The Five Essential Gs
1 April 2009
Volume 11, Issue 13
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This weekÕs article is
dedicated to the memory of Dale Anderson a compatriot from my college days at
both Eastern and graduate school at WSU, fellow sojourner to the land west of
the Cascades, and Chronicle email subscriber. Dale died suddenly Sunday. We
pray that the peace of God will comfort and direct his wife Pam and his family
as they move forward in this time of great economic uncertainty.
Glenn Beck is the new rising
star on the Fox News Channel. Much of that success that has allowed his show to
rise to the number three most popular cable program stems from his focus on
nine principles and twelve values of traditional American culture. These
talking points are focused visually by adapting the ÒUnite or DieÓ flag from
the era of the American Revolution. The problem with this number of things to
remember is that there are: twenty-one things to remember. Without a
teleprompter or some method of similar display, all those values and principles
of something, get confusing and all mixed up.
For some time, I have been
involved in cultural survival discussions that revolve around four simple words
that begin with G. Those four are God, Gold, Groceries, and Guns. Those four
necessities served us well, but as we move forward in this new era of 21st
Century change, we need to do a little modification and add another point to
make a total of five. Compared with the twenty-one on BeckÕs list these five
definitely qualify for the concept of KISS, keep it simple stupid. If kept in
alphabetical order these five also allow you to understand the unique nature of
the United States in the world.
So here is our list of Five
Essential Gs: God – Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns.
What makes the United States
of America unique in the historical sense is that our Founding Fathers
surrounded the means of prosperity with two absolutes. Put in theological terms
the indicatives of God and Guns were the absolutes that allowed the imperatives
of Gold, Grub and Gumption to grow and prosper without a significant threat to
national unity.
The American Civil War had
to be settled by guns, but it was an internal struggle in which the real
discussion related to the center principles as they were applied in a diverse
natural and economic system.
Today that complexity is
greatly increased but is still essentially a disparity in economic outlooks or
priorities between traditional values. As a general rule conservative values
are more rural and liberal values (as we define them today) are more liberal.
So that same tension that brought about the Civil War are still present. The
problem is that as time as elapsed the Civil War as been allowed to be defined
simply along racial lines and all economic discussions are either greatly
simplified or ignored all together.
The purpose of this article
however is not to deal with any of that, but rather focus upon the Five
Essential Gs and how they are being used or misused today.
The Founding Fathers and the
founding documents focus strongly upon the keys for developing a vibrant
self-governing culture. Today we have dumbed down and made these keys
politically correct. Hence we call this America, a democracy rather than a republic.
Just like cultures based on fiat money do not have a very successful history,
neither do true democracies, because of the natural relative nature and value
of everyoneÕs opinion, right, wrong, or just stupid. But we are getting ahead
of ourselves.
The Declaration of
Independence gives uniquely to each individual American, unalienable rights
descending from God alone. These rights are not to be messed with by the
government. We all have the right to be right, wrong, or just stupid, and are
required to accept the responsibility of those choices. The coming failures of
the Obama Administration will stem from not fully understanding the power of
those rights, simply because when you mess with the declared rights of people
you are also messing with God himself and Natural Law dating from before the
creation of the world.
The Founding Fathers were
well tensioned in the understanding of the balance between human reasoning
(enlightenment) and its limitations. Hence, for the preponderance of life
beyond the capacity of human intellect, our American traditions have accepted
the reality of a sovereign God to design and control the future.
Today there are those who do
not understand that human – God relationship, simply because they realize
that if they acknowledge the reality of God, they will be forced to essentially
change their immoral lives and their desire to exploit their own position in
the world generally and specifically in their interactions with other people.
What makes the United States
unique in the world from its founding until today is the linkage between God
and the role of guns as an option to maintain the Natural Law of NatureÕs God
within the nation. The concept of enlightenment mankind is that there is no
problem that cannot be discussed away. This has not worked very well on the
international scale and even within countries themselves.
However only in the United
States is this individual right to own guns for the sake of defense, codified
and sustained judicially, even though those individual rights are continually
assaulted by those who, just as with the authority of God, want to exploit
others for their own immorality and personal glorification. As you are
increasingly hearing on the street, Òbrass and lead are becoming precious
metals.Ó
This brings us to the
concept of Gold. Just this week
Russia came out and recommended that the world consider returning to the gold
standard. Of course the generous RussianÕs realize another law, this time a golden
rule. ÒHe who has the gold makes the rules.Ó Russia has a lot of gold and most
of it still in the ground, hence gold and a gold standard would give Russia a
new status in the world. That would quickly achieve the Russian desires of
world domination and make the old Soviet era look quite unpretentious.
All that Russian wishful
dominance being said, the reality is most of the gold in the world still
belongs to God as Haggai 2:8 states: ÒThe silver is Mine, and the gold is
Mine,Õ says the LORD of hosts.Ó Even in Russia, most of that gold is in pockets
of ore bodies too small to be of economic value to todayÕs large international
mining consortiums. While the funny money debt system continues to evaporate, a
golden opportunity exists worldwide for small commercial mining adventures
funded and sustained by rapid linear wealth creation.
However, that means at the
present there is virtually no chance that the huge global fiat money system
will be changed significantly. If fiat money and high debt/credit leverage were
reined in, then those powers could not become rich by basically being money
transfer agents. Hence they would have to begin to work for a living like most
people. Work being something that these people really donÕt know how to do, or
care to learn. That would ruin the whole love of money scheme and would force
the world to look again at evil, this time based in greed as pointed out in the
Bible in 1 Timothy 6:10.
