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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 10 Destruction by Paradigm How
the by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR March
20, 2007 Paper
money eventually returns to its intrinsic value--zero. ~
Voltaire
"I
want to stress just how fast this all happened. By the time Serverus was
crowned in 193 AD, the denarius was still the international currency, even
though for the last few generations it had gradually been devalued. But a
mere 22 years later, in 215 AD, And
of course the world moved much slower in those days, with trade between After
215 AD and the final loss of I
must stress again how quickly and completely Roman living standards fell
from the time that the rest of the [world] rejected its money as the
world's currency." ~ A
Short History of International Currencies by Christopher Weber, -
1 - Introduction As
I will support in this essay, imbalances and systemic problems have become
so severe that the economic downtrend in the This
current and onrushing disaster is entirely the result of
historically-typical and well-understood government dynamics and actions.
Ordinary Americans have allowed, encouraged, and participated in these
dynamics and actions because their understanding of government has been
systematically and purposefully subverted, beginning with the adoption
(via the Constitution) of a powerful central government and then
especially with the push for Prussian-inspired
government schooling in the 1800s. The political and corporate power
elite have encouraged these same dynamics and actions because they
personally benefit from them, directly and indirectly. By
now, the paradigm that Americans use to understand government has become
so corrupted as to be massively out of sync with reality, to such an
extent that Americans clamor for more of the same policies which caused
the problems in the first place. If
we are somehow able to avoid an epic melt-down of America’s economy
(and perhaps the world’s), such a miracle would require a rapid and
dramatic turnaround in the typical American’s understanding of the
dynamics and effects of government action – it would require, in other
words, the widespread adoption of a new paradigm. My
scientific calculation on the odds of that happening in time: a billion to
one against, with a margin for error of "not enough to matter."
I will be surprised if more than a small minority understand the reason
for the problem even after You
may disagree with my conclusions – most do – but the facts themselves
are widely known and not in serious dispute. Intelligent, well-connected
and well-respected people have issued warnings in recent years on the
problem; these warnings have been reported in the media and then, for the
most part, forgotten. The situation continues to grow more
precarious, which makes the "soft landing" many are hoping
for less likely by the day. As for when
the crash will become too obvious to ignore or deny: once again, many
unknowns can trigger or affect the speed and nature of a great unwinding
such as the one we now face. A few such possibilities: a U.S. attack on
Iran; a nuclear
U.S. attack on Iran; a domino of bank failures triggered by
overwhelming numbers of mortgage
defaults and other credit defaults; an acceleration of the world
trend away from using the US dollar; China and other mega-creditors dumping
their massive dollar holdings and using the cash to buy commodities
and other real assets. The
tipping point could happen before this column is published, or not for
several more years. I lean towards "soon" however; I will be
surprised if we get through the next year (or even this
year) without our current Rube
Goldberg economy coming unraveled. I
urge you to do your own research and analysis and come to your own
conclusions, but please give this issue the time and consideration it
clearly deserves. -
2 - The Current Situation My
thesis here is serious and goes against both common wisdom and the view
typically presented by government and the media. Hence, I begin this
section with a long list of news items and comments from respected sources
to support my thesis that a major unraveling is likely and perhaps
imminent; many of these items also support my point that government action
is the direct or indirect cause of this situation: Stephen
Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has
a public reputation for being bearish.
But you should hear what he's saying in private.
Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week,
including a group at Fidelity.
His prediction:
Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has
obtained a copy of Roach's presentation. A stunned source who was at one
meeting said, "it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed
to me, than in public." --
Economic
'Armageddon' Predicted by Brett Arends, The -
- - Yet,
under the placid surface, there are disturbing trends: huge imbalances,
disequilibria, risks -- call them what you will. Altogether the
circumstances seem to me as dangerous and intractable as any I can
remember, and I can remember quite a lot. What really concerns me is that
there seems to be so little willingness or capacity to do much about it. --
An
Economy On Thin Ice by former FED chief Paul A. Volcker, The - - - The
GAO found that the government’s true debt — on-the-books and off —
more than doubled between 2000 and 2005, and now stands at a staggering
$46.4 trillion. GAO,
it seems, actually low-balled the true debt by using the entitlement
obligations for only the next 75 years. To permanently fix these programs
we’d have to put up enough money to cover all of their obligations
forever. That’s where the Trustees Report comes in. Using the estimates
from that report, the federal government’s true debt is shown to be a
stunning $94.7 trillion. That’s more than $315,000 owed by every man,
woman, and child in the --
Our Off-the-Books
Fiscal Problem: Forget the current deficit. Our real problem is the
long-term, entitlement-fattened debt by
Phil Kerpen
in The
National Review, -
- - The
Medicare “trust fund” is already badly in the red, and the only
solution will be a dramatic increase in payroll taxes for younger workers.
