Free markets can not exist but the label is a tool of manipulation

By Glen Wallace

Advocating for a free market is like advocating for a square circle -- an impossibility.  Markets operate much like a game, and just like a game needs rules that all the players are bound by for the game to work, so does a market require rules that players are bound by as well in order for that market to operate at all.  The terms 'bound' and 'free' are mutually exclusive terms. 

I've never heard of a free market advocate suggesting, for instance, abandoning the Universal Commercial Code (UCC) that most all businesses abide and are bound by.  Instead there is a general recognition that there needs to be some set of rules that everyone in the business community more or less agrees to bound by in order for the markets to run smoothly.  The UCC is just one example of the myriad of different types of rules, laws and contracts that the market is bound by, both within and without, that even the free market advocates would agree are entirely necessary for the markets to exist at all, let alone run smoothly.

The 'free market' just seems to be some vague pie in the sky variable ideal that people fit into all their fanciful capitalistic hopes and dreams.  The problem with vague goals is that some powerful forces can use them as a means to reach their own personal goals by leveraging the masses that struggle for their goals using as their goal what they think is the same goal as the ruling elite.  What the masses never realize, is that the goal of the ruling elite and the masses never was the same but rather the goal of the elite is at the expense of the masses.  But still the elite create this deliberately vague goal that they call a 'free market' and convince the masses that reaching this goal will lead to
everyone's hopes and dreams being realized.  And of course the elite will give the masses step by step instructions on how to reach that goal.  The instructions are given because the elite cannot reach their own goal without riding on the backs of the masses who mistakenly think not that they are carrying the load of the wealthy and powerful trying to get more wealthy and powerful, but rather that they are working to achieve their own goals that they have fitted into the label of 'free market.'

But it has never been the plebs that have designed the so called 'free market' but rather it is the bourgeois that have designed the market system to operate in their best interest at the expense of the proletariat that have carried on their backs the bourgeois to any given market system.

Inevitably for those who fail in any market they either will blame themselves or blame the markets for being not free enough and often then will just work harder to create a system that the winners who have already designed the current system say that needs to be done to create a 'truly free market.' But what the winners who design the market system just try to do is tweak the markets in whatever manner will allow them to squeeze out a little more profit because there is never enough profit for them and it is always a fun challenge for them to see how much more they can gain the system in their own advantage.

But the point is there is a vague goal created such that a great variety of goals in the minds of individuals can easily fit their own goal into the vague goal in the sky.  Now you have a great number of people chasing after the goal with one label and therefore everyone chasing that goal with the same label thinks that they are chasing after the same thing even though the goal of each individual in the chase varies widely.  The only question left then, is who is going to design the path to the goal with the same label.  It will of course be those already with power that design the primrose path that
everyone follows because they are convinced that is the one route to their seemingly shared goal.  Now, everyone with different goals in their minds effective pull the ropes that pull the bourgeois chariot down the primrose path by advocating for legislation that the proletariat  have become convinced will help them reach what they believe is the same shared destination but in reality is the route to a very exclusive destination for the ruling elite that in all likelihood each member of the middle and lower classes has already been excluded from reaching.     

In Spain workers now have to sacrifice their labor for the sake of the banksters

By Glen Wallace

The New York Times article For Spaniards, Having a Job No Longer Guarantees a Paycheck , seems to be describing a situation in Spain that is more dire than how it appears in the mainstream media here in the U.S.   Apparently there is a fairly widespread problem over there of people with jobs getting paid either very irregularly in small amounts or not at all.  Often the workers not getting a paycheck see few options since they think they will have even less chance of finding another job at all if they leave there current  employer.  But on the other hand if they try to hold their employers publicly accountable for the non or slow payment of wages, the workers are afraid that will hurt the business they work for so much that it will tip over into bankruptcy. 

I had no idea this was going on over there.  I imagine many will blame their plight on socialism.  I would tend to disagree and if anything lay the blame in the opposite direction on the capitalist bankers that encouraged and profited from the indebtedness that has lead to the current European crisis.

The economic systems that we all live under exist not because it grew out of nature or as some law of physics, but out of the decisions of fallible humans.  None of the people featured in the article had any goal or expectation of living lavish lifestyles off of the income they were assured of from their employment.  Rather they just wanted to live a simple modest life from the fruit of their hard work in their jobs.  But now even though they are working and many more in their country are willing and desirous to work and be productive, they are struggling just to keep a roof over their heads by keeping up with the mortgage payments.  Isn't that kind of a funny expression -- 'keep the roof over our heads' -- I mean, where is roof going?  Is it blowing away and you're trying to hold onto it?  Of course not, but economics is supposed to be fundamentally about the relationship between humans and the material world that makes up modern civilization.  Those of us who are satisfied with a modest standard of living should demand an economic system that supports a symbiotic relationship between our participation in that system and an adequate maintenance of its supportive economic structure.  The roof is not going anywhere,  it is the bank that is deciding that the people living underneath the roof must go and the law enforcement that is supposed to be advocates for the people show that in reality they are advocates for the banks when they use force or the threat of force to evict the people living underneath the roof.

 It doesn't have to be this way -- remember, the laws that govern our economic system are not laws of physics but are rather malleable rules created by humans.  One of the individuals featured in the story, who is owed $13,000 in back pay, is a woman working in a factory hand rolling paint onto tiles.  I wonder how many square feet of wall space in houses all those tiles she has painted could fill?  I ask that question because I wonder how much labor is really needed to support a smoothly running modern civilization where most citizens simply want to live a modest life with a modest roof over their heads.  What if we were to forget about the big banks and debt?  Could we create a system that functioned solely with the goal of first meeting the basic needs of food, shelter, water, sewage, heat, electricity as the top priority and look to how that goal can be met given the available resources of labor and land.  If, and only if the basic needs for modest living are met, then those that are especially ambitious can be allowed to pursue a few extra niceties and comforts of life - but only if doing so in no way depletes or takes away from society meeting the first priority of basic needs.   Instead, in our current bankcentric economic model, I'd be willing to bet that tile painter is, in effect, through no choice of her own, sacrificing her labor in order to make sure debt obligations are met that keep the banksters living in luxury.  What kind of economic system allows that sort of injustice?  Clearly a rotten one that needs to be tossed into the compost bin.  And from the lessons we have learned we can grow a new fruitful society nourished by the soil fertilized by the mistakes we now know to avoid.  

Representative Democracy as a Failed Experiment

By Glen Wallace

In NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof column, A Failed Experiment, he points out how in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy there has been a rush by the wealthy to equip their homes with backup generators as a workaround to a crumbling infrastructure that has led to frequent power outages in the NE.  While he is not entirely clear in his column what the experiment is that has failed, he seems to be indicating that it is our political system that has failed to address the problems of not only our infrastructure, but also crime, education, healthcare costs and climate change. (On a side note, I am still skeptical about the dominant paradigm of climate change, but I will leave that for another essay.)

In addition to not clearly stating what the experiment was that failed, perhaps out of the limits of space that the NY Times allots him, he didn't present a clear solution either.   Well, let me chime in on both accounts.  I will present the experiment that failed as the representative democracy that we and most of the western world lives under and a solution of a return, as much as is practically feasible, to a true democracy as was originally practiced and invented by the ancient Greeks. 

If one is to stand aside and think mindfully as an observer it should quickly become clear that there seems to be some inherent flaws to our representative system that are intractable.  The cause and nature of those flaws can be found by looking at basic human nature and psychology and the vulnerabilities therein that are easily taken advantage of and manipulated by certain vested interests in their interests.

One psychological tendency is to affiliate oneself to what could be called a clan, tribe or wolf pack.  We are inherently very social creatures and any perceived threat made by another group directed towards the group we identify ourselves as being a part of will frequently provoke an instinctual reaction to protect one's group and also fight the offending group.  Clan feuding or warfare, then, can quickly develop from seemingly small offenses.  Additionally, one could imagine it would be easy for someone knowledgeable about these human tendencies, to deliberately manipulate the masses by means of either engaging in false flag attacks or by pushing the emotional buttons and convincing one side that some act by the other side should be considered an insult.  In the group dynamics there is nothing more uniting than having a common enemy.  That unity is only strengthened the more the common enemy is despised.  I have become convinced, then, that the biggest ally for any political candidate is his or her biggest critic.  And the more outrageous that critic is, the greater the boost is for the target of that outrageous criticism.  Eventually the supporters start to lose touch and forget why they even support their candidate and merely focus on why they dislike the opponent and his or her supporters so much.  As a result, the supporters, the constituents, also forget, or demand, that their candidate, once in office, takes care of things like the infrastructure, education and health care costs.  All their energy is focused, as if under a trans like delusion, on the enemy clan as the root of all the ails of society and the world.   

Here in the US we have two main political clans and they go by the names of the 'Republicans' and the 'Democrats.'   And within each clan there are figures, the politicians, that take on patriarchal and matriarchal roles to the adult citizens who subconsciously want to revert back to comfort of childhood when they could always look to Mommy and Daddy to take care of everything.  Childhood was such an easier and simpler time for most that the lure of the comfort of that time makes it difficult to resist when a politician offers to effectively"kiss the boo boo and make it all better."  The elected official then is effectively offering to act in a parental role, where they are taking care of everything on a societal level, that the parent took care of, on a household level, when the constituents were children.  Most of us, as we were growing up, didn't have to occupy our thoughts with whether the roof was due for new shingles, or that the electric bill was paid on time or the myriad of other details of daily necessities of modern life.   So why, our reflex becomes, do we need to be concerned that our politicians aren't making sure that the infrastructure, the house of civilization, is being kept in good repair.  Sure, such questions may occur to us from  time to time -- especially during a crisis like Hurricane Sandy,  but as soon as the crisis passes, those questions quickly fleet from the forefront of our mind and become like a fictional story of history. 