If wealth creation truly is
a linear function, the exponential creation of fiat funny money will eventually
be replaced with a linear historic money base upon some type of reality. The
problem for us today however are quite numerous as well as historically unique.
Hence the value of gold, as gold, is probably the source of maintaining wealth
in turbulent times as it has been throughout the history of mankind. But notice
gold is not really the source of achieving wealth but maintaining wealth. For
those not interested in directly trusting God to find eternal wealth, notice
that the Haggai quotation above begins with silver.
I am in the process of
ramping up again to do small commercial mining operations by reengineering the
air (rather than water) concentrating tables I was working on during the decade
of the 80s. Those tables were limited by size constraints to a nominal five
tons per hour of crushed ore, but their energy consumption was pretty much in
the noise level of the ore extraction and crushing itself.
Recently trying to use a
little imagination and incorporating more mechanical energy in different ways,
perhaps one percent of the extraction and crushing energy budget, a host of new
air concentrating technologies may be developed. This would achieve a greater
process throughput with an overall reduced capital cost and would also allow
for an enterprise to grow at a high linear slope of wealth creation, which
would exceed significantly that achieved in the consumer society. For us the
opportunity is in selling-licensing the shovels rather than the digging.
Now to get back to the funny
money world in which we now live and the problems we are currently
encountering. Those problems relate to the inability to significantly truly
measure the underlying linear wealth in a speculative world, A world in which
inflationary and deflationary monetary pressures are in constant flux by
everyone trying to maintain their piece of the love of money behemoth. Put in
context, doing nothing might not be the best alternative in the absolute sense,
but it is much better than continuing to change the enterprise economic
ecosystem for what appears to be solely Machiavellian principles.
So while the world continues
to play with money, European socialists, Russian oligarchs, and Chinese
communists, are lecturing the Obama Administration about the values of capitalism
and fiscal responsibility. Therefore it behooves us all to get out of debt and
begin looking at the attractive nature of a modest lifestyle.
This brings us to the last
traditional G, which was Groceries. Groceries assumes you have some sort of
money to go to a store and buy some. We have modified Groceries to Grub, which
removes somewhat the cultural requirements. The two quickest ways to reduce
your costs of eating is to quit eating out as often, and quit going to the
grocery store to buy any type of process food. However, the greatest cost in
our food today, and the least sustainable, is the cost of transportation.
In the modern global world
today, the reason we have fresh tomatoes from Chile each winter is that it is
cheaper than trucking tomatoes from Mexico. There are numerous studies on the
Internet that point out and actually estimate the cost of transportation in the
food we buy. But what that really means is that the only entity making
signiicant money in the food distribution chain is the distribution sector.
I bought some fresh grapes
on Monday. I love fresh grapes especially when they were $0.98 per pound and it
was snowing horizontally as I walked from my car to the front door of the
market. Grapes are mostly water and these tasty sugar water vessels came to
wintery Eastern Washington from Chile. Marketing types say that modern
consumers demand this type of service, but the demand was created by the
elasticity of the price rather than the supply. I would not have bought those
grapes if they were probably not some type of loss leader. The grapes are not
grub but groceries. The dry rice I bought was grub even though it says it comes
only from a California distance.
This brings us to our final
G and the one we added from the original four G dialogue. This G is Gumption.
In the old days it was called Òget up and go.Ó The prosperous thirty years from
the late 1970s until 2007 made Americans lazy. In that time frame we worked
really hard at getting lazy. In 1977 we bought our first house in the
Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle for $37,500, almost double what it was a
year before. In 1979 we sold that house for $77,500 and bought a nice house in
Montlake for $100,000. When I left Seattle in 2007, I would estimate that house
to have been worth in excess of $600,000. So what changed?
Most significantly when we
bought that first house I qualified by myself for the loan with my job at
Boeing. I think I qualified for that Montlake house also, but that was because
we had a whole lot more money to put down. The major run up was shortly after
we bought the house in Wallingford, HUD and President Carter made it possible
for two incomes to qualify for a loan. That doubled the price of that
Wallingford house in a little over a year.
What that all means now is
essentially everyone is working really hard to get ahead, because that ahead
price in true real value is about four times of what it was during the 1970s.
Hence everyone is so overworked and underpaid you must buy pretty much anything
by increasing your debt. You just donÕt have any gumption to do anything beyond
those TV doldrums, because there is just no way to really make something pay
directly for the added expenditure.
When you turn on Glenn Beck
and his other friends at Fox News you will here the drumbeat of how the Reagan
Revolution brought this all about. The reality is that it was the Alan
Greenspan funny money leveraged debt global peddling scheme. The chief
beneficiaries being the talking heads with the Republican – Libertarian view
that this will all change with more tax cuts. This is just as fallacious as
ObamaÕs spending desires for the audacity of hope to spend trillions of debt
beyond the enlightened imagination.
So the Five Essential Gs:
God – Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns
Get going, for the way out
of this mess is not coming from the government, nor from some easy money tax
cut. We are involved in a natural law correction for unsustainable economic
extravagance. Looking back is history. Hoping in change you can believe in has
no definite object of that faith. In the present reality the Five Essential Gs
remain. Use your God given gumption to make them the operational realities of
your life.
The Five Essential Gs: God
– Gold – Grub – Gumption – Guns
© 2009 under Creative Commons
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