The National Taxpayers Union reports that Medicare will consume
nearly 40% of the nation’s GDP after several decades because of the new
drug benefit. That’s not 40% of federal revenues, or 40% of federal
spending, but rather 40% of the
nation’s entire private sector output! --
The Coming
Entitlement Meltdown by Congressman Ron Paul, - - - “It’s
worth remembering that markets were very upbeat in the early summer of
1914,” said former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Summers
was warning the attendees to this year’s upcoming World Economic Forum
in --
The
Voices of Warning Prepare for The World Economic Forum by Bill Bonner,
The Daily Reckoning, - - - Concern
for pricing oil only in dollars helps explain our willingness to drop
everything and teach Saddam Hussein a lesson for his defiance in demanding
Euros for oil. And
once again there’s this urgent call for sanctions and threats of force
against Using
force to compel people to accept money without real value can only work in
the short run. It ultimately
leads to economic dislocation, both domestic and international, and always
ends with a price to be paid. -- The
End of Dollar Hegemony by Congressman
Ron Paul, - - - Retired
government workers are twice as likely to get a pension as their
counterparts in the private sector, and the typical benefit is far more
generous. The nation's 6 million retired civil servants — teachers,
police, administrators, laborers — received a median benefit of $17,640
in 2005, according to the Congressional Research Service. Eleven million
private-sector retirees covered by traditional pensions got $7,692. Governments'
generosity could have serious consequences for taxpayers and pensioners.
Some states — including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio
and West Virginia — have troubled retirement systems that may require
huge tax increases, spending cuts or even defaulting on promised benefits.
The The
pension gap will continue to widen because governments pump far more money
into employee pensions than companies do. Civil servants earn an average
of $12.38 an hour in benefits, about $5 an hour more than private-sector
workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The difference was
just $2.70 an hour in 1995. --
Pension
gap divides public and private workers by Dennis Cauchon, -
- - “There
are signs that dollar [sic] is at the start of a broad-based decline that
reflects a downward re-assessment of the --
Mortgage
concerns weigh on dollar by Peter Garnham, Financial Times,
- - - Commodities
investment guru Jim Rogers stepped into the "You
can't believe how bad it's going to get before it gets any better,"
the prominent "It's
going to be a disaster for many people who don't have a clue about what
happens when a real estate bubble pops. "It
is going to be a huge mess," said Rogers, who has put his $15 million
belle epoque mansion on --
Top
investor sees U.S. property crash by Elif Kaban, Reuters,
- - - Last
month we saw the first tell tale signs of things to come. The possibility
of lower rates coupled with a declining dollar led to a fifty billion
dollar shortfall in the flow of funds into the I've
lived in --
How
Bad Will It Get? By Enrico Orlandini, The
items above barely scratch the surface; one could fill a bookshelf with
such material. Other points of economic stress and possible event triggers
include: * the approach (or arrival) of peak oil, including a recent, sudden drop in Saudi production, and the resulting upward pressure on prices *
rapid economic and infrastructure growth in *
the transfer of manufacturing and other jobs to low-cost producers in *
the ever-worsening disaster of the American
auto industry, a once-core element of this nation's economic strength
(see also here
and here) *
bursting
of the housing bubble (mentioned above), with millions
of Americans on the verge of foreclosure, will also extinguish the
economic stimulus of refinancing – the use of one's home as an ATM –
and much consumer spending along with it *
the massive growth in government size, expense,
and repression here in *
the bizarrely inflated pay
[PDF, see pages 40 – 43, and remember that this document was prepared BY
a government employee], benefits, and especially retirement
arrangements for government workers at the city, county, state, and
federal levels, which are severely
under-funded in many cases *
the continuing and ever-growing *
the rapid, unprecedented, and highly
dangerous growth in derivatives (more than $370 trillion worth) *
The nosedive
in America's standing around the world (see also here)
due to our aggressive wars, our reputation for torture and other
mistreatment of prisoners (including denial of the centuries-old right of
habeas corpus), our third-world status as the planet's largest debtor
nation, and our unique combination of arrogance, coercive foreign policy,
and rapidly growing financial, industrial, and moral decay You
will surely have no trouble adding to these lists. Individually, such
problems are serious enough. Add them together and we have a situation
that not merely could, but will
at some point spin rapidly out of control. Two
more excerpts, in this case to further support the assertion in my
subtitle that Americans have already become impoverished: The
American dream, at least on the economic side, is fading. Most people see
the Today,
though, nearly 1 in 5 American households has zero net worth or actually
owes more than it owns. And the odds of a son or daughter rising above
their parents in such a financial predicament have shrunk. "Income
mobility has declined in the last 20 years," says Bhashkar Mazumder,
an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of .
