JHUS Staging

Tag: capitalism

  • The Price Of Bread

    The Price Of Bread

    Introduction

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]he “price of bread” is a tried and true hook on which to hang any given complaint from any given ideological perspective to shock the consumer, draw attention, and stoke feelings of anger and frustration. The “bread” in question is a metaphor for any consumer good. The arguments in question tend to take the general form of “I can’t believe how terrible the economy is today. Why, when I was young I used to get two packs of name-brand cigarettes and two 16-ounce glass bottles of Mountain Dew for $2!”

    The “price of bread” argument fails not only in that it’s usually highly subjective and prone to strong influence of personal bias e.g. artificially glorifying “the past” as having been “better,” but it’s also completely meaningless by itself. Numbers increase, particularly in capitalized systems wherein the currency is based on an intangible asset like “the full faith and credit” of the issuing nation, as is the case with all such nations including the United States. By itself this increase means nothing that can be said to meaningfully reflect on the average quality of life.

    Worse than that for those seeking progress, it often inadvertently draws attention to weaknesses in argumentation and flaws in a given logical calculus attempting to rationalize or validate progressive social policy. In doing so, the net effect tends to be empowering counter-arguments rather than advancing the ostensible agenda at hand.

    In today’s example we’re going to look at a tweet by someone calling themselves “Fred Krueger” (not likely to be a real name, but it’s possible). Mr. Kreuger, who is entirely unknown to me, claims to hold a PhD from Stanford, and says he’s a “bitcoin maxi,” whatever that is, in his twitter profile. I’ve included a link to the original tweet below, but given conditions at Twitter I thought it best to also include a screenshot.

    Original URL: https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285
    Tweet by "Fred Krueger" (@dotkrueger) reading: "The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for "progress"" Dated Dec 29, 2024
    Screenshot of original tweet posted at https://x.com/dotkrueger/status/1873320780739510285

    The tweet reads as follows: “The median family income in the US has gone from 10K in 1971 to 55K today, a gain of 5.5x however, The median cost of a car has gone from 4K to 48K, an increase of 12x. The median cost of a house has gone from 25K to 357K, an increase of 14x. The median cost of an ivy league college has gone from 3K a year to 87K, an increase of 29x. The average cost of healthcare per person has gone from $400 to $15,000, and increase of 37x. Basically, the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971. So much for “progress.””

    Problems Of Fact

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]here is a whole lot wrong here. First and foremost there is no indication of any of the sources of any of this information, so let’s track that down first. The Census Bureau tells us that the first number isn’t far off – the median family income in 1971 was $10,290. We also find with a bit of quick google-fu that the median price of a new car was $3890, and a new home was a nice even $25,000. Of course none of those numbers are normalized – those are 1971 dollars being compared to 2024 dollars, which is sort of the whole point of the exercise.

    The “reader added context” in this case isn’t particularly helpful and leans toward its own agenda.

    First and foremost the reader feedback ignores that the entire point of the framing is to compare price increases of specific items to baseline inflation. I believe the intent of the writer was to imply that life is much more economically challenging for most of us than a simple broad average inflation rate tells us, so noting that the numbers haven’t been normalized doesn’t really address any of the problems with the tweet and in fact mostly serves to point out that the people offering that particular criticism didn’t understand what they read very well. The fact that the numbers aren’t normalized is the whole point of the tweet.

    Second, there aren’t many people alive right now who were around in the 70s who really feel like they have nearly twice as much purchasing power today as they did fifty years ago, and there are some very good reasons for that.

    While the implication that quality of life is significantly improved across the board for most people is ostensibly supported by adding up the cash value of various goods and services, it also overlooks the necessity of far greater levels of spending than were necessary fifty years ago, even accounting properly for inflation. This is propaganda in the other direction; suggesting that people are basically doing just fine right now and any struggle you’re experiencing must be down to something other than a steadily decreasing quality of life. In short: gaslighting.

    But I digress, let’s get back to the tweet at hand and check some numbers. I’ve included a few direct citations links, those numbers not directly linked come from the same or similar sources.

    The median family income “today,” i.e. 2023, the most recent year for which statistics have been properly documented, is $80,610 – a difference from the quoted post of about $32K, and an increase of 8x, rather than 5.5.

    Already this is going to make the comparisons less striking, and we haven’t even checked them yet, but let’s finish the job for posterity and we’ll move on to understanding why we can’t keep doing this, nor allow it to continue being done.

    A new car in 2024 is averaging about 48,400.

    A new home is about $420,400 – a greater increase than the tweet by about 18% (and an increase of about 17x rather than the 14x cited).

    The rest of the numbers are similarly garbled; an ivy league education in 1971 was 2600 rather than 3K – a difference of about 13%. Today’s cost is 64,690 – $25K less than cited. The Social Security Administration tells us that per-capita health care expenditures in 1971 were $358 – less than 90% of the number given here. The most recent available information is for 2022, which the WHO tells us is 12,473 – about a sixth less than this tweet reports.

    So we’ve established that, at the very least, there are significant errors in basic information here, which of course throws all the calculations off.

    We’re not off to a good start; if someone wanted to argue against the core thesis of the tweet (that the average person in the US is worse off today than in 1971), this writer has certainly given them plenty of ammunition to call their basic reliability into question, which delegitimizes the thesis in the reader’s mind before it even happens.

    It all forces us to consider: why are we listening to this person or taking this message seriously in the first place?

    Problems of Reason

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]O[/su_dropcap]n the other hand, here are two semi-randomly selected prices for 25-inch televisions from the Sears catalog in 1974. One is 609.95, the other 759.95, which average to 684.95. Divide by 25 and you’ve got 273.98 per viewable diagonal inch, in old-school NTSC resolution at best.

    I’m currently using a 40-inch Polaroid flatscreen as my desktop monitor. I paid $259 for it in 2019, which is 319.62 in 2024 dollars, or 7.99 per viewable diagonal inch.

    That’s a 97% price decrease, and this is why item price comparisons are always a flawed argument.

    Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, this isn’t less true but more so when the flawed argument is supporting a larger (and entirely valid) point about the relative cost of living.

    In 1974 the minimum wage was $2.00 an hour, that would be 12.80 today. But that’s also not a fair comparison because so many things have changed since then about how we make and spend our money. The internet and its accouterments were not a required part of living in 1974, and the expenses one might incur to replicate the necessary functionality were often far lower but also with much lower quality of access, e.g. looking up information in an encyclopedia at your local library rather than on your cell phone. Fundamentally free or close to it, but also limited access and functionality. (Worth pointing out for pedantry that there are of course costs involved in transportation plus the value of one’s time, but that’s still not working out to a monthly cell phone bill of $50-$200+ dollars…and if you’re a kid in the seventies and eighties like I was, you were at school with a library full of reference material several hours a day anyway).

    There is also a long, LONG list of important social advances that have happened in the last fifty years. That we are not yet in some progressive utopia doesn’t change that. However as a rhetorical tactic, to ignore or disregard that progress out of fear that people will think the job’s done and stop trying or something (see: “post-racial America” circa 2009) is insulting to the people who made that progress happen and disheartening to those working to ensure we keep moving forward. It also adds to the general sense of futility that can attach to any attempt at meaningful social change, on any level.

    Cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

    “People aren’t going to change and it’s a waste of time to try. You may as well give up, because even with all this advancement you’ve gotten nowhere.” This is a critically important subtext contained within this entire argument. It’s messaging that serves only the interests of the entrenched and abused power to which so many people taking this attitude believe they’re working against.

    A loaf of bread ran 28 cents in 1974. It’s 1.92 now. That’s only 7 cents off the standard rate of inflation.

    These comparisons have no meaning. They’re only intended to shock and grab attention, but they don’t convey meaningful information. What they are is a nice setup for someone who understands why this framing fails (consciously or unconsciously; Hanlon’s Razor applies) to come along and yank out a list of similar comparisons – go ahead and price what would’ve conceivably passed for a home computer in 1974, or a mobile phone! – in an attempt to invalidate the core point that we’re living in a capitalist-sliding-quickly-into-fascist dystopia, which stands just fine on its own without making a bunch of cherry-picked comparisons in an appeal to emotion.