The solution then, is to force upon ourselves the role of being the grown-ups that we of voting age are all supposed to be.  We can no longer kid ourselves into believing that the responsibilities of governing a society can be left in the hands of a few individuals that are confronted with a plethora of temptations while being afforded a level of ivory tower isolation that protects them from public accountability.   And the only way we can stop primal regression into feuding clans, is to come to dissolve our political clans and come to the realization that we are one big family with a lot of adults that are perfectly capable of sharing the burden of deciding how to run this country.  It is when we are faced with a true democracy, where every adult citizen gets an equal say in how things are run, that we realize we can no longer escape dealing with our adult responsibilities of dealing with things like infrastructure maintenance and repair.  And like a family all living under one roof, we will realize that there is no other acceptable solution than to find ways to get along rather than finding ways to fight each other.  There are already many examples where we as a society automatically realize that, when we are all together a one group in an enclosed space, whether it be an airplane cabin, an elevator, or a restaurant, that we must achieve a certain degree of civility that facilitates everyone getting along with each other.  I believe that same automatic realization of peaceful coexistence and cooperation will also kick in once we realize that in a true democracy we all have to work together as adults to come to solutions to all of our shared problems. 

In the future we will need wealth redistribution more than ever

By Glen Wallace

In regard to the Bloomberg interview with Ron Paul posted below, I don't think the citizens have ever expected the government to do as much as Paul says.  Congress and the president just keep on acting separately from the public and then just hold a popularity contest every 2 years to see who gets to stay or join up with the ivory tower that is capitol hill.  Who among the citizenry, after all, has demanded we have several hundred overseas military bases?  Not many, but the politicians go ahead and fund those bases, give out foreign aid and farm subsidies that most citizens are blissfully ignorant of, much less advocating for.

Also, I highly doubt that we are not as productive as we used to be.  I'm quite sure instead that we are much more productive than we ever have been.  It is just with every improvement in productivity, the fruits of those improvements have been going into fewer and fewer hands.  Unfortunately that regressive trend will likely continue where every job lost to technology will only represent a loss of income for the worker replaced by the machinery while the owner will just hang on to all the increased profits due to the total cost of ownership of the machine being less than the cost of the employee.  I don't see any other way to reverse the trend other than with the help of the government to force a fair redistribution of the nations wealth and bounty.

We are living in a fundamentally different time from when the constitution was written.  There was no such thing back then as the computers, robots and artificial intelligence that now or in the future could potentially replace the modern day equivalent of the colonial blacksmith, cooper, cobbler and every other position that was once held by a human being.  Without a government enforced fair distribution of wealth, how will a human be able to have any income in a world where there are no no longer any jobs that provide an income for humans?

World Domination by the Fed through deflation

By Glen Wallace

With regard to the future US fiscal picture I foresee a deflationary spiral as more likely than an inflationary or hyperinflationary scenario.  My hypothesis is that the private central banks are leaving little to chance and while the reckless over-spending  may appear as fiscal bumbling and incompetence by congress and various offices of the president, it is in fact carefully planned by the central banks.  Then one must ask oneself what benefits the Fed more, a deflationary or inflationary scenario.  Currently after all the quantitative easing, the Fed is now holding a tremendous amount of US public debt that for the most part is earning very low interest rates.  Under inflationary conditions, the Fed would be facing a situation where they are holding all of this debt that would now be worth much less but without the benefit of receiving a higher rate of return that new treasuries would have to offer in order to entice buyers.  Additionally, under a hyperinflationary condition, by its very nature there is a lack of control of the financial conditions, thereby rendering central banks impotent.  And looking at the Fed and other central banks, their member banks already are completely free from material want and therefore their primary area for potential growth is that in terms of power.  While the central banks already yield tremendous power, it is not absolute.  And a deflationary picture could yield them the opportunity for what could be the closest thing possible to having absolute power over the entire planet.  They could achieve such power through taking receivership of the entire publicly owned system both materially and organizationally in exchange for forgiveness of debt owned.  In an hyperinflationary scenario, however, the public debt could be just inflated away and the Fed would no longer have anything over the people to control them with.

The beginning of a deflationary crisis may ironically begin with inflation.  Were the economy to grow enough to lead to inflation, the Fed, given their mandate to control inflation, may be forced to significantly raise the federal funds rate.  Any rise in interest would have to be born by the the US deficit as it issues new treasuries.  That, coupled with the Fed no longer having reason to engage in quantitative easing, would mean that now all the bond sales would have to go to private purchasers having no assurance that the Fed would turn around and buy those treasuries.  If there where a failure to find sufficient purchasers of those treasuries then the US government would lose the funds it would need to pay for the programs that the congress agreed to pay for.  Given how dependent the economy has become on government spending, were that spending unexpectedly to come to a halt due to a treasury auction failure then the economy could suddenly dip into a recession.  This could all come at a time when the baby boomers would be beginning to tap into the  entitlements that the government had been committed to providing but even before any auction failure, had been not funded anywhere near sufficiently by revenue.   A chain reaction could ensue whereby the retirees would no longer be receiving the checks that they need to pay businesses that have now become dependent on the senior population having a dependable and reliable source of income from the government to pay their bills.  Those businesses that had depended on the seniors could now become insolvent which in turn could jeopardize their vendors that were not catering directly to the seniors but still provided goods and services to businesses that did.  Negative growth could ensue that would quickly become apparent to any observer that the US government would have great difficulty in generating sufficient tax revenue in the future to pay its future obligations.  All the past warnings about future unfunded liabilities would no longer seem like some far away fiction, but would now be very apparent and real.  US Treasuries would have to be issued with very high interest rates in the hope of enticing potential buyers.  But of course the problem there is that unless the fed did try to print our way out of the problem,  the higher rates would make paying off the debt all the more difficult.  This is the point where the Fed would have the economy at its mercy.

Also, under deflation, the group that traditionally has been some of the biggest critics of private central banks, the gold bugs, would be stunned into silence as the value of their gold would suddenly plummet in value along with all the other commodities that would also deflate in value.  Do you really think the all powerful central bankers would allow a hyperinflationary situation to occur that would give their harshest critics more power, confidence and wealth?  What has been going on instead, I
believe is leading the gold bugs and other central bank critics down the primrose path by doing everything to make them believe that the central banks will do everything to prevent deflation and in their bumbling incompetence will instead allow hyperinflation to take hold.  To keep the ruse alive the Fed has installed Bernanke, someone who has studied the great depression and has committed himself to do everything he can to prevent the deflationary spiral that lead to that economic crisis.  But it will turn out that Bernanke is merely an actor cleverly placed to throw everyone off track in an effort to keep prying eyes off the Feds deflationary plot.

There will come a time I believe during a market crash when it will become apparent that servicing the public debt will no longer be possible by the traditional means.  When it also becomes apparent that Bernanke and company will not simply fire up the printing presses to make it all go away, then we will see a really big crisis that will hit every household in the country as the whole economic infrastructure and the system of commerce that goes along with it that we have all become dependent on for our daily needs will grind to a near complete halt.  At that point the public will be clamoring for a rescuer, anyone, to save them from their plight.  And along comes the Fed to save the people from their plight.  The masses will be completely ignorant of the fact that the private central banks planned for this all along, but the mass media, being party to the crime, will do nothing to dispel that ignorance.  Instead newscasters will do just the opposite and urge everyone to put themselves at the mercy of the Fed, and give everything they ask for, including all of our public infrastructure, public lands and governments.  Wanting to do anything to alleviate the suffering the masses will gladly comply and the plan for world domination by the banksters will be complete.

Socialism and Regimenarchies

 By Glen Wallace


Sure, socialism as it has been practiced may not be the answer but there are many different forms of political systems that can be referred to as socialist.  And I am not about to abandon a plan that looks and sounds good just because it might be labeled socialist.  As a matter of fact many of the socialist systems of the past might better be labeled oligarchies due to the special privileges granted to the government officials running those systems.  Although 'oligarchy' might not be appropriate since so many government officials tend to benefit from their positions in those so-called socialist regimes -- perhaps we need a new term here.  Well, the Latin word for government is 'regimen' so I'll call the political form where the government and some of its enforcement and intelligence employees becomes unwieldy and oppressive to the people it is supposed to support, a 'regimenarchy.'  So, wouldn't it at least be possible to create a socialist system with all its nice safety nets and useful and pleasant services that is not a regimenarchy?

