives of the political state as a useful instrument for effective
exploitation. How otherwise? The public good cannot be served
apart from business interests for business interests are the public good
and in serving business the state is serving society. Everybodys eggs
are in the basket and they must not be broken. For a capitalistic
society Whiggery is the only rational politics, for it exalts the profit-
motive as the sole object of parliamentary concern. Government has
only to wave its wand and fairy gifts descend upon business like the
golden sands of Pactolus. It graciously bestows its tariffs and
subsidies, and streams of wealth flow into private wells. [Parrington
introduced this thought with: Whiggery springs up as naturally as pigweed
in a garden.]
[a fly in the Whiggish honey]
But unhappily there is a fly in the Whiggish honey. In a
competitive order, government is forced to make its choices. It
cannot serve both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it must
take away with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalism
in the common interest degenerates in practice into legalized
favoritism. Governmental gifts go to the largest investments. Lesser
interests are sacrificed to greater interests and Whiggery comes
finally to serve the lords of the earth without whose good will the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES96
wheels of business will not turn. To him that hath shall be given. If
the few do not prosper the many will starve, and if the many have
bread who would begrudge the few their abundance? In Whiggery
[now cultural dogma of the GOP side of politics] is the fulfillment of
the Scriptures.
[Is this fulfillment, an Armageddon that ever looms?]
Schumpeter’s ‘static circular flow’ analysis answered economic
concerns about profit: He showed that statically neither profit nor inflation
was truly causally endemic to economy. After describing the new rented
value that entrepreneurs gave to ‘circular flow,’ his conclusion was
emphatic: The new flow is not therefore a more or less permanent rent. It
is a wholly transient profit. So, when profits are taken regularly, without
adding entrepreneurial rent value, profit takers surely benefit. However,
without adding entrepreneurial rent value to the ‘circular flow,’ profit-taking
acts like Brockway’s ‘bankers’ COLA,’granting economic benefits to
‘Peter that are taken from Paul.’ Regularly taking profits without adding
directly compensatory entrepreneurial rent value causes paradoxical
phenomenal endemic companions,’ as inflation, to oppositely give the
allusion of balance to the economic ‘circular flow.’ And, despite official
legalities that grant paternalistic rights and privileges to those who
superintend political economy’s privatized mechanisms, uncannily, those
who directly benefit from the paradoxical phenomenal ‘inflation endemism’
intrinsic of the ‘profit taking,’ as legally paternalistically granted, still are
causally responsible for the economic determinism that mechanistically
endemically rapes and pillages wage-earners. Critical economic observers --
notably Franklin, Ricardo, Malthus, Weber -- indicted this economic
determinism for imposing ‘the iron cage of wages.’ Schumpeter’s ‘static
circular flow’ analysis causally therefore, gave reasoned evidence why
graduated general revenue taxation is both justified and necessary.
Putting inflation’s cost onto general revenue taxes is the only rational
causal place for recovering the economic endemism that was
paternalistically granted as unearned benefits only to the investment
97 Is ontologism embraced or rejected?
class of ‘superintendents’ of privatized political economy. Rationally,
this causal change order should soon be resolved!
By cutting inflation’s cost from the SS contribution taxes, the
contribution rates would be vastly reduced (maybe as much as 80 to 90
percent), and still satisfy the SS’s inflation free benefit requirements.
The systemic regressiveness of SS taxation would then be mitigated.
And if contribution taxes were then applied to all income, SS benefits
could be greatly enhanced: and also include ‘social usage’ funding for
other areas of income security.
Another aspect on Shumperter’s ‘static circular flow’ analysis shows
clearly that deontological (not teleological, i.e, entrepreneurial) profit-
taking is mechanism-based. Organic profit-taking that is not
entrepreneurial is teleologically invalid: affirming it as valid, as97
federalist-Whigs have done, is an inrational but effective economic lie.
Shumperter’s analysis confirms that the SS system, as a mutual insurance
form, is teleological, while Unitary Materialism-based economic
mechanisms are deontological. Mitigating the paradoxical phenomena
caused by this irrational political economy, by ‘social usage’ (a mutual
insurance form) is not only rational, it is necessary.
Anyway, teleological analysis is convincing. The birth counts of
any large existing group do not pose a threatening problem for the SS
System. Instead, the threat to SS is from ideological sophistries of
mechanist deontological politics: due to classicists of The American System
of Political Economy that fail to follow Adam Smith’s ethical creed
regarding wage-earned production. The political, mechanist design has
entrapped consumers into paying by consuming the full cost of economic
inflation endemism (Those consuming to subsist and not required to pay SS
contributions, are reimbursed by enuring capital returns that enhance their
income). This deontological duty was systemically and covertly
accomplished, in the manner, which John Maynard Keynes had astutely
portrayed:98
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,
secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their
citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES98
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process
engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is
able to diagnose. Keynes
Parrington had documented the Federalist designs ‘to devise legal springs’
(legal entrapments) of (constitutional teleologies).99
Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlier
age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were devoted
to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles of law
and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition days of
New York. A desciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the Ameican experiment, assigning exact metes
and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall and
Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springs to catch unwary
democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over their
victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of placing
the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the English law.
An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig, he reveals in
his precise thinking the intimate relations that everywhere exist
between economics, politics, and [affirmed] legal principles. [The
irrationalism affirmed as principles should be identified and untied
mechanistically]
Validating my proposed critical theses
The problem is this:
The BabyBoom’s rounded factual aggregate birth count, as recorded
between 1946 and 1965, is 77 million. Birth facts do not and cannot
99 Validating the proposed critical theses
randomly increase, and only mortality, at any age, reduces the birth
count. The BabyBoom’s population is the natural difference of
recorded birth counts naturally reduced by mortality, the rates of which
actuarially are quite arcuately maintained for insurance purposes. And,
therefore, only mortality rates are actuarially needed to reliably
establish the anticipated life schedule for the BabyBoom’s retirement
population. With SS retirement eligibility shifted to age 67, upwards of
seven million births are delayed from entering the retirement
population. The BabyBoom’s population of natural births, age 67 and over,
peaks, for a short period, at about 42 million (sans immigrations and
emigrations that are population after facts that also can be eligible for SS
insurance):
---- 31 million retirees (age 65-4) were counted in 1990, 100
35 million in 2000. 101
The Census Bureau’s ratio projection, which might have been based
on the zero population growth theory, cited in 1983, is ‘false’:102
The ratio of the working age population . . . to the retirement age
population will begin an unprecedented decline. The nation had 5.3
people of working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older. The ratio
is projected to drop to 4.7 in 2000 and to 2.4 in 2080.[Population facts now show that the ratio did not drop in 2000.]
The only fact of this cited scenario is this: ‘The nation had 5.3 people of
working age in 1982 for every person 65 or older.’ All the rest is asserted
fiction of projection rather than of fact, which politically intended to infer
that SS was not a workable system. This politics, maybe deliberately, failed,
however, to consider that the worker to retiree ratio, was at the time,
conflicted by the system’s immaturity, which independent start-up concern
had a profound influence on the ratio of concern. With the SS system now
mature, facts show the ratio did not drop in 2000. It improved. And by
shifting eligibility to age 67, keeps the ratio at or above 4.39:1, close to the
ratio in 1982 (5.3:1). Inflation’s endemism is a far greater economic
problem than is the BabyBooms’ demographics. Causally, inflation, which
returns as business capital, directly relates to the nation’s paternal
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES100
mechanized grant of profit taking by the private businesses, and, oppositely
is directly related to the nation’s paternal administration of the economic
circular flowing SS contributions taxes: adjusting (i.e., Indexing) for
inflation that impacts on SS benefits, which is proper, politically has
resulted in double taxation from wage-earners who pay SS contribution
taxes, which is improper since SS does not cause inflation, endemically
or directly. Political paternal granting of profit taking should only relate to
entrepreneurial business activity but has become a paternal business
entitlement, which precedence allows a diminished amount of capital for
wage-earned income from economic productions. Therefore, the results of
this disparity must be recompensed: both the SS contribution’s tax
surplus, spent as general government revenue, and inflation’s
endemism, which mechanistically is transformed into capital returns
directly to businessws from produced consumption, both must be
recompensed! Politically, and falsely, inflation’s economic effect on SS
benefits, was irrationally loaded onto SS contribution taxes, and to be
rational, must be recompensed from general revenue taxation.
Validations:
Thesis 1) Effectively, the following table shows that the ratio of
workers to retirees, remains higher than statistical experience in 1990.
Validation of Thesis 1: SS reached its relative maturity in the late 1970s.
SS began in 1935, and gradually matured as beneficiaries reached age 65:
when a full population complement of beneficiaries became qualified to
receive full SS benefits (workers in 1940 would not qualify for full
retirement benefits until 1980). The system approached maturity in the
late1970s coincident with a mini boom demographic, the notch babies’
eligibility for full SS benefits. Before 1980, statistics are not typical of the
mature SS system, i.e., systemic coherence as fiducially appraised, fails as
necessary systemic reality: for instance, back when the average age of
mortality was age 50, the number of workers compared to those 65 and older
was very large (And as our young nation began, the ratio of workers to
101 Validating the proposed critical theses
All birth counts of my model are registered facts, which are conservatively'
reduced by actuarial determined mortality rates!
retirees probably might have exceeded 200:1), but this circumstance has no
logical nexus to the circumstances of SS in the twenty first century.
Similarly, to assume that requirements for SS today had anything to do with
the facts in 1945 (that 42 workers existed for every retiree) also has no
relative significance to the now mature SS system. And while the ratio in
1982 (5.3:1), might, for various reasons, be a little high, in reality, it is a
benchmark (a standard) of the now mature SS system. Recent
demographical facts prove the ratio did not drop in 2000 as, in ‘82, had
officially, fallaciously been projected and cited. Then, with the shift to age
67 (other circumstances not considered), the ratio remains above 4.39
(shaded ratios apply and the applicable ratio for 2015 is between 5.29 and
5.49 depending on conversion to age 67). My mature system’s model,
shows that the following shaded ratios apply: '
Year
Ages
1990 2000 2010 2015 2025 2050
18-64 5.15 5.88 6.06 5.29 4.22 5.43
18-66 5.23 6.13 6.29 5.49 4.39 5.59
Thesis 2) Social Security is teleological ‘social usage’ virtue that
mitigates a major paradox (vice) of the mechanist political economy: SS’s
static circular flowing ‘social usage’ ensures sustenance income during the
retired years of each wage-earner’s life. And causally, paying for the
inflation COLAs related to SS benefits is a responsibility far more related to
income from profits routinely legally granted to be taken from returning
capital from consumed business productions, which capital is not subjected
to SS contribution taxation, but is rewarded by the legally consumed enuring
capital from inflation endemism. This comment is from Part III:
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES102
With classical political economy’s extra fair accounting treatments, profit,
taken as an absolute right of business owners, now exceeds 10 percent of the
‘gross personal income (or ‘Gross National income’).
Increases in GDP during the twentieth century averaged 4
percent while inflation averaged 3 percent. Taken together, the103
classical practice of cost accounting inflation’ endemism to consumption,
which then, at points of consumption (sale), is returned to the capital side of
accounting (i.e., then bypasses wage-earning that was involved in
productions), while acting to increase ‘National income,’ covertly also acts
to put inflation’s economic cost only onto consumption (the average 4
percent growth in GDP, plus the 3 percent average inflation’s consumer cost,
which returns to business owners, as enured capital) mysticly eases the
effects of taking 10 percent profits from GDP’s ‘gross personal income,’ as
classically accounted and taken from business capital accounts, while
inflation’s cost burden (economy’s negative impact) is covertly
mechanistically born only by consumers: mostly wage-earners. Maybe said
more novelly, if the 3 percent inflation effect did not enure as returning
capital, then included in business owners high profit take from GDP, taking
10 percent profit from a diminished ‘Gross’ economic growth would
necessarily require a greater offset taken from Parrington’s Paul’s ‘wage-
earned personal income’ [which aggregated wages and salaries is listed104
separately in the Analysis of U.S. National Income by Type of Income (page
8)]: the ‘iron cage’ of “Paul’s” wages and salaries would necessarily be
more directly restricted by capitalists’ demand for profit.
Validation of Thesis 2: maybe disappointing is that SS is not a savings
account or that, to retain the simple, direct, teleological mutual (social
usage) insurance basis of SS, not-for profit-systems cannot properly be
managed in the classical mechanist ‘for profit’ manner (the greatest
difference involves profit, which incidently is not a valid necessary
consideration of the static economic circular flow). And because of this, we
need be aware that SS is not only more efficient: its administrative cost is
only about 2% of revenue, with 98% of the non surplus collections
distributed as benefits. But also, profits taken from so called for-profit
103 Validating the proposed critical theses
The notch babies drew the fortuitous short straw of this scenario: their SS'
benefits were lower than were usually paid. And shamelessly this
circumstance was ignored.
economic mechanisms is causally a growing source of inflation’s endemism.
And when comparing economic growth, sans the inflation, the nation’s net
economic growth for the twentieth century was then an anemic 1 percent:
just a little less than early Greeks had hypothesized as ‘true’ economic
growth in pace with population increases.
Thesis 3) Neither were the SS bankruptcy charges ‘true‘ nor does
paying retirement benefits’ to the BabyBoom, when they come due,
endanger SS.
Validation of Thesis 3: the ‘necessary’ systemic realities of SS cannot
logically be concluded from hypothesized projections and trends. For
instance, often now, officials assert this fallacy as a fact:
‘When the BabyBoom retires, there will not be enough workers to
support them in retirement.’ [SS’s political opposition to SS, with
preemptive encouragement, commonly asserts this ‘false’ anticipation.]
SS’s political opposition has reasserted this fallacy since when SS was
adopted: reasserted it during the 1980s, and now often despite factual
evidences, which show that it is ‘false.’ In 1983-1984, this fallacious
assertion had embroiled the retirement debate of another factual mini
demographic birth wave and this fallacy was taken as evidence and the
commonly affirmed fallacy was again certified. *
* SS had reached maturity coincidently as the notch babies’ retirement
wave, born between 1918-1926, presented a particularly heavier benefit
burden on the pay-as-you-go SS system. At the critical time when SS was'
experiencing this increased benefit’s burden, the conservative Congress
had changed the nation’s fiscal accounting year, adding months of SS
benefits’ expenses without additional contribution tax collections to
accommodate the added months to the fiscal year: the administrative
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES104
politics, which otherwise was faced with running huge federal deficits, then
seized the opportunity to declare SS Bankrupt.
Based on this fiscal scenario, the SS contribution tax rates were loaded to
accumulate surplus (ostensibly to make SS a pay-for-yourself system for
when the BabyBoom retired). However, none of this surplus went to
equally pay retirement benefits to the then retiring ‘notch babies.’
Thesis 4) Inflation’s endemism endangers political economy as it also
does Social Security: taking profits, that are not directly related to adding
entrepreneurial value to mechanisms of political economy, is maybe
inflation’s primary cause that also causes SS benefits to increase. Inflation
costs loaded onto the SS benefits must be recompensed.
Thus, exactly as Ricardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there
is no place for profit! [R. L. Heilbroner on Shumperter]
Without adding entrepreneurial value to economy, taking profits endemically
take value from labor-based wage earning. Labor has nothing to do with
inflation’s endemism. Therefore, inflation’s cost must be recompensed from
general revenues taxation, as necessarily levied on a graduated scale of non
wage-earned income.