    In both cases – and this is important! – the actors at hand, both the person throwing these kind of “information” around and those who show up to try to undermine the thesis by attacking the obvious weak points in the supporting arguments or evidence, are deliberately and intentionally aiming at your emotional responses in order to subvert, distract, and ultimately mitigate your critical thinking, because they both know their arguments don’t hold up to critical analysis.

    Why It Matters

    An angry troll picking cherries out of a pile of statistics. Generated by Bing AI with additional modifications by JH
    “RAWR! THERE’S NOTHING BUT LIES AND DAMN LIES IN HERE!’ (Bing AI generated image, with modifications by JH)

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]A[/su_dropcap]s with so many discussions of this nature, the first objection one can usually anticipate is some sort of argument from apathy – why does this matter, you’re just splitting hairs, this is all just pseudointellectual self-indulgent twaddle, insert dogwhistle for whatever audience e.g. “wokeism” or appeals to ridicule, etc.

    So let’s talk about why it matters for a minute.

    First, cherry-picked statistics are a fundamentally dishonest and manipulative tactic, and we have to start recognizing that and holding our information sources to a proper standard of valid reasoning and factual accuracy.

    This seems like one of those things that would hardly bear saying out loud, but apparently it does: the most effective way to lie is with as much truth as possible. Simply throwing a bunch of statistics around without context and validation is often the tactic of someone who knows they’re trying to make a point, but doesn’t know how, and doesn’t want to let that get in the way of the dopamine rush and-or traffic bump and-or possible passive income generated by throwing around empty aphorisms and questionable statistics that are emotionally appealing and don’t invite careful scrutiny.

    (NB: When this is done at high volume with deliberately malicious intent, it can quickly turn into what’s become known as the “Gish Gallop,” wherein the speaker just throws such a ridiculous pile of misinformation around that by the time you sort through it you’ve forgotten the original point and likely made some superfluous error the speaker can then seize on as evidence of your incompetence. Hence the troll…)

    But there’s more. Inherently the application of dishonest and manipulative rhetorical tactics reflects, at the very least, a lack of confidence on the part of the speaker in their own words – if they believed what they were saying they wouldn’t think they have to lie about it to convince anyone else. By using these tactics, the subtext we’re writing is that either we don’t believe our position holds up on merit, or we don’t believe we’re not capable of expressing our reasoning effectively. Most importantly, it shows. People tend to pick up on it when you’re trying to con them, whether they do so consciously or not.

    To a discerning media consumer – and we’re all media consumers, discerning or not – this is an immediate red flag that the speaker may not be a reliable information source. Maybe they know they’re lying; maybe they’ve bought into it and are choosing to resolve any internal cognitive dissonance between what they want to believe on one hand and reality on the other by trying as hard as they can to convince other people to believe with them. Whatever the specific situation may be, people who are paying attention are going to pick up on the flaws in the argument almost immediately, and that calls into question the validity of the entire thesis. As I’ve noted above, they’ll often pick up on it even if they don’t consciously realize it.

    Arguably however the real damage comes among the less discerning consumers, those who repeat this information in earnest good faith, not realizing that they’re basically being set up to fail. Now they’ve distributed the information, and those who consume it via their distribution will hold them responsible for its accuracy. The entire conversation is now reduced to back-and-forth arguments that resolve nothing and are all based in factual and logical error. They’ve sacrificed their own credibility and taken on a huge set of arguments, while validating the source of the bad information!

    I have a problem with this in a pretty serious way because I happen to fully support and believe in the surface thesis presented by this tweet as a question of personal ideology. I was alive and conscious in the early 70s and I absolutely believe that in many important ways we were all doing far better then than we are now. Many of us were also doing far worse, which nobody of any sense wants to ignore or pretend isn’t the case. However it’s also true, and important to recognize in this context, that in terms of stability and security in the lives of the average American, the 70’s and early 80’s were far superior to any time since including the present, and indeed the nature and pace of our social progress has sunk to embarrassing lows by contrast as well, especially when one thinks not in terms of what constitutes the current status quo but in terms of what’s being done to improve it, and why, and for whom.

    We had a lot of work to do back then.

    We still do.

    We’ve done a significant bit of it as I’ve alluded above, and there are significant and powerful forces in this world who do not want that work done because our collective progress threatens their personal power. We were more honest with ourselves, culturally, especially in advanced nations, about our need to grow and recognize that we weren’t the pinnacle of human advancement but just the current step in a never-ending series of them, and that our job was not to be the best but to be the best we can, improve on what came before us and set up and inspire what comes after to do the same, where “improvement” is defined as being in more complete compliance with the “ultimate ethic” of keeping the species alive and propagating.

    We know through the research of all human history that the greatest progress happens when human minds are well-educated and free to explore and express their thoughts and ideas in a fair and just context that ensures both the right of the individual to say their piece and the right of other individuals to reject their piece as ugly, ignorant, or malicious, including the right of society to collectively reject their values or ideology as unacceptable, immoral, or unethical.

    We know that the holding the privilege (and it is a privilege, as is everything else we keep trying to call a “right”) to say your piece does not include the privilege to insist everyone pretend they agree with it and love you for saying it.

    We know that human progress individually and collectively relies entirely on our capacity to unlearn old lies. We also know that there are forces in this world whose power relies (no pun intended) on us not doing that. The capitalists can’t keep running everything if we refuse to be capitalized or to participate in their games anymore. Problem is we’ve been letting them do it for about five hundred years now and they refuse to get out of the way.

    Now, given all of that…

    Ya Thought I Forgot, Huh?

    [su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]O[/su_dropcap]ur thesis is that dragging out prices fifty years ago, or a hundred, or twenty-five and comparing them to current prices is a waste of time and energy, except perhaps in radical situations like a collapsing currency where you’re seeing prices jump by orders of magnitude in a short period of time, and in very specific applications of economic analysis that simply aren’t either directly relevant to or within the personal intellectual capacity of the average person. It’s certainly of no value in social media conversations about the need for broad social reform of capitalized institutions.

    Another image of a troll picking cherries out of a pile of statistics, visualized here as stacks of paper. This troll is less angry than cunning, with an evil grin.
    Another AI take on trolls cherry-picking statistics, this one courtesy of OpenAI via Jetpack, and enhanced a bit by yours truly

    I hope that by laying out weaknesses that are readily open to valid criticism in this framing, we can learn to first frame our own thinking more effectively but also learn to start rejecting those who either can’t or don’t.

    Because the raw truth of the matter is that either you understand the things I’ve discussed here or you don’t. If you don’t understand them, you’re probably not qualified to be participating in the conversation as anything but a spectator, and that’s okay. I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery, and that’s not a reflection on my character either. NB: If I know I’m not qualified to perform heart surgery and insist on doing it anyway, that is definitely a reflection on my character!

    If you do understand the things I’ve discussed here and still choose to frame things in this way, you’re being deliberately dishonest and manipulative. This means you can’t be trusted, and nobody with a worthy message wants to have it promoted by someone who engages in deceit and manipulation to communicate it. Since I happen to think that the underlying message of diligent and constantly refining progress of human quality of life is worth, I have to stand up and call out this radically unhelpful framing as it is.

    If the message is worthy, deceit and manipulation isn’t necessary.

    If deceit and manipulation are necessary, the message isn’t worthy.

    What happens when we allow this kind of noise to flood our zeitgeist is that we begin to accept the premise that the behavior is necessary, like someone trying to rationalize lying on their resume. “Everyone does it, you can’t avoid it.” That argument has its place. For instance, I can’t avoid trying to make money with my work; I live in a world that requires money to survive and ensure my capacity to do that work.

    That argument isn’t valid in this conversation; it’s a capitulation to the bullies and the liars, the manipulators and deceivers.

    What happens when we allow those who are intentionally deceitful and manipulative to control the conversation is we force everything to become deceitful and manipulative in order to keep up. The deceit and manipulation undermines the legitimacy of the core ideas in people’s minds until eventually nobody knows what truth is anymore, and at that point Big Brother has won the game. We let them make deceit and manipulation necessary, and then none of us can trust each other enough to work together on anything…including pushing back against the powers who want to permanently convert the vast majority of us – everyone but them and those they choose – to “human capital stock.”

    So please stop doing this stuff and stop putting it over. Stop believing and validating things just because they push your emotional buttons in a way that satisfies you. That reaction, all by itself, is what every perpetrator of evil has counted on in one way or another for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories.

    The only way to stop the evil is to stop falling for it.