Wealth Redistribution is Class Peacefare not Warfare

By Glen Wallace

Government assistance as it has been practiced in this country is clearly not a case of wealth redistribution as has been alleged.  If it were intended to be so, then those in charge of distributing the wealth have been doing a rather crummy job since it has been apparent that even as the prevalence of food stamps has greatly increased in this country the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few has correspondingly only also increased.  So if anything the opposite has been occurring whereby wealth ultraconcentration has been going on for decades in the US regardless of the POTUS and his political party affiliation.  And while the the wealth has been concentrating in fewer in fewer hands, the remaining masses left over have been left with less and less of the available material wealth.  It's not so much a merely a case of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer it's a case of everybody else besides the already rich getting a smaller piece of the pie.  What appears to be going on is that the government assistance is a case of the powers borrowing from the play book of the ancient Romans, and using food stamps and the like as the bread in the 'bread and circuses' plan to keep the masses somewhat content and less likely to rebel.  For the circuses analog, fortunately for the ruling elite there is more than ample entertainment distractions both passive and active ranging from video games to movies and TV to sports to keep the plebs distracted 24 hours a day.  It is rather clever of the rich elite to try to turn the tables and allege that government assistance is a form of wealth redistribution when in reality it is a method to prevent the masses from rising up and demanding a fair share from the wealthy in a true form of wealth redistribution.

A similar tactic is employed when allegations are made by some that demanding higher taxes on the wealthy is a form of class warfare.  I believe this 'warfare' baiting is being deliberately employed to both apply a unflattering label to the progressives and to try to get the progressives to think less of themselves engaging in activism since most progressives do not want to think of themselves as engaging in warfare of any kind.  But when looked at closely, the demands of the progressives or 99 percenters are nothing like warfare.  The requests instead, have been along the lines of demanding fairness by way of the peaceful changing of the civil laws.  There need not be any warfare.

All that is needed is to have laws enacted that allow for the transfer of funds from one account to another or the changing of names on titles from one name to another.  New taxes could be enacted that completely bypass the accounts of the IRS but instead revenue funds could go directly from, for instance, the cash accounts of large corporations to the accounts of a number of food shelves. In the process no blood was shed and no heads rolled as was the case with the French Revolution, which was a true case of class warfare -- I might add that I think that what the French Revolutionists did was an immoral, inhumane, brutal act when they coldly gathered all the members of the upper class and systematically ended their lives by means of the guillotine, all without even due process or assessment of character.  I'm supporting a true wealth redistribution by a peaceful, civil and legal means not just because it is the right thing to do but also to prevent a true class warfare situation as was seen with the French Revolution.

  I believe there is a certain amount of unavoidable scarcity on this planet and there is a point that is reached with any individual or organization where they necessarily end up taking out for themselves more than they every can be credited with contributing to the material wealth of a society through the increased productivity they may have activated.  I believe there is certain principle I like to call 'sandbox values', where when we were growing up we learned that while playing in a sandbox there is a limited number of toys to play with and we should learn to share those toys and not hog all of them for ourselves while all the other little boys and girls just sit there in the sand with nothing to play with while one brat sits there with a grin on his face with all the toys piled up behind him in the corner of the sandbox.  

We don't need a revolt, just an awakening.  People need to realize that gov assistance is not wealth redistribution but rather the old ancient Roman trick of using bread and circuses as succor to quell the rabble. The goal then of the ruling elite is just the opposite of what is being accused; government assistance is designed to prevent the people from demanding real wealth redistribution.  The democrats just coyly sit there allowing themselves to be accused of something that they have tried to prevent but should be a compliment - spreading the wealth around, while in reality both parties are together in the plot to further consolidate wealth.  That is the one constant that has existed for many decades now -- regardless of what party is dominating, wealth consolidation has continued unabated. 

 I propose a civil, peaceful legal system of wealth redistribution whereby a system of taxation is instituted that completely bypasses the IRS and instead mandates direct bank transfers from the super rich to the working poor.  Both individual and institutional accounts would be subject to these transfers such that corporations with large cash balances would also see significant outflows to individuals and organizations such as food shelves that actually need the money.  There would be no class warfare because there would be no warfare.  Instead these measures would be taken civilly as the result of laws enacted by a populace demanding such laws.  Most of the actual redistribution would amount to nothing more than a few electrons moving around and changing the digits on hard drives and computer screens.  The rich whose digits become smaller on their balance sheets likely would never miss them to any practical manner but oh what a difference it would make to those that have been struggling and now see a higher balance on their accounts.  

I think my proposal would be rather inviting to most, but you will likely never hear of it from a mainstream politician from either party or even a so-called liberal mainstream political commentator on the radio or TV.  You wont hear about such an idea because they are all part of the effort to help consolidate the wealth until nearly everyone becomes an indentured urban serf slave to a few bourgeoisie elite.

Individual Mandate Requirement Makes Some Unsafe Assumptions

By Glen Wallace,

Regarding the health insurance mandate there is a couple of problems.  First there is the assumption that health insurance is, and will continue to be, the primary method of payment for healthcare for the vast majority of citizens.  That may be the current fact but there is no assurance that health insurance would continue to be the choice method of payment for the vast majority if there was no mandate in place.  Perhaps the citizenry might decide a whole new methodology for payment, such as barter, would work better.   In issuing the mandate then, congress would be interfering with interstate commerce by acting as an impediment to the organic flow of free market decision making.

But even if we did take as a given that health insurance will remain popular in the future, the mandate does not provide allowance for those that do not want to utilize the modern western medical system.  Some individuals may believe that holistic medicine is the superior method of medical treatment.  Those people may be so successful with that treatment that they never need to utilize the western medical system.  They wouldn't then have ever opted in to the medical market system that is part of interstate commerce but are instead forced into it by the individual mandate.

While the comparison is made to the so-called superior court's decision to forbid farmers from eating their own harvest with the healthcare mandate, in the case of the farmers, while I disagree with that decision by the court, there is an important difference with the farmers insofar as in that case I believe only the farmers that have already opted into the futures market for their crops are the one's who are forbidden the freedom to consume their own crops (at least I hope it is limited to those farmers as I'm not that familiar with this particular court decision).  In the case of the healthcare mandate, on the other hand, all citizens are not afforded the opportunity to decide to opt in, but instead are forced into the insurance market by the government.  The human, then has been turned into a health insurance market commodity, just like soybeans and corn are in the agricultural market, whether that individual human likes it or not.

 While I believe socialism has its place and can be beneficial, especially in the case of medicine, I don't believe crony capitalism ever has a place in
socioeconomic systems.  The healthcare mandate is the ultimate in crony capitalism since the government is requiring that every individual buy a particular
product from a private company.  It seems like with the mandate, human beings are being treated by the government as a commodity for the health insurance industry.  We are being forced to make ourselves available as tradable assets on the health insurance market whether we like it or not.  

The absurdity of environmental regulations without tariffs

By Glen Wallace


There is an out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach to environmental regulations that pervades the lawmaking world in the United States.  The approach is to enact strict regulations for manufactures to follow in the US with the stated goal of protecting the environment while at the same time having no problem with importing items manufactured in foreign lands that have little if any regulations to protect the environment.  It is as though the health of the earth doesn't matter because we don't live there we can't see that land from here.  I think environmental regulation is great, but safeguards should be in place to insure that a net reductions in pollutants reaching the earth and atmosphere is achieved by any such regulation.  Polluting manufactures should be seen as a slippery entity whereby if you clamp down on them from just a couple sides then there is a good chance they will slip out your grasp and just end up somewhere else.  Indeed there may even be a net increase in pollution if a company offshores their manufacturing facilities due to steep regulations here in the US.  That increase in pollution would not necessarily be from the manufacturing itself but also from the power plants in foreign lands with less pollution controls powering the factories.  Additionally, the products now manufactured on foreign soil has to be shipped back over here on freighters each chugging out diesel exhaust equivalent to a dozen or more diesel train engines.   That's a lot of exhaust being spewed out over a long trip over the pacific ocean.  As I understand it, those compact florescent light bulbs that are supposedly so green could never be manufactured in the US due to the environmental regulations here governing their manufacture.  However it seems everyone is encouraging their purchase and use because doing so is so environmentally responsible and shows you care about the earth.  However, nobody seems to be paying any attention to what the manufacture of those lights are doing to the land oversees where there is looser regulations on such matters.

What I propose is that we maintain our strict environmental regulations but enact a system of inverse tariffs whereby the tariffs are highest for goods manufactured in countries with the least environmental regulations such as China and tariffs would be the least for goods manufactured in countries with strict environmental regulations such as Germany.

It seems like a simple and commonsensical plan but the two recent pieces of regulation seemed to completely ignore anything resembling my idea - if anything they went in the opposite direction.  One had to do with the valuation of Chinese currency relative to the dollar and the other was some new free trade agreements that it sounds like will eliminate any existing tariffs with some countries.

But that seems like par for the course when it comes to the people who actually make the laws, when they actually do something, they choose between two non sensible choices that are in the interests of the few (and who probably pre-selected those choices) while never even bringing up for consideration any good ideas that would be in the interest of the many (while hoping that not many people use their own imagination to come up with any novel ideas and solutions and realize that what the congress people put forward is not necessarily the limit to all logical possibilities conceivable as a solution to any given problem). Ya, they want us to think that big brother knows best and that with all their official prestigious titles and respect garnered from the so-called expert talking heads on TV that surely all the solutions have been gone over and they have come up with all the selections that is best for the people. With all that pomp and ceremony showered on them, how could they possibly be wrong!?  After all, isn't that a logical form - modus pompous? /sarcasm

- Glen Wallace

QE Has Only Tightened Main Street While Easing Wall Street

By Glen Wallace

With the recent downturn in the stock market and a slowing of the job growth in the US, there have been increasing calls for third round of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve.  Quantitative easing, or QE as it is commonly known, is the practice of the Fed purchasing US treasury bonds from a select group of banks.  The Fed pays for those bonds by simply printing, or more accurately, computer generating digits on their balance sheets and calling those digits 'dollars.'  Money is often referred to metaphorically as water and in the case of QE, the Fed is manning the money spigots and is easing up on the valve and thereby letting out an increasing quantity of currency into the stream from which the overall economy dips into.  The goal with QE is to stimulate economic growth by reducing the scarcity of the money businesses require to grow and hire more employees.  However, the Fed has to keep in mind that they have a dual mandate of not just increasing employment but also controlling inflation.  If they ease up to much on the money supply there is the danger that dollars could become too plentiful, causing the prices of goods and services to rise excessively.