Validation of Thesis 4: Since SS did not and cannot mechanistically
cause inflation, the inflation portion of benefits cost put onto SS
contributions, also must be separated from SS’s contributions taxation.
And this inflation’s cost put onto SS, in total, should be recompensed
from general tax revenues. High end incomes, beyond the SS taxation
caps, not only do not pay for the inflation they cause, as a class they are
inflation’s main cause. And economically, inflation benefits them:
Therefore, graduated rates of general revenue taxation should
completely pay for the SS inflation load. And, as well, recompense
inflation’s endemic effects causally related to “the iron cage of wages”
effect.
Thesis 5) Inflation endemism’s effects on wages must also be
recompensed. If wages kept pace with inflation, the median family wage
105 Validating the proposed critical theses
earned in 2000 would be 3.1 times greater than median wages paid in 1975
($19,480 white w 1-3 yrs of college ): more than $60,000.105 106
Validation of Thesis 5 is provided by the Endnotes.
Thesis 6) Real economic growth (growth sans inflation’s endemism) is
population growth related.
Better teleology for workers now mechanistically (casually by determinism
of an ‘iron law of wages’) made to pay the SS benefits’ inflation put onto the
SS contributions tax, is for Congress to fulfill its Constitution-VESTED
POWERS [section 8. (5)] and as reasserted in 1978 by the Humphrey-
Hawkins law: to contain inflation by setting fixed regulation and trade
standards and restrict banking rates of interest.
I suspect the ‘golden ratio’ [Phi (N)], which early Greeks found had
natural application to population growth, also naturally applies to our
capitalist economy: to rid it of systemic inflation’s endemism.
Mathematically, ‘the golden rule of consumption,’ in which growth in107
economy equals growth in population and consumption is maximized, is
nearly in balance when the ‘golden ratio’ [Phi (N)] applies to economic
growth. An irrational number like B, N approximately has the decimal value
1.618. If Congress accepted its constitutional teleological charge to regulate
the value coin and trade (thereby control inflation), investments in
production and wage-earning would shift away from the casino economy of
fluctuating markets into real economy of productions and consumption. A
dollar earned would retain its inflation neutral economic value. And SS
contribution rates would be but a fraction of present inflated rates.
Validation of Thesis 6: the following statement of recent research results,
was made on TV during October of 2003: ‘Over the last century, average
economic growth was 4%, inflation 3%.’ To these facts of research, my
deliberate commentary is added: economic growth measures the national
increase in non earned economic value (shares of corporate profits by
investors in fluctuating markets, for instance), while inflation measures the
national increase in aggregated consumer costs. Economic growth is
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES106
enhanced by capital returns from consumed inflation to effect non earned
affluence, while inflation in consumer costs negatively effects wages-earned
in two ways (as goods and services are necessarily consumed to subsist and
by the effects on wages-earned because of owner profit-taking that exceeds
the sum of economic growth and inflation): systemically, mechanistically
‘giving to business owner-investors by taking from wage-earner-consumers.’
Thesis 7) Adam Smith’s market-based system of economy is far more
promising now than when Smith had proposed it. Schumpeter’s analysis and
conclusion provided principled keys for assuring long running economic
growth: 108
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by
Ricardo and Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed
the end of capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter it
was the beginning of capitalism. Therefore, we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. . . .
Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation of labor or from
the earnings of capital. They were the result of quite another process.
‘Profits appeared in a static economy when the circular flow failed
to follow its routinized course.’ [And profits routinely taken, despite
entrepreneurial activity, as now is commonly a classical political economy
sanctioned (legalized) business right, causes the static circular flow fail to
respect labor’s contribution to producing goods and services.] . . .
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is so
brilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions in
routine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological or
organizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaper
ways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘As a
result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot be
traced either to the contribution of labor or of resourse owners.’. . .
Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and
used it to describe these revolutionists of production. He called them
‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity were
107 Validating the proposed critical theses
thus the source of profit in the capitalist system. [Sans entrepreneurial
activity, Schumperter’s analysis showed inflations’ endemism as
paradoxically as its determined complement, ‘the iron cage of wages.’] By cutting out all unnecessary paradoxical inflation causes, we must restore
and preserve Adam Smith’s ‘economic baby.’
The validation of Thesis 7 was made by quoting Heilbroner on
Schumperter.
Thesis 8) Only by its fundamental spiritual aspect, which added to a
material visceral body, often called dualism, does democratic philosophy
(Rational Empiricism) diverge from Fascism and Communism. When we,
by official actions or licensing of privatized mechanisms, disband dualism
teleology, and instead make unitary materialist deontology our antecedent
principle (our king), we no longer can claim that a dualism of democratic
antecedents are our principles. 109
‘Rational Empiricism,’ the philosophic basis of democracy, believes
that the world is both material and spiritual. It holds that change and
progress occur by applying reason to experience, and human nature
can be changed and improved by experience. On the basis of these
principles, democracy stresses discussion and the use of reason as a
way of arriving at conclusions. It emphasizes the importance of
tolerance and freedom in developing intelligent, loyal citizens.
We should respect the material part of democracy for providing
temporal bounties, but also must regard its natural limitations with regard to
truth and virtue: didn’t Bertrand Russell logically prove that unitary
materialist truth was nothing but imagined fallacy? : 110
If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for
falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may be
called ‘facts,’ it would not contain any truths, in the sense in which
truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth and
falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements; hence a world of
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES108
mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would
also contain no truth or falsehood.With Unitary Materialism asserted dogmatically and, thereby, the
deduced nihilist ‘positivism’ in both fascism and communism, their cultural
failure was destined because of the dogmatic unitary materialist belief.
Without dualism-based rational teleology, there is only meaningless facts!
The context here requires no further Validation.
Thesis 9) Natural Causal Realities require natural Principles, the
logical keys of which are ‘true’ antecedence, necessity and coherence.
Validation of Thesis 9: Tautologically, only democratic principles in this
review qualify as principled antecedence while GOP Republicans’ Whiggish
ambitions mostly only qualify as either the denial of necessary antecedent
principles or fallacious affirmations of unnecessary consequents: both of
which logically clearly bereft of dualism, represent only dogmatic
irrationalism.
From their respective philosophical postures, each Political Party
argues that they best serve the interests of the nation. Unfortunately, too
little thought, and less dedication, is given to holistic solving problems of
our macro economy that constitutionally intends that ‘all’ are served. Our
politics, in fact, has become enterprise, as E. Hoffer observed:111
When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in
their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous
stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in
possessing and preserving the present. It ceases to be a movement and
becomes an enterprise.
And prominently, our holistic macro-economy is ignored because the micro
‘special interest’ political desires of affluence are to sustain the American
System’s paternalism that has government expending effort and taxes to open
international markets to business enterprise: simply an ever expanding
dimension of American System paternalism, emanating from the Whiggish
designed Gilded-Age-federal ‘poker game’ that naturally leaves those bereft
of their ‘poker stake’ disfranchised and on the sidelines of the nation’s
109256 Preserving Economic Baby
While everyone favors economic growth, those not benefiting from it have'
good reason to react to the irrational results put upon them. Wage-earners
would undoubtedly settle the smaller portion, however, must decry the
excesses of economic exploitation in which, for instance, inflations’ endemism
is put onto SS and medical insurance.
economic progress, and many more losers clinging on but without political
standing (without effective political representation in government) -- it is
explicitly a tyranny of the masses.
However, before open mind sets become dogma convinced by orthodoxy, we
need carefully to contemplate the System that Adam Smith gave to us.
256 Preserving Economic Baby
(Coping with the Economic Paradoxs of Mechanism)
To mitigate the legally licensed politically exploitative deontological results
of government’s fiction-based American System mechanisms’ paradoxs,
social usage programs are required. However, infusing mitigating
teleologies is always vigorously met with politics of those directly value
benefiting from idealistic deontologies of wedge politics.
We have social usage-based workers’ compensation, pensions,
crop-hail and flood insurance, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
We have a Constitution which specifies a Bill of Rights and equal protection
under law. However, we lack common philosophical reason (exercised
political opinions are far too often irrational and also violate oaths of office
that are taken) to support the original constitutional American teleology of
‘equal protection’ under law (the constitutional Categorical Imperative).
And, to be effective, this Imperative is essential for democratic teleology.
But, while casting out the dirty bathwater (irrational unitary materialist-
mechanist dogmas endemic of the fallacious belief that axiomatically
supplants constitutional teleology, as if it were the antecedent of teleology),
we must preserve our mechanism-based deontological ‘economic baby ’:'
The American System of Political Economy. *
* While everyone should favor economic growth, those not benefiting from
it have rationally good reason to react the irrational results put upon them.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES110
Wage-earners would undoubtedly settle for their smaller portion, however
must rationally decry the excesses of economic exploitation in which, for
instance, inflation’s endemism is irrationally mechanistically assigned to SS
and medical insurance.
And this is why centrist politics, with rationally antecedent principles
instilled, are of necessity to democracy: only democracy offers philosophy
that rationally balances the dual spiritual and material aspects of human life.
Irrationally, socialism, fascism and capitalism aggrandize unitary
materialism: life’s sum (its spiritual essence) is denied, conflated, belittled
or equivocated. And while Whigs have done this, we cannot blame our
plight on the politics that founded the GOP: Abraham Lincoln’s politics. In
his letter to H. L. Prince, Lincoln cited Jefferson’s logical fidelity to
antecedent principles, for instance.112
“Remembering . . . that the Jefferson party was formed upon its
supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the
rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior . . . it will
be . . . interesting to note how completely the two [parties] have
changed hands as to the principles upon which they were originally
supposed to be divided. The Democracy of today hold the liberty of
one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another’s
right to property [as Democrats’ politics of slavery had done];
Republicans on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar, but
in case of conflict the man before the dollar [is Lincoln’s ‘true’ appraisal
of Jeffersonian democracy]. . . . But, soberly, it is now no child’s play to
save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. . . .
The principles of Jefferson are the principles and axioms of free
society and yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of
success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another
bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies!’ And others insidiously argue that
they apply to ‘superior races.’ These expressions, differing in form,
are identical in object and effect -- the supplanting the principles of
free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and
legitimacy. . . . They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of
111256 Preserving Economic Baby
returning despotism. We must repulse them or they will subjugate
us.” [By returning us to Sixteenth century dogmatism]
Also Schumperter’s finding that our economic system is young and flexible
but needs rational attending, we should bear in mind. 113
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by Ricardo and
Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed the end of
capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter it was the
beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully.Clearly, our unequal democratic society has neither rationally attended to our
economic system nor to our human spiritual reality, upon which culturally
truth and knowledge are naturally dependent. Instead, in acquisitive
aggrandizements of Unitary Materialism, we mostly subscribe
irrationalisms, as the glorious Epicurean Paradox had expressed:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Befitting this Epicurean Paradox, issuing from Political Economy’s paternal
license and privilege, Whiggish irrationalism increases relatively with
inflation’s endemism. Society now bears what we commonly call ‘society’s
haves,’ which most all now aspire for.
Henry Clay’s full blown Whiggish American System was installed by the
GOP following Abraham Lincoln’s death. The deontology of this privatized
unitary materialist mechanist system, as was fundamental to mercantilism,
was designed to politically grant federal paternalism to productive business
entities in faith that all in society would benefit economically, which faith
alone has never been fulfilled, particularly among the wage-earning class
(But wage-earning production was then made irrelevant to economic growth,
which has phenomenally occurred to benefit society’s haves). H. Clay
sponsored and his classical Whiggish followers affirmed this trickle down
fallacy as the American System of Political Economy’s essential pseudo
principle. Mercantilism’s determinism was fitted in to contend many
subliminal things, in which orthodox dogma is also appended: for instance,
‘money is wealth,’ instead of its original exclusive exchange utility, and as
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES112
Adam Smith observed, ‘in the mercantile system, the interest of the
consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.’ The114
systemic irrationalism constantly perpetrated (which only covertly cause
Desiderius) paradoxically effect the naturally inviolate human free will, as
Schumpeter inferred, were expressed as complaints, or as terrorism.
Thorstein Veblen wrote The Theory of Business Enterprise: 115
[It] came out in 1904. . . . the point of view that it advocated seemed
to fly in the face of common sense. Every economist from the days of
Adam Smith had made of the capitalist the driving figure in the
economic tableau; whether for better or worse, he was generally
assumed to be the central generator of economic progress. But with
Veblen all this was turned topsy-turvy. The businessman was still the
central figure, but no longer the motor force. Now he was portrayed
as the ‘saboteur’ of the system!
Needless to say, it was a strange perspective on society that
could produce so disconcerting a view. Veblen did not begin , as
Ricardo or Marx or the Victorians, with the clash of human interests;
he began at a stage below, in the non human substratum of
technology. What fascinated him was the machine (unitary materialist
causality that is called mechanism). He saw society as dominated by
the machine, caught up in its standardization, timed to its regular
cycle of performance, geared to it insistence on accuracy and
precision. More than that, he envisaged the economic process itself
as being basically mechanical in nature. Economics meant
production, and production meant the machine like meshing of society
as it turned out goods. Such a social machine would need tenders, of
course -- technicians and engineers to make whatever adjustments
were necessary to ensure the most efficient cooperation of the parts.
But from an overall view, society could best be pictured as a gigantic
but purely matter-of-fact mechanism, a highly specialized, highly
coordinated human clockwork.
113256 Preserving Economic Baby
But where would the businessman fit into such a scheme? For
the businessman was interested in making money, whereas the
machine and it engineer masters knew no end except making goods. If
the machine functioned well and fitted together smoothly, where would
there be a place for a man whose only aim was profit?
Ideally, there would be none. The machine was not concerned
with values and profits; it ground out goods. Hence the businessman
would have no function to perform -- unless he turned engineer. But
as a member of the leisure class he was not interested in engineering;
he wanted to accumulate. And this was something the machine was
not set up to do at all. So the businessman achieved his end, not by
working within the framework of the social machine, but by conspiring
against it. His function was not to help make goods, but to cause
breakdowns in the regular flow of output so that values would
fluctuate and he could capitalize on the confusion to reap a profit. *
* Particularly, the mortgage banking business proves this: providing teaser
rates of adjustable interest, and of course fully charging for the closing costs,
then soon thereafter offering a higher fixed rate to curtail rising adjustable
rates, and again fully charging for closing costs. Closing costs amortized
over time are a causal source of consumed inflation.
A few years later, Schumperter proved Veblen’s view: the following passage
is repeated: 116
‘The Theory of Economic Development’ sounds like an analysis of
what we have come to call the underdeveloped world. But in 1912 the
special economic status and problems of that “world” had not yet
come into existence -- this was still the unabashed colonialism [Whigs
in charge of the government’s Gilded Age officially had installed the
American System of Political economy’s administrations along with its
pork barrel ‘internal improvement’ paternalism]. Schumperter’s book
was about another kind of development -- the way in which capitalism
develops its propensities for growth. Scholarly in tone and tedious in
style (a lite from time to time with lightning flashes), the book would
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES114
not strike the casual reader as being of much political importance.
Yet this academic treatise was destined to become the basis for one of
the most influential interpretations of capitalism ever written.
The exposition begins in Schumpeter’s contradictory way. It is
a book about capitalist growth and dynamics, but it opens with a
depiction of a capitalist economy in which growth is totally absent.