  • Health Care A Right?

    Is health care a right, a privilege, or a commodity? This began as a quite different post back in 2009. In 2023, I’ve reworked it to generalize elements that were personalized. It’s a little startling how little has changed about the steadfast position of the right that human beings somehow have a right to live but not a right to the things that keep them alive.

    The refrain is now almost cliché: “health care is a right, not a privilege.”

    Inevitably this observation draws out right-wing trolls, usually calling themselves “libertarians,” to insist that the idea that health care is a right somehow means that we’re all entitled to the services of medical professionals without those medical professionals being compensated, which is just nonsense and has nothing to do with the argument, but makes for a great little chest-thumping FREEDOM! scream for those whose idea of “freedom” begins and ends with their freedom to obstruct the freedom of everyone they don’t like.

    Typically, those arguments look a bit like this (and to be clear: these are all statements made in the course of the original conversation from which the 2009 version of this article was taken…and repeated constantly before and since.

    Rights are things that one has access to without another person giving up their own rights to Life, Liberty, or Property. Unless you are a doctor or surgeon and can diagnose and/or fix yourself, then you do not have a right to health care.

    Should the federal government provide your food for you? Should we all get free college through the government? Should HUD provide homes fr every person who decides they want to own one? And if you believe any of those things to be true, where does it end?

    I’m not making any argument for or against any sort of health care reform; I’m simply stating a fact: health care is not a right, it’s a commodity.

    Nobody seems to be interested in socializing health care on a local level, just the Federal.

    The idea of a free society in and of itself prohibits the concept of things such as “a right to health care”.

    The argument that a right to health care entails by necessity the violation of the rights of others to make a living is at best specious and at worst servile and self-destructive. This has always been one of the manipulative, dishonest, and underhanded tactics employed by the “libertarians” and right wingers: as soon as you start talking about people not having to pay out of pocket for health care, they start talking about health care providers being expected to work for free, which is simply not the argument being made.

    The entire framing also overlooks the basic fact that the government is of, by, and for us. Yes, it is precisely the government’s job to ensure we all have food, shelter, clothing, health care, and all the other things necessary to protect and empower those rights we love to talk so much about. That is the purpose of a democratic government (including the form of democratic government we call a constitutional republic).

    Then they’ll discuss all these other “rights,” like the “right to obtain and choose my own food,” but entirely ignore the reality that this isn’t a right; if it was, food would be free. I have the right to choose which food I’ll exercise the privilege of my material wealth to acquire, and that’s all.

    Even if I did have a “right to obtain food,” what good does that do if I don’t have any teeth to eat it with because I can’t afford dental care, or I can’t digest it because I can’t get treatment for the ulcers that are slowly metastasizing in my gut because I can’t afford to have them treated?

    In the world described by these folks, people fall into three categories: the plutocracy, the avaricious marks who support the actions of the plutocracy because they think they too will someday be greedy and selfish enough to become a plutocrat if only they wear their brown lipstick thick enough (this group is nearly always the one making these arguments), and the poor, who don’t deserve to be healthy because if they wanted to be healthy they shouldn’t have chosen to be poor.

    Self-governance and deregulation are not the solution to our current problems, in health care and in so many other areas of life in the twenty-first century: they are the cause.

    This particular brand of “libertarianism” is marked mostly by freedom of industry from regulation and a callous, selfish, and frankly heartless disregard for the well-being of other people masquerading as a stoic and perverse sort of social Darwinism, i.e. “only the strong survive, so long as I am allowed to define what constitutes strength in terms that are most advantageous to me in my current situation.” 

    The reality is that universal health care is not “taking from” the medical industry, but rather spreading the burden of cost among all of us collectively, consistently, across time, rather than the current reactive system that relies on treatment at the greatest expense to individuals in response to acute health issues.  Rather than trying to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars at once in response to a disease or injury, universal health care allows us all to pay a little bit at a time perpetually into a system that ensures we all get health care when we need it. This also neutralizes the constant demand of capitalism that everything be constantly more expensive in order to ensure profit margins.

    (Sidebar:  don’t believe the hype regarding long waits, death panels, etc.; while it’s true that various socialized models have various flaws, and that one of those flaws is that sometimes care is delayed, the idea that everyone will suddenly be on years-long waiting lists for acute life-saving treatment is a myth; a scare tactic, a boogeyman waved in the face of the frightened, credulous, and uniformed, in much the same way that “socialism” and “Islam” and “the terrorists win” have been. The only truth to the assertion is that truth which is deliberately created post hoc by those working to dismantle socialized health care systems, putting up roadblocks, preventing access to education to ensure there are sufficient professional to staff such a system, and then blaming the system they’ve broken because it’s not perfect.)

    Our constitution guarantees the “right” to  life and liberty.

    Can you have either of these, if you don’t have your health?

    If the answer to the above question is “no,” then health care must, by derivation of the enumerated rights, also be a right itself. 

    If one has the right to liberty, then one has the right to everything that enables that liberty.  While it is true that these derived rights may sometimes clash irreconcilably with reality – no matter what rights I have, if I’m born without eyeballs or optic nerves the current state of medical technology can’t make me see, even though from a legal standpoint I have the right to see – this does not invalidate the derived rights as rights per se; it only demonstrates that our rights are limited in fact by the caprice of fate.  I have the right to be an auto mechanic; I don’t have the skills, nor the inclination.  My eyeball-less self has the right to see; I just don’t have the tools to see, and in the extreme case I gave, there exists no substitute tool that could be made available to me by society.  Even so, we as a society have agreed to provide our best available substitutes, from alternate languages to guide dogs to audible signals at crosswalks.

    QED:  Health care is a right; we as a society have consistently agreed in many situations to provide health care or a working alternative in any number of situations.  Ergo health care is not only a right, it is a right that is almost universally acknowledged when framed in a friendly context like helping the blind people by putting in audible crossing signals, rather than a less “sexy” context like helping the poor keep their teeth and bodies, and thus their minds, in the best working order that is attainable by the consensual application of medical technology, and in doing so ensuring that they have the ability and inclination – even if gently coerced by a sense of debt to society – to be productive citizens.

    The bottom line is this:  regardless of whether you define it as a right, a privilege, or a ‘commodity,’ universal health care – including birth control and comprehensive sex education free of factual distortion by religious institutions pushing agendas of abstinence and strict heterosexuality, among many other health care needs – is a critical necessity to the survival of our species.

    The reality remains that we are all in this together, and if we don’t get together and work to keep the people we have alive while working to control population growth and the abuse of finite resources through comprehensive reproductive health education and care, this argument will be moot…because sooner rather than later, there won’t be anyone to argue about it anyway.

  • In Capitalist America, Bank Robs YOU

    In spite of all the disinformation you’ll find around the subject of capitalist economics, it is very true today in the US that banks have rigged the system to rob everyone else.

    And it just sort of…happened, while we weren’t looking. The result of it happening is this massive inequity of wealth and power that we’re living in now.

    In the US (and most other places) we have this thing called fractional reserve banking. In this system, commercial banks are allowed to loan money in excess of their actual cash and assets on hand. If the fractional reserve is 10% and I have a thousand dollars, I can write loans for ten times that.

    Perfect conditions for this to actually work are first, all the loans have to be paid back, completely, on time. Second, the banks aren’t leveraging regulatory and tax code features to lower their tax liability through artificial or less than honorable – even if legal – means.

    In that perfect world, the payment of the loan cancels the money created by the loan. This is the same mechanism as federal tax; they “print” the money by appropriation, and then they “destroy” it by taxation.

    We don’t live in a perfect world.

    If you default on a loan, that’s money in the economy which has lost its way to get back out. If you pay it off early that’s (usually) a loss of some amount of profit for the bank. That and innumerable other variables all have to be accounted for in tax policy.

    It also means that even though that money cancels itself out as its returned to the lender, you still have to adjust tax policy to account for the money that’s in the economy right now, including the rates “we the people” must pay in to keep things running smoothly.

    The people who manage the whole thing aim to balance between maintaining currency value and ensuring there’s sufficient currency stock in the economy to keep it stable. That balance must be calculated to fit as closely as possible what’s really in the economy, rather than only the aspirational projections of what commercial banks expect to be in the economy.