While QE could work in theory, as it has been practiced with QE1 and QE2, it has largely failed because of its reliance on trickle-down economics.  Trickle-down economics is a theory that whenever the the higher rungs of economic ladder prosper, that prosperity trickles down, like water, to those on the lower rungs, thereby quenching their thirst and boosting their energy to climb higher as well.  But when looking at reality, history has shown that trickle-down economics does not work.  If anything, there tends to be an opposite effect, leading to the adage of 'while the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.'  And yet despite the refutation of trickle-down economics, the Fed has insisted on exclusively showering prosperous banks with the billions in QE cash.  Its not as though the Fed has hired teams of asset purchasing crews to fan across the country and stop by garage sales to buy piles of second-hand clothes, or go to small family businesses on main street ringing their cash registers by buying their wares.  Rather the Fed has merely hoped that its exclusive clientele of large banks, now flush with QE money, would willingly begin providing more loans to businesses across the country.  Once the business got their new loans, they could expand and hire more employees and the trickle-down from the big banks to the little business on main street would be complete.  Only it hasn't exactly worked out that way.  Throughout QE1 and QE2, business loaning has remained tight, wages have been stagnant, and real job growth has been slow to non-existent.

So where has all that increased money supply gone?  Well, from the standpoint of the ordinary citizen observor, it is rather hard to tell.  Even though it is the ordinary citizens that are the most vulnerable and who are the ones that QE is designed to ultimately benefit, all we can do is make a deduction based on the observable market factors.  And those market factors tend to indicate that QE1 and QE2 has boosted the prices in stocks and commodities.  While an increase in stock prices has benefited 401k retirement accounts, the increase in commodity prices has been burdensome on the individuals and small businesses that rely on those commodities for day to day living.  While the cost to fill up the gas tank or fill the grocery basket increases, peoples income from working has not. Likewise, small businesses have seen the cost of the supplies they need to run their business driven up by the inflationary effects QE has on the commodities markets. But since the wages of the consumer have not risen with the costs of doing business, it becomes difficult for businesses to raise prices for the now tapped out consumer.  As a result, the bottom line for the business is hurt and it becomes difficult or impossible to grow and hire more workers.  Consequently, the opposite effect that was intended by quantitative easing has occurred. Instead of flushing main street with cash, a tightening of the money supply on main street America has occurred as more and more dollars go out into the international commodity markets while fewer dollars are returning.  But that should have been expected as the fulfillment of the known failure of the trickle-down economics theory.

What did the Fed think would happen when it threw money at the large banks in this high flying era of market speculation by banks?  Did the Fed think that the banks would forgo the prospect of astronomical returns in the markets and instead provide loans to small businesses with a return of a few percent and a
good chance of default?  Given that they can always count on the government to bail them out, why wouldn't the banks play the market casino with their new-found QE cash?            

Don't call a financial rescue a bailout, call it a suppression.

By Glen Wallace

I think the term 'bail out' derives from historical practice of scooping water out of sinking ship to keep it from sinking.

Perhaps here, that is part of the problem, where people can't get it out of there heads that this bailing out of countries has some fundamental differences from bailing out a sinking ship. When one is trying to save a sinking ship you simply keep shoving a bucket into the water and heave it over the side until there is no more water on board.

But here dealing with nations 'under water', a better analogy would be to think of the countries as being on fire with only a limited amount of water available to, not remove from their deck, but rather to put onto them in hopes of putting out their inferno.

Maybe if nation bailouts were thought of in this respect, it might actually occur to the EU that one of these times when they turn around to fill up their buckets they'll find the well is dry and now the fire is going to get out of control and spread to their country next.

Deep Thinking in 19th Century America

By Glen Wallace

While there may currently be a dearth of broad deep thinking intellectualism amongst our citizenry, I don't think it has always been this way even within the breadth of America's short history. I'm basing this belief based on the public's reaction to the 19th century novel 'St. Elmo' by Augusta Jane Evans. I picked up a tattered copy of this book at an estate sale some years ago just because with a publication date of 1866 it would become the oldest book in my library. But I got started reading it and found it rather profound; constantly addressing many deep concepts. Reportedly this book reached a very fervent widespread degree of mainstream popularity to such a degree that many streets and children were named after the books heroine Edna Earl. This was no mere cult classic like 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' and yet 'St. Elmo' is at least as deep and maybe even a more difficult read.  In order for such a book to reach such mainstream popularity I've concluded that a very different mainstream social intellectual milieu existed at the time of its publication in terms of how people thought of deep concepts and their discussion and contemplation.

On the Need for Regulations and Tariffs

By Glen Wallace

I think we tend to take for granted the regulations that protect the consumer.  As an example there was the problem with the toxic drywall from China that had it been manufactured in the US perhaps the existing regulations in this country would have prevented the problems from occurring in the first place.  Additionally there are certain food and drink manufacturing regulations that we count on to insure that those products are safe to consume.  But these are the sorts of regulations that the consumer both wants and needs.  I think both of those factors must be present before regulatory restrictions are implemented on any given product.  If the consumer wants to consume something that the government believes is unsafe for the consumer, then the consumer should still be allowed to consume the product.  The government should not be taking on a 'Big Brother knows best' approach where they exist to be our masters that protect us from ourselves.  Rather government should be the servant of the people and only takes on the role of protector when we ask it to, but quickly backs off when ordered to do so as well.

The following is a post I wrote somewhere in response to a speech/testimony by Peter Schiff:

Mr Schiff is so selective in his arguments, only pulling out the best examples that appear to support his positions while selectively ignoring the glaring refutational examples.  For instance in the case of Henry Ford the workers and the economy benefited by the wisdom and benevolence of Mr Ford.  But given human nature we can not count on all the heads of business to have such virtuous characteristics.

All too many in business suffer from a case of tunnel vision nearsightedness, where if they can get away with squeezing every last dime of productivity without killing their employees they will do it.  I'm thinking of the sort of characters as Scarlett O'hara from 'Gone with the Wind' and her treatment of the prison laborers in her husbands lumber mill.  It is for those sorts that government regulation is absolutely necessary to protect the worker from abuse by the Scarlett O'haras and pre-epiphany Ebenezer Scrooges of the world.  I also think back to the working conditions as featured accurately in Upton Sinclair's book 'The Jungle'.  There wasn't much unions or government regulation then either.  What did the free market do for those workers Mr Schiff?

But on the other hand I believe supporters of heavy regulation in the US often have an out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach in ignoring how a lack of regulations on foreign businesses with regard to workers rights and the environment, creates an incentive to offshore work to those countries with factories that abuse the environment and their workers due to lack of regulations.  But when it comes time to import those foreign made goods, the pro regulation set is silent and by their silence, imply that it is perfectly fine to buy those goods and thereby support those foreign factories that may be paying slave-like wages and polluting the environment.

It doesn't make any sense to support regulation under the pretext that it is being done to protect the workers and the environment when there is no disincentive to offshore the work to countries where workers and the environment are not being protected.  As a solution I would suggest implementing a tariff system that varies inversely with the level of regulation in the country of manufacture for a product.  For instance, a very high tariff would be levied against Chinese made goods whereas little to no tariff would be put on products made in Germany.

Why capitalism can be a disincentive to good medicine

By Glen Wallace

There have recently been some prominent news stories featured on the mainstream media about shortages of certain drugs faced by hospitals and emergency rooms.  In addition to shortages there has also been problems with price gouging by pharmaceutical manufacturers of certain prescription drugs.  And one more problem that I recently saw featured on the mainstream network national news was about the growing problem of antibiotic drug resistant bacteria. What all those problems have in common is an inability of the drug companies to adequately respond to the needs of the public using those drugs.  The drug companies are not responding to the public's needs because they are not directed by those needs but are instead being driven and directed solely by the profit motive. Drug companies price gouge because they can get away with it because the drug patents can provide a total monopoly in cases where there are no comparable alternatives.  New antibiotics are not being developed at the rate that is needed to respond to drug resistance because there is not enough money to be made off of any new antibiotics to justify the enormous cost necessary to bring them to market.  And shortages are occurring because production capacity may be more profitably utilized by some other drugs. Once they are done making their money makers then if they have time maybe they will make more of the less profitable drugs for which there is a shortage. All this is recognized by the media and the medical field but few seem to put two and two together and realize that capitalism has been an abject failure at promoting good medicine.

So far I've only discussed the problems between capitalism and medicine that are already readily recognized by mainstream media and medicine.  But if one turns to alternative medicine one sees further evidence of the antagonism between Capitalism and good medicine.


