Due to the number of questions I’ve received about Jesus, I think a podcast devoted to him is in order.

People addressing this material, from whatever angle, tend to have fiercely held opinions, cherry-picking facts around them. That makes these discussions very difficult, and I’ll do my best to avoid that trap. This is a fascinating subject, and removing dogmatic opinions is what opens it to us.

Massive monetary bailouts have been ordered and more are promised to follow. A first, and completely valid, first response goes something like this:

So, you’re printing up six trillion dollars, giving 7/8ths to banks and corporations and 1/8th back to us… which we’ll be taxed on… plus, all that money creates a monster deficit that our children be expected to pay back anyway? The honest answer, if it were ever given, would be “yes.” And for this we’re expected to thank them!

So, angry responses are understandable. That said, I want to go deeper, down to the things that cannot be fixed with ever-more money.

Business is a massive coordination of people, materials, information, tools and machines. Money is just something we use to exchange these things efficiently; it doesn’t directly fix any of them when they break.

If a business process is broken, money allows you to thrown more tools and people at it. But if the break in the process doesn’t respond to those things, more money won’t fix it. Here’s an example:

1. A business finds that they can’t send their goods by cargo ship as usual. The manufacturing of some part was considered non-essential and the boats won’t be sailing for weeks at least.

2. The business can consider shipping by air, but they’ll also be guaranteed to lose money on the order, since that option is much more expensive.

3. The new money available to them is a loan, not a gift. If the company takes the free money and sends their goods by air, they’ll be unable to repay the loan, ending their business.

So, free money doesn’t fix this kind of broken process, of which there will be many. (And the longer things are locked down, the more there will be.)

And consider what happens if the manufacturer of the critical part goes bankrupt. No one automatically picks up the slack, and if there’s a file cabinet full of regulations to be conquered before making the missing part, will anyone want to attack that obstacle? Better off to start a new robot company.

So, we’re in for a lot of shortages. Eventually things will limp back to functionality – Europe recovered from World War II, after all – but only after a lot of pain and loss. Politicians don’t let go of regulations until lots of people suffer and/or die. And the corporations who paid for those regulations are likely to fight the whole way.

As I noted recently, politicians understand nothing about business. An economy, to them, is a big, magic box that spits things out. They’ll be the last to understand what’s happening, and they’ll knee-jerk to more and more centralized responses… until they can’t.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

Mikkel at the Expat Money Show just posted a really good podcast we did together.

https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/087-paul-rosenberg/

Enjoy!

Imagine a pretty spring day. You’re standing on your front porch or some other pleasant vantage point and looking out at a sunlit landscape: trees, grass, and singing birds. Then your five-year-old child or grandchild walks up to you and tugs on your hand to get your attention. You turn and the child asks, “What kind of world is this?”

What do you reply?

This child deserves the truth. You won’t be able to use fancy words or long explanations, but truth doesn’t require those things. This child is ready to hear the truth about the world. This kind of moment comes along haphazardly, and you can’t be sure if or when another might show itself. Your answer may affect this child for the rest of his or her life. What do you say?

The 14 Words

As you stand on the porch, away from everything but nature and your child, the only intimidations, biases, and slogans present will be those inside of you… and your child should be insulated from such things. You have to speak truth. And as I say, it doesn’t have to be long and complex; in fact it can’t be, if you want to help a five year old. And it comes to just 14 words:

We are a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world, ruled by abusive systems.

Later – after true words have sunk into the young mind – you can explain that we’re not a perfectly beautiful species, that most people are often confused and that a few are just plain bad. You can further explain that volcanoes and hurricanes and grizzly bears exist. But if you value your child enough to tell them the plain truth, you’ll tell him or her the 14 words first and let them sink in before getting to the small print.

With that said, I’ll move to some explanation for the adults.