    It’s that first calculation which has the greatest impact on tax policy. You and I pay taxes now to balance the money creation that banks are profiting on now (by charging interest on those loans). Then banks hire attorneys and accountants and lobbyists to take advantage of regulatory and tax code features to reduce their own tax bill – and also to have a strong hand in creating those features. That includes increasing the amount of money they can “print” via loans versus the amount they actually hold.

    Eventually other capitalists realized they have attorneys and accountants and lobbyists too and joined the party, further shifting the burden of taxation onto the backs of the people they were refusing to pay and overcharging to live – us.

    End result: they are never paying the taxes needed to offset the money they’re printing and putting in their pockets, and thus that money, the taxes, has to come out of our pockets.

    Then our pockets become too shallow to meet our needs and we get a credit card. Or take out a loan. Next verse, same as the first. They get paid on the money, then they don’t pay taxes on what they get paid. The taxes must be paid to keep things running smooth and stable (but not to pay for federal spending! It’s so important people internalize that fact!) so we, the rest of people who aren’t major executives in banks and multinational corporations and such, pay them instead. Over time this puts an ever-larger portion of the “real” wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, while leaving an ever-smaller portion for everyone else.

    Executive compensation is a tax-deductible business expense.

    This isn’t all the result of some “invisible hand” or magic. It’s the result of individual human beings making decisions for their own material benefit, knowing that they’re doing so by harming others.

    As the old meme goes, those people have names and addresses – not to encourage anyone, mind you – but that’s why we don’t talk about these things.

    If there has ever been a valid way to say “taxation is theft,” this is the true way. Problem is you say that and everyone thinks the thief is “the government.” The government is just the bookkeeper. The thieves are the people who are taking the money – capitalists, oligarchs, plutocrats. The more control they have over every aspect of our lives, the less likely it is that we’ll start looking for those names and addresses, or even know there’s a problem at all.

    Means, motive, opportunity. Capitalism is a dead-end street for the species, and none of the other things we’ve tried are perfect either, so it’s time to move forward into what’s next. I’d hold on tight, because these folks aren’t going to let go easily.

  • Morning Message 1.14

    Hey there everyone I’m intrepid ace reporter John Henry beaming you this encoded message from my undisclosed secret hideaway somewhere underneath the Mojave desert, and welcome to today’s Morning Message!

    I’ve talked a lot over the years about the inherent conflicts of interest that exist in capitalism. The minute you start chasing profit or focusing on making money, you are compromising whatever it was you started off doing.

    Time and again we’ve seen it – in criminal justice, in education, in journalism…and in health care. A couple of days ago MLive.Com published an investigative report about the profits generated by several hospital networks in the state, including one of the two major hospitals in my city.

    Analyzing the records of a handful of non-profits (which are public by law) the investigation found significant profit increases during the pandemic. This isn’t entirely surprising, but does stand in stark contrast to the claims of massive losses by hospitals early on.

    The story at Bronson Healthcare based in Kalamazoo and McLaren Health Care headquartered in Grand Blanc is similar to many stories in many sectors over the last few years. Corporations take in millions or billions of dollars, executive pay and bonuses skyrocket, prices go up, government subsidies are leveraged, etc.

    It’s interesting to me that the story focuses on these two networks when they weren’t even the most profitable. I feel like the reporters are putting a lot of weight on the idea of non-profit status as though that magically means money isn’t necessary, and focusing on the $455m in profit growth from 2019-2022 at Bronson while not mentioning the $880 gained fifty miles up US-131 at Metropolitan Hospital in Grand Rapids strikes me as rather strange.

    Mostly what’s interesting is that at no point do the reporters ask why we’ve allowed health care to become a thing that is money-dependent in the first place.

    Focusing on the frankly exorbitant executive compensation packages and profit margins during an unprecedented and unpredictable moment in history seems to me to entirely miss the point. They edge closer in pointing out how many of these executives are specifically skilled in business and marketing rather than health care. It absolutely is important to know that public funds are in play and what’s being done with them.

    Somehow lost in all of this is the basic question: why would we expect any other result in a system based on profit and capitalism? This is what money does to systems, regardless of whether they’re “non-profit” or not. If you have to focus on money, you’re not focusing on health care or education or whatever else.

    Every other point of failure in this story starts there, but the reporters didn’t touch it. Instead they chose to recite a laundry list of offenses by these two systems while basically ignoring the rest – the only place in the article that the profits of other systems is discussed directly is an embedded map showing hospitals in the state and their profit growth or loss between 2019-2022. Similarly, the sheer reality that the real resources sufficient for a quality public health system do not exist was overlooked with only passing mention of staffing shortages during the peak of Covid.

    We don’t have the personnel and material for a proper health care system in this country…because it’s all being done for money, and how do we save money or how do we make money or how do we pay more money for this hotshot executive or that one to come in and rearrange a few things to generate more money?

    That’s the real story here, and it’s being overlooked in favor of a more sensational but less meaningful examination of two hospital networks’ finances…because that generates more interest, and therefore more eyeballs, and therefore more money. Again: the compromise.

    Today’s morning message is simply this: whenever there’s money involved, all other core goals are compromised to some degree. It can’t be avoided. Keeping your eyes open to that can help you make better informed and more effective decisions when you’re asked to make that compromise.

    That’s it for me, speaking of money please don’t forget that I’m entirely crowdfunded here so please do help out if you can via PayPal, Patreon, CashApp, lots of other options available and those are all linked at johnhenry.us/money, and as always the best support is your engagement so please do like, share, subscribe, and comment, and I will see you tomorrow with another Morning Message!

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 2)

    The Gold Standard

    In part one of our series on the National Debt, we discussed what “debt” is and why in spite of well-intended contradiction the fact is that the “national debt” is a real thing and it has real meaning, just not at all the meaning we’re sold in political rhetoric.

    We left off with a brief note about the gradual decoupling of the US dollar from the value of gold, beginning with FDR’s expansion of the dollar in 1933. Remember, our core purpose here is discussing debt, specifically the “national debt,” with additional necessary examination of concept of value and trade.

    I don’t want to get into the weeds on side details or a bulleted list of dates, but once upon a time the US dollar was backed – that is to say, its value was derived from – a quantity of gold bullion held, physically, by the United States Government. That’s why the legendary vault at Fort Knox exists. This was known as the “gold standard,” and for centuries was the basis of money everywhere – how much gold (and other precious metals like silver and copper) did the issuer of the money have on hand?

    Moving off the gold standard unfortunately started making the picture of what money “is” less clear to the average person, because the dollar was no longer backed by a tangible object. “But,” you exclaim, “it must be backed by something!” You are both right, and wrong. An important part of the wrongness is the belief that “it must be backed by something real, tangible, and with uniquely and objectively identifiable intrinsic value.“

    Modern currency is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the issuer. In the US (and with some variability in any other sovereign currency system) that amounts to our GDP (gross domestic product: the sum total of value of all the holdings, goods, services, labor force, etc. created or held by a nation during a given period; if no period is given this is typically one year) plus whatever value is attached to expectations of future stability and growth.

    You’re not imagining things: this is a highly speculative and complicated series of educated guesses derived from abstruse calculations of arcane data to the point some would say it’s entirely made up

    They wouldn’t be wrong, but you’re also getting out of economics and into metaphysics at that point because the intrinsic value of gold is also “made up,” in the sense that human beings designated it valuable due to its properties which are useful to humans, e.g. not being prone to deteriorating through oxidation the way iron is, being easy to alloy, and being both malleable and attractive enough to work into fine art including coinage. Best not to let yourself get too deep in the weeds on what’s “made up” when you’re talking money. (If you think coinage isn’t fine art, take a good look at a nice new one through a jeweler’s loupe sometime.)

    The simple fact is, all modern money is created in this way: out of thin air, at will, by the owner of that currency denomination – US dollars, British pounds, Japanese Yen, etc. Nothing more than the individual integrity of the people running the systems stops any sovereign currency issuer from simply printing the money to pay off their debts.

    What induces them to maintain integrity is the impact that would have on the value of their currency and the trust placed in them by international trading partners who would be loathe to exchange goods and services with a partner known for either refusing to pay their debts or intentionally doing so in such a way that the essential value of the debt is seriously lowered. If I agree to buy your EU beef for $10US when $1 = 1 euro, but then when I pay you off $1 = .5 euro because I (as the US) arbitrarily decided to double my dollar supply thereby devaluing each dollar by half but not changing the dollar amount of our contract, you’ve lost half the EU money you thought you were going to have even though you have the same amount of dollars you expected. That’s dumb business, nobody wants to risk that.