The problem is that drug companies will not spend money at all on research that they cannot see a potential return on.  The only goal of the big pharmaceutical corporations is to make a profit, not benefit mankind.  Therefore, if there is already some research showing promise on an herb or compound that cannot be patented then there is no incentive to spend all the money on further research to bring the product to market.  Additionally, keep in mind that most big pharmaceutical companies are publicly traded corporations and therefore have a legal obligation to act in the financial interests of shareholders and not in the medical interests of the users of the pharmaceuticals that those corporations produce.

For instance I heard of a study of mice where their Alzheimer's disease was halted and reversed when the mice consumed caffeine in an amount that was the human equivalent of 5 cups of caffeinated coffee per day. 
 I have also read anecdotal reports of Alzheimer's patients improving just through the consumption of coconut oil.  Currently pharmaceutical corporations are enjoying a nice gravy train of profits from drugs for Alzheimer's that are not a cure but a treatment where the patient continually takes the medicine and therefore pays for the medicine over a period of time that will likely amount to years.  Why would the for-profit pharmaceutical corporations want to spend money to research something like caffeine or coconut oil that they wouldn't be able to patent, but instead if the caffeine was found to be as useful in humans as it is in mice for Alzheimers, or if the anecdotal reports about coconut oil and Alzheimers were scientifically verified, the drug companies would  be facing an elimination of the currently reliable long-term revenue stream that they already enjoy with their prescription Alzheimer meds?

As another example, there is an alternative medicine doctor by the name of Dr. Tullio Simoncini from Italy, that is using ordinary baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to treat cancer with what he claims is very successful results.  Currently the cancer treatment industry is very profitable as is; but if drug companies were to explore and find baking soda is indeed superior to any of their current chemotherapy meds, then billions in revenue would be eliminated if cancer patients were to be prescribed a non-patentable product like baking soda that can be had for fifty cents a pound.

There is a great deal of collusion and cronyism between such organizations as the FDA, the AMA, University research facilities, the mainstream media and congress.  Any close examination of those organizations reveals that they are clearly working together with the goal of maximizing the profits of big pharmaceutical corporations.

Have you ever watched the commercials during the breaks on the big network national TV news?  Those commercials are filled with ads for prescription pharmaceuticals still under patent protection that offer huge monopolistic profits to the big pharma companies buying the expensive ad space from the large TV networks.  The networks want to keep their largest sponsors happy so you'll regularly see features on the national news badmouthing any alternative medicine that would replace big pharma's monopoly profits if those 'supplements' became 'replacements'.

Anyone trying to bring a non-patentable drug to the mainstream medical market with FDA approval,  will be going against the collusion of cronies mentioned above.  Just to get a drug approved by the FDA requires investments of 100's of millions of dollars by an organization that is already set up to do the research.  Much more if you're not already a drug company or University that has the facilities and know-how to do the enormous research required for FDA approval.  As for universities, they are either already getting grant money from big pharma or they are already enjoying profits from patent medicines.  Universities get a lot of their funding from patents for medicines they own. 

There is a widespread assumption that there is always a synergistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  But the evidence indicates that the opposite is true; there is an antagonistic relationship between capitalism and good medicine.  If only the medical field would apply the same testing standards to the for-profit medical paradigm as they do to individual drugs, they would soon discover widespread refutations of the belief in the necessarily benevolent nature of the overall for-profit capitalistic setup of the mainstream medical system.

The only solution as I see it is to eliminate medical patents and nationalize most medical research.  There already are plenty of people that go into medical research with the highest of ideals, but only their ideas that have the potential to profit the company they work for, will be supported.  Instead, we need to set up a system that eliminates the profit variable and allows those idealistic individuals to act as both the researchers and executives in the medical development field, whose decision making control of what avenues to pursue is only measured by other members of the medical field and the citizens observing and funding their work.

The NIH has already set up a division to study alternative medicines, but even though I've seen promising results from at least one of their studies, it seems like we only hear about the the results on the mainstream media that are not so promising.  In Germany they've set up a government run organization called the E commission, that studies and gives rulings on herbal medicines and what they can be prescribed for.  Those are a couple of examples of the nationalization of medical research that are good starts in that direction.  But to achieve the ideal of  good medicine, the profit motive from patent monopolies needs to be completely eliminated.  The allure of those patent monopolies is too corrupting because there is just too much money that can be made with them. 

End the Fed but Keep the Fiat

By Glen Wallace

We need to end the Fed, but not go back to a gold or silver standard.  Sometimes I think there is a conspiracy within a conspiracy whereby the powers that be deliberately put forth a gold standard as the only alternative currency if the Fed was abolished.

The general conspiracy is the creation and existence of the private central bank 'The Fed' and all the other private central banks around the world and their issuance of debt based currency.

The conspiracy within that general conspiracy is where the private central bank conspiracy is exposed, but only in a manner where the only alternative given is one that allows the private bankers, that own a majority of the worlds gold, even more power with a gold backed currency. The banksters would then be gaining increased power through the ability they would then have to manipulate the money supply to their advantage through the manipulation of their own huge stockpiles of gold. The plebs are then effectively being led down a primrose path to a destination not of freedom from the banksters, but just the opposite, further enslavement to the private banking system.

Bill Still, in his documentary 'The Secret of Oz' (that I've embedded at the end of this post) shows in historical instances of where gold-backed money was issued, how the masses were oppressed by bankers who withheld their gold, leading to an unnecessary scarcity of money, which in turn lead to a deflationary depression among the masses, but was advantageous to the wealthy bankers insofar as they could then buy up properties of the downtrodden masses for pennies on the dollar.

But Mr Still also showed how when president Lincoln issued, via the US Treasury, the Lincoln Greenbacks as debt free fiat money, there was widespread prosperity as a result.  Backing money with gold limits the growth of the economy because the supply of gold itself is limited.  The Lincoln Greenback on the other hand effectively amounted to a barter equivalency which grew in supply as the growth in goods and services also grew.

And as occurred with the Lincoln Greenback, when a money supply is not limited by the supply and suppliers of gold nor is arbitrarily limited according to the vested interests of the private central bankers, a bountiful burst in organic economic growth seems to occur once the unnecessary limits to the money supply are removed. It is as though, within all of us, is a natural eagerness and curiosity to create and explore in ways that, if harnessed, will result in a verdant economy flourishing in an environment of widespread entrepreneurship.  But we are tied down and shackled by the bankers, prevented from exploring our human potential, while at the same time we are chastised for the very indebtedness that is the shackles the bankers put on us that keeps us from actualizing our potential.        

So there still would be a backing of sorts to a fiat currency that was issued by the US Treasury insofar as the dollars could be exchanged for a given market-determined amount, of any given goods or services.  Just so long as the fiat dollars are issued in a controlled manner that varies directly with the supply of goods and services in existence, that the dollars are exchanged for, hyperinflation will not occur.  Hyperinflation would not occur because the money printers would be limited in the amount of money they could print to the amount of real goods and services in the economy and not the amount of paper and ink available to print that money.

While some may argue that we could not count on our government to issue fiat currency in a controlled manner, I would counter that the risk would be just as great for a gold backed currency to be issued in an uncontrolled manner by an irresponsible government.  It is just as easy to print a dollar that says it's backed by gold as one that does not.  After all, isn't that why I so often read the goldbugs urging people to take physical delivery of their gold and not trust paper gold certificates?  If the issuers of gold backed certificates cannot be trusted, why would they necessarily expect an improvement from an institution that the goldbugs seem to generally mistrust -- the government.

I think that if there is sufficient transparency along with adequate democratic measurement, we can at least sufficiently count on the government to issue our currency in a controlled manner. I certainly think that a transparent democratically controlled government is many times more trustworthy than the private banking system that is currently controlling our central bank, the Federal Reserve.  And for the reasons I've explained, if the government is going to be issuing money, it should be in the form of debt free fiat currency.

If you go to the Federal Reserves website you can see where they tell the story of the Continental.  The Continental is the name of one of Americas earliest currencies.  In what seems like an ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black, the Feds article argues that the continental became worthless because it is a fiat currency, not backed by anything, and as a result became worthless due to rampant printing.  What the article ignores is that Federal Reserve Notes, the dollar, is also a form of fiat currency insofar as it is not backed by anything material either. Additionally the only reason that the Continental fiat currency became worthless, due to hyperinflation, was because the British, in a military act against the American Colonies, printed mass quantities of counterfeit Continental notes in a successful attempt to undermine the value of the money used by the Colonies.  But there is no reason to believe that the British would have been any less successful had the Continental been printed with a statement that said it was backed by gold or silver.

All things being equal, history and reason shows that the best chance for economic success as a nation is with a government treasury being the sole issuer of a debt free fiat currency, issued in a controlled manner.

The Obelisk Deception

By Glen Wallace

I would like to call into question the belief i have read elsewhere that obelisks are symbolic representations of the phallus.  some have contended that widespread building of obelisks in ancient Egypt was our of reverence and worship of the phallus.  My suspicion however is that this explanation of obelisks being stone phallic symbols is just a cover story for some other deeper meaning.  I believe that this is common practice in general for secret societies to essentially maintain two sets of books with one being the false cover story intended to throw the non initiate general public off the track and thereby protect the knowledge found in the book intended only for initiates of the secret society.  I belief the 'obelisk as a phallus' story is from the first book, the one for the public designed to throw them off by making them think they have finally found the truth when in fact they are way off the mark, just as the secret society had intended.