A Beautiful Species

11,000 or 12,000 years ago, humanity – perhaps five million of them – stumbled out from an ice age and began to spread across the earth, most of them having nothing in the way of science and technology. Since then, we’ve learned to fill the earth with food, build machines that race across the face of the earth, sail oceans and streams, and fly through the atmosphere at fantastic speeds. Imagine trying to explain these things to the people wandering away from their receding glaciers.

And not only this, but we’ve cured the vast majority of diseases, figured out the smallest parts of the machinery of life, built compendia of human knowledge, made them available anywhere and everywhere, and landed men on the moon.

We are a magnificent species. If that triggers “Never forget the darkness!” voices in you, please hang on to “We are a magnificent species” until they subside.

Here are two passages from G.K. Chesterton’s book, The Defendant, that bear upon dark, automatic thoughts:

There runs a strange law through the length of human history – that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelly, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.

You can find the same thing in the Bible, by the way. Theologies be damned, this is what Psalm 82 says, and which Jesus repeated: You are gods; all of you children of the most High.

A Beautiful World

This is a beautiful world. Get out and look at it: lay outside on a summer night and gaze at the stars for an hour; explore the wilderness. Don’t watch it on TV; go out and experience it.

It is beautiful. Perhaps not perfectly beautiful, but one flaw among fifty beauties does not negate those beauties.

Abusive Systems

We all know the systems that rule mankind are abusive. I’m not going to itemize, since we complain about these things every day. You already know. The problem with most of mankind is not that they can’t recognize abuse; it’s that they think they deserve it.

Now, let’s be clear on another thing: Rulership requires us to stay focused on evil. They have to frighten people and portray their competitors as “evil Huns.” They have to publicize threat levels and convince people they need to be saved from impending death. And of course, their dear friends in the media promote evil-consciousness 24/7.

Do you think, just maybe, that all this fear has bad effects upon us?

The Truth

The truth is that we are surrounded by people who cooperate, who assist one another, and who care about one another. But those aren’t the things we think about – those are things we’ve learned to ignore. The flashing images of evil surround us and scream at us, after all: The Russians are going to attack, the other candidate is going to destroy all you hold dear, SARS (or bird flu or swine flu or Ebola) is about to kill us all! It’s a long, dark symphony of manipulation.

The truth is we’re a beautiful species, living in a beautiful world.

The systems that wish to rule us are quite otherwise.

**

Paul Rosenberg
www.freemansperspective.com

“If all you have is a hammer,” says the old proverb, “everything looks like a nail.” And I’m hard pressed to think of a better way to describe the destruction of the US economy (and many others) over the past few weeks. It has been a foolish set of reactions, and I’m going to show you both why it happened and why it was unnecessary.

First, however, I should clarify that the financial meltdown and the blowing up of the economy are two different things:

• As many of us have long noted, the leading finance regimes of the world were insanely over-blown bubbles, just waiting for some kind of pin to pop them. This was a virtual economy of fabricated currency units contained within carefully controlled securities markets.
• The real economy of goods, deliveries, repairs and so on was separated from the virtual economy, and its surplus was skimmed away with paid-for regulations and obligations. The people in this economy got relatively poorer and poorer, the big corporations treated them as serfs and their rulers despised them, but they were allowed to keep working.

Finally the financial bubble popped, hurting lots of people, both comfortable and poor. But that didn’t require the burning down of the real economy… the aforesaid making, growing, repairing and distributing of everything that really matters to us.

Why They Burned It Down

Really, it boils down to this: When the shit hits the fan, people revert to their basic psychological premises. And for politicians… for rulers of most any sort… that psychological premise is control. If and when they reach down into their souls, that’s what they find.

On top of that we should remember that politicians aren’t much different than perpetual beauty pageant contestants. When such people see a parade developing, they run to the front and grab the parade’s attention any way they can. And if the parade has come together mainly out of fear, you get their attention by agreeing with them (loudly) and being just a little bit more extreme than they were. Then, you present yourself as the solution.

“Hooray, it’s now my parade!”

Afterward, when the other beauty pageant contestants up their ante (more fear, more control) you raise yours too. Politicians react to the other contestants, not to some schlub on Main Street.