    The Eurozone

    A Different Feather Of Fish

    The Eurozone is a bit of a strange duck that I frankly don’t have my head entirely around yet, but as nearly as I can tell for lay purposes one may think of the European Central Bank as being analogous to our Federal Reserve, with member EU states being similar to US states albeit with more sovereign power due to the EU being a confederation of previously existing nation-states rather than one large nation consisting of new subdivision states as US history imagines to be its own case. (In reality of course there were dozens of existing nation-states on the continent before Europeans arrived, and they were subjugated and dislocated by the Europeans for the sake of American expansion westward.)

    “Germany” doesn’t print its own money but “Europe” does, and “Germany” is a participating constituent part of “Europe.” I frankly don’t know how this works out in the interplay of how “your taxpayer euros are spent” – in the US at the federal level that’s a null string because “your taxpayer dollars” are never “spent,” they’re destroyed. I assume the Eurozone has a similar overarching taxation system for the same purposes of pulling Euros back out of the system, but I don’t know how that breaks down into e.g. federal infrastructure funding in the Netherlands.

    The Guardrails

    Each sovereign system has its own checks and balances to forestall bad actors. In the US, for instance, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

    For the record, yes this means the entire concept of a debt ceiling is unconstitutional the moment that ceiling attempts to deny the validity of a public debt, which it does the moment it refuses to account for and settle any given debt. As that is precisely the purpose of a “debt ceiling,” it simply can’t exist constitutionally, but it does because it was originally implemented in 1917 and we didn’t have the proper information and experience to say “hey wait a minute, isn’t this the whole reason we’ve got a set of rules about these things? These rules, right here, the ones you’re egregiously violating?” The purpose of the debt ceiling as conceived is entirely obsolete and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

    Additionally, it means all the games the Republicans play with refusing to sign off on the funding to pay the debt until they get the draconian social program cuts they want are also unconstitutional; they legally don’t have a chip on the felt. Yet this has been the operating dynamic of federal budget negotiations for at least half a century, long after the reasons for the original creation of a “debt ceiling” in 1917 were obsolete by our decoupling completely from gold in 1971 (Richard Nixon finalized what FDR started).

    Thus the underlying purpose of this series: to help you understand the extent to which this entire “debt ceiling” argument is nonsense, but also to fill that vacuum created in your fact library by the removal of that nonsense with information that’s accurate and useful instead.

    Also accurate and useful, ridding yourself of the notion that “central bankers” and “capitalists” are the same creatures. Believe it or not, the space most “central bankers” inhabit is at a computer staring at miles of data and doing their honest best to make sense of it, not some cigar-chomping back room where odious industrialists plot ways to rob people of their labor and freedom.

    That’s not to say such rooms don’t exist, but that’s not generally where you find a central banker; you find them poring over spreadsheets trying to figure out exactly what percentage of the currency we’ve sent out needs to come back in order to avoid devaluation while also ensuring there’s enough money circulating for people to live and do business.

    The influences of capitalism and corruption tend to be external; economists and macroeconomists (for the most part *cough* Friedman) love math and numbers and statistical trends, and tend to keep their ideology and work separated to avoid one unduly influencing the other. That’s not to say they don’t have beliefs, but like a doctor (a real one, not one in Florida) or journalist as a professional matter they must be able to set those beliefs aside and deal with manifest facts which contradict those beliefs, when such facts arise.

    It’s a science, speculative and diaphanous as it may seem from the outside…and the numbers work the same regardless of whether the dollars are capitalist dollars or communist rubles or anything else; sovereign currencies have observable behavioral tendencies which are predictable and are only reliant on ideological influence to the extent that influencers motivated by ideology attempt to disrupt the existing “natural” tendencies of money flow.

    This all adds up to a picture of modern economics in which a great deal of energy is expended determining just what the fair value of the “full faith and credit” of a nation really is, when denominated in currency, and those calculations, performed internally and reflecting among other things similar calculations based on known data relevant to other currencies from an “external” standpoint, constitute the guideposts for a central bank as to how much money they can safely create without risking devaluation (or having to raise taxes to avoid that risk) which functionally translates into inflation.

    All of this, balanced against the behavior and predictability and stability of several dozen other currencies all denominating the same core “values” (e.g. “the consumer price of a loaf of bread”) in ways that are culturally localized.

    It’s an act of juggling cats balanced on crystal wine glasses. A third of the cats are invisible and may be made of razor blades, a couple of them are marmosets, one appears to be a previously undocumented mating of a dachshund and a mountain goat, and you have an eyepatch on one side and the opposite hand tied behind your back.

    That, my beloved assembled guests, is what we call “macroeconomics.”

    In Part 3, we’ll talk more about that phrase “full faith and credit” and the nature of those cats!

  • Morning Me, May 18 ’23

    Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

    Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

    Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

    Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

    Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

    Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

    Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

    I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

    The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

    They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

    They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

    We refuse.

    Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

    Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

    Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

    Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

    Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

    When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

    That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

    I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

    What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

    And we…aren’t.

    Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

    That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

    NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

    Those are your “American Values.”

    When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

    Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

    In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

    As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

    Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

    Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

    So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

  • What Is The National Debt, And Why Does It Matter? (Part 1 – What Is Debt?)

    A recent social media conversation brought forth the question, “what is the ‘national debt,’ really?”

    This came by way of one person’s well-intended insistence that the national debt isn’t “debt” at all, really…which, is almost right, but also so hugely wrong that deconstructing it in a useful way that wasn’t dismissive or confrontational required a good deal more than a simple comment.

    More to the point, when I realized the comment was approaching 700 words and not nearly done, I thought it would make a better blog post here…

    Exhibit “A” – we’re going to ignore the questionable assertion that bankers and investors no longer “control the money supply.” Pretty sure the governors of the federal reserve are still “bankers.” There’s a lot wrong here, and the problem is how much if it is based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting useful and factual information.

    So let’s talk about what’s wrong about our friend’s assessment, then why, then why it matters, and hopefully we’ll all walk away having learned something useful, and we’ll be better empowered to make well-reasoned decisions at the voting booth!

    We began with a comment I saw in my feed that said “the only debt the US has is treasury bonds” or something to that effect, to which I replied “not quite true; 78% of the national debt is the money in circulation.”

    This is a great place to note I was a bit wrong there. In a bit of synchronicity that number turns up in the current data, but the actual information I was communicating was something else and my communication was based on outdated data; the actual number is 76.6%. The information below is compiled from the most recent “Monthly Statement Of The Public Debt,” issued by the US Treasury Department.

    • 22% of the “national debt” is debt held by various departments of the government against other departments of the government. This amounts to money deliveries and exchanges that haven’t yet been completed for one reason or another.
    • Of the 78% (there’s that number) that remains – called “Debt Held By the Public” or “DHBP,” – 30% is held by foreign entities.
    • 78 * .3 = 23.4. 100-23.4 = 76.6% of the national debt is, one way or the other, money we owe only to ourselves.
    • That other 23.4% is the number on which our friend and I agree as being “debt.”
    • In the sense that it is not the same as a e.g. a household, personal, or business debt, the original poster is right, however it is debt, and it’s important to understand how and why that is, in order to understand more completely “how money works.”

    So with all of that said, it’s understandable that our correspondent insists that it’s “not debt.” That’s probably more correct than the general perception that this debt represents something that must be paid from some finite store of resources. Indeed, this debt will never be “paid off” or “balanced,” nor would you want it to be?

    Why? Because even though there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means, and those misunderstandings are very much leveraged maliciously against those who subscribe to them (and the vast majority of the rest of us), in the end from a standpoint of economics a dollar bill is a debt instrument, it’s a token representing a legally binding agreement that someone owes someone for something, and unraveling that is much more important than simply engaging in some grand “pulling back the curtain AHA YOU SEE? NOTHING!” gesture. Plus the gesture’s wrong. There’s definitely something there, and it matters. Just not how you probably think…and it all adds up to the simple reality that if the national debt were “paid off,” that would mean there are no more US dollars.

    There are only two ways that’s going to happen: if the US unilaterally defines and adopts a successor currency (which it sort of already did, see notes further on in this series about the “gold standard”), or the US collapses entirely and ceases to exist as an operating entity.