So what are the obelisks symbols of, or what are they representative of or what do they  do?  Let me start off that I am not a member of any secret society so I don't have  access to the members only book of secrets I referred to earlier.  As a result we are left to speculate and do independent research.  But my inclination regarding obelisks is that they representative of or are crystal transceiver devices that are able to act as a sort of antenna that transmit and receive information and/or energy.  Think about it, what does an obelisk look more like; a phallus or a crystal like a quartz crystal?  Phallus's, if they are anything, they are very rounded with no sharp angles.  Crystals, on the other hand have many sharp angles and few if any rounded angles and crystals also typically come to a sharp pointed end just like an obelisk, but not just like a phallus. 

Now returning to the point about obelisks being energy and information tranceiving devices.  Quartz crystals have long been used in radios with their unique ability to tune into a given frequency range.  The very first radios in fact were known as crystal sets that use a crystal to receive radio signals.  Those crystal sets do not require their own power source but rather can be run entirely on the power generated by the signal put out by the radio station that may be many miles away.  Now just suppose there is after all free energy coursing through all space that if only it could be tapped into we could have an unlimited source of energy for all our world's needs.  Well perhaps all those obelisks were more than just symbols but were in fact the crystal of a giant crystal set that tapped into that free energy that powered the civilization that built the pyramids?  I think it may be possible that the knowledge of what these obelisks were originally used for was lost even to  the secret societies but they continued to acknowledge their importance even if they didn't know why they were so important.  But I have a hard time believing they were every supposed to represent the phallus.  If that were the case then round out the edges more.

I just read someone state that according to an Edgar Cayce reading, Atlantis was destroyed because they misused the power of crystals.

Enormous power may be found in Quartz crystals if they are used in a certain manner.  It just seems to me that the obelisk and cathedral spire as phallic symbols seems to be an occult dead end (Yes I've also read allegations that cathedral spires are also supposed to represent the phallus. Additionally the twin towers that appear so often in both mythology and in architecture are also supposed to represent the phallus as well. But to me the spire looks much more like an ordinary antennae that is a transceiver of energy and information. And the twin towers look more like the positive and negative terminals of a battery or electric circuit or the two poles in the high voltage jacob's ladder device).  That is, the phallus and what it is and what it does is fairly well known and mundane.  It seems odd to me that such great effort would not be made to build such enormous structures and make it a mystery what they stand for and then have that hidden secret be of something that is no mystery, but rather of something that is rather mundane and banal.  Once the 'secret' is 'revealed' I'm left thinking "that's it, a phallus."  It sounds like something kids in their early teens would do, not the adults in charge of and operating civilization for the last few thousand years.  Could they be really that immature emotionally? I doubt it, rather, those in charge are rather clever and have gone to great lengths to provide false clues and leads steering occult investigators to believe the phallus story is the hidden truth when in fact it is a false lead.

Obamacare is Not Socialized Medicine, But I Wish it Were

By Glen Wallace

While I have no doubt that they have the best of intentions, I think it is unfortunate that the progressive set has now seen it as their duty to rally in support and defend Obamacare as thought it were this great compassionate improvement in the current state of affairs.  I think the only solution that progressive minded folk should see as acceptable is a single payer government run universal plan that is modeled after the best run plans of northern Europe.

The Hillarycare plan would have been much more like the European single payer model, and therefore I really wish it would have succeeded.   With hindsight they should have been able to come up with a better way to sell the plan to the public.  What they could do now is have their own 'there's got to be a better way' commercial like the insurance companies put out against the plan, but this time the government could put out their own commercials supporting the plan using real people recounting their health insurance horror stories from dealing with medical debt they incurred from either high deductibles or cases where the insurance company has weaseled out of paying for hospital bills.  At the end of the commercial they would say "there's got to be a better way..... but wait, there is, and they're already doing it over in Europe and Canada."

I heard on public radio that two thirds of all American's with medical debt had health insurance when they incurred the debt.  One person that they had featured on the radio program with medical debt, who had health insurance, was battling with the billing hospital and health insurance company because the insurance company claimed some of the billed care he received from the hospital was not covered.  Trying to get either the hospital to remove the charges or get the insurance company to pay for them, had become a full time job for this guy who was still recovering from the motorcycle accident that caused the very costly hospital stay where the bills got run up in the first place.  Not only would all these problems go away for the individual with a universal single payer plan, but implementing such a plan would remove a huge costly burden from employers that would likely free up some money to hire more employees and expand a business.  It seems like the single payer plan is such a win-win that it should practically sell itself.  Perhaps we as a country need to get over our aversion to particular terms such as 'socialism' and become more pragmatic and simply choose the ideal solution regardless of what label applies to it.

The Theft of America's Natural Resources

By Glen Wallace

When natural resources are obtained from federal land, the same financial relationship that exists between a private land owner and a business obtaining the resources from private land, should also exist when a business removes natural resources from federal land. That is, the US citizens should be treated from a financial perspective as the group that owns federal lands in the same way that an individual or business that owns private land.

Our legislative representatives, then, should be acting as just that, our representatives acting in our, the citizens, best financial interests in much the same way that a lawyer should, if retained to handle someone's financial affairs. But to the best of my knowledge, our best financial interests are not being looked after by our so called representatives. Instead, to my understanding, if, for instance, a lumbar company wants to do some logging on federal land, all the lumbar company has to do is pay a small fee for the logging rights to a particular parcel of land and in return gets to keep the entire bounty of the logging companies logging operation in that parcel. But if it were private land that the owner wanted to harvest the trees for lumbar, the owner would seek out bids to log it. Eventually the winning bid by the private logging company would be the amount that the private land owner would be paid and be an amount commensurate with the value of the timber minus the cost to cut and clear the timber from the land. If I am correct in the preceding analysis of how logging works, then this country and its citizens could be losing out on a large scale from the profiteering off of citizen owned federal lands. I'm sure some people would come up with arguments why it might be impractical to treat federal lands financially the same as private lands. I would counter that for every reason someone would give why it couldn't work I would ask then why does the system work just fine for private lands -- I would essentially turn their arguments around and try to use the same argument but replace the words 'federal' with 'private' and show that their argument makes just as much sense that the current system dealing with private land transactions shouldn't work then either, but of course it does work just fine and therefore should work just as well with federal lands.

An added benefit to contracting out federal land resource extraction in the same manner as done with private lands, is that the logging operation would be scrutinized more carefully due to the desire to be sure the people get their money's worth. That extra scrutiny could help insure that loggers do not remove more than what is allowed in the contract. As it stands, with the current system of paying small fees and being let loose on federal lands there is little scrutiny and a lot of incentive to exceed the limits of the specific logging rights, and remove trees that may be protected, such as some old growth forests. Or perhaps an even better system to protect protected lands is to set up a system where the US Forest service does the selling of the felled trees on the open market, selling them for whatever the market will bear. And then for the logging itself the bidding would be for what we would pay the logger to fell, clear and stack the logs. Then if the contractor extracts more resources than contracted they would just be doing more work than that they were paid for -- it wouldn't make any sense! Doing so would be akin to a builder that had been contracted to build an office tower and then, just for fun, decides to add a few extra floors to what they had been contracted to build.

I've focused mostly on logging with this essay but I believe we are being cheated out on most all of the resources being extracted from federal lands in the US. As it stands, it seems like we have a sort of wild west approach to private profiteering on public lands even though all the land has been carefully and specifically plotted as far as ownership rights are concerned. This no longer is the wild west and insofar as we do allow natural resources to be extracted from the peoples lands, we should be taking full advantage and reaping the financial windfall from doing so. But instead just a few large companies are reaping the benefits from our land while left with just the shaft.

The amount that the citizens are losing out with this, what could only be called a scam, is hard to calculate. But not only would our taxes most certainly would go down, the return from the natural resources from this bountiful land that are supposed to belong to us, could be significant enough that we could have all citizen taxation eliminated along with receiving a dividend check every year just for being a citizen.

Another possible area of lost revenue for the US citizen is in the area of communication airwaves.  To the best of my knowledge, a given block of bandwidth is first owned by the federal government and then is sold to a private company.  If that is how it works, then I don't believe our best interests are being looked after.  A much more fiscally prudent method would be for the federal government to retain ownership and simply rent out the airwaves for whatever the market will bear.  After all, the airwaves would present all the benefits for the owner of renting out without any of the usual hassles of maintenance and repair; no calls in the middle of the night by a tenant with a broken radiator or furnace.  Airwaves just don't suffer from wear and tear with use like regular material property usually does.  Additionally when renting out, the rental rates can keep pace with inflation and with the increased demand that the modern computer age is likely to continue to bring.  Couple that increased demand with a very limited supply of usable bandwidth, and an investment owner of that property, the US citizens, should be presented with a dream scenario that they will want to have the price structure nimbleness that renting out affords.