Complications aside, the actual economies of America and much of the world have been shut down because of this. The damage is already severe and the fallout may last a long time.

“They Had No Choice!”

To those saying the politicians had no choice I have a very simple response: “No; they saw no choice.”

Now, since almost everyone has been taught to see the world as the ruler sees it, most people saw no choice either. But there were far better choices… choices that didn’t burn down economies.

“What Other Choices?”

I suppose we can begin our list of other choices with a respectable adult – an actual grown-up – standing up, day after day, explaining to people the history of epidemics, the choices we face, the costs of each, and how every person can either save their neighbor or endanger them. We had several weeks, after all.

But this was not done. Sure, politicians acted a little bit like this after the horse was out of the barn, but people need time to assimilate such things, and a one-shot effort doesn’t work. Any ruler worth his or her salt would know this. But, they didn’t. Instead they reverted to what they did know: more control. Their psychological bias was for war rhetoric, soldier boys, tanks and quasi-tanks, more cops, fines, punishments and jail cells. Everything, to them, looked like a nail, and so the real economy was hammered.

But even without a respectable adult talking sensibly, most people were intelligent enough to take precautions. By the time the first lock-down orders were given, most Americas were already “sheltering in place,” and I suspect that most other peoples were too.

Here are a few other choices the rulers never considered:

• Tell the people they won’t be taxed upon – won’t even have to report – their income from making masks, ventilators, valves, etc.
• Tell the people that patents and regulations are suspended for the next year… that they will be held to account for negligence, misrepresentation, and so on, but that they needn’t get approvals.
• Put every bit of data, every proposal, every blueprint and chemical formula online, available to the world. Upon receipt. (Why not? Because the people are brute beasts and the ruling class is not?)

This list could go on at length, but just this much would put millions of intelligent and motivated people to work – immediately and at zero cost – fixing the crisis in far more and better ways than command-and-control processes.

The proof of this is that even with none of the above, and at significant risk to themselves, some people are still acting independently. Here, for example, is a home-made ventilator (cleverly hacked together from CPAP materials) that could save many lives:

The Price We Pay For Being Ruled

Things didn’t have to go this way, and the price we’re paying now is the cost of rulership. I’ll spare you the details, but millions of us have already realized that rulership was never as advertised and that other options, while less than perfect, are far less bad than the bloody, arrogant and exceedingly expensive mess we’ve had.

You are not a nail; you’re a thinking and productive human being. Be clear on the fact that you didn’t deserve to be hammered and that it wasn’t okay. Because you didn’t and it wasn’t.

This is not the kind of world we deserve, and it’s up to us to improve it. The rulers are unable to move forward, and they just proved it again… this time on a massive scale.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

Lord Acton wrote that power tends to corrupt, but I’m going to say flat out that it does corrupt. I’ll go further and say that it’s an addiction (probably every bit as bad as cocaine), and that the lust for control is one of its primary drivers.

Right now, with big governments – governments with gigantic intelligence operations – trying to grab ever-more surveillance powers, I want everyone to be clear on this. And so I’m going to give you reasons to believe it. Yes, we all feel in our guts that this is true, but I’m going to give you further reasons, because we’ve also been conditioned to conform to power.

With the world on fire and with power freaks at the helm, we no longer have the luxury of doing it the easy way and imagining that power will be kind to us in the end. It’s clear enough that power isn’t our friend, and in truth it never really was.

So, let’s get directly to it. Here’s a passage from a 2014 interview with Thomas Drake, formerly a top executive at the NSA, likening the control of surveillance to mainlining heroin:

In the digital space, you’re “data drug” habit goes exponential, because there’s just so much. You can mainline this all day long. To me, there’s a psychology that’s not often written about: What happens when you have this much reach and power, and constraints of law and even policy simply fade into the woodwork… Which is made worse by the fact that you can’t get enough, there’s never enough, and there’s more coming… You’re high all the time. Because you’re plugged in. It’s now 24/7. There’s no relief from the addiction.