    What your money’s really worth. Don’t get any bright ideas; destroying coinage is a more serious federal crime than you think.

    A “debt” is something that is owed; a “fiat” or “token” is something that holds the place of the debt in a way that’s generally accepted as valid and enforceable by the general public. All paper currency (and most coinage now) is “fiat” currency. Currency’s not valuable in and of itself, it’s just paper (well, cloth) and ink, but it’s still valuable because we all agree to let it represent value under certain conditions and for certain purposes. (Coinage may have intrinsic value depending on the composition of the coin, but as far as I know there is currently no nation producing coins whose metal content is equal to the face value of the coin. US pennies, for instance, cost about $1.07 per dollar’s worth at current (2:18pm 15-May-23) commodity prices.)

    In the case of your dollar bill (or its electronic representation in a bank computer somewhere), what it represents – what it is – is a token legally validating that “The United States” is owned, to the tune of 1/x where x= total $ in circulation, by the holder (or “owner”) of that dollar bill, whose ownership stake has not yet been converted to real property or services.

    Ergo, “The United States” owes that person or entity one dollar’s worth of real property or services, which they have not yet claimed. (Note to self: stretch this into a separate short piece about the international bond market…) Unavoidably, by definition, every dollar “in circulation” is a dollar of debt.

    NB: In this case ‘in circulation’ simply means it’s not in the government’s hands, nor is it in the hands of a governmental unit who is using it for trade, and includes ALL money, not just that which physically exists. About 95% of it doesn’t – around a trillion and a half of that debt is circulating currency and coinage, the rest is electronically recorded and doesn’t “really exist” at all. This is often used as a cheap-shot, elementary school rebuttal to the observation that the “national debt” is in point of fact the collected dollar savings of the United States, to the penny.

    Savings accounts, the values of stocks, commercial lending, are all dollars “in circulation” in this sense, and they all represent a debt, usually on multiple levels. But getting back to dollars, the only exceptions are those which make their way into the hands of those who collect coins or currency as a hobby, or trades in those items as collectibles as a business. Then they become a “real resource” rather than a representation thereof. Even at that, the US government will happily cash in your silver and gold certificates and coinage at face value, just take it to any bank and they will replace your old worn-out five dollar bill or twenty dollar gold coin with a nice crisp new Federal Reserve Note in the amount of your bill or coin!

    That is why a dollar bill is a debt, not because of some archaic and nefarious witch-doctoring by those mysterious bankers and businessmen. It’s literally a legally binding note saying the United States as a collective political entity owes you real property or services in the amount of that note, and there are very good reasons for that arrangement which are entirely without ideological or political cant; neither capitalism nor communism required.

    In Part 2, we’ll take on the question of The Gold Standard, why we’re not on it, and why we definitely don’t want to be. Later we’ll talk about how you get “real value” out of your pile of notes and those ‘very good reasons’ I mentioned. See you soon!

  • Conspicuous Absence: My Thoughts On The Gun Debate

    The Gorilla In The Living Room

    Another day, another bunch of children and adults brutally murdered by handguns. The conspicuous absence of any ethics or conscience in this country related to gun control cannot continue.

    Being a left-wing political writer you may wonder why you don’t see more from me about the “gun problem” in this country.

    Photo of WWE announce team Bobby "The Brain" Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon.
    Classic WWF/WWE announce team Bobby “The Brain” Heenan and Gorilla Monsoon – probably the greatest unheralded comedy team in entertainment history, but that’s another article. Image: WWE.Com

    In the pro-wrestling world there was a fella named Gorilla Monsoon, who went from being a pretty legendary “big man” wrestler in the 60’s and early 70’s to being one of the best known “straight man” voices in the business as an announcer for the then-WWF, most often with “color commentator” and “heel,” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan

    I could and probably will write at least one and probably multiple articles about him in due time but what’s important here is that he was known for his little turns of phrase, like “they’re literally hanging from the rafters here in [venue/city] tonight!” when announcing live shows and pay-per-views, or “external occipital protuberance.” (Gorilla: “Looks like Big John Studd got the Hulkster right in the external occiptal protuberance…” Bobby “The Brain” Heenan: “Yeah and he got him right in the back of the head, too!”)

    One phrase I’ve thought of as long as I can remember as a “Gorilla-ism” even though I’m quite certain it’s really not is the phrase “conspicuous by his/her/their absence.” “The Hulkster now in the ring with the Big Boss Man, and conspicuous by his absence is the big fella’s manager, Mouth of the South Jimmy Hart.”

    One of the things that the careful observer might notice tends to be conspicuous by its absence in my work is a whole lot of talk about gun issues.

    An Unspoken Agreement

    I do talk about them. Just not often, relatively speaking. You’d think I would, huh? Being a leftie, quite the lil tree hugger and empath for looking all big and burly the way I do, you’d think that every time this happens I’d be right there, outraged and demanding to know why this keeps happening and why nobody’s fixing it.

    Here’s why I’m not:

    It’s a waste of time. I did it for decades, and I’m telling you: it’s a waste of time.

    We know what needs to be done. A vast majority of Americans favor common-sense gun regulation to help mitigate two of the biggest sources of gun violence: impulse purchases made in the heat of anger or depression, and background checks to ensure we’re not selling guns to people who have shown in the past to be incompetent to be trusted with a deadly weapon one way or another.

    We’ve been talking about it for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough talking.

    We’ve been asking why for my entire life and the pile of bodies just gets higher and younger. Enough asking why.

    grayscale photo of a boy aiming toy gun selective focus photography, with additional film grain and cutout effects added.
    Pictured: not a well-regulated militia. (Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com, with some artistic modification by JH)

    We know why nothing’s being done: because the National Rifle Association, acting as the public relations and political lobbying arm of the gun manufacturing industry, has spent a hundred years deliberately warping the intent of the second amendment out of shape, stoking and helping to perpetuate all kinds of evil including racism, sexism, domestic violence, and especially toxic masculinity for their profit.

    They pay politicians to write laws in their favor; they pay media companies to make movies that make guns look positive and strong and powerful.

    None of this is a secret or a “conspiracy theory” or in any meaningful doubt; there’s a century of – ahem – smoking guns marking the trail.

    Gun manufacturers have conspired for a century to constantly reinforce messaging that benefits their sales against the best interests of public safety and the operation of a truly free society.

    They do enough of it directly and openly so they aren’t accused of being a secret cabal, mind you, but they do plenty of it in back-door style deals as well – think in terms of product placement in films, but this is as much “idea placement” as for any specific brand or item.

    Sold, American!

    Tie it to all the good old American values like rugged individualism and standing up for what’s right and of course subtextual racism and the reinforcement of paradigms and ways of thinking and behaving that benefit mostly exactly the kind of people who you’d think would definitely start pushing their way around if they had a gun in their hand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do and so forth. (Jim Jeffries’ American accent in his bit about “protecting my family” is so perfectly the sound of that attitude…)

    In this way they keep the general public from being too clear-eyed about where they got the idea that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” and other corrosive and demonstrably untrue ideas on which the industry has relied for their profit-making for over a century now…to the point that we literally have more guns than people.

    I don’t talk about that much.

    I don’t talk about it because I’m sick of talking about it. I’ve talked about it all my life, and we’ve spiraled into such madness with this I swear half the instapundits on the internet spend their days hoping for the next one so they can churn out some saccharine clickbait about the horror of it all and cash in on those dead bodies.

    The staid speeches, the well-researched data, the well-rehearsed catchphrases and talking points…they don’t work. They don’t work because a lot of people are really not terribly bright…

    It’s George Carlin, if I have to tell you the audio’s NSFW I genuinely have no idea how you found me to begin with.

    …and fear is among the most basic and powerful human emotions there is. There’s always something to be afraid of, isn’t there? Wild animals, roving non-white people, the dark, your own shadow…it’s a terrifying world out there! Why a fella barely dares get a cup of coffee without being armed anymore!

    We’re not going to change until we’re collectively more afraid of having guns than we are of not having them. That’s the bottom line.

    Until then, all the talk is just traffic generation and marketing to appeal to various discernible groups of people and position one’s self as being among them. Another sorting chute in the never-ending corporate game of human Plinko.