Schumpeter’s initial portrait describes a capitalism that lacks the very
ingredient that brought growth into the worlds of Smith and Mill and
Marx and Keynes -- namely, the accumulation of capital. Schumpeter
describes instead a capitalism sans accumulation -- a capitalism
whose flow of production is perfectly static and changeless,
reproducing itself in a “circular flow” that never alters or expands its
creation of wealth.
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by
Ricardo and Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed
the end of capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter it
was the beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. Because
the system has no momentum, inertia is the rule of its economic life:
“All knowledge and habit, once acquired,” writes Schumpeter,
“becomes as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in
the earth.” Thus having found by trial and error the economic course
that is most advantageous for ourselves, we repeat it by routine.
Economic life may have originally been a challenge; it becomes a
habit.
More important, in this changeless flow competition will have
removed all earnings that exceed the value of anyone’s contribution to
output. This means that competition among employers will force them
to pay their workers the full value of the product they create, and that
owners of land or other natural wealth will likewise receive as rents
whatever value their resources contribute. So workers and
115256 Preserving Economic Baby
landowners will get their shares in the circular flow. And capitalists?
Another surprise. Capitalists will receive nothing, except their wages
as management. That is because any contribution to the value of
output that was derived from capital goods they owned would be
entirely absorbed by the value of labor that went into making those
goods plus the value of resources they contained. Thus, exactly as
Ricardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there is no place for
profit!
Why does Schumpeter present us with such a strange -- not to
say strained -- image of the system? Perhaps we have the static
circular already divined the purpose behind his method: the model of
a static capitalism is an attempt to answer the question of where
profits come from.
The source of profits is a question that has been gingerly
handled by most economists. Smith wavered between viewing profit as
a deduction from the value created by labor and as a kind of
independent return located in capital itself. If profits were a
deduction, of course, the explanation implied that labor was
shortchanged; and if they were a contribution of capital, one would
have to explain why the profits went to the owner of the machine, not
to its inventor or user. Mill suggested that profits were the reward for
the “abstinence” of capitalists, but he did not explain why capitalists
were entitled to a reward for an activity that was clearly in their own
interest. Still other economists described profits as the earnings of
“capital,” speaking as if the shovel itself were paid for its contribution
to output. Marx, of course, said that Smith was right in the first place
though he didn’t know it -- that profits were a deduction from the
actual value created by the working man. But that was part of the
labor theory of value which everyone knew to be wrong and therefore
did not have to be reckoned with.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES116
Schumpeter now came forward with a brilliant answer to this
vexing question. Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation of
labor or from the earnings of capital. They were the result of quite
another process. ‘Profits appeared in a static economy when the
circular flow failed to follow its routinized course.’ [And profits routinely taken, despite entrepreneurial activity, as now
commonly is a classical paternalism of political economy’s sanctioned
business right, preempts just rewards to labor: fails to respect labor’s
productive contribution.]
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is so
brilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions in
routine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological or
organizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaper
ways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘As a
result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot be
traced either to the contribution of labor or of resource owners.’ A
new process enables an innovating capitalist to produce the same
goods as his competitors, but at a cheaper cost, exactly as a favorably
located piece of land enables its owner to produce crops more cheaply
than less well situated fellow landlords. Again, exactly like the
fortunate landlord, the innovating capitalist now receives a “rent”
from the differential in his cost. But this rent is not derived from God-
given advantages in location or fertility. It springs from the will and
intelligence of the innovator, and it will disappear as soon as other
capitalists learn the tricks of the pioneer. The new flow is not
therefore a more or less permanent rent. It is a wholly transient
profit.
An innovation implies an innovator -- someone who is
responsible for combining the factors of production in new ways. This
is obviously not a “normal” businessman, following established
routines. The person who introduces change into economic life is a
representative of another class -- or more accurately, another group,
117256 Preserving Economic Baby
because innovators do not necessarily come from any social class.
Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and used it to
describe these revolutionists of production. He called them
‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity were
thus the source of profit in the capitalist system. [Sans entrepreneurial
activity, inflations’ endemism is introduced, as its paradoxical complement,
‘the iron cage of wages,’ also is.] Whenever profits, by paternalist license are taken from political
economy’s privatized mechanisms and are not entrepreneurial justified, the
paradoxical complement, ‘the iron cage of wages,’ is also endemic of
paternalist license to economic results.
About Whigs’ mechanist philosophy, G. P. Brockway wrote this:117
Once the universe was running like a clock, there was nothing for it
but to fit us to a wheel in the works -- perhaps a greater thing than a
cog, but mechanical nevertheless. For us to be fit for this function,
psychology had to subject us to mechanical controls. Or, as J. W.
Miller said, we had first to lose our souls, then our minds; finally, with
the behaviorists, consciousness. Economic man is a prime example
of this remarkable servomechanism.The covert fallacious paternal official policies are thereby politically applied
to nomos-defined property [which include mechanisms, capital, machinery,
labor (which is a form of slavery), . . . ], and they deliberately intended to
transpose constitutional teleological necessary purposes into nomos-based
deontological duties, causing myriad Desiderius to adversely effect natural
human sovereignties and rights. Henry Clay had the vision, but men like
John Calhoun rhetorically provided the fallacious affirmations that appealed
to society: Whigs designed the American political economy to cater
individual and corporate property interests in the accumulation function of
political economy. Calhoun’s rationalized argument for democracy as
patterned on Greek democracy justified wage-earners as the slaves of the
Whiggish political economy. Parrington gave this sample of Calhoun, a
prolific political thinker and orator.118
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES118
The true origin of government, he asserted in common with John
Adams, is to be found in practical necessity . . . It has always been
found necessary to lodge coercive powers in certain hands as a social
protection against individual aggression. Since all men are impelled
by self interest, political systems are determined in form and scope by
this universal instinct. Without government there is anarchy; with
government there is[ Tpeortreonritsimal, tmyroastn pnryo.b ably is caused by imposed tyranny]
Speaking of Jefferson Davis, who northern conservatives called a terrorist,
Parrington, bared the underbelly of this northern irrationalism:119
The president of the Confederacy may have been an unfortunate civil
leader, but the slanders that so long clung to his name are only worthy
of the gutter. The sin that he was led into was not counted a sin in his
southern decalogue; it was the sin, not of secession, but of
imperialism--a sin common to all America in those drunken times
when the great West invited explo[bitya tmioenan. s of paternalist license, no less!]
--- Is American society still afflicted by political divisions caused by
exploitative interests in gold’s glitter, timber, grazing, recreation and such on
public lands whose proprietor is the consented authority, which has licensed
the exploitations, i.e., by creating special interests of paternally licensed
private businesses to exploit the commonwealth’s resources?
--- What is the commonweal interest? (Parrington commented,):
In the year 1825 three streams of tendency were flowing through the
[American mind], rising from different sources, incompatible in spirt
and purpose, strong in their diverse appeals; and in the end the major
current was certain to engulf the lesser. The humanitarianism of
Virginia, the individualism of the new West, and the imperialism of the
Black Belt might seem to mingle their waters for a time, but there
would be confusions of thought and diversity of counsels until one or
another had worn a deeper channel through which the dominant
opinion might run. There could be no more fascinating study in the
economics of political theory than the changing mind of the South
during the critical decades from 1825 to 1850, as it followed the
119256 Preserving Economic Baby
course determined by its peculiar institution. . . . It is unintelligent to
charge upon southern politicians a lack of consistency---to point out
that after 1820 Calhoun reversed himself on every major political
principle. It was true of Calhoun, as it was true of Webster and true
of Clay. In a rapidly changing America, with economics in a state of
flux, men were no longer free political agents, guiding themselves by
the fixed stars of accepted theory: they were borne like corks on the
current of the times, and their inconsistency is the surest evidence that
they spoke for their constituents. The North and the South were at the
parting of the ways, and if southern imperialism created for its needs
a philosophy of particularism, it was met by a counter philosophy of
nationalism created for its needs by northern capitalism, which
likewise was following the path of its manifest destiny.R. L. Heilbroner wrote about economic fallacies with this comment: 120
. . . The notions of the great economists were world-shaking and
their mistakes nothing short of calamitous. ---- Are policies less calamitous when officially made by authorities of
government instead of by economists?
---- Do issues confront America in 1996 (or now in 2002) that resulted
from errant American politics that influenced the official policies of
exploitative Imperialism and Manifest Destiny?
---- Are these politics perpetuated as our nation’s Foreign Policy?
--- Is the policy of Preemptive Action (war) related to the irrational
paternalist official Imperialism and Manifest Destiny?
The ongoing political debate about a patient’s right to sue, for
instance, boils down to whether this or that economic entity is given official
paternalist immunity from law suits (‘legal immunity’ as affirmed by
classical Justice is, therefore, also exposed as fallacious irrationalism):
unequal sovereignties and rights in this organic debate, are routinely
politically nomosly decided? As similarly, in affirmed mercantilism,
business is granted the right to exploit consumption, management to exploit
labor, bankers (insurers) to the exploit money’s utility, . . .: Irrational
fallacies! , All! By what right or sovereignty are fallaciously affirmed
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES120
vices of dogmatic biases justified? For instance, by what equality of right
or sovereignty can capitalists claim profits produced by labor? (Veblen’s
view as confirmed by Schumpeter’s economic ‘circular flow’ analysis is
about this.) The answer is this: politically irrational inequalities are legally
affirmed policy, fallaciously supplanting rationally ‘antecedent’ principles by
affirming logical ‘consequents’ to replace them: making irrationalism the
basis of law. Politically, what has been inculcated as science, and legally
justified, is devoid of natural antecedence, systemic necessity and coherence.
Therefore, it cannot be ‘true!’: maybe it’s art, but never is it science. About
life’s omnipresent quandary, these definitions and explanations shed light,
on materialism:
Idealism (philosophy) -- belief that all our knowledge is based on ideas and
that it is impossible to know whether there really is a world of objects on
which our ideas are based. Idealism, as opposed to materialism, holds that
objects do not really exist apart from our ideas.121
Idealism conflates life’s essence to a unitary form of materialism! : the
meaning of conflate is critical to understanding that Unitary Materialism
results when materialist politics conflates the essence side of democracy (as
has happened during the G.W. Bush administration): 122
Conflate, v.t. 1. to bring or put together; compose of various elements.
Is idealism logically reasonable? -- it is not! Idealism consistently,
unjustifiably, demeans the omnipresent fiducial purposes of logical reason:
as Kant had challenged philosophers and scientists to produce evidence that
would allow us to make assertions about things we have not actually
experienced. Science is critically important regarding finding and123
retaining truth and knowledge. Ideology’s first definition confirms that
science and ideology are not compatible disciplines: 124
1. A set of doctrines; body of opinions: The majority of teachers and
professors do not teach any ideology (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) 2. The
combined doctrines, assertions, and intentions of a social or political
movement: i.e., “communist ideology.” 3. Abstract speculation, especially
theorizing or speculation of a visionary or impractical nature. 4. The
science of the origin and nature of ideas. 5. A system of philosophy that
derives all ideas exclusively from sensation
121251 Social Security
[assertions based on empiricism].
Philosophically, democracy cannot exist in an absence of rational human
essence, which absence occurs when unitary materialism is officially
affirmed as the antecedent of reason.
If our materialist political economy ever achieves to sponsor the
investment of SS surplus contributions in fluctuating markets, then wage-
earners’ only savings for retirement will be made into the subject and cause
for greater endemic inflation, i.e., wage-earners will become a causal
accomplice of the mechanists’ inflation endemism. The far better teleology
for workers that, by consuming what they produce, mechanistically are
determined to fully pay for the mechanists’ endemically caused inflation, is
for Congress to fulfill its constitutional charge: reduce inflation by restricting
the Bankers’ COLA along with all other inflation causes. I suspect the
‘golden ratio,’ named Phi (N), that the Greeks found, has natural application
to our capitalist democratic economy: to rid it of systemic inflation.
Mathematically, ‘the golden rule of consumption,’ in which economic125
growth equals population growth (and consumption is maximized), is
nearly in balance when the ‘golden ratio’ applies to economic growth.
An irrational number like B, N approximately has the decimal value of
1.618. If Congress accepted its constitutional teleological charge and126
controlled inflation by eliminating the endemism wherever found,
investments in production growth and wage-earning would shift away from
the casino economy, of fluctuating futures markets, into the real economy of
production and consumption. The dollar would then retain its value.
251 SOCIAL SECURITY
Found among illusive economic perceptions of American Society, Social
Security is a beneficent oddity that centrally the Old Age, Survivors, and
Disability Security System depicts: a beneficent not for profit social usage-
based mechanism designed to operate, without disruption, alongside the
Whiggish ‘for profit’ mechanisms, SS, functions supplement the exploitative
for profit mechanisms of American political economy. Jaded American
society scorns (claims to hate) Socialism: maybe because, as a clearly
expressed form of unitary materialism, the socialist foundation is commonly
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES122
Philosophically, democracy (rational empiricism) has the duality of essence'
and materiality, whereas socialism has only Unitary Materialism as its basis.
known? Still, the American System’s capitalism feigns democracy while
also practicing unitary materialism. And so, while Social Security curiously
is thought to be related to socialism, which thought gives feelings of
indigestion to many, American capitalism is more closely related. Despite
its label, Social Security is a pure form of social usage-based Mutual
Insurance with no more socialist tendencies than the Mutual, Grange, Farm
Bureau or Union Insurance Company that functions in most American
neighborhoods: with benefit payments made to current SS beneficiaries
spread onto the social base of wages-earned by the current policyholders of
SS. And, wage-earners are the financial base of the Old Age, Survivors, and
Disability Security System of insurance reserves. Contributions to this
system are the basis for benefit entitlement to eventual retirement annuities.
Insurance, was never more straight forward and direct! But inflation’s
systemic endemism effects on SS benefits are not only extraneous, their
source systemically is completely foreign, which fact has been ignored by
government authority: forty years of compounding inflation effects devastate
an SS benefit value. Politically, this inflation cost was licensed for
collection by SS contributions’ taxation, and it will remain this way until
wage-earners unite politically to demand redress of this economic disparity.
Compounding inflation, has made the problem very big: now in year 2000,
the nation owes wage-earner-contributors to the SS surplus, which began in
1984, something more than $3 trillion, which has routinely been spent as
governments’ revenue.
Wisely, I believe. The designers of privately organized mutual
insurance companies, which operate as form of ‘social usage’, chose not to
name their companies, The ABC Socialized Insurance Company. They did
not because ‘social usage,’ as Roger Williams had defined it was a vestige
of embryonic democracy not socialism. Mutual insurance in the U.S. is'
older than the nation. ‘The Philadelphia Contributorship’ (a mutual fire
insurance company and the first insurance company in the colonies, with
Benjamin Franklin’s support) was founded in 1752. Since then, literally
123251 Social Security
thousands of Mutual insurance companies, Granges, Farm Bureaus and
Unions were organized by policyholders (the insurance subscribers) whose
common interest and purpose was to spread, or share, particularly defined
individual risks of loss on the whole subscribership financial base (whenever
insurance premiums were insufficient to pay losses, a special premium
assessment then became a necessary subscriber liability). 127
The policyholders own Mutual Insurance companies. All profits are
held for their mutual benefit [and company losses are a mutual
liability]. Many largest U.S. insurance companies are, or were, mutual social
usage-based companies: Society did not pause to ponder the social usage
aspect of mutual insurance, as being a form of Socialism (socializing
insurance losses by social usage does not qualify, in any philosophical
organic sense, as socialism): philosophically, Socialism is a form of organic
Absolute Idealism that practices unitary materialism and, in which the
freedom of choice does not exist. Because the distinguishing factor of
democracy is human dualism (of essence as well as materiality), in fact,
therefore, while unitary materialist commonalities relate to mechanism of
the U.S. economy and to the organic philosophy of communism and fascism,
it fails to apply to the dualism-based social usage principle as was or is
applied to all insurance forms in the U.S.