Heroine… addiction… mainlining. The images are all too clear. And it’s this way through the entire operation… through the many, many operations.

Please understand that once surveillance gets going, it turns into a merciless war for ever-more data. This has overwhelmed not only governments, but Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the rest. Here’s an industry expert named Jennifer Sims, writing in The Future of Counter-Intelligence:

If information is power, then those who master this digital chaos first, and derive meaning from it, will likely gain critical advantages. Intelligence professionals, whether in business or in service to the state, are therefore in a silent race to develop tools for mining and analyzing growing volumes of swiftly moving information and then to use it…

And here’s Craig Mundie, Senior Adviser to the CEO of Microsoft, writing in Foreign Affairs March/April 2014:

“Big data” has rendered obsolete the current approach to protecting privacy and civil liberties.

If you’re still minded to believe that it isn’t that bad and that it’s still easiest to be quiet and go along with them, you can get the study I did on this with Jonathan Logan. It’s called The New Age of Intelligence, and it’s a fast, cheap read on Kindle.

More reading, however, isn’t what will turn the tide on this. What will is simply calling things by their real names, over and over and over. You can start with “control is slavery” and figure out what to add on your own. Oh… and Do Not Comply.

Understand, this addiction has no end, and every time people get scared they just ramp it up… because they can, and because they’re addicts! Humans will agree to all sorts of horrific things if you can first get them afraid… and modern media is little more than a fear delivery system.

But we can’t fall for it any longer. This addiction has no end point, and what dies in the end isn’t the addict, but our souls. And if we don’t start taking this seriously, the control addicts of the world get a clear shot at proving Julian Assange right one final time:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto a vacant human face—forever.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

Humans are not naturally stupid. They are not naturally bad. Fear, however, distorts them, weakens them, and makes them far less effective than they’d naturally be. Fear, in its many guises, is the great enemy of mankind, and it’s time that we addressed it head on.

Fear is useful (even if unpleasant) when encountering an angry bear. But it is strongly degrading to both our bodies and our minds when we imagine a bear around every corner.

To state our problem simply, fear makes humans very easy to hack. When someone tries to make you afraid, they are abusing you; they are hacking you; they are grabbing your inner workings and turning them toward their own ends.

Intimidation is a hack, shame is a hack, a threat is a hack, confusion is a hack, insecurity is a hack, authority is a hack. All of these are tools for applying your life and energy to someone else’s purpose. Whoever uses them strikes at your reason, your enthusiasm, and more or less all the better forces within you.

We can be far more than we have been, but not until we defeat fear, which is a direct attack on the human psyche.

The Depth of the Problem

Please take a look at these two cards and decide which line on the right is the same length as the line on the left:

Obviously, the correct answer is C. A is shorter and B is longer.

However, a psychologist named Solomon Asch ran a group of experiments with these images, and found that 37% of his subjects were willing to say C was not the right answer if other people said so first. If this pressure was applied more than once, 75% gave in at least some of the time.

In the control group, with no pressure to conform, the error rate was less than 1%.

In other words, the problem of fear is so large that three quarters of us are willing to deny reality in the face of a possible threat. And I think that all of us have felt the fear of non-conformity well enough to understand these results.

This problem, then, is serious.

Resisting It

The first step in countering fear is to recognize it. That sounds simple, but often it isn’t. We develop emotional inertia in these areas, and after uncritically allowing fear to sway our minds hundreds of times, changing the habit requires persistence.

Fear being imposed upon you is not okay. The honest way to get another person to do something is to convince them. To use fear is to use a kind of force. Not only is it hacking, it’s thuggery. And again, it is not okay, no matter who does it to you.

Once you recognize that an attack is being made upon you, all you have to do is think about it rationally for a moment, formulate an appropriate response, and then act. At first your actions may be less than perfect, but once you are acting against fear, rather than accepting it, things will begin to change.

