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“How we teach is what we teach.”
— John McArthur, Harvard Business School

Money, money, money, we never can seem to get enough of the filthy lucre.

We even love to sing about it. From the 1972 classic movie Cabaret — “Money makes the world go around” has about 4.5 million YouTube views. The movie was set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic in 1931. That German linkage we will come back to later.

Even more popular is “Money, Money, Money” by the Swedish group ABBA which has over 6.2 million views.

The world is awash with money, or so we are told, but why is it that I don’t have my share? After all, our economics are based on a total monetary equation: GDP = C+I+G+N(I-E). This means in human terms the Gross Domestic Product is equal to Consumption, plus Investments, plus Government spending, plus the Net Value of Imports minus Exports. It’s all about the money and where we sit in the world, our wealth, our future, is all supposedly determined by this measure of money, with, or sans inflation.

Last week a segment of the stock market traders were waiting for Friday in anticipation the FED chairman Ben Bernanke would signal that there would be another round of Quantitative Easing (QE) to help that Investment segment of the economy; but they really didn’t get that short term assurance. After that, the hope shifted to the European Central Bank (ECB) chief, Jean Claude Trichets would say the same thing. Again, under current world circumstances, he gave no assurances either.

In reality neither the FED nor the ECB has much ammunition left in their money ammo bunkers to provide true incentives to really get the global economy going again, or in reality, even staving off a recession, in either the United States or in Europe. However, should they believe that economic globalism is about to collapse; we will see economic QE that will make the past stimuli look like a tent revivalist’s offering request.

So the question that really needs to be asked in this world of money, money, money — Where are all the people in this faux-fiat money economic world?

It seems to be: “People? We don’t need real people to have economic growth! Especially if those people are the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat, you know, those stupid commoners, who have primitive beliefs, so as long as we, the more evolved citizens of the new global order, have enough money, those common humans will have nothing to worry about!”

Tags: money, GDP, quantative easing, Munich Analogy, Barack Obama, Democrats, Republicans, Reagan Revolution, John Mauldin, entrepreneur

The Grizzly Bearish, No Bull Plan, for the Future of United States of America:

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The Federal Reserve’s current two-fold mandate to pursue low inflation and job creation is rescinded and replaced with the goal of providing a strong dollar as the primary basis of national financial security. A gold standard is totally unworkable in the modern world; a strong dollar standard only requires responsible, consistent monetary policy.

Our Federal government’s portion of national GDP will be reduced to 14 percent over a period of ten years. During that period the national defense portion will be reduced to 2 percent of GDP, through the dismantling of the military-industrial-Keynesian-complex. This will very likely produce another recession, but will reset a solid foundation, for future economic growth that looks optimistically forward.

The current progressive income tax will be replaced with a standard flat tax rate on individuals and corporations of 20 percent, with the only exception and exemption for the poorest Americans. This rate will continue until such time as the nation is again established on a sound financial debt-reduction basis. Then and only then can that rate be reduced.

Social Security and Medicare withholdings from individuals will be maintained at current levels, but the cap of total contributions on a yearly basis will be removed. In pursuit of a sound dollar financial monetary policy, those funds will go into a true lock box concept, with no ability of the legislative and executive branches to use those funds; except as truly marketable and repayable investment bond securities.

National catastrophic healthcare coverage will be instituted for all citizens and documented workers, being funded through a national sales tax on goods and services. This tax can be used for no other purposes. That rate will be determined by actuarial data. Within that program every individual will be responsible for the first $50,000 of the defined catastrophic illness or other healthcare event, except for what is currently defined as long-term care, where the maximum individual liability will be $100,000. Individuals will be able to buy insurance to cover those minimums through market-driven insurance options. Over time this national tax will be reduced as current Medicare and Medicaid are gradually phased out over a period of twenty-five years.

Tags: Grizzly USA

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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
— Romans 12:2 (ESV)

Looking at it optimistically, we sure have been learning some important lessons in this early decade plus of the twenty-first century. Two twentieth century strategic lesson failures have been booked, one more to go. And actually the third is just an anabolic steroid witch’s brew of the first two.

In alphabetical order, we have come to realize that crony Industrial Age crapitalism, with humongous global corporations, and bureaucratic governments; hiring overpaid and over-benefited workers really aren’t and can’t provide engines of continuing economic growth.

We also have learned that economic Keynesianism, to create consumer demand through the multiplier effects of massive deficit spending, really provides only very short-term demonstrable stimulus to the economy. One thing it does do however, is greatly increase the national debt to totally unsustainable levels.

Finally, the tutorial yet to be apprehended, the bipolar ten thousand pound gorilla in the room, is when you combine Industrial Age crapitalism with military Keynesianism you end up with a military industrial complex that provides the physical bases for a type of imperialism that consumes more financial resources than basically the rest of the world’s national defense budgets combined.

When it comes to Acts of Man, defense of our American way of life always seems to float to the top. The problem is that the scum is never removed and eventually ends up spoiling the whole vat. So it is with our military-industrial-Keynesian-complex; all components are colluding together. Most recently we needed to fight a “War on Terror” to protect our supply lines for the stuff we need to consume to keep the economy moving onward and upward to the future shining city.

Furthermore when you add together all the national defense related expenditures from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, classified and off budget expenditures of one type or another, there is a strong indication that we may be spending ten percent of GDP, to be the world’s last superpower, nation builder, policeman; attempting to maintain the shining military garrison on the hill—everywhere.