As our nation began, capital was scarce - frankly did not exist. The
mutual organization was the only viable insurance alternative for most
Americans who desired to enjoy insurance security and otherwise had to
make do without it.
The capitalist unitary materialist objective to ‘grow’ by ‘gaining
from profit’ infused deontological duties to privatized ‘social usage’
insurance mechanisms, and by doing this, teleological mutual ownership was
supplanted by private ownership. (See Schumpeter’s: the way in which
capitalism develops its propensities for growth.)
Poignant stories were commonly told about the unique cooperative manner
in which mutual insurance losses were settled, without implications of law.
Trust prevailed: insurance furnished the materials and policyholders joined
together to repair or rebuild, what had been lost or damaged.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES124
Even with the money hoarding of today, society has not outgrown its
need for mutual insurance (for example, ‘Terrorism Insurance’ is a late
mutual form of informal insurance that is tax based). In fact, private sector
‘for profit’ insurance, has inculcated broad public expectations for economic
redress in ever more frequent instances of loss that private sector ‘for profit
insurance’ is incapable to provide. And, therefore, agencies of the federal
government paternally politically have provided tax based economic redress
to victims of private catastrophic losses of an earthquake, hurricane, flood,
ravages of war, insurrection, and other natural disasters that do not qualify
for or are denied by private sector insurance. To the ever growing list of
natural disasters, the Savings and Loan and Bank bailouts of the 1980s was
added to this category of federal tax-based economic redress (the government
after all, in fact, informally provides a form of mutual insurance of last
resort).
Private insurance defines the policy (the contract of coverage) that is
based on, and balanced with, the financial capability as limited to each
company’s financial capacity. And, natural catastrophic events, more often
now, prove to exceed the aggregated financial capacity of all private
insurance. Katrina, unfortunately, once again in fact, has proved this. Most
tax-based redress of private financial loss (social paternal assists paid by
government agencies) depend on politics and because the lac of formal
contractual risk definition, or a defined contractual social usage base on
which to spread the individual losses, these examples are of aid, and,
therefore, are not considered as insurance, which defacto it is.
Anyway, Benjamin Franklin did not import Socialism to America.
What he imported was the valid insurance concept of spreading risk onto a
social group of voluntary participants. Whether a company is private, stock,
mutual, or government does not change the insurance principal that is, in
fact, social usage based: the fundamental insurance concept, which
Franklin imported, might be stated? :
Risk, specifically defined and sufficiently spread onto a socialized
economic base, is manageable whereas risk which is not socialized
can and at times will devastate, economically, individuals of society.
125251 Social Security
The overwhelming number of mutual companies that have withstood
loss adversities of centuries offers undeniable evidence that this insurance
principle works. But, to be sure, there are uninsurable risks, the losses of
which can only be redressed by government by social usage of the total
public sector’s tax base. And such social redress is not, any more than
mutual insurance is, a Socialism form. The only difference is that the
ultimate organic league of risk socialization has politically shifted onto our
national federation. ‘Risk-spreading,’ is a legitimate insurance principle that
formally applies only to private sector insurance: cannot apply in
catastrophic instances of property loss. And, if catastrophic risks, which
often defy policy definition, are ever to be insured, the private insurance
business sector must better cooperate with government to provide for it.
This heterogeneous partnership needs much improvement and unwillingness
always has originated in the private sector more than from government.
Organic rights paternalistically granted, as often are politically achieved, get
in the way of reason: what society, by way of government without cost to
private businesses, paternally has allowed in realty and security, experience
has shown, are then legally adjudged as the businesses’ own private
property? *
* For instance, in The End of Economic Man, G. P. Brockway called
attention to the organic financial grant, which private business claims to own
by way of freely given license to business economic productions: wages that
are paid only after each pay period is completed. Brockway described this
organic grant as a free front end loan with each pay period, which in fact is a
continuous loan that the productive wage-earners make to their employer.
With this fact in mind, wage-earners that start pennyless are often put into
crisis situations, which force onto them prospects of obtaining usury-based
loans from a growing, thriving paternally licensed private business sector
that charges from eight to 15 percent, per week, (which at the low end
amounts to 416 percent yearly interest) for what is called a paycheck loan.
The ultimate solution to this growing problem rests mostly on the redress of
the organic paternal license modification to businesses, which allow free
front end wage-earned work without pay: in effect are capital loans to
businesses (and which also includes military pay periods): wage-earners
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES126
Recently, my wife had reason to consult a primary doctor, and inocently'
clarified the workings of her new HMO subscription. Her wait was long, her
visit brief, ten minutes or so. The doctor’s HMO billing note read:
‘Comprehensive, new patient interview, more time than usual, 45 min.’
must be organically be also granted an equitable paternal license for to
access prospective pay directly as work is delivered.
The government’s Crop Hail Insurance was in the news a few years
ago. Agents of private insurance companies profited fraudulently from this
insurance: Insurance policies for crops, which had never been successful in
the dust belt of America, were sold only with an intent to file claims of loss
for the corn and peanut crop failures. The report of this fraud exhibited a
large barn that a farmer had built with his insurance check. The checks for
supposed losses were issued by private insurance companies and were
contractually reimbursed by the government: taxpayers paid for the fraud!
The fronting private sector underwriting companies had perpetrated an
insurance sham of mechanist design to only reap profits. The agents of these
companies got their commissions and farmers got paid for failed crops that,
agents, farmers, and the private insurance companies knew, from the outset,
would never grow to be harvested.
Fraud is a huge business centered in all private forms of insurance
and private sector business: seeking profits is the concupiscent culprit.
Twenty percent of auto insurance loss payments routinely go to paying for
stolen cars that never are recovered. Medical insurance fraud is huge. And
Medicare is the granddaddy of private mechanist concupiscent nefariousness.
Seemingly innocuous breaches of ethical culture are wrought by political
economy’s pseudo principles of legalized property-based mechanisms:
fictitious corporate entities, and (‘shrug’) nefarious concupiscent type
attitudes as ‘insurance pays my bill, not other patients or the hospital.’ '
And all insurance fraud is causally related to inflation endemism that
when consumed legally returns as enured capital that is then owned by
the business source. In his chapters on Speculation and Property, G. P.
Brockway exposes a vast divergence between legal allowances given
127251 Social Security
corporations and those given to persons: legal court-interpretations are at the
roots of business’ nefariousness: despite this, Jefferson’s interpretation of
‘ownership’:
The earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.
While Jefferson said this, his argument was Paine’s, in an ongoing and
unsettled debate with Burke, the adopted ‘father of conservatism.’
And still, the public’s greatest need is health insurance: Forty
million Americans cannot afford the private insurance system’s cost.
The Clinton administration’s attempt to install a universal health insurance
system was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition to this system came
mostly from private sector insurance that provided more than $100 million in
PAC lobby money to ensure this defeat. And such fictitious sovereign
intrusion, by licensed fiction, into politics by Corporate Interests represents
the greatest threat to American constitutional democracy.
Maybe there is new hope of better democratic representation with
‘soft money’ reform of McCain-Feingold? (And, more surely, with the 2006
national congressional election?)
But getting the attention of classically orthodox officials -- to act
rationally -- is as impossible as solving the chicken and egg question: each
antecedent hypothesis is independent of the other. Anyway, change is
always radical (therefore, is liberal?). Brockway points to the orthodox
notion of rights and declares this:
There is no right that capitalists claim, that equally cannot be claimed
by labor.Brockway reasons that classical orthodoxy gave legal advantages to
capitalists: with all earnings delayed until a work pay period is completed,
capitalists are legally thereby granted a continuous periodical increment of
free capital. Capital, which is, thereby, a free advantage for to advertize and
lobby. And, egregiously this legal advantage was then deemed a business
right (as speech, for instance). Which classical capitalist orthodoxy achieved
to put wage-earners into a mechanist ‘iron wage cage’ with no free front end
payment of or access to their wages earned. And, paternally organically, this
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES128
paradox has not been mitigated! About capitalism’s propensities for
economic growth, R. L. Heilbroner cited J. Schumperter’s telling economic
analysis, which is again repeated: 128
‘The Theory of Economic Development’ sounds like an analysis of
what we have come to call the underdeveloped world. But in 1912 the
special economic status and problems of that “world” had not yet
come into existence -- this was still the unabashed colonialism [Whigs
in charge of the government’s Gilded Age officially had installed pork barrel
‘internal improvement’ paternalism into the American System of Political
economy’s administrations]. Schumperter’s book was about another
kind of development -- the way in which capitalism develops its
propensities for growth. . . . this academic treatise was destined to
become the basis for one of the most influential interpretations of
capitalism ever written. . . ..
Schumpeter’s initial portrait describes a capitalism that lacks
the very ingredient that brought growth into the worlds of Smith and
Mill and Marx and Keynes -- namely, the accumulation of capital.
Schumpeter describes instead a capitalism sans accumulation -- a
capitalism whose flow of production is perfectly static and changeless,
reproducing itself in a “circular flow” that never alters or expands its
creation of wealth.
The model resembles the stationary state envisaged by
Ricardo and Mill, with the difference that the stationary state seemed
the end of capitalism to the earlier writers, whereas for Schumpeter
it was the beginning of capitalism. Therefore we must examine the
characteristics of the circular flow a little more carefully. Because the
system has no momentum, inertia is the rule of its economic life: “All
knowledge and habit, once acquired,” writes Schumpeter, “becomes
as firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth.”
Thus having found by trial and error the economic course that is most
advantageous for ourselves, we repeat it by routine. Economic life
may have originally been a challenge; it becomes a habit.
129251 Social Security
More important, in this changeless flow competition will have
removed all earnings that exceed the value of anyone’s contribution
to output. This means that competition among employers will force
them to pay their workers the full value of the product they create, and
that owners of land or other natural wealth will likewise receive as
rents whatever value their resources contribute. So workers and
landowners will get their shares in the circular flow. And
capitalists? Another surprise. Capitalists will receive nothing, except
their wages as management. That is because any contribution to the
value of output that was derived from capital goods they owned would
be entirely absorbed by the value of labor that went into making those
goods plus the value of resources they contained. Thus, exactly as
Ricardo or Mill foresaw, ‘in a static economy there is no place for
profit!
Why does Schumpeter present us with such a strange -- not to
say strained -- image of the system? Perhaps we have already divined
the purpose behind his method: the model of a static capitalism is an
attempt to answer the question of where profits come from.
The source of profits is a question that has been gingerly
handled by most economists. Smith wavered between viewing profit as
a deduction from the value created by labor and as a kind of
independent return located in capital itself. If profits were a
deduction, of course, the explanation implied that labor was
shortchanged; and if they were a contribution of capital, one would
have to explain why the profits went to the owner of the machine,
not to its inventor or user. Mill suggested that profits were the
reward for the “abstinence” of capitalists, but he did not explain why
capitalists were entitled to a reward for an activity that was clearly in
their own interest. Still other economists described profits as the
earnings of “capital,” speaking as if the shovel itself were paid for its
contribution to output. Marx, of course, said that Smith was right in
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES130
the first place though he didn’t know it -- that profits were a
deduction from the actual value created by the working man. But
that was part of the labor theory of value which everyone knew to be
wrong and therefore did not have to be reckoned with.
Schumpeter now came forward with a brilliant answer to this
vexing question. Profits he said, did not arise from exploitation of
labor or from the earnings of capital. They were the result of quite
another process. ‘Profits appeared in a static economy when the
circular flow failed to follow its routinized course.’
Now we can see why the wildly unrealistic circular flow is so
brilliant a starting point. For all the forces leading to disruptions in
routine, one stands out. This is the introduction of technological or
organizational innovations into the circular flow -- new or cheaper
ways of making things, or ways of making wholly new things. ‘As a
result of these innovations a flow of income arises that cannot be
traced either to the contribution of labor or of resource owners.’ A
new process enables an innovating capitalist to produce the same
goods as his competitors, but at a cheaper cost, exactly as a favorably
located piece of land enables its owner to produce crops more cheaply
than less well situated fellow landlords. Again, exactly like the
fortunate landlord, the innovating capitalist now receives a “rent”
from the differential in his cost. But this rent is not derived from God-
given advantages in location or fertility. It springs from the will and
intelligence of the innovator, and it will disappear as soon as other
capitalists learn the tricks of the pioneer. The new flow is not
therefore a more or less permanent rent. It is a wholly transient
profit.
An innovation implies an innovator -- someone who is
responsible for combining the factors of production in new ways. This
is obviously not a “normal” businessman, following established
routines. The person who introduces change into economic life is a
131251 Social Security
representative of another class -- or more accurately, another group,
because innovators do not necessarily come from any social class.
Schumpeter took an old word from the economic lexicon and used it to
describe these revolutionists of production. He called them
‘entrepreneurs.’ Entrepreneurs and their innovating activity were
thus the source of profit in the capitalist system.
Schumperter’s capitalist Entrepreneurs neither asked for nor required
government paternalism, as granting free front end capital or Gilded Age
demands for ‘internal improvement‘ assistance. Only entrepreneurship was
required: so, what political irrationalism justifies government’s
paternalism with profit-taking? Answering this question requires the
holistic recognition that granting privilege to some naturally requires that
what is given must be taken from others. And the bond of democratic
equality is thereby broken! If our nation is to remain interested in preserving
democracy, equal rights must be preserved and, therefore, the granting of
privileges must be redressed with beneficent grants to the unprivileged,
which beneficence must be paid for by those of the politically granted
privileges, with profit-taking, for instance. Economy’s inordinate growth
has been irrationally achieved by fallaciously accounting the intrinsically
related paternalism’s economic benefits derived by the Whiggish political
economy scheme, which Parrington described as being ingenious:
a curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow and divide the milk
among those who supervised the milking. And profits taken fail to trickle down as capitalist ideology claimed: 129
Henry Ward Beecher, the 19th century American clergyman,
said 'You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are
indispensable to the rich.’
The early-20th century English poet and novelist G. K.
Chesterton felt that even when the rich helped out, it was more
through acceptance of poverty than a desire to cure it. He wrote: 'If
we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favor of fixed rules and
clear dogma. The rules of a club are occasionally in favor of the poor
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES132
member. The drift [the political flux] of a club is always in favor of the
rich one.