I think this quote from the film Defending Your Life paints a nice picture of our current situation:

Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything – real feelings, true happiness, real joy. They can’t get through that fog. But you lift it, and buddy, you’re in for the ride of your life.

In Conclusion…

My message today is very simple: We’ve been maliciously and habitually hacked, and it’s time to start resisting. Fear is the enemy.

“Fear,” wrote Frank Herbert in Dune, “is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” We don’t have to let this death into our lives. We can notice it and turn against it.

**

Paul Rosenberg

freemansperspective.com

When writing historical things, I try to include perspective from people who actually lived through the events. And for money issues in the US, I’m able to do that back to about 1905.

So, do you think life was nasty, brutish, and short in 1905? That there were poor and starving people falling dead on every street corner?

Hardly.

The Wright brothers were flying for 30 minutes at a crack; Einstein was upgrading the laws of physics; telephones and electric lights were being installed all across America; Henry Ford was getting the final pieces in place for his moving assembly line and Model T; radio was being developed; art was flourishing; and the world was more or less at peace.

Sure, we have far more tech and better medicine now, but mostly because the people of earlier times (like the 1905 era) gifted it to us.

People in 1905 lived in heated homes, refrigerated their food, had access to professional physicians, traveled the world (mostly on trains and ships), read daily newspapers (there were many more of them in those days), watched movies, and ate just about the same foods we eat.

So, was it really that bad a time?

No, it wasn’t. In fact, it was better in important ways.

Money Issues in the US: The Facts Don’t Lie

Consider this:

The working person of 1905 kept his or her money. They ended up saving somewhere between a quarter and a half of everything they made – after living expenses.

It’s hard to be completely precise when reconstructing the budgets of average people in 1905 (records are hard to find), but we do have enough for a good, close guess.

Here’s how finance worked for a working family man of 1905:

Annual income:           $700.00
Annual expenses:      ($350.00)
Annual savings:           $350.00

If you’re thinking that I’m taking liberties with these numbers, let me assure you that I’m not – I’m being conservative. For example:

• The income figure should probably be higher. I’ve found figures of well over $800 for construction workers.
• As for expenses, I rounded up from a New York Times article, dated 29 September, 1907. It specified $325 per year.
• Added to that is the fact that many people grew their own food during that time, which would skew the figures further.
• As noted initially, I compared these numbers with stories I heard from relatives who lived through the time. My uncle Dave, for example, used to tell me how he got a job paying $390 per year sweeping floors as an unskilled immigrant (who spoke almost no English) in 1903.

The next time you drive through an old part of town and see the grand old houses, remember that people were able to build and buy them because their paychecks weren’t stripped bare. There were no income taxes in 1905, no sales taxes, no state taxes, and not much in the way of property taxes.

There was also no such thing as a military-industrial complex in those days, and – miracle of miracles – the rest of the world survived!

And Now…

Today, the situation is much, much different. The average working family pays about half their income in combined taxes: income taxes (to the state and the Feds), payroll taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, utility bill taxes, sales tax, local taxes, and on and on.

So, figuring an average income of just over $50,000 (the 2011 figure). And combined taxes of about $25,000, the average American family is left to pay bills like these:

Mortgage                     11,000
Car payments              6,000
Gas, repairs, etc.         2,500
Property taxes             2,500
Food                              3,000
Total                          $25,000

That leaves people zeroed-out. And again, I’m being conservative, and I haven’t included a number of smaller expenses.

Great Grandpa Did It, So Why Not Us?

Your great grandfathers faced very few of the taxes that we face. (The government survived on tariffs.) There was no social security either, and – believe it or not – the streets were never full of starving old people. Families were able to take care of their own – it’s not that hard when you’re saving half of your income!

We have forgotten that it was once possible for an average person to accumulate money. The truth is that productive people should be comfortable. Well-off, as they used to say.

So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?

You might want to think about that question.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com

I got an email from my old friend Dick not too long ago – maybe the smartest guy I ever met, and I’ve known a lot of smart guys. He was coming through town and we decided to meet at our old hangout, Jay’s Bar.