Categories of Capitalism

By Glen Wallace

In the movie Wall Street the character Gordon Gekko makes a famous speech before shareholders where he states "greed, for a lack of a better word, is good." I would counter that 'greed' is neither necessarily good nor bad. Greed, rather, is simply a motivational tool that can, if allowed, motivate people to make money by taking advantage of workers and the environment. But greed can also motivate someone who has lost their job to start a new small business that provides a needed good or service, along with perhaps some jobs to provide or manufacture the goods, to the community. Therefore the correct approach to greed and capitalism is a pragmatic one. Greed and capitalism should be seen as a powerful team of horses that needs to be directed to aid society, but if not guided would run wild trampling people everywhere. Herein lies the fundamental flaw of the free market capitalists: they seem to be in some kind of fantasy land where they only imagine how capitalism can be beneficial to society and assume that it then is always beneficial if allowed to roam freely unfettered by regulation or laws imposed by the government. First they don't recognize the fact that where the capitalistic business has benefited society, that business has been carefully directed to so by intelligent people with benevolent intent. Therefore, it is not capitalism itself that is acting like some intelligent machine or robot looking for ways to help humanity, it is people that are directing the machine properly. But if the robot of business is being run without regard to humanity by its operators, anyone in the way of that robot better scramble away or hope for luck that the robot randomly veers away from your direction. The only way that we can insure that the robot of business is directed in a manner benefiting the community is to have a powerful government oversight imposing regulations that mandate that the business robot or the team of greed horses are directed in a manner that will benefit the community and not trample it. How else can we insure that the human designers and operators of the capitalistic business are driving their machine with benevolent intent? The free market capitalists, however, never bother looking at the manifold examples that refute the belief that unfettered capitalism is so great for the whole world. The free marketeers would rather live in their lala land where every business is this nice mom and pop operation that pays all their employees great wages, never dumps any toxic sludge out the back door, provides a product or service that the community greatly needs and would be facing hardship if the business never existed in their community. This brings me to my theory of the three basic forms of capitalism: 1) Crony 2) Parasitic 3) Symbiotic. The free marketeers in the fantasy land of their own minds prefer to imagine that if it were only allowed to roam free, then all businesses would be operating under the third form of capitalism, symbiotic. The symbiotic form is one that exists much like the mom and pop business example I described above where there exists a mutual benefit between the owner of the business and community where that business exists. The parasitic form of capitalism is where someone finds a way to drain money off of the flow of currency without putting anything back from where the money was drained. The best example of the parasitic capitalist brings us back to the start of this essay: Gordon Gekko. In the movie he gives the example of a painting he bought for X amount of dollars and could turn around and sell it for a much greater Y amount of dollars today. He didn't do anything to the painting -- he didn't improve it in any way. That is the goal in parasitic capitalism -- to take out from the flow of currency more than you put in. Any example of 'flipping' is an excellent example of parasitic capitalism. The term flipping is often used in the sale of houses where someone buys a house and immediately turns around and sells it for a profit without doing any improvements to the house. If that is the definition, buying something and without improving it in any way, sells it for more than what was payed for it, then most all forms of stock market trading would be considered flipping. The only possible exception would be if someone in buying shares used that opportunity to use their stake in the corporation to influence the board of directors as to how the company is run. It is a little ironic that we come back to him since he's the one that said that greed is good. But in parasitic capitalism the only sense of 'good' exists for the parasite himself. Now it sounds like I'm painting a rather bad picture of parasitic capitalism, but I think just as with capitalism as a whole we should treat this subset of capitalism pragmatically as well. While due to its nature, it's hard to see how parasitism could be beneficial to the community at large, I do think there can be, like in the biological world of parasites, where the negative effect for the host is either insignificant or nonexistent. Perhaps, to a degree, I'm trying to defend myself since I have in the past and am currently trying to 'play the markets.' In so doing I'm trying to come up with some way to realize some capital gains, but I'll have to admit I don't see how what I'm doing in playing the markets, in itself, will benefit humanity. However, if I succeed, that will leave me with more time to write essays like this one with intent to benefit mankind and without regard to the commercial success it might have with whatever I write. Additionally, especially considering the very small amounts I have to play with, I'm lead to believe that I'm engaging in the neutral form of parasitic capitalism where there is little or no negative impact on the host of commerce. But like in nature where there can be parasites that are very harmful to the host, the same problem exists in the world of commerce. An example of malevolent parasitic capitalism exists in the movie Wall Street (and I suppose I should issue a **spoiler alert** for what follows for those who haven't seen the movie) where Gekko tries, after buying it, to break up and sell off in parts the fictional Blue Star Airlines. Along with the break up, all the jobs would be lost along with the all benefits of the airline to the community where it was based. Gekko was planning to sell the airline, in parts, simply because he thought he could suck off more capital gains that way than by running it as a symbiotic business. Of course there is very often a great deal of overlap in all the categories of capitalism when looking at real world examples of how businesses are run. A business may alternately by parasitic at times and symbiotic at others or some parts or divisions of the same business may each be engaging in the different categories. However, its hard to imagine that one particular business act could be simultaneously parasitic or symbiotic. It would seem that the two terms are mutually exclusive if were using them as the business equivalents of the same two categories in the biological field. That is, if the relationship between two or more entities is mutually beneficial then I don't think that in biology that it would be correct to call the relationship parasitical. Rather the relationship if mutually beneficial would necessarily be called symbiotic. While the free marketeers seem to be completely oblivious to the reality of capitalism often devolving into malevolent parasitism, they do, to their credit, recognize the harm to society of capitalism engaging in its third basic form: Cronyism.

Condos are Communistic

Even the most affluent Condominium communities largely populated by right wing free market capitalists are living in a communistic enclave. Those communities contain community owned pools, exercise rooms, entertainment rooms, roads and even the building exterior and HVAC systems are properties that everybody living in the community shares. All the hallmarks of a communist system are present in any housing community that shares ownership and responsibility for some of the property existing in the area that the residents call home.

Motivational Categories

By Glen Wallace

I'm thinking of modifying my motivation theory to having just two very general categorize of types of motivation; Social and Creative. In so doing the altruistic motive would be merged into as a subset of the Social motive.

The practice of engaging in computer games is a very popular activity that usually involves both of the basic categories. Even when a human is playing just against the computer I believe the social motive still comes into play. The human player ends up anthropomorphizing the artificially intelligent computer generated competitors. The human also brings imagination to play by imagining that there are real human spectators either watching the event on television or are in the stands viewing the event. And when the human does well against the computer generated components, in the mind of the human player, the same reward with the sense of having ones social status among both the competitors and spectators exists just as it would in the real world with real human competitors and spectators.

Why People Love to Work for No Money

If we are to abandon paying for work the question arises of what will motivate anyone to get anything done. Unfortunately, many subscribe to the jackass fallacy whereby people wont do anything unless they have a carrot in front to walk towards. Motivation is a complex subject that deserves careful study. But instead of examining the subject carefully, the entire modern western society is largely based on one simpletonic, poorly examined, poorly thought through belief that humans are required to have a paycheck to chase after in order to get anyone off their duff and do anything. It doesn't take too much examination to refute the 'humans are jackasses' premise. One only need look at the practice of engaging in hobbies to see that people engage in work and get things done, not only without being paid but usually the hobbiest ends up spending a great deal of money to make the work possible. Similar to the activity of hobbies is the activity of fitness and athletics. I'm a competitive distance runner and let me tell you it is a lot of work and I have never won any money and while it's conceivable that I could win a cash prize from a race, I'm certain I could never 'make a living' from competitive running. So why do I do it? What is the motive? Well this brings me to my theory that there are three basic primary motivators for any given activity and competitive running satisfies two of them; those being status and creative motives. The status motive pays heed to our very social nature and our tendency to frame ourselves in comparison with others. In any competitive activity whether it be athletic, business or academic the status motive clearly plays an important motivator role. But there is also the non-status social role of the camaraderie that one enjoys when sharing a hobby or athletic event or any other activity with others. Typically this social role of camaraderie becomes an strong motivator in the conventional work experience where co-workers become like a family and a worker looks forward to going to work just to be with that family. I believe camaraderie is an especially strong motivator in the military where every soldier in a unit feels a need to look out for their fellow soldier with the same zeal that they look out for themselves. I strongly suspect the military organization fully takes advantage of the social camaraderie motive to drive soldiers to work to lengths that they would never go to without that motive.

While the creative motive may seem to be an odd motivator for a competitive athletic activity, I'm using the term in a rather broad sense of involving any activity whereby work is mixed with the physical realm to create something that did not exist before the work was done. And I believe a 'something' that is created can include completion of a run. Additionally the planning of workouts and race strategy also involve creativity. Often times, creativity is the primary motive for hobbiests. Whether that hobby is gardening, painting, or wood working the spark of creativity is perhaps the strongest driver of the activity so that people will spend great amounts of money so they can experience the process of creating something. Therefore, in theory, an economic system could be set up whereby instead of paying people to do something that needs to get done, the only incentive necessary to attract employees would be to offer the tools and supplies for a worker to get the job done. And anyone with an interest in practicing that activity would flock to the job in order to experience the same creative rush that motivates hobbiests to engage in their activity. But status often also plays a role in motivating hobbiests as they compare each others projects. The third primary motivator is altruism - the desire to help others. Now one might say that those engaging in altruistic acts are doing it for selfish reasons - to make them self feel better or give them self a good feeling inside. That may be true, but that is true for the other two motivators that ultimately the fundamental motivator is coming from the felt state resulting from engaging in the given activity.

I think the role of parenthood employs all three motivators. I've even worked on jobs where co-worker moms have said that they consider coming to work a break from the job of motherhood. That just shows to what lengths people will go to do a difficult job that doesn't pay but instead costs a lot, such as motherhood, when the basic human motivators exist for a job -- and none of those motivators involves getting paid money to do the job.