Beecher and Chesterton’s thoughts are teleologically rational because
recognize that paternalistically granting license to some naturally impugns
others. They also recognized that politics will always favor the rich and
powerful. Parrington observed this irrational politics as giving to Peter by
taking from Paul: leaving equally deserving citizens to contend with myriad
economic misfortunes, of which the paternal granting of license to private
business mechanisms to exploit the natural whole of society caused. And
that logical principles were politically aborted by this- * ), 130
* Principles must not stand in the way of success
Through the fierce scramble of rival politicians moved a scholarly
figure who preserved to the last dignity and distinction of an earlier
age. James Kent, whose long life and ripe legal learning were devoted
to upholding what he conceived to be the ultimate principles of law
and politics, was the chief political thinker of the transition days of
New York. A disciple of Locke and Blackstone, remodeling
seventeenth-century liberalism into eighteenth-century conservatism,
he was concerned to erect the barriers of the Common Law about the
unsurveyed frontiers of the American experiment, assigning exact
metes and bounds beyond which it should not go. Like John Marshall
and Joseph Story he was expert in devising legal springs to catch
unwary democrats, and while the Jeffersonians were shouting over
their victories at the polls, he was engaged in the strategic work of
placing the Constitution under the narrow custodianship of the
English law. An ardent Federalist and later an equally ardent Whig,
he reveals in his precise thinking the intimate relations that
everywhere exist between economics, politics, and legal principles.
[Asserting affirmed fallacies as principle are mechanistic hallmarks]
-and where the nation’s growing public debt is fallaciously excused, or
ignored, because the economic progress’ cost ultimately mechanistically
133251 Social Security
settles onto wage-earners’ consumption and taxes. About this, George Will
on ABC’s, This Week, astutely observed this:
We privatize profits and socialize debts
[Profits from economic progress go to owners of companies of The American
System of Political Economy while public debt ultimately is only repaid by
the general revenue taxes of wage-earners].
Political Economy decidedly favors acquisitive influence and power more
than human rights or teleology?
Social Security, as conservatives perceive of it, however, contradicts
political economy’s economic paternalism. But SS is compatible with
Schumpertarian capitalism, which denies randomly taking profits unless
entrepreneurship is provided. And what this says was quite exactly
expressed by the Epicurean paradox:
‘give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.’Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Social Security System spreads the ‘risk’ (certainty in this instance) of
age related loss of wage-earning abilities, under defined cases of old age,
survivorship and disability, onto the ‘social base’ of wage-earners: If paid
wages, you participate in this social usage-based insurance.
The teleology of SS is the logical necessary principle that mutual insurance
had introduced in the U.S.; it is devoid of the exploitative ‘profit’ motive
intrinsic of classically orthodox ‘for profit’ economic insurance mechanisms;
collectively, under any natural meaning of ‘ownership,’ as entrusted to
government’s administration, wage-earners own the SS insurance (as all
mutual insurance mechanisms are of this Schumpertarian ‘static circular
flow’ type). And all that constitutes ‘the insurance premium’ (contribution
taxes) are (should be) enough to cover benefits (in inflation neutral dollars)
that are necessarily paid. And, fiducial reciprocity exists between the owners
and beneficiaries: Mutual insurance and SS are forms of reciprocal risk
spreading that Roger Williams called ‘social usage.’ And, even ‘for profit’
businesses have internally employed this concept: The Federal Reserve, for
instance, operates as ‘social usage’ to its family of banks. FDIC insurance is
another example of it that serves to insure bank deposits. Reinsurance,
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES134
which is conducted between insurance companies, is also ‘social usage’
insurance - as also is the federal redress in cases of catastrophic disasters.
Terrorism’ insurance, has no mutual reciprocity. It insures
‘privatized capitalists’ profit, while socializing the losses of it that wage-
earner tax payers must pay to provide for it. It is an extension of
government’s paternalism granted to ‘for profit’ business mechanisms.
Myths about SS have sprung forth, in part, because, as individuals,
we have not paid much attention to the SS System as a reciprocal form of
‘social usage.’ Sure we each are aware of those, on SS, who don't need it
and to fewer instances of those who need SS and aren't on it. It's easy to be
critical of the seeming obvious omissions-inefficiencies or to suppose that
our SS contribution-taxes are, or should be, deposited to some gigantic
account to be held in some sort of ‘locked box’ while compounding interest
until, in our retiring years, we individually need the money. Maybe it
disappoints us that SS is not a savings account or that, to retain the simple,
direct, teleological mutual insurance basis, that not-for profit ‘social usage’
mechanisms cannot efficiently be managed in the ‘for profit’ business
manner. One thing we need be aware of, in this regard, is that SS is the most
efficiently designed reciprocating insurance ever: excepting surplus
collections, its operations cost is about 2% of revenue: 98% of it is
distributed in benefits paid.
‘Social Security’ was established to provide a pipeline through which
revenues collected from today's larger group of workers flow out as benefits
to today's smaller group of elderly beneficiaries. The smaller retired group is
getting larger and quite fallaciously orthodoxy expects it to become very
large beginning in 2010. And, has made fallacious deductions about this
perceived demographical trend, which the Census Bureau’s zero growth
study had presented. But while this expectation is ‘false,’ it has popular
orthodox political appeal!
As any well-defined insurance, SS was established with clear ‘risk’
definition (loss of wage-earning) and everyone who participates, is a
survivor, or dependent of a participant (not only - or all - those who need it)
is an eligible beneficiary of the system (SS provides security through the
working years as well). However, the July 17, 1991-news clip confirms
135251 Social Security
that political problems exist: Maybe we trust too much that the SS
administration is unaffected by politics. SS is now an ‘off budget’
government account: Help! 131
“The Social Security Commissioner, asked local governments to help
the Social Security Administration find a large segment of the
American public which is eligible for benefits but can't be found. 35
percent of those eligible aren't being located.
Social Security is reaching out, and needs help from counties
to find that homeless woman, that elderly couple, that disabled child,”
King said.
The administration last week began mailing notices to
435,000 disabled children found by the U.S. Supreme Court to have
been denied supplemental benefits improperly over the past 11 years.
[Was this denial of benefits politics related?]
The court ordered the agency to redefine its standards for
eligibility, and to provide retroactive benefits that could amount to
$2 billion.
“It is the right thing to do,” King said. “A child improperly
denied justice should not have to wait one minute longer to receive
benefits.” [As there was no available follow
up on this news release, the issue remains unresolved: was this simply
political rhetoric made to satisfy, but not settle, a law suit?]
I furnished this disclosure to emphasize the expanded SS coverage:
those paying into the SS pipeline, and their families, are insured in
specific cases of disability and death: benefits are intended to be paid to
many who are eligible without having reached the threshold age of
retirement. Survivors benefits have greatly expanded SS coverage:
---- 3 Widows or widowers -- benefits are paid at age 60, (at age 50 if
disabled), or at any age, including those divorced, when they are
responsible for dependents, under age 16 or disabled and receiving aid.
---- 33 Surviving children under age 18, (19 if attending high school), or at
any age when disabled.
---- 333 Dependent parents aged 62 or older.
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES136
A unique Medicare benefit, which must be signed-up for, became available
in 1988 but was not adequately disclosed (politics, maybe ?): Eligible
persons for this benefit have not been contacted because Congress, federal
officials explained, had cut all administrative costs. The Medicare benefit
pays the Medicare premiums and the deductibles in cases of hardship.
Hardship is explained:
---- 3333 Retired persons on Medicare who fall below the poverty level,
are eligible for this Medicare benefit, which pays both the Medicare
premiums and deductibles.
Contact Medicare for answers to your questions.
Bills charged to Hospital Insurance (Medicare) are paid from
revenue that flows through the SS pipeline (The tax rates are listed in the
following table under the heading, HI).
SS law in 1984 expanded the regressive SS contribution’s tax, the specified
rates of collection, which went beyond providing for the inflation adjusted
benefit payments. The contribution tax collections included surplus funding,
which since have routinely been spent as government’s general revenues: the
maximum new SS tax increase index (76.5), represents a 7,510 percent tax
increase since SS’s inception. And because the SS cap has been adjusted to
rise ahead of median family income, wage-earning families, aggregated, pay
close to the maximum tax increase. The SS revenue near directly is indexed
to the median rise in wages, which irrationally lags inflation’s index (since
the 1960s, constant dollar wages have not kept pace with inflation). This
SS contributions’ tax law should signal alarm, particularly with wage-earners
who contribute surplus funding that routinely is spent as government’s
general revenue (the collections of surplus funds, with inflation included in
benefits as anticipated, which has routinely been spent, now exceeds $ 3
trillion).
For fiducial purposes of accounting, employers deposit SS
contribution tax revenues with participating collection banks before they sent
to the government: where the revenues are then accounted to three separate
trust funds for disbursement to the beneficiaries (The Treasury Department is
government’s collecting and dispensing arm). And because surplus SS funds
137251 Social Security
The ideological politics, which achieved law to collect SS surplus contributions, has'
maintained the position that taxes, including SS surplus, are government’s to use as it
wishes, for to disclaim any liability to the tax payers, which also can easily argue that
funds spent cannot be made a liable obligation to the Trust Funds.
are routinely spent as general revenue, the trust fund accounts now include
IOUs (showing that government owes the collected money, that was
routinely spent, to the Trust Funds ). The contribution tax is commonly'
called the OASDHI payroll tax: the trust funds acronym.
The Old-Age and Survivor's Insurance (OASI) and Disability
Insurance (DI) is this research’ primary concern.
For convenience of reference, the following table is repeated.
SOCIAL SECURITY TAX RATES
-------- RATES ------- WAGE CAP MAXIMUM
(PERCENT OF WAGES) INCREASE
TOTAL OASDI HI (IN DOLLARS) (AN INDEX)
1950 3 3 - $ 3,000 base = 1.00
1955 4 4 - 4,200 1.87
1960 6 6 - 4,800 3.2
1965 7.25 7.25 - 4,800 3.87
1970 9.6 8.4 1.2 7,800 8.32
1971 10.4 9.2 1.2 7,800 9.01
1972 10.4 9.2 1.2 9,000 10.
1973 11.7 9.7 2 10,800 14.04
1974 11.7 9.9 1.8 13,200 17.16
1975 no rate change 14,100 18.33
1976 no rate change 15,300 19.89
-------- RATES ------- WAGE CAP MAXIMUM
(PERCENT OF WAGES) INCREASE
TOTAL OASDI HI (IN DOLLARS) (AN INDEX)
1977 " " " 16,500 21.45
1978 12.1 10.1 2 17,700 23.8
1979 12.26 10.16 2.1 22,900 31.19
1980 no rate change 25,900 35.28
1981 13.3 10.7 2.6 29,700 43.89
1982 13.4 10.8 2.6 32,400 48.24
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES138
1983 no rate change 35,700 53.15
1984 14 11.4 2.6 37,800 58.8
1985 14.1 11.4 2.7 39,600 62.04
1986 14.3 11.4 2.9 42,000 66.73
1987 no rate change 43,800 69.59
1988 15.02 12.12 2.9 45,000 75.1
1990 15.3 12.4 2.9 45,000 76.5
(Senator J. Kerry allowed that the SS cap in 2003 was $86,000, thereby
allowing that the contributions’ index is now more than 150 times its origin)
As of 1998, the accounted Trust Funds shown in the 2000 World
Almanac (New York times, pp. 766-767, in $ millions) are:
---- 3 Old Age and Survivors (OAS) $653,108
---- 33 Disability Insurance (DI) $77,087
---- 333 Hospital Insurance (HI). $117,113
---- SMI (paid from general taxes) $40,889
---- Total accounted Trust Funds $847,308
The third program, the Medicare program, has part A, Hospital
Insurance (HI) and part B, Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI). HI’s
funding is piggybacked onto the payroll tax. And because of inflation
extremes with HI, the public's perceptions of OASI and DI programs, by
association, are partly blamed. Seldom, but at times to satisfy particular
payout demands (as happened in 1984, and politically dubbed ‘the
bankruptcy of SS’), contributions earmarked for one program were diverted,
as a loan, to another: This expedience riled political opposition: particular
illusions, deliberately spun by the irrational politics, succeeded to set the SS
contributions tax increases.
Medicaid, as Medicare, was approved by Congress in 1965.
Medicaid, also not a prime consideration here, is public aid administered by
individual states. Its only connection to SS is that it was authorized under
Title XlX of the Social Security Code. The federal government’s general tax
revenues provides most -- about 70% -- of the funding for this public aid.
States that fail to supplement their 30% share, lose proportionately, the
federal participation.
Medicaid has not worked uniformly well. And with federal budget
constraints, increasing tax burdens are shifting onto States, whose political
mood more often now is represented by initiatives to deny spending
139251 Social Security
increases, state’s Medicaid support is then cut in the state’s budget
processes: complicities make Balanced Budget politics impossible.
Escalating costs of Medicaid, as with all private medical insurance, has
defied inflation containment. The cost of gratuitous health care is to a
practical extent spread onto bills paid by insurance. And, most insureds’
reaction to high billings for medical care, as with fraud, is rationalized:
‘it didn’t cost me a cent; my insurance paid the bill.’
Unfortunately, medical insurance premiums must, therefore, increase,
unusually. Private insurance has provided a litany of financial mechanisms,
which offers protection by assuming personal cost, and, in this sense,
insurance has abetted the inordinate increases in health care cost, which
increases also indicate increasing inflation endemism.
A reality check of economic privileges and legal grants perpetuated
by Political Economy of private business mechanisms, reveals that
consumers of products and services are the ultimate bearers of all production
costs (On TV’s This Week, it was, I expect, because of this mechanist
systemic reality that prompted Treasury Secretary O Neil to tell a
businessmen’s group that business’ income taxes should be eliminated.).
Particularly, the cost of employer-paid private, so called, insurance plans are
ultimately repaid by returning business capital by consumers. So, in reality,
those who must use all their wages to subsist by consuming necessities,
mechanistically pay for ‘employer-paid insurance,’ that is enjoyed by the
employees who have it. Only in the sense of ‘unequal rights,’ by politically
asserting ‘consequents’ as supplanted for principles, which are irrational
fallacies, is this orthodox lament true:
‘We, with insurance, pay for the uninsured gratuitous care.’
The ‘prejudice’ of this lament ignores ‘special interest’ unequal ‘legal right’-
based privileges granted by Political Economy to them: so, when does a
legal privilege granted preempt the moral validity of ‘equal rights’?
Parrington recorded the events and circumstances that allowed Whigs to
make the Republican Party’s political economic determinism into the ‘Fairy
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES140
Godmother to business:’ holistically, necessarily taking from Paul to give
to Peter. Parrington wrote this: 132
Democrat and Whig no longer faced each other conscious of the
different ends they sought. The great party of Jefferson and Jackson
was prostrate, borne down by the odium of slavery and secession . . .
The Whig Republican was still Hamiltonian paternalistic, and the
Democrat Republican was still Jeffersonian laissez faire, and until it
was determined which wing should control the party councils there
would be only confusion. The politicians were fertile in compromises
but in nominating Lincoln and Johnson the party ventured to get
astride two horses that would not run together. To attempt to make
yoke-fellows of democratic leveling and capitalistic paternalism was
prophetic of rifts and schisms that only the passions of reconstruction
days could hold in check.
In 1865 the Republican party [the now GOP] was no other
than a war machine that had accomplished its purpose. It was a
political mongrel, without logical cohesion, and it seemed doomed to
break up as the Whig Party had broken up and the Federalist Party
had broken up. But fate was now on the side of the Whigs as it had
not been earlier. The democratic forces had lost strength from the war,
and democratic principles were in ill repute. The drift to
centralization, the enormous development of capitalism, the spirit of
exploitation, were prophetic of a changing temper that was preparing
to exalt the doctrine of manifest destiny which the Whig party stood133
sponsor for. The practical problem of the moment was to transform
the mongrel Republican party into a strong cohesive instrument, and
to accomplish that it was necessary to hold the loyalty of its
Democratic voters amongst the farmers and working-classes whilst
putting into effect its Whig program.