    Screen grab of comedian Drew Carey hosting game show "The Price Is Right" during the well-known "Plinko" game.
    It’s cheaper and more versatile than a sorting hat. Courtesy of CBS without endorsement or permission under 17 U.S. Code § 107

    It’s talking heads making money for themselves, and for the most part I think fundamentally most of them don’t really care about any of it much beyond that.

    Certainly nobody on the right does, but I have a hard time taking the left seriously on this too…and frankly, I’m just “American” enough myself that I’m not sure I’d want to see the levels of restriction that exist in some places, even knowing that due to mental illness including major depressive disorder and a long well-documented history of suicidal thoughts, if common-sense gun laws ever were enacted I’d likely be among the earliest groups of folks declared unfit to own one. I’m okay with that.

    Getting To The Point

    Frankly, though, I’m almost as sick of seeing the feeding frenzy of the pundit class every time a tragedy happens as I am of seeing tragedies related to guns on the news – more to the point, as sick as I am of gun tragedies happening.

    There’s no reason for any of this madness to happen except that it’s profitable for the gun industry and we’ve ignored that for so long, in part because they convinced us to do so in ways we weren’t aware of, that we ended up letting them buy a significant portion of our government – in BOTH parties.

    There’s no solution for it except us deciding that the lives of innocent people are worth more than the profits of gun manufacturers – yes, including the jobs they “create.”

    We don’t want to face that honestly and deal with it honestly, and until we do rushing to be the first out of the gate with an overwrought think piece every time a school is shot up amounts to an attempt to pimp out the resulting pile of bodies just so you’ll take me seriously as a leftist or whatever. It’s gross and disgusting and it’s pandering to exactly the base and shallow human inclinations that we need to lose if we’re going to survive, and it’s nearly always done for profit.

    No. If I’ve got something to say about it, I will – as I am here and now – and pandering is exactly the opposite of what I do so I don’t know why anyone would expect it on this issue. (NB: I’m burying it here so I can get an additional chuckle at the expense of people who don’t read the article, but I’ve shut all the ads off on this article precisely to avoid “making money off a tragedy.” I don’t think I can turn off the tip jar on a post-by-post basis.)

    The Point

    Look, I’m gonna make the point before I end up doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t.

    I don’t see where there’s anything left to be said about any of this, except it’s all monstrous and horribly shameful, we created it ourselves because we let our thinking be guided by greed, fear, and selfishness, and the resulting ongoing trauma against our nation and especially our children will remain with us in the form of accumulating child corpses until we deal with that and start letting our thinking be guided by something better.

    Either that or it’s time to just admit that we’re okay with a few thousand kids dying every year for our own “freedom.”

    In 2022, according to the CDC, 3,597 children died by gunfire in the United States.

    In 2023, those children and already probably a thousand more are conspicuous by their absence.

    Since a little after Sandy Hook, when I realized that not even an elementary school full of corpses would be enough to slap the stupid out of the haploamorous contingent in this country, for the most part the gun debate has been conspicuous by its absence in my work.

    Once in a while I get emotional and fire something off – to be clear, I’m not at all saying “I don’t care” – but generally I don’t talk about guns and gun control much – particularly in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting.

    Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May 1998
    Students at memorial fence following shooting at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon May, 1998. Twenty-five years ago almost exactly from the date of this article. And it’s happening far more often now. Photo courtesy Ron Olsen (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

    Until I see some evidence that anyone cares enough to do something REAL about it, the subject will remain largely conspicuous in my work by its absence because I won’t be part of the reason we’re secretly not doing as much as we could about it – I won’t partake in the “collateral benefit” by deliberately creating content to play to gun violence every time gun violence happens in this country. I won’t give myself a pathway to being in any way motivated in my thoughts on the matter and the expressions thereof by profit.

    The reason for that – while acknowledging that I understand there are plenty of folks out there acting in good faith to do what they think is best to address the situation and I was right along with the crowd in this behavior for a long while before reconsidering my behavior – is that as far as I’m concerned the part of the cycle where everyone in my band of the spectrum lines up to spew impotent outrage is morally equivalent to ripping the bodies out of their coffins and dancing with them at the funerals, and I just can not find a reason to be involved in that.

    Until I start seeing people care about all the conspicuous absences in their local elementary schools because of our negligence – Covid and guns, just in the last three and a half years, how many young lives have we just cast aside like so much used tissue in the relentless pursuit of gratifying our egos and turning a buck? and the evil bastards who do this are often the exact same people accusing women of “murdering children” when they terminate a pregnancy! – I feel strongly disinclined to take seriously any complaints about the absence of my voice in this debate.

    There are enough voices in the debate for another thousand debates like it. Could stand a few conspicuous absences there.

    I don’t need to add mine to the chorus, by and large – not in the least because when I do (as now) I want it to matter, and it won’t if it’s the same navel-gazing bullshit I and ten thousand other self-important twits have spewed out a thousand times each in the last ten years.

    When the conscience of this nation is no longer conspicuous by its absence from gun control policy, when our children are no longer conspicuous by their absence from our lives after they’ve been stolen by the madness of unfettered capitalism and induced stupidity for profit in the form of a firearm, then perhaps we’ll have something worth talking about.

    Until then, the discussion remains thus:

    • we’re out of our minds on the gun thing in this country
    • we don’t want to get in our minds about it because it’s profitable and the world is scary
    • until we do, we’ll continue sacrificing roughly ten kids per day and climbing to the gods of profit and machismo.

    Until we face that reality head on, there’s just not much to be said that will add anything of value to the conversation, no matter how well-researched, eloquent, or well-intended.

    Until we face ourselves and admit that on the subject of gun control we’re absolutely off the rails and need serious re-evaluation, the most conspicuous absence in the arguments will remain our collective conscience.

  • When I Was Forty-One I Had A Very Good Year…

    A tiny snippet of a whole lot of Mr. Desmond and his friends proving once again how much they don’t care what I have to say, I’m not relevant to anything or anyone, and there’s no way in the world they’d be the types to gang up and dogpile someone who criticized them genuinely and politely over a minor error in a “news” article…for now a dozen years and counting.

    Curating all this old content has me thinking…gosh I did a lot of great work in 2011.

    2011, when I had equipment and fairly stable housing and transportation, and also wasn’t working full time (was in school; still very much full time but way more flexible, and I could integrate a lot of the work you’re seeing here as material for my classwork). Almost like there’s a connection there…

    If I was the conspiracy type I’d note that all of this was happening and moving forward pretty well until I ran into Mr. AddictingInfo and his friends in September of that year who continue to this minute to openly and publicly exhibit the very behavior I’ve been calling them out on for over a decade and they continue to insist they’re not engaging in, *even while they do it right in front of your eyeballs.* The contempt these people have for your intellect is astounding.

    Not to belabor the point, I’m just looking at the material I was producing and the reactions it was getting and wondering what would’ve happened if once again the “cool kids” hadn’t decided I wasn’t allowed to be “one of us” because they know they look like the half-assed pikers they are by any meaningful measure in comparison. They know that my entire raison d’etre is to do my best to help as many people as I can understand where we are, how we got here, and how to get out of it, and that includes divesting them of their ill-gotten and broadly abused power over public discourse.

    Thanks to all of you who read, comment, share, like, and contribute. This is unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, coming on the heels of a series of very difficult periods interspersed with just bare stability that consumed the time I’d have rather been creating content. I’ve taken some really major hits, and I wish I was all mister stiff upper lip and roll with the punches, but I’m kind of sick of normalizing that crap. My life sucks, any fault in that of my own ended a long time ago and I’ve worked hard to set right what I could and stop doing things that would need to be set right later. I’ve helped a lot of people. Some appreciated it, some didn’t. Some just appreciate what I do.

    But there can be no question that the rabid dogpile response on YouTube validates everything I’ve been saying about these clowns, and they showed up precisely as expected.

    “C’mon now, who do you think you are?
    Hah! Bless your soul…
    You really think you’re in control?”

    Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

    Sure, my life is really tough right now and I’m still not sure how I’m gonna fix it other than coming in to a LOT of money FAST. And I’m up against such BS; I had a major network admin tell me flat out that he could easily put me in front of Mackenzie Scott, but wouldn’t because I was linking to content on other platforms. Stupid little human crap like that for whatever reason just constantly floods my path, and I’ve been plowing through it like a North Dakota winter road crew for what seems like all my life, and now I’m finally just sick of all of it and not playing the game anymore…and that’s exactly what a whole lot of folks were hoping wouldn’t happen.