The solution is really quite simple, just like the British systematically dismantled Hail Britannia after World War II, and the Soviet Union wisely did the same a half a century later; the United States of America, must follow in these wise governance footsteps, or confront the reality of total national economic collapse.

Tags: Keynesian, military industrial complex, shining city, Richard Nixon, all volunteer military, power law, Business Ecology, USA

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You can’t know where you are headed, if you don’t know where you are, and where you have come from.
— Anonymous

How about one man’s brief description of that time continuum reality. In reference to the above quotation, we are all free, actually required by our humanness, to construct our own personal reality worldview.

Mine starts with God miraculously creating the heavens and the earth, not all that long ago. A global flood and a following ice age with resultant massive alluvial deposits extensively reworked this creation.

Mankind can make minor improvements upon this creation to allow for the development of civilization and cultures.

Capitalism, as it grew out of a Scottish-English-American response to the Age of Discovery, was essentially the most viable of those natural creative opportunities for mankind to improve human culture by creating real diverse wealth-producing enterprises, with accompanying freedoms, including the freedom from want.

With the rise of material evolutionary thought and the closing of the physical frontier, mankind believed that we could, and needed to, come up with a process to improve upon natural capitalism, so that human societies and cultures could continue to develop unchecked by physical limitations imposed by natural law.

In the twentieth century, a number of these improvements were tested; communism, socialism, national socialism, fascism, laissez faire markets, crony crapitalism (sic), material stateism, liberal progressivism, to name a few.

Once the concept of money was divorced from its requirement to function solely as a medium of exchange for goods and services, and without any ties to the real world, except as a means to facilitate global trade, in the early twenty-first century money evolved or morphed into a global deistic cancer.

In order to appease this behemoth god, nations states of the world are now sacrificing their civilizations and their cultures, on the altar of austerity and deleveraging; all the while money continues to grow and consume the hopes of humans, through economic bubbles and following bursting busts.

Yet when you look at it seriously, these events are nothing more than primitive paganish sacrifices to the gods of the dark mysteries of natural law; deep things the priests of evolving enlightened understanding can no longer interpret or discern.

Hence humanity has reached the limit of creative abilities within the closed system of atheistic materialism.

This is where we are. Now where are we headed?

Tags: Ronald Reagan, shining city, Republicans, Mormons, Barack Obama, Obamacare, Richard Nixon

Tags: Republicans

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When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.
— P.J. O’Rourke

It’s the middle of summer in the Pacific Northwest so the old adage about “keep your powder dry” is not all that difficult. But with the way things have been unfolding over the last week or so, I am reminded of our “5—Gs” God, Gold, Grub, Gumption and Guns.

Last week we added a little detail to our proposal that Federal spending should be cut to 14 percent of GDP over ten years and healthcare spending to 12 percent; with the first installment being the institution of national catastrophic illness coverage, that would be funded by a percentage of Federal tax revenues, probably administered by the individual states.

The reason for these proposals, as seems obvious to anyone outside the American political class, is that U. S. Federal spending is going to have to decrease much more rapidly and much more deeply than anyone in Washington currently believes is necessary. The best I have heard from conservative Republicans is reductions to 18 percent of GDP; and so far Democrats have said a lot of things, but none of them seem to apply to any type of spending curtailment, or to the real world in which we live.

It is not that I am such an uber-libertarian, or a libertarian at all, but rather when you look at history, we are falling in line with all the former greats. There are multitudes of examples, but when you look at the world seriously, European countries are basically nation states formed out of the former Roman Empire.

The current European Union is basically an Act of Man to recreate that behemoth, with a little ancient Babylonian mysticism thrown in. Well, they seem to have made it through a decade, and even with some very serious financial restructuring, the Eurozone may become one of history’s poorest big experiments in human governance, led to destruction by modern Italy and Rome being to big to save.

Tags: Federalism, GDP, Eurozone, entrepreneur, startup jobs, Industrial Age, BRICs

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Your Fired! — Donald Trump

While I have never mentioned this before, the most interesting concept of the current United States morass is that it is totally focused upon the Federal government. No matter ones’ personal political persuasion, the savior, or the satan, or any personality in between—is totally about what happens in Washington DC.

There are fifty states that are supposed to be United; today they do nothing but take orders from the Federal government, and of course they also come for a handout to fund local initiatives, which should really be financed by the natives who reap the benefits.

If you truly look at what has and is happening with the closing of the physical frontier and the winding down of the specialization of the Industrial Age; every institution—private and public, employed individual—either privately or publicly, and even the so-called wild critters, look to Washington for direction, subsistence, or survival.

Gratefully in late 2007 it all began to unravel, everyone took a financial haircut, and a few of those people began to look at what is really happening. Sadly, that is a very few, and the rest either are hoping for the past to return, or they are too afraid to look seriously at the present and developing world to be of any positive value.

Into that world of rapid stupendous change, not only in the United States, but also around the world, in the last six months our legislative and executive branches of the Federal government have accomplished, or hope to have accomplished, one very minor thing, that is to raise the debt limit borrowing ability of the Federal money-spending machine another $2.4 trillion for maybe a couple of years.

Looking at reality in that light, all the giddy, childish talk about changing the atmosphere in the nation’s capital is just that, giddy, immature childish bloviating, which should be more maturely described as: reprehensible, repugnant and reactionary.

Following directly the debt-limit farce, does anyone think that the United States Federal Government is functional anymore?

Tags: USA, debt ceiling, TEA Party, John Mauldin, Federal budget, healthcare, PREFER Ltd

Tags: Royal Fireworks Concert, Spokane, debt ceiling, Congress