Under normal conditions the thing would have been
impossible, but the times were wrought up and blindly passionate and
141251 Social Security
the politicians skillful [in Plato’s words, ‘their popular truth was of
‘opinion,’ not ‘reason’]. . . The rebellion of the Independent
Republicans under Horace Greeley in 1872 was brought to nothing by
the skillful use of Grant's military prestige, and the party passed
definitely under the control of capitalism, and became such an
instrument for exploitation as Henry Clay dreamed of but could not
perfect. Under the nominal leadership of the easy-going Grant a loose
rein was given to Whiggish ambitions and the Republican party
became a political instrument worthy of the Gilded Age.
Tautologically, only democratic principles in this review qualify as
representing natural necessary antecedence, while Whiggish ambitions of the
classical Republicans imbued by opinions of manifest destiny can only
qualify as a denial of antecedent necessary principle, the affirmation of
natural consequents, or both: tautologically, the new GOP clearly politically
represented irrational fallacy.
From their respective postures, each Party argues that they best
serve the interests of the nation. Unfortunately, too little thought, and less
dedication, is given to solving the paradoxical problems caused by our macro
mechanist economy that constitutionally holistically was consecrated for to
serve all equally. Each side of our politics, in fact, has become an enterprise
as Eric Hoffer observed:134
When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in
their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous
stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in
possessing and preserving the present. It ceases to be a movement and
becomes an enterprise.
And prominently, our holistic macro-economy is ignored because the
‘special interest’ micro political desires of affluence are to sustain the
American System’s mechanist paternalism that has government expending
prime efforts to open international economic markets to them: simply ever
expanding American System paternalism, emanating from the Whiggish
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES142
designed Gilded Age federal ‘poker game’ that paradoxically leaves hoards
on the sidelines of our nation’s economic progress and many more losers
clinging on without political standing, and, therefore, without government’s
representation -- paradoxically it is tyranny of the masses.
‘American System,’ political economy referenced ideas credited to Henry
Clay of the Jacksonian era. Parrington wrote this:135
The spirit of Henry Clay survived his death and his followers were
everywhere in the land. The plain citizen who wanted a slice of the
rich prairie land of Iowa or Kansas, with a railway convenient to his
homestead, had learned to look to the government for a gift, and if he
got his quarter section and his transportation he was careless about
what the other fellow got. A little more or less could make no
difference to a country inexhaustible in resources [This, we can no
longer afford to believe]. America belonged to the American people
and not to the government, and resources in private hands paid taxes
and increased the national wealth. [Those of paternal grants must
recompense what organically was necessarily taken from others: taxes
paid by those of paternal grants are insufficient to fulfill this organic
responsibility!]
Parrington had previously described how political philosophy was
adapted to sponsor business interests and as Eric Hoffer has observed, to
make politics an enterprise:136
Citizens had saved the government in the trying days that were past; it
was only fair in return that government should aid the patriotic citizen
in the necessary work of developing national resources. It was
paternalism as understood by speculators and subsidy-hunters, but
was it not a part of the great American System that was to make the
country rich and self-sufficient? The American System had been
talked of for forty years; it had slowly got on its feet in pre-war days
despite the stubborn planter opposition; now at last it had fairly come
into it own. The time was ripe for the Republican party to become a
143251 Social Security
So, for which, Peter or Paul, was the Constitution created: can democracy'
exist when equality is not meted by economic policy?
fairy godmother to the millions of Beriah Sellerses throughout the
North and the West.
Despite the evolution which gave our nation determinist mechanism-based
economic paternalism via ‘The American System of Economy,’ truth about
‘covert shadows instead of truthful reality’ remain as dogma:
However attractive the disguises it may assume, it is in essence the
logical creed of the profit philosophy. It is the expression in politics
of the acquisitive instinct and it assumes as the greatest good the
shaping of public policy to promote private interests. It asserts that it
is a duty of the state to help its citizens to make money, and it
conceives of the political state as a useful instrument for effective
exploitation. How otherwise? The public good cannot be served
apart from business interests for business interests are the public good
and in serving business the state is serving society. Every bodys eggs
are in the basket and they must not be broken. For a capitalistic
society Whiggery is the only rational politics, for it exalts the profit-
motive as the sole object of parliamentary concern. Government has
only to wave its wand and fairy gifts descend upon business like the
golden sands of Pactolus. It graciously bestows its tariffs and
subsidies, and streams of wealth flow into private wells. [Introducing
his thought, Parrington wrote this: Whiggery springs up as naturally
as pigweed in a garden.]
[But there is a fly in the Whiggish honey]
But unhappily there is a fly in the Whiggish honey. In a
competitive order, government is forced to make its choices. It
cannot serve both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it must'
take away with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalism
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES144
in the common interest degenerates in practice into legalized
favoritism. Governmental gifts go to the largest investments. Lesser
interests are sacrificed to greater interests and Whiggery comes finally
to serve [in momos and not physis] the lords of the earth without
whose good will the wheels of business will not turn. To him that
hath shall be given. If the few do not prosper the many will starve,
and if the many have bread who would begrudge the few their
abundance? In Whiggery [which home is with GOP politics] is the
fulfillment of the Scriptures.
Holistic organic systems, which constitutionally are any U.S. state or nation,
which practices paternal, i.e, ‘legalized favoritism,’ most probably, also
fallaciously denies any mechanist nexus to the complementary
impoverishment. This sort of rational blindness is a result of political
conflations of human essence to belief in unitary materialism: 137
Men are regarded by the Idealists as innately, though imperfectly,
moral in their essential, nondualistic natures. This leads, as we shall
see, to a strangely Hobbesian view of the State as possessing the
right and duty to perfect the ego’s moral imperfection by the exercise
of its authority.
[In] prenational Prussia under Frederick the Great. Christian
theology assumed a [unitary] merger with the divine after this life;
Hegel posits such a merger here on earth -- with history and the
collectivity he terms the state.Craig Thomas also wrote this about the Idealists who influenced Hegel’s
unitary materialist view:
The principal Idealists -- Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel -- sought,
above all else, a unitary explanation of reality, some essence behind
all appearance -- in Kant’s terminology, a ‘common’ and universal
noumenon, and in the poet Hölderlin’s description, the ‘spirit that is
in everything’ [ontologism]. They were [expedient idealist]
systemizers, assuming that there could be discovered some essential
145251 Social Security
explanation of all experience, knowledge, and reality, and it was
largely on this basis that they objected, Fichte most immediately and
systematically, to Kant’s division between self and the world, which
[they as irrationally contended] for Kant could be no more than a
world of appearances. To achieve the healing of [Kant’s] dualism the
Idealists posited, in Fichte’s theory most succinctly, the ego as the
‘ground of experience.’ It was not the rational ego of Kant [Plato and
Descartes] nor the passive receptor of the empiricists but what Fichte
describes as the ‘active ego,’ inextricably intermingled with reality,
imposing itself upon the world of experience, to a degree ‘making’
the world of experience in its own image. [In this instance, the principle
Idealists conflated even God’s antecedence to comply with the unitary
materialism, of their nomos-based reality, to which Nietzsche then cried out,
“we have killed God!”] As Fichte claims in ‘The Vocation of Man’ of
1792, ‘Not to KNOW but to DO, is the vocation of Man.’ For Fichte
(1762- 1814), there were only two possible responses to the world,
that of the realist, or ‘dogmatist’ in his terminology, and that of the
idealist. The philosopher’s response, more profound than that of the
ordinary man, is idealist, while realism remains the province of non-
philosophical response to an understanding of the world.
Thinking is no longer reflection, it is experience. Also,
because of this, there can be no kind of reality that is distinct or
separated from the ego that experiences it. Whereas empiricism
posits, at least by implication, a ‘real’ world that is experienced, the
Idealists assumed no distinction between the subject of the
experiencing agent and the objective world being experienced. [Which came first, the egg or the chicken, is of no
consequence to this materialist conservative idealism that compounds the
issue rather than reasoning to find answers; the dogmatic focus is then
shifted onto the neatness of confusion.]
Further, Fichte and Schelling assumed that the ego was
innately a moral agent, again contrary to Kant’s conception of the
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES146
As Hamilton observed: success knows no ethics! (But also this lac of''
ethics also shows the deficient insight in virtue and good of truth and right.)
effort of moral duty for the rational being, the necessity to achieve
the categorical imperative [of ‘do unto others . . .’] in making any
moral decision or taking any moral action. Men are regarded by the
Idealists as innately, though imperfectly, moral in their essential,
nondualistic natures. This leads, as we shall see, to a strangely
Hobbesian view of the State as possessing the right and duty to
perfect the ego’s moral imperfection by the exercise of its authority. Take a moment to review the Social Security Tax Rates. Look
closely at changes made in 1984 when the SS surplus taxes began. This SS
Tax legislation, completed in 1983, signed into law in 1984!
During the 1980's, SS contribution tax rates more than doubled. Political
economy’s inflation endemism was a greater cause of this increase. Political
rhetoric, as conflated to unitary materialism, blamed SS for the high inflation
rates. And irrational rhetoric is opinion that defies reason: tautologically''
fiducial ‘trueness’ is, however, capable to evaluate and settle the political
falsity of rhetoric. And, if the thesis set forth by Parrington on the previous
page is correct (I believe it is), the GOP’s politics is incapable of anything
but dogmatic political rhetoric, which, therefore, cannot know logical truth.
The payroll tax (OASDHI) funds three separate trusts: OASI, DI, and HI.
Employers match the employee's payroll tax (self-employed individuals must
pay both the employee's tax and the employer's matching tax). Social
Security began in 1936 with OAI (Old Age Insurance). Survivors Insurance,
SI, was added in 1940 and Disability Insurance, DI, in 1956. Separate
accountings are maintained for OASI and DI, but for simplicity the rates of
taxation are bundled with inflation effects of benefit costs.
The primary cause of increasing SS benefits cost is neither the
politically influenced expansion into social welfare nor higher rates and
wage caps that are fundamental to increased contribution tax rates. The
main culprit of increasing SS benefits cost, and, therefore, the
147251 Social Security
contribution tax rates, is inflation’s mechanist endemism. Responsibility
for inflation’s endemism is squarely government’s. Not Social Security’s!
The requirement that all federal employees must now participate in
Social Security and pay contribution-taxes greatly expanded the
contribution-tax base. This expansion, in the short term, furnishes a large
infusion of revenue to SS until the retired complement of this new group
matures to also become full SS beneficiaries. However, this expansion does
nothing to solve the main problem: INFLATION!
The purchasing power of the dollar, since 1950, has lost value so
much that inflation must be separated to accomplish meaningful economic
analysis. Take away inflation and a far different wage-scenario is revealed:
most important, average family income declined from a peak reached in
the late 70's. Inflation was not caused by SS and, therefore, SS contribution
taxes should not be burdened because of it.
Inflation, as the indices of consumer prices (CPI) indicate, is the
primary factor of SS cost increase. One dollar in 1950 has an equivalent
purchase value of $5.00 in 1988. But five times is but a fraction of 76.5
times that SS contribution tax indices have increased to in 1990. With
inflation set aside, the main cause of increase is with inordinate start-up costs
of the maturing SS system. But, the conflated unitary materialist Whiggish
deontological politics prefers to compound one causal increase by the other
(the rates of inflation then are multiplied by rates of increase due to the
maturing SS system). This fallacy has resulted in politics based on
appearances of inordinate SS systemic inflation that does not, did not, and
cannot exist. Worse, the 76.5 times tax bite was put onto low necessary
wages that were required simply to subside: and sans inflation, the politics of
the capitalist ‘iron cage of wages’ has succeeded to deny all real inflation
neutral wage growth.
CONSUMER PRICE INDICES138
YEAR ALL ITEMS MEDICAL CARE
1950 base = 1.00 base = 1.00
1960 1.23 1.47
1970 1.61 2.25
1977 2.52 3.77
1980 3.43 4.98
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES148
YEAR ALL ITEMS MEDICAL CARE
1984 4.31 7.07
1988 5.0 NA
(Inflation’s endemism has effected medical care far more than SS; and the
greatest part of this difference is related to systemic fraud, which mostly is
perpetrated by medical professionals, quite similarly as political economy is
effected by mechanist conservative greed.)
Not available when this research was concluded, medical costs have
continued to increase far beyond the CPI, and this anomaly is in part
explained by a rather common necessity to put the cost of unpaid gratuitous
care onto paid insured care. Another part is caused by Political Economy’s
unequal rights doctrine that choosing mechanism, denies the holistic,
teleological nature of economy. Affluence profits from inflation: for
workers, however, compounded effects of inflation has politically been
assigned to the SS contribution-tax burden: only those with incomes, which
allow discretionary spending, has money to invest for to gain from the
inflation effect on economy: George P. Brockway’s inflation producing
‘bankers COLA’ works for them. *
* Brockway’s book documents the deontological Political Economy
endowed unequal rights advantage that bankers and investment counselors
enjoy (which profits usually are the greatest): added to the rate of interest
banks pay for renting money they loan, is the Bankers COLA. What was
once around 3% is now what political economy will allow.
With the new financial services approach, insurance has merged
paternalist Political Economy rights of banking with those allowed in cases
of insurance and annuity products, which they both now offer. For instance,
the latest insurance annuity product guarantees a flat rate of return from a
contract that allows for the company to invest the premium in mutual funds
(endemic pernicious pitfalls exist here which consumers usually are not
aware of). Of course the banker’s COLA applies in both instances and pays
the investment brokers commissions. Because endemic inflation is
ubiquitous, efforts to control it are made difficult.
149251 Social Security
The SS Tax Law of 1984 unreasonably began the collections of so called SS
surplus. If this SS surplus has made SS into a general revenue tax collector
(for government to spend at will), inflation has compounded the heavy
burden of paying the contribution taxes of our nation's most regressive tax
system: all average wage increases are held below the apperance of growth
due to inflation. Irrationally the effects of the ‘84 SS rate increases to collect
SS surplus has been compounded by the wage-earner contribution tax
burden. This compounded tax burden was put upon the lowest quintile of
wage-earners, severely restricting, even violating their natural subsistence
requirements. This ‘84 SS law violated a fundamental natural principle of
freedom and right:
Bread shall not be taken from the mouth of labor!
The following graph demonstrates fundamental unfairness in the distribution
of income, which unfairness applied in the matter of the SS Tax Law of
1984. It demonstrates how mechanistically applied inflation’s endemism has
acted: wages touted as merit increases and position promotions had the
appearance of increasing economic status but in reality, holistically, had lost
economic value. SS tax rates that appeared low (because half was paid by
employers) were, as
regards subsistence
needs, much more
burdensome than were
the highest income tax
rates on affluence. And
as Brockway has
observed, the ‘Bankers’
COLA’ only kicks in to
aid the unearned
incomes of those in the
upper quintiles of
income distribution. It
portrays inflation’s
effects more than
growth, as John Maynard Keynes had warned that it would: 139
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES150
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,
secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their
citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process
engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is
able to diagnose. Keynes
However, as V. L. Parrington had described the American System of Political
Economy, inflation was a false but brilliant addition allied to Whiggish
mercantilism, which mechanistically returned as capital:
a curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow and divide the milk
among those who supervised the milking. [greatly aided by fiat money
infusions, during the 1980s, investment bankers became corporate takeover
pirates: taking $ billions of legalized booty ]140
The important fact here is the deliberate classical rejection of Adam Smith’s
wealth: goods and services circulated to the benefit of ‘all’ in society.