    These people were betting I’d be long gone by now, and I’m not.

    I’ve got my flaws. I’m about 60% nuts, really. Not in the sense of being genuinely unstable per se, I’m not that guy. I got way to close to BEING that guy a long time ago, and I put the brakes on that crap real hard. That’s not me.

    But there’s this thing that so-called “normal” people have where they can tolerate being forced to exist in ways that are objectively intolerable. Our entire “way of doing things,” with money buying political power and the ability of a human being to survive and be their best without first committing half or more of their waking adult lives to generating profits for someone else in exchange for a tiny, tiny fraction of the value their work…those things are really insane.

    Of course I’m aware that anyone who’s genuinely lost their minds tends to think they’re the ones who are sane and everything else is nuts. Trust me, it’s kept me up at night more than once. I defy you to suggest in any way that anything is working well and properly anywhere in the world right now for anyone but the wealthiest, and that there is a direct proportional relationship to the wealth controlled by a given individual and their sense that the world is currently well-ordered and sane.

    Part of what’s nuts, and part of why I have kept circling back to Mr. Desmond and his abhorrent, ignorant business model over the years even as it has – to the great detriment of pretty much everyone but the people at the top, as usual, in this case the folks who are running these giant meme farms purporting to be liberal and progressive activists while the entire extent of both their activism and their expertise extends to reading the statistics at the bottom of every tweet, looking for keywords that resonate with the left, and pasting the popular ones into their branded template for distribution.

    As far as I can tell not one of them has ever had a real job, but they’ll stand here all day telling you the journeyman tool and diemaker who’s been a musician for four and a half decades, put well over a million miles under his ass as a professional driver, spent years in desktop support and various network administration and database development roles, web design, media production, and a ton more is the fella who “refuse to work.”

    People fall for that crap, and that’s nuts.

    The people pushing it will push until their last breath to make you believe I’m the one who’s nuts for saying so.

    The degree to which that small group of folks who doesn’t like me REALLY DOES NOT LIKE ME and will absolutely cross any boundary including trying to influence me to suicide, attempting to destroy me professionally, attacking my family, attacking my workplaces, trolling the social media of people who share my content in an effort to discourage that from happening (again, all of this happening in broad daylight while the people doing it tell you that you’re nuts for not believing them instead of your lying eyes), is beyond nuts.

    I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m pretty broken and screwed up myself, but I seem to attract some real deep-core psychos, the types who will play out a game for fifteen or twenty years just to amuse themselves because they think they’re getting away with it. These twits at the big leftie pages are just one subset of a larger group of folks – still a tiny fraction of a minority of the people I engage with and talk to, mind you, but an incredibly loud and aggressive one – who fall into that “really does not like me” category, and near as I can tell the only legitimate complaint most of ’em have is either they don’t like my personality or I stopped pretending I was falling for their bullshit.

    That’s pretty nuts.

    Anyone telling you otherwise is not a reliable information source.

    Anyone telling you the insane amount of time and energy I’ve had to spend dealing with all this nonsense over the years, including pervasive death threats, including hassling my parents when they were alive, threatening my kid when she was little, countless employers harassed, is somehow the reasonable and expected result of my unacceptably aberrant behavior is not only an unreliable information source, they’re a psychotic asshole and they need serious help.

    The truth is we – you reading this and me writing it -have an incredible amount of power when we work together, and that terrifies the people who run the instapundit and bias-pandering clickbait ideology-for-profit accounts. When we work together, we can improve our collective information quality by improving our collective information literacy.

    The way to stop falling for grifters is to understand how the grift works, so it works less effectively on you.

    Now ask yourself this question:

    Who’s the person you trust? The person who tells you that…or the person who spends a dozen years with all his friends ganged up to tell you the person who tells you that is the real grifter?

    I don’t have exclusive command of THE REEL TRVTH or even “all the answers.” I’ve got a pretty decent dose of each, but I’m human and fallible.

    What I do have is not just the iron-clad certainty but ironclad real-time evidence that these “leftist” heroes and “influencers” are mostly just a bunch of money-grubbing fascists selling you a cheap imitation of the principles and values you hold most dear. There’s a screenshot of it at the top of this post.

    Class dismissed.

  • 2022 State of the Union

    Some rolling observations I made while watching the Big Speech.

    “Freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” We start off with a few bold statements praising Ukraine and sharply criticizing Russia. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause chaos.” Biden makes a good solid speech and case here, discussing work on alliances, sharing and analysis of intelligence data, and the deliberate choices to speak clearly about these things as they were happening.

    It’s a good case made, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a time there’s been this clear, sharp, and immediate response from the international community to provocative events.

    Talking about going after the oligarchs. Wish our leaders in the Democratic Party were as enthusiastic about mitigating the power of oligarchs here in the US.

    Biden reinforces that they’re not moving US forces “to fight Russia in Ukraine,” right before listing off all the countries where US forces are being moved and readied for conflict the minute one of those borders is crossed by Russians fighting in Ukraine.

    Announcement of release of some oil reserves, 60Mbbl total.

    “Iranian” instead of “Ukrainian,” and someone shouted something. We’ll see how the right-wing punditry handles that in this new era of anti-Russian sentiment.

    LOL boos from the right as Biden mentions “unlike the two trillion from the previous administration that went to the top one percent.”

    Economics. Lots of slogans and so forth, will there be any kind of solid announcements for any kind of relief? Applause line for infrastructure plan. Hearing more details on how that money’s being spent specifically, all of which is cool or cool-ish at least.

    Passing econ bill with sales pitch including promise from Intel to drop $100Bn on manufacturing growth. Lots of revitalizing manufacturing talk and so forth. I think it’s short-sighted to continue focusing on “creating jobs,” but most of the world isn’t on that page yet.

    Inflation and price conversation, lots of nativism in this conversation, but it is what it is. “USA” chant like we’re at a wrestling match. Validating the economic plan. Reducing prescription drugs, arguments in favor of reducing prices, political rhetoric but not ineffective, shout out to the kid in the audience, lots of well-used crowd-pleasing techniques here. Proposes capping cost of insulin at $35 a month. Let medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. Next up cutting energy cost & climate change. Tax credit for weatherization. Hints of subsidies for EVs and similar tech, but no specifics. Cutting child care costs, which is very popular and not a bad thing, but it’s not an issue super close to me as a single adult.

    Not hearing anything to strongly disagree with here or be terribly cynical about so far, other than continued bleating about “back to work” and “continued economic growth.”

    Discussions of fixing tax code and so forth, as well as a shot about confirming his fed nominations.

    Watchdogs are back, the Justice Department “will soon be naming a chief investigator for pandemic fraud.”

    “I’m a capitalist.” I’m not impressed, but that’s the frame we’re in. He’s not wrong about anything so far, staying within that framework.

    Lots of pitching for some leftist favorite ideas, and some discussion of Covid impact.

    Eh. Fund the police. Blugh. They’ve got funding; we need funding for everything else that feeds in to criminality.

    Right to vote. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the DISCLOSE act, etc. All good things, nothing particularly new here though.

    Shoutout to Justice Stephen Breyer, which naturally goes to a pitch for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    Border security and immigration reform, some idiot – probably Boebert or Greene – trying to get a “built that wall” chant going that died quickly. More generally well-known talking points on that issue.

    “Preserve a woman’s right to choose,” Equality Act and addressing the LGBTQ+ population with supportive statements that appear to be aimed not so subtly at some state-level oppression that’s been happening there.

    “Unity agenda”

    • beat opioid epidemic, including the usual details
    • mental health, particular for kids
      • “hold social media companies accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
    • support veterans
    • end cancer as we know it

    This section of the whole thing seemed pretty cookie-cutter and not holding any gigantic announcements or headlines, but also nothing terribly objectionable or obnoxious.

    Ah, here we go, ARPA-H, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. I like this.

    “The state of the union is strong because you the American people are strong. This is our moment to overcome the challenges of our time, and we will.”

    Overall a solid performance, nothing to give progressives any huge enthusiasm, but some support for those priorities with a much heavier dose of status-quo dogwhistling…which isn’t unexpected. As a speech I’ll give it a B+. As a matter of hearing what I wanted to from a standpoint of advancing progressive priorities, C+.