The Freedom That Communism Brings

By Glen Wallace

Perhaps I should have elaborated that some element of capitalism can be both beneficial to humanity and also exist harmoniously with a system of communism.

So the communism that I'm suggesting is not absolute but rather broadening of its implementation in this country and abroad. It would be a broadening because this country utilizes a lot of communism already. Not only does communism already exist in the USA, most people use and enjoy it, without thinking that they have become the least bit of a 'pinko commie.' What I'm referring to is the publicly owned property that nearly all of use such as sidewalks, roads, parks, bike paths, lakes, rivers and streams. Those properties are owned by the community for all to use and therefore to advocate and support the continued creation and maintenance of community owned land and infrastructure is to support communism.

Without the existence of widespread communism in this country our lives would be much more restricted and less free than they our today. Imagine a world where as soon as you walk out of your front door having to pay a toll just to walk on a sidewalk. And that's if your lucky enough for a vendor to have created the sidewalk. Maybe the owner of the property outside of your front door doesn't like pedestrians or anyone for that matter and has put 'no trespassing' signs everywhere, causing you to be a prisoner in your own home! What an awful world. But that is just the sort of world that you might face if the supporters of free enterprise capitalism had there way. But it's not the sort of world I want to live in. I love being able to stroll down the

sidewalk anytime without having to swipe my credit card at every intersection just to pass through. I love having beautiful parks, full of nature where people like myself with little money can visit and be with the towering trees that birds flutter about in. Anyone can look up property records online and see that most city parks have valuations in the millions of dollars that I'm sure some greedy capitalist would love to get there hands on to bulldoze and turn into a high-rise condo with big iron gates surrounding the property to keep out the unwashed masses like myself. I'm sure it also irks many capitalists that I can go the public library and be able to check out a book or movie without providing the least bit of revenue to some profiteer.

I think whenever someone sees the term communism, people tend to automatically assume the word is referring to the system used by the so-called communist states of the former eastern block and some Asian nations. I say so-called because they are/were pseudocommunist nations that merely paid occasional lip service to communist principles to help build what was in reality a tyrannical oligarchy that only cared about gaining power and cared nothing about the welfare of the community they were governing.

Perhaps the biggest mistake was to use Karl Marx's philosophy on the relationship between a worker's labor and the material wealth created by that labor, as a complete playbook for how to run an entire government system. I don't know if Marx ever even intended for his philosophy to be used as a complete system, but some did and in doing so, it left the door wide open to the abuse of power. And when it comes to political power, if you give an inch they take a mile - and a Marxian system gave several feet of leeway to the bureaucrats. And it's now historical record that the bureaucrats that got that leeway used it in such a horrific manner that the some of the pseudocommunist perpetrators such as Stalin and Pol Pot have become rightfully vilified as ordering some of the worst cases of mass murder not just in modern history, but in recorded history as well.

The solution then is to implement a communist system measured by libertarianism. While most people automatically consider libertarianism and communism to be mutually exclusive, close examination reveals that not to be true at all. Instead, utilitarianism; the belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice justice for a few individuals for the betterment of the society at large, is the antithesis of libertarianism.

Utilitarianism has been, and continues to be used, as a justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals, in order further the goals of both capitalist and communist systems. While many may be very familiar with the ways utilitarian principles have been used to justify communist tyranny - sending dissident writers to the gulag was justified by the belief that their authors beliefs presented an obstacle to reaching a utopian Marxists state, but few realize how often utilitarianism is used to justify restrictions on freedom because exercising that freedom is believed to result in lower revenue for certain industries. The most obvious example of this is the efforts by the music recording and motion picture industries to restrict the freedoms of individuals to copy, share and manipulate digital works as the individual sees fit in the privacy of their own home. The recording industry argues that it is ok to sacrifice the freedoms of the individual owners of copies of artistic or intellectual works, because if freedom were allowed in that case, society as a whole would lose out on future works because the creators of those works would no longer have the incentive to create because the guarantees of profit from those works would be gone. The problem with that argument is twofold. First is the mistake of prioritizing values whereby specific freedom of action is given a lower priority to vague theories about both to the benefits to society as a whole in the form of better arts and entertainment and improved profits garnered from sales that would have been lost to file sharing. Therein lies the problem with utilitarianism: some theory about the benefits to society as a whole can always be thought up to justify any given restriction on freedom and justice for individuals. And typically there isn't any demand by lawmakers that the theories about societal benefit be in anyway corroborated with evidence. Rather if the theory makes any sense at all, by the principles of utilitarianism, it is justifiable to impose any degree of draconian laws that impose tyranny on a people, if it can be successfully argued that in the long run society will be better off for it. What ends up happening though is the government or corporate official puts forth the appealing utilitarian argument for the tyrannical measures while at the same time, being motivated by entirely different, selfish reasons for implementing the measures. If utilitarianism is allowed any acceptability by society, all that is required by the ruling elite to impose a harsh draconian tyranny onto the populace, is merely a little creativity to generate a useful fiction that the people will buy.

While some may argue that the injustice faced by those that can no longer file-share pales in comparison to the injustice endured by the millions of individuals sent to Stalin's gulags, I would counter that, in a way, we already effectively have our own sort of gulag system in this country in the form of the prison industrial complex. And there are many capitalists that benefit tremendously from our prison system, that since the start of the war on drugs, this country has incarcerated millions of citizens for engaging in the non-violent act of merely possessing or selling a substance that people wanted to use out their own free will in their own bodies. Industry groups that act either as vendors for government run prisons or operate privately run prisons, have lobbied legislatures to pass laws recommending or mandating longer prison sentences for non-violent drug offenders. The utilitarian justification presented for the longer prison sentences is that society as a whole will benefit by limiting the scourge of narcotic drug intoxication but undoubtedly the real reason for desiring the longer prison sentences is that it will result in more prisoners requiring more product and therefore more profit for the prison vendors and private prisons operators. It may be a very poor justification for the grave act of taking away someones freedom and putting them in a cage for years at a time, but therin lies the problem with utilitarianism - an excuse, reason or justification that has some appeal to the public can always be found with it for implemmenting tyrannical measures. But the actual reason for measure that would be unappealing to the public, can remain hidden by the tyrants.

The solution then is to implement a communist system measured by libertarianism. While most people automatically consider libertarianism and communism to be mutually exclusive, close examination reveals that not to be true at all. Instead, utilitarianism; the belief that it is acceptable to sacrifice justice for a few individuals for the betterment of the society at large, is the antithesis of libertarianism. Utilitarianism has been, and continues to be used, as a justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals, in order further the goals of both capitalist and communist systems. While many may be very familiar with the ways utilitarian principles have been used to justify communist tyranny - dissident writers were sent to the gulag because their beliefs presented an obstacle to reaching a utopian Marxists state, but few realize how often utilitarianism is used to justify restrictions on freedom because exercising that freedom is believed to result in lower revenue for certain industries. The most obvious example of this is the efforts by the music recording and motion picture industries to restrict the freedoms of individuals to copy, share and manipulate digital works as the individual sees fit in the privacy of their own home. The recording industry argues that it is ok to sacrifice the freedoms of the individual owners of copies of artistic or intellectual works, because if freedom were allowed in that case, society as a whole would lose out on future works because the creators of those works would no longer have the incentive to create because the guarantees of profit from those works would be gone. Once again, no attempt by the recording industry is made to either prove that any individual that illegally copies would have instead legally bought the recording instead of just going without owning the recording at all. Nor is any attempt made to prove that people would no longer create music without the incentive of money. Rather the theory is put forth and the legislatures consider the theory, especially a theory coming from large campaign contributor, sufficient justification for restricting the freedoms of individuals handling digital works. Freedoms are something that should be held with a degree of sacredness by those who are responsibly for managing them. In a free society, it should be the freedoms that come as a first priority, and it should then be problem of business and police to find ways to deal with the requirement of citizen freedom, not the other way around as it is quickly becoming in this country. In the communist system I envision, a society is organized to allow the most freedoms possible with the understanding that there is a certain degree of necessary scarcity in the world. In any given community, there is only so much space for roads and sidewalks on the surface area within the confines of that community. I think there is a degree of unwritten understanding by individuals of that fact already and has resulted in the open widespread willingness of citizens to think there is a need for public roads and sidewalks and use and enjoy them and not think they should be converted to privately owned and operated entities with the same accompanying property rights by the owner as a homeowner has. But in a society that values capitalism and free enterprise while decrying communism so much, the properties owned and used by the public are rarely called by the communist leading term 'the peoples' as in the peoples sidewalk, or the peoples library. Instead the leading term 'public' is used even though both 'the peoples' and 'public' used in the same contexts mean basically the same thing, regardless of whether you live in a communist country or a free market capitalist one.

I would contend that Stalin and company perverted and thus gave a bad image and reputation to the term 'communism' in much the same way as the Nazi's perverted the swastika symbol. Just as the swastika is one of the oldest known symbols that were used by mankind for literally thousands of years before the rise of the third Reich, communism as a form of ordering society was used for thousands of years before the communist part was ever formed. In fact, communism is such a natural and fair way of running a community, that I believe it has been used throughout human history, recorded or not. I believe most native american societies were using a form of communism before the invasion by western Caucasians. Communism was such a common sense idea to the first nations peoples of this continent that they didn't really have a conception of land ownership like the colonists did. Rather, it was intuitively obvious to the native american peoples that the land was created for everyone to use in a responsible and respectful manner.