Instead ubiquitous fiat income, as distributed in the graph, is now
fallaciously asserted as wealth’s equivalent. As David Callahan, in The
Moral Center had quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies, “We can
have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few or we can have democracy.
But we cannot have both.”
Unearned income
If we could strip away the industries of the military-industrial-complex, we
would find that our political economy’s fiat money has facilitated far more
exchange than its capital based production of wealth (according to Smith’s
original economic definition). Despite Smith's postulated economy, we now
define new wealth as government’s accumulated procurement of war
implements and machinery, the maintenance of armies, mechanist
bureaucracies (including private businesses), by usury and myriad other
sources of ‘unearned’ income, contemporary to our federally sponsored
American Plan of political economy. I suggest, our paternal political
151251 Social Security
economy has for too long allowed leveraged ‘wealth’ (Smith's postulation),
by creative assertions that unearned and often unaccounted money hoards are
the equivalent of ‘wealth.’ *
* By magical creative means, unearned money is now routinely generated
by processes which Keynes had described as secretly and unobserved
confiscations: by socializing the ownership of future production of goods
and services (as with owning stocks, bonds, and commodities futures).
How, for instance, William Rockefeller gained a large ‘money hoard’ (which
was considered the equivalent of ‘wealth’) by purchasing Anaconda Copper
Corp. with a conditional check (Then immediately he floated a new public
stock offering to cover the check and personally gain a substantial cash
reward). More recently, money hoards amounting to $15 million -- units of
unearned value ‘in God we trust’ -- taken at different times and
circumstances each by George Bush, the father, and George W. Bush, the
son. And, while they represent small fish in Political Economy‘s big pond
of myriad legal and illegal mediums of unearned inflation prone and
privatized ‘money hoarding,’ all are forms of futures ownership economic
chicanery, of which, according to George P. Brockway, the ‘bankers COLA’
represents inflations greatest source. Keynes had observed myriad other141
sources when in 1920 he wrote this:142
“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate,
secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their
citizens. There is no subtler. No surer means of overturning the
existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process
engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is
able to diagnose.” -- John Maynard Keynes --
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920
Roger Sherman’s ‘A Caveat Against Injustice’ is on my desk to remind
me of inflation’s evils: of fluctuating privatized values of our floating futures
Mediums of Exchange. Sherman had argued hard to secure the
constitutional provision for a non fluctuating value standard. The
Constitution’s instruction to Congress is Article I Section 8:
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES
. . . to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,
and fix the standards of weights and measures.
Legally causally inflation is bad. Its illegal side is maybe worse:143
Banks wash billions in dirty laundry
Washington -- The failure of U.S. banks and regulators to track
transactions with foreign banks enables criminals to route billions of
dollars from drug sales, Internet gambling, tax evasion or other illegal
activities into the United States each year, a new Senate subcommittee
report concludes.
Althouth regulators have prodded U.S. banks in recent years to
bolster their efforts to control money laundering through individual
accounts, the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations found
banks and regulators have been lax in applying similar standards to
correspondent banking, in which foreign banks use U.S. banks to
perform wire transfers and other transactions.
The subcommittee’s report, which concludes a yearlong
investigation, will be made public today. Regulators and bankers
familiar with the inquiry say it’s the first comprehensive look at this
aspect of banking and how it facilitates money laundering.
“Inattention and disinterest by U.S. banks in screening the
foreign banks they take in as clients have allowed rogue foreign banks
and their criminal clients to carry on money laundering and other
criminal activity in the United States and to benefit from the
protections afforded by the safety and soundness of the U.S. banking
industry,” said Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on
the subcommittee.
The subcommittee launched its investigation after a Russian
money-laundering scandal erupted at Bank of New York 18 months
ago. It examined a number of giant, well known banks, including
Bank of America, Citygroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. And First
Union. . . .
153251 Social Security
Money laundering, which the Clinton administration declared
a national security threat, is the act of concealing the source of funds
obtained from an illegal activity. An estimated $1 trillion is
laundered each year -- about half of it, or $500 billion , through the
United States, according to the report. . . All this is evident in the fact that the dollar’s value today compares to a few
pennies of a century ago. Much of the excess corporate capital of the '80s --
hundreds of billions -- was seized by modern acts of Whiggish piracy (as
previously described as money hoarding by Rockefeller and the Bushs’):
captivating by creative purchasing, then restructuring and downsizing the
raided corporate entities, and finally refloating new public offerings.
Relatively dormant accumulated corporate capital was seized, then converted
to privatized money hoards (confronted retroactively from a twenty first
century economic perspective, regulators had allowed the nation’s economic
life blood to be seized by this creative form of piracy, which they summarily
excused because corporate debt had replaced it).
Utilizing computer technology, investment bankers (who’s access to
the nation’s fiat money creation is at lowest interest rates) consorted to
purchase all the corporate stock via short term bank loans, then as sole stock
owner consortiums, enforced restructuring and privatized money hoarding:
now as the closed corporate owners, by arranging long term corporate debt to
finance ongoing productions, they freed the corporate capital accumulations
for distribution to the closed stock owner-consortiums, and then divided the
cash hoards among themselves. Then, sometime later, they issued new stock
offerings to the public to retire the short term bank loans from which they
had purchased the original stock. All corporate entities considered for such
buy-outs were ‘cash cows’ ready for ‘milking’ by the American System’s
‘curiously ingenious scheme to milk the cow and divide the milk among
those who superintended the milking,’ as Parrington had observed. The
investment banker, KKR, was ranked higher than GM on the auditor’s list of
clients.
. . . .
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES154
We must ask and answer: should investment bank consortiums be allowed to
commandeer money that the nation explicitly ‘coined’ to exchange goods
and services produced, for to purchase as if a commodity, the corporate
producers of the nation’s goods and services? : making licensed fictitious
corporate entities the investment banker’s exclusive commodity? Or does
this fiducial breach of political economy’s intended Banking authorization,
make the leveraged buyout practice a common act of piracy? And, to
what end does it lead? 144
The right to property is defined as an essential or basic right for the
purpose of defining the sovereignty of the individual and the necessity
to guarantee his rights and property 'against' others, 'not' so as to
allow him to acquire, to control, to achieve domination through
landed property. *
* We should note the legal disparity between investment banking that,
analogous to ‘property,’ considers ‘corporations’ a commodity, and the
Supreme Court’s decision that analogous to ‘human property,’ considered
Bill of Rights protections to corporate fictitious legal persons of far more
legal force than protections assured to humans are given. John Locke’s
‘property of person,’ is thereby violated:
----Every Man has a 'Property' in his own 'Person.'
----Men living together 'according to reason' are properly in the 'State
of Nature.'
----No individual has a right or power over the life of another.
----Force without Right, upon a man's person, makes a State of War. .
----It is a 'right,' a possession of each individual which must be
protected together with his other freedoms, protected from others who
are in a 'State of War' against the individual . . .
---- He that in the State of Nature, would take away the Freedom,
that belongs to anyone in that State, must necessarily be supposed to
have a design to take away everything else, that 'Freedom' being the
foundation of all. ..
155251 Social Security
Brockway, portrayed property as intrinsically related to rights and concluded
that economics must eventually weigh equities in rights to be more valuable
than what Smith called equities in material hoards.
*********
The Industrial Age is giving way to another less secure age and society's
need to formalize insurance to provide Sustenance Security to all citizens
who find themselves in need through circumstances which are beyond their
own making is becoming increasingly necessary. *
* Fed Chairman Greenspan on 5/21/’03 told Senators that unemployment
insurance must be short in duration to give incentive to unemployed’s to
actively find work. He admitted that unemployment insurance was not
designed to cure unemployment: inferring that causal reasons for long-term
unemployment are not related (i.e., unemployment is not the employer’s
problem). The employee’s deontological economic duties to find and keep
employment, intrinsic of the American System’s causal mechanisms, as
compared to the teleological purpose of earning wages is clearly drawn. So,
answer whether or not economic mechanisms are of the people, for the
people or by the people? They surely are not! Organic mechanisms are of,
for, and by organic ideology, are often corporate forms of this. And as
surely, mechanisms were not constitutionally addressed and consented to?
My compulsion with writing about this arises from the same rational
argument from which SS came to be: a sense suggesting that Sustenance
Security is as necessary and must find political support: with politics in
which the spiritual sense of physis and teleology is equally real and practical
as ideological organic deontology is (Fictions are not real and should not
legally be made the equal of real). Sustenance Security should replace all
welfare systems, but must not become an extension of SS: the welfare
burdens put onto SS might then be transferred to the social usage-based
Sustenance Security Insurance.
And, with Sustenance Security, infusing newly printed fiat money to
the economy, the purpose of which serves utility with the exchange of goods
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES156
and services, might then be directly routed to effect teleological alternatives
to the existing Fed system of discounted loans to banks, which then fund
loans to investment bank consortiums established to effect corporate
buyouts, for instance. Banks no longer need government’s paternalism that
is mis-usable in this manner. While printing money is government’s
constitutional function. And antecedently, government wholly sustains the
Federal Reserve’s government function, government was not conceived for
to sustain any particular paternal utility. Particularly, government should not
be the paternal gardian, which mechanistically disadvantages individuals.
An alternative to these investment banker acts, is to require
government to distribute printed fiat money directly to impoverished
individuals who are sure to spend it to subsist: no good or essential reason
exists not to distribute all newly printed fiat money to fund necessary
economically-beneficial consumption, thereby putting the distribution of
goods, services, and education where it is most needed:145
The fundamental weakness of the 1920s prosperity was not that
Americans were profligate, spending too much and saving too little,
but the opposite. "We did not as a nation consume more than we
produced--far from it," Eccles declared. "We were excessively
thrifty." The maldistribution of incomes guaranteed that millions of
potential consumers--workers, farmers, everyone who did not earn
enough to join the ranks of accumulating wealth--would eventually
exhaust their purchasing power. "While the national income rose to
high levels," Eccles explained, "it was so distributed that the incomes
of the majority were entirely inadequate and business activity was
sustained only by a rapid and unsound increase in the private debt
structure, including ever-increasing installment buying of consumption
goods." When the consumers' chips were gone, when they could no
longer borrow or buy things, the producers would naturally curtail
their production of goods too. More factories were closed; more
people lost their incomes. The game was over.
157251 Social Security
For Eccles, it did not matter greatly who owned wealth or how
much they owned. Money itself was neutral as an economic force--
positive if it was put into transactions and investment, harmful if it was
hoarded in idle savings. What mattered was that people kept their
money moving.
Putting money into the direct control of citizens with need, and making
banking an equal service to these real subsistence consumers. Whereas as
now, fiat money loans are misused by banking consortiums (an economically
devastating form of monopoly, Adam Smith would say) to arrange corporate
takeovers and economic restructuring.
Fiat money would then flow upward rather than as crumbs falling
from the tables of the overlords: It would have teleology rather than be of
service to the mechanist economic deontological advantage that Brockway
called the ‘bankers’ COLA.’ Here, there is opportunity for installing an
oppositely oriented economic mechanism compromise.
Real income increased in the '50s and '60s, reached a high in the
'70s, then declined, approximating in 1983 the purchasing value achieved in
1965. Since 1983, real income has not increased appreciably (while I have
not reviewed this since 1988, not much improvement was achieved, until
1992 and minimum wage increases).
MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME 146
CURRENT INFLATION CONSTANT
YEAR DOLLARS FACTOR DOLLARS
1950 $3,319 4.31 $14,305
1960 5,620 3.5 19,692
1970 9,867 2.68 26,444
1977 16,009 1.71 27,375
1983 24,580 1.00 24,580
With inflation, an increasing worker population, and wages increasing
accordingly, it is surely expected that total non-government employee wages
rose at an unprecedented pace. They did:
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES158
1965 1984 Increase
inflation index 94.5 310 3.28147
Tot. Wages (billions) $292.1 $1,454.2 4.98148
Employed (millions) 71.1 105 1.48
Of the 4.98 total wages increase, 3.21 of it was due to inflation, and 1.48 due
to population increase (note that employment counts do not relate to work
force population counts). And this real wage increase scenario is compatible
with real wages increasing until 1965, then remaining flat. Density factors --
those working as a proportion of the available (male-female) worker popula-
tion -- are respectively .66 and .75. More often heard these days is the lament
that two salaries are now necessary. And these density factors substantiate
the reason for lament: The income of working mothers is now required to
achieve an equivalent constant dollar wage value that existed in the 60's.
This economic result reflects poorly on the conventional mechanist
deontology that unrealistically and irrationally holds wages low while
winking at inflationary profit and salary abundances taken at the top. Real
wages did not keep pace: and inflation is The American System’s pernicious
wage-earner tax that systemically takes from wage-earners to compensate for
the vastly increasing profits that are taken.
Had wages in 2001 kept pace with inflation, median wage-earned
income would have been $89,852.00. The 2000 reported median income for
white males (the highest cited income group) is far short of inflation’s pace:
it was $29,696. For white females, it was more anemic: $16,190. And,
relatively still worse for minority races as blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
Wage-earners became a determined economic underclass of the
American System’s political economy: only the mechanist upper-caste of
owner-superintendents was rewarded by the American System’s
determinism. These mechanist rewards distinguish what is commonly
referred to as the American Dream.
159251 Social Security
Despite this sad economic irrationalism resulted median income, the
Whiggish deontological government administration’s explanation, “because
it is their money,” returned $ 1.3 trillion of the revenue taxes collected from
those that inflation had benefited in 2001 (not to those of median or lower
income). Government repeated this nefarious deontology again in 2002 --
2007 --? , with annual federal deficits up to $ 500 billion.
Natural Causal Realities require natural Principle: the logical keys
of which are ‘true’ antecedence, necessity and coherence.
Therefore, testing for tautological reason and truth is necessary. 149
By a tautology we mean a statement, which has the truth value ‘true’
for all possible truth values of its components. . . .
Compound statements with all truth values ‘true’ are called
tautologies and represent valid argument forms. The implication
formed by the conjunction of all the premises as the antecedent and
the conclusion as the consequent that form a valid argument form,
will always result in a tautology. Testing compound statements to see
whether they are tautologies is thus equivalent to testing an
argument for validity.
John N. Fujii gave three classical valid arguments (a, b, and c) and
two invalid arguments (d, and e) in which P = compound premises,
Q = consequent, - = denial, � = therefore.
(a) Modus ponens (b) modus tollens (c) hypothetical syllogism
P 6 Q
P
� Q
P 6 Q
- Q
�- P
P 6 Q
Q 6 R
� P 6 R
250-260 SS: VIRTUES and VICES160
It is government paternalism that assigns inflation’s endemism, as measured by the'
CPI, to the contribution taxes of Social Security.
(d): invalid classical argument
that ‘affirms the consequent.’
P 6 Q
Q
� P
(e): invalid classical argument
that ‘denies the antecedent.’
P 6 Q
- P
� - Q
(d) Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, and (e) Fallacy of Denying the
Antecedent, Fujii warned, are irrational argument forms.
[By author’s definition, each P and Q is a statement that when written in the
‘if,’ ‘then,’ compound statement format, the ‘if’ statement is the antecedent,
and the ‘then’ statement is the consequent.]