Dick was from California, but he came through Chicago every now and then back in the 90s, and he often joined our cypherpunk hangout in the back room at Jay’s.

At the appointed time, I met him in front of Jay’s and we walked in together. It was still afternoon and there weren’t too many customers.

Jay was behind the bar, making sure everything was ready for the evening rush. His face lit up when he saw Dick. “Hey, mister Viking, I not see you for a long time!”

Jay always called Dick “the Viking,” which he really did resemble back then. I left Dick and Jay to talk for a few minutes and sat down at the other end of the bar and ordered a couple of drinks from Jamie, the daytime bartender.

After a couple minutes, some random guy (a business type) came up to me and said, “Hey, isn’t that the genius who used to be on the Donahue show way back when?”

“Sure is,” I said. “They found out that he knew just about everything, and so they put him on as a curiosity.”

In just a minute or two Dick walked over and the guy slid down to give Dick his stool. He talked about the TV shows for a minute, and looked like he was ready to get up and let the two of us talk (he must have seen us walk in together), but then he stopped and looked directly at Dick.

“Ya know,” he said, “you answered all those impossible science questions, which was really cool, but you never told us how to get rich.”

Dick looked the man over. “You’re already rich,” he said.

“Yeah, I wish.”

“Okay,” Dick said, “what do you make, sixty thousand a year?”

“Including my wife’s pay, almost a hundred.”

“Then you’re definitely rich.”

The guy looked some combination of angry and embarrassed. “We’re in debt up to our eyeballs! And not from buying crazy things. Between the cars, the house, schools and doctors for the kids, we’re losing money!”

Compassion didn’t always register on Dick’s face, but this time it did. And I knew him well enough to guess that this guy’s predicament got to him. He nodded his head silently for a few seconds, then swiveled slightly, hunched a bit, and spoke in a serious tone.

“You don’t understand me. You’re already rich. It’s just that you let other people take most of it away from you, before you can use it.”

The guy’s posture became soft and serious in response to Dick’s, but he didn’t get it.

“Look at it this way,” said Dick. “You get a hundred thousand per year, but your bosses also pay another seven or eight percent for social security, right?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, so you’re actually getting paid a hundred and seven thousand or so.”

“Okay.”

Dick reached into his shirt pocket for a pen and a small note pad. (Those old engineer habits die hard.) He handed them to the guy and said, “Here, make a quick list of all your expenses. Round up, ’cause you’ll probably miss a few.”

The guy said nothing, but complied. Dick and I sipped our drinks as he did. Then he handed Dick the list, which came to sixty thousand.

“You see,” said Dick, “You make enough to pay all your bills, with almost fifty thousand left over for investments or whatever. And you wouldn’t have to pay all the interest that you do either. The problem isn’t what you make – you’re already rich – the problem is what you let people take from you.”

The guy was actually appreciative, and didn’t speak for a moment, and then he said, “but the government takes all that money, what can I do about it?”

Dick turned directly at him and said, “First, stop saying that it’s okay. It isn’t. You’re rich, but they’re making you suffer at the edge of poverty. Start holding them accountable for what they do to you. Treat them like organized crime.”

With that, the guy had enough. He understood, and he truly appreciated what Dick had told him, but it was going to take him some time to digest it. He thanked us and left.

Jay came over. “So, you chase away my customer?”

“Sorry, Jay,” we both murmured like schoolboys. I said something about the other guy starting the conversation and Dick said something about just talking finance, but Jay just waived his hands at us and mixed a drink for another customer.

“Ah, I was right to put you all in the storage!” We said nothing. He was referring to the back room he used to give us. It was really a storeroom.

Then, he smiled. When it was over with, no matter how angry we had made him, Jay always smiled.

* All the stories that I set in Jay’s Bar are fictional. The characters are based on real people and the stories are often based on actual events, but the presentation is fictional.

Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com