Unanchored, therefore, unreasoned, deficient truth is the
quintessence of politics, which too often not only lacks commonly
understood definition, it begs for the natural axiomatic principles of
noumenon: Increasingly, anchored to dogmatic prejudice rather than to
principles of reasoned-noumenon, it is nothing more than logic-deficient
rhetoric, calumnious opinion, that of design appeals to a dogma-afflicted
class of sycophantic believers. Science look-a-likes, 150
Humanists - philosophers, theologians, historians, literary critics [and
judicial officers particularly] -- have to worry about whether they are
being scientific - whether they are entitled to think of their
conclusions, no matter how carefully argued, as worthy of the term
‘true.’ Richard Rorty
Mechanistically, as effected by government administered economic
paternalism (mostly inflation’s endemism) , ‘Peter’ now owes ‘Paul’ far'
more than $ 3 trillion in 2000, growing to $ 10 trillion by 2010.
161ENDNOTES
1 Edited by T. Honderich, THE OXFORD COMPANION TO
PHILOSOPHY (Oxford Press, 1995) 194
2 V. L Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol II, 197-98
3 Reported on national TV as 2003 ended. Think about it. $3 of every $4
accounted as the nation’s GDP during the twentieth century representedinflation. Real net growth was, therefore, only about 1 percent. Inflation’sendemism was directly cost accounted to prices that consumers paid forgoods and services. Consumers, therefore, became the only owners ofinflation. All unearned income, much of which had created inflation, gota free ride. And organic profits (greater than the sum of inflation andgrowth) were classically construed to belong exclusively to ‘businessowners.’
4 The paradoxical companion of taking profits, which upsets static
economic circular flow’s economic balance, is the Bankers’ COLA, G. P.Brockway charged was inflation endemism’s primary cause?
5 Dictionary, 1196
6 Thomas, 264-265
7 Dictionary, 1516
8 G. P. Brockway, The End of Economic Man (Cornelia & Michael Bessie
Books, 1991) 91 (from Smith, Wealth. 6) : Discretionary money, whichtranscends subsistence, is classically regarded the same as property andwealth. And the ubiquitous nature of money is violated.
9 The World Almanac, 1994, 957-958
10 The World Almanac 2002 (New York Times) 385
11 World Almanac 1986, 257
12 Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (1978) 457
13 World Almanac 2002, 103
14 Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac 2004, 847: While median family
income is not shown here, the median male income w compatible educationin 2000 in ($) thousands 40, and the female income is 29. Two incomes arenow required to keep pace with inflation.
15 D. Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 115
16 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (Touchstone, 1986) 293
162 ENDNOTES
17 Encyclopedia, Vol. 15, 348
18 L.P. Pojman, Philosophy, The Wuest for Truth (Wadsworth, 1989) 152
19 J. N. Fugii, Introduction to the elements of Mathematics (J. Wiley &
Sons, 1961) 45
20 Parrington, Vol. I, 300-301
21 Parrington, Volume Two, Winds . . ., 297
22 Parrington., Vol. I, 70
23 Heilbroner, 68-70
24 E. K. Hunt, PROPERTY AND PROPHETS (Harper and Row, 1990)
123
25 Hunt, 132
26 Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 647
27 Dictionary, 1293
28 World Book Dictionary (1965) 1293
29 Parrington, Vol II, 197-98
30 Brockway, 91 (from Smith, Wealth. 6)
31 Parrington, Vol. I, 171-175
32 Max Weber’s “iron Cage” that Malthus had called the “iron Law”?
33 Parrington, Vol. I, p. 333-35
34 Bob Deans (Cox news service), Third year is typically tough, Las
Vegas Review Journal October 5, 2003, included these questions: Whywere 35 million Americans living in poverty last year -- about 1.4 millionmore than the year before -- while the number of people without healthinsurance rose by 2.4 million to reach 44 million? And, what exactly is theplan for confronting the massive federal budget deficit?
35 Do our enemies view our government in this manner? If so, is our
tyranny the cause of foreign terrorism directed at us?
36 Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982), 142
37 Parrington; Vol. III, p. 23-25.
38 Parrington; Vol. III, p. 23-25.
163ENDNOTES
39 Parrington, Vol. III, 20 - 23
40 Belief in the inevitable territorial expansion to encompass all of North
America. First argued in the 1840s: revived during and after the Spanish-American War. It is of the same philosophy as Dollar Diplomacy, uponwhich Captains of American enterprise expanded their exploitations beyondthe nation’s borders: driving the expansion of the nation’s Foreign Policy.Preemption is also of this philosophy.
41 T. Honderich (editor), The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford,
1995), 707
42 E. S. Bates, The Bible (Simon and Schuster, 1993) xii
43 D. Ravitch (editor), Speech to the Second Virginia Convention,
American Reader (Harper Colins, 1990) 18
44 Diaglott’s Heb. 11:1 (Diaglott is an original Greek translation)
45 L. Pojman, Philosophy, The Quest For Truth (Wadsworth, ‘89) 25
46 Pojman, 49
47 Diaglott’s Heb. 11:1 (Diaglott is an original Greek translation)
48 Diaglott, 312
Dr. A. Clarke remarks, : “[Logos] should be left untranslated for the verysame reason why the names Jesus and Christ are left untranslated.”
49 Brockway, 4
50 Mechanist, World Book (1965) Vol. 13, 298
51 G. R. Morrow, Plato and the Law of Nature, in Essays in Political
Theory Presented to George H. Sabine, Milton R. Konvitz and Arthur E.Murphy, eds. (Ithica, N.Y. :Cornell University Press, 1948) 20-25, 28-29
52 World Book, Vol. 9, 203
53 V. L Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol II, 197-98
54 Bates, xii
55 I John
56 R. L Hielbroner, Worldly Philosophers (Touchstone, 1986) 27 & 53
57 E. K. Hunt, 12
58 See E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon,
1988)
164 ENDNOTES
59 K. Day (The Washington Post), Banks wash billions inf dirty laundry,
Las Vegas-Review Journal, February 5, 2001
60 Parrington, Vol. II, 197-98
61 Romans 7: 15
62 Parrington, Vol. I, 66-71
63 Parrington, Vol. I, 299
64 Pojman, 354
65 A. Satariano, Method to set rates debated (Critics say using credit
reports to establish risk level is an underhanded way to increase rates), LasVegas Review Journal, December 2, 2002
66 Heilbroner, 129
67 Parrington, Volume Two, Winds . . ., 297
68 Pojman, 99 (Cartesian Theory of Knowledge)
69 Pojman, 340-41(The Ethics of Virtue)
70 Pojman, 152
71 S. Thomma, Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 29, 1995 Las Vegas
Review Journal
72 H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (Garden City, 1961) 426-27
73 World Book Encyclopedia, Vol. 13, 326: Mennonites base their beliefs
on the New Testament, particularly Christs sermon on the Mount.
74 Pojman, 471 (Reflections on Suffering)
75 J. Gleick, Chaos, Making a New Science (Penguin Books, 1987)
76 St Matthew 19:14
77 Regarding outward-turning, see R. Hughes, Culture of Complaint, The
Fraying of America (Oxford Press, 1993) 10
78 Pojman, 103 (Cartesian Theory of Knowledge)
79 The World Book Encyclopedia Dictionary, 1965,
80 The New Dictionary of Thoughts, A Cyclopedia of Quotations, Standard
Book Company, 1955, 315
81 Pojman, 2
165ENDNOTES
82 New Dictionary of Thoughts, 662
83 E. K. Hunt, 12
84 Thomas, 264-265
85 John Quincy Adams, Publicola, Columbian Centinel of Boston, June 8
to July 27, 1791 (as reprinted in Main Currents . . ., Parrington, p 325)
86 World Book Encyclopedia (1965) Vol. 14, 330
87 R. Hughes, Culture of Complaint, The Fraying of America (Oxford
Press, 1993) 10
88 Heilbroner, 302
89 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1978, 8
90 The Associated Press, The Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1993
91 Reported on national TV as 2003 ended. Think about it. $3 of every $4
accounted as the nation’s GDP during the twentieth century representedinflation. Real net growth was only about 1 percent. Inflation’s endemismwas directly cost accounted to prices that consumers paid for goods andservices. Consumers, therefore, became the only owners of inflation. Allunearned income, much of which had created inflation, got a free ride. Andorganic profits (which were greater than the sum of inflation and growth)were classically construed to belong exclusively to ‘business owners.’
92 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
93 Brockway, 193
94 R. L. Heilbroner, 293
95 Heilbroner, 72
96 Parrington, Vol. III, 21
97 Brockway points to the orthodox notion of rights and declares:
There is no right that capitalists claim, that equally cannot beclaimed by labor.He asserts. Classical orthodoxy gave legal advantages to capitalists:
98 J. M. Keynes,‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ 1920
99 Parrington, Vol. II, 197-98
100 The World Almanac, 1994, 957-958
166 ENDNOTES
101 The World Almanac 2002 (New York Times) 385
102 World Almanac 1986, 257
103 Reported on national TV as 2003 ended. Think about it. $3 of every
$4 accounted as the nation’s GDP during the twentieth century representedinflation. Real net growth was only about 1 percent. Inflation’s endemismwas directly cost accounted to prices that consumers paid for goods andservices. Consumers, therefore, became the only owners of inflation. Allunearned income, much of which had created inflation, got a free ride. Andorganic profits (which were greater than the sum of inflation and growth)were classically construed to belong exclusively to ‘business owners.’
104 Parrington astutely recognized that government’s paternalist grants to
“Peter” required the equal taking from “Paul.” (See quote on p 86-87)
105 Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (1978) 457
106 World Almanac 2002, 103
107 D. Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 115
108 R. L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (Touchstone, 1986) 293
109 Encyclopedia, Vol. 15, 348
110 Pojman, 152
111 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (As furnished by Shelby Steele in his
essay The New ty), Harpers Magazine, July, 1992
112 Letter to H. L. Prince, April 6, 1859, in Works, Vol. V, pp. 125-126
113 Heilbroner, 293
114 Brockway, 91 (from Smith, Wealth. 6)
115 Heilbroner, 235-36
116 Heilbroner, 293
117 Brockway, 4
118 Parrington, Vol. II, 78
119 Parrington, Vol. II, 66
120 Heilbroner, 14
121 World Book Dictionary, 1965, 976
167ENDNOTES
122 World Book Dictionary, 1965, 418
123 World Book Encyclopedia, 1965, Vol. 11, 200
124 World Book Dictionary, 1965, 976
125 D. Greenwald, Encyclopedia of Economics (McGraw Hill, 1982) 115
126 Over the last century, average stock growth was 4%, inflation 3%:
stock growth reflects non earned income (shares of corporate profits thatenure to investors), inflation the growth in consumer cost. Stock growthenhances affluence while growth in consumer cost mostly impressesnegatively on wages earned: systemic ‘giving to Peter by taking from Paul.’
127 Insurance, World Book Encyclopedia, 1965, vol. 10, p. 243
128 Heilbroner, 293
129 Excerpted from a United Press article carried by the Daily Spectrum,
St. George, Utah; Oct.2, 1988.
130 Parrington, Vol II, 197-98
131 (AP) article, Federal-Local Partnership Urged, The Daily Spectrum,
July 17, 1991 (a news report on the National Association of Counties' 56th
convention in Salt Lake City, Utah:)
132 Parrington, Vol. III, 20 - 23
133 Belief in the inevitable territorial expansion to encompass all of North
America. First argued in the 1840s: revived during and after the Spanish-American War. It is of the same philosophy as Dollar Diplomacy, uponwhich Captains of American enterprise expanded their exploitations beyondthe nation’s borders: driving the expansion of the nation’s Foreign Policy.Preemption is also of this philosophy.
134 Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (As furnished by Shelby Steele in his
essay in Harpers Magazine, July, 1992
135 Parrington, Vol. III, 22
136 Parrington, Vol. III, 21
137 Thomas, 264-265
138 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
139 J. M. Keynes,‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace,’ 1920
140 see G. Anders, Merchants of Debt (Basic Books, 1992)
168 ENDNOTES
141 Brockway, Book’s Cover
142 F. T. Saussy, Roger Sherman, 8
143 K. Day (The Washington Post), Banks wash billions inf dirty laundry,
Las Vegas-Review Journal, February 5, 2001
144 Thomas, 89, 91
145 W. Greider, Secrets of the Temple (Touchstone, 1987) 307-308
146 Source, the U. S. Bureau of the Census.
147 World Almanac (2002), 103 (CPI, 1915 -- 2001)
148 World Almanac (1986), 103 (non government wages and salaries)
149 J. N. Fugii, 45
150 Lawson and Appignanesi, editors, Dismantling Truth (St. Martin’s
Press,1989), 6
CONTENTS
of
OUR FEDERAL SAVINGS PLAN
and
ETHEREAL-GOLD
(the shaded titles)
FOREWORD
100 Quintessential Foundations (An Introduction)
101 Security: our Heritage
102 Insurance: our Heritage
103 Political Economy: the foundation of our Heritage
(introduces 205)
104 Exercising Sovereignty: a responsibility of Heritage
(introduces 208)
109 Truth’s Fiducial Gauges (introduces 209)
200 Substantial Quintessence (Virtuous Knowledge)
201 Life’s enigma and the essential need for philosophy
202 Perceptions of reality and illusions
203 The requirements of self in finding truth
204 Politics for what it is
205 Political Economy
205 Appendix, Petitioning ‘Civitas’
206 Liberal and Conservative
207 Our "Captains of Industry"
208 Sovereignty
209.1 Truth: The value predicate divisions of
209.2 Truth: The Fiducial Gauges of
210 Truth: Postscript about Organizations
211 Truth: Postscript about Emotion
212 Truth: Postscript about Faith
220 Truth: Postscript about Paradoxs
230 Truth: Postscript about Paradox and Mechanism
240 Truth: Postscript about Deontology sans Teleology
250 Virtues of Social Security and Vices of organization
In 2000, wage-earners have a $2 trillion (+) stake in the Economy.
Teleologically, this $2 trillion stake (with interest) should have been
repaid before the top 20 percent of income earners (who did not
contribute to SS) were given a revenue tax refund (top income earners
got tax refunds, common wage-earners did not).
ABOUT ETHEREAL-GOLD
“It is the uniqueness of individuals, as they are encouraged to
develop responsibly, into which the beauties of nations
bloom. The American heritage is ETHEREAL-GOLD. The
unalienable qualities of individuals are not compatible with
anything that we produce, particularly on production lines.”
From Petitioning‘Civitas,’ the Appendix to 205
The American System of Political Economy is a mechanism that opposes
teleology: It divides the economy and upsets the ethical flux in culture. Our
Political Economy locks Americans of the REAL ECONOMY between
Americans of the SURREAL ECONOMY and Americans of the NON
ECONOMY. Tyrannous Determinism results to compromise the human
rights bequeathed by the Constitution.
--- Are we losing our unique AMERICAN HERITAGE?
--- Do we allow Mechanism to gamble with Teleology?
Increased in 1967 to provide for Medicare, Congress increased Social Security
contribution-taxes again in 1984 to fund OUR FEDERAL SAVINGS PLAN for SS
(Then spent the money) and (as reported in NEWSWEEK, May 13, 1991, p. 35)
"the centrists [in Congress] say the deficit-ridden government needs the money."
All attempts to cut SS taxes have failed. Political Economy, however, now calls
for general tax reductions. The Administration of 2001 anointed this political
objective.