. . That
marks a change from the past. From
1950 to 1980, Americans were more and more likely to see their offspring
move up - or down - the income ladder. For example: poor parents in the Today,
it could take five or six generations to close the gap between poverty and
middle-class status, calculates Mr. Mazumder. --
The American
Dream gains a harder edge by David R. Francis, Christian Science
Monitor, - - - It's
a Thursday today. 2007, by the way. But the news of the day comes to us
from the waaaaay back machine: 1933. The
personal savings rate the year Franklin Roosevelt moved into the White
House was -1.5 percent of disposable income. Makes sense that people were
dipping into their savings when you remember the Great Depression was in
full swing. Seventy-three
years, later [sic] the economy's a whole lot better. But we've gone back
to our spending ways. The
Commerce Department told us this morning that last year, the savings rate
hit it's the lowest level since the early 1930s. --
Americans
are spending their savings, Public Radio's Marketplace
for February 1, 2007 (Marketplace
also ran a piece titled Almost
everything's more expensive on March 15, 2007 about the newly released
Producer Price Index report) In
addition to spending their savings, going deeper into debt, and living in
a more difficult economic environment, the average American family is,
remember, saddled with over a million dollars in federal
debt; living with decaying infrastructure (roads, bridges, sewers, etc.)
caused mostly by government spending too many tax dollars on other things
and not enough dollars on fundamentals; and supporting wars of foreign
aggression (that is, against nations which have not attacked us and were
realistically never a danger to us) with not only their tax dollars but
with the lives and bodies of their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers,
aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. The
negative savings rate in this supposedly wealthy nation is a warning
flare, alright, but it is only one symptom in a very broad drama of
destruction. -
3 - How it Happened Two
epigrams from Thomas Jefferson: Experience
hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted
with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into
tyranny. If
Americans ever allow banks to control the issue of their currency, first
by inflation and then by deflation, the banks will deprive the people of
all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent
their fathers conquered. All
I can do in this short column is present an overview and point you to
further resources. I will include enough detail to, I hope, illuminate the
path from relative freedom and sound economics to our current corrupt and
massively imbalanced system, but I will of necessity leave much out. I
encourage you to further educate yourself on the topic to the extent you
are interested. Timeline
to the Twilight of an Empire: *
Members of the Continental Congress
write the Articles
of Confederation in 1776, as the war for independence gets underway.
The Articles are adopted by the Congress the following year and finally
ratified by the states in 1781. The government created by the Articles is
more a trade agreement and set of rules for loose alliance among thirteen
sovereign nations than a blueprint for a central government as we know it
today; this "government" does not even have the power to tax.
There are ten* "Presidents
of the (What?
You never heard of Samuel Huntington? Most Americans today could surely
not identify him. The victors always re-write history – or at least
decide what gets taught in government schools – and big-government
advocates won the day when the Articles were replaced by the
Constitution.) *
Flaws in the Articles of
Confederation plus the desire (among the would-be power elite) for a
powerful central government make change inevitable. The Constitution,
written in 1787, goes into effect in March of 1789. The *
The Constitution's Section 10
(which has, interestingly, never been repealed) provides an absolute and
unqualified prohibition against eliminating the gold standard (bold
added): No
State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant
Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make
any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; . . . One
might object that this is a restriction on the States, but of course the Why
is that significant? Because gold and silver cannot be "printed
up" like paper money, which puts a powerful restraint on government
spending. Governments have historically stolen from the people by means of
counterfeiting; that is, by printing more and more money, just as a
counterfeiter prints $100 bills in his basement. Governments, being vastly
larger than a single private counterfeiter, do vastly more harm in this
fashion. The ocean of newly-created cash that can be generated by
government erodes the value of every existing dollar (or yen or other unit
of currency). This
inflation of the money supply has historically financed wars and empires;
it has been used to bribe populations with social programs (the modern
version of "bread
and circuses" in ancient Rome) – which also has the effect of
making citizens more dependent upon politicians and government – and to
fill the coffers of favored corporations, special interests, and those in
power by funding mandates and programs (most often war)
that government would otherwise be unable to pay for. Even
before the printing press made paper money feasible, governments ( Such
inflation of the money supply is what leads to price inflation: more
dollars (or pesos or whatever) chasing the same amount of goods and
services, resulting in higher prices generally and often creating
investment bubbles, which inevitably crash, destroying the finances of
those participants who did not sell near the top – and thus transferring
massive wealth to those few participants who DID sell near the top.
Examples of bubbles include the John
Law episode in Extreme
cases of monetary and price inflation are called hyperinflation,
and such episodes are far more common than most people realize. Could
a hyperinflation happen in modern-day Gold
and Silver Cannot be Hyperinflated For
most of this nation's history, a dollar was defined
as a specific weight of gold or silver. For example, a $20 gold piece,
such as the $20
Liberty coin (also called the Double Eagle) contained .9675 ounce of
gold. The difference between that amount and an ounce was the seigniorage, the mint's cut for producing the coins. In most
discussions – and for most of this one – the seigniorage amount is
ignored and a $20 gold coin is thus said to contain an ounce of gold. The
important thing is that the amount per coin was specific, legally-defined,
and unchanging. Anyone could slap a $20 bill on the counter at a bank (or
a hardware store, for that matter) and exchange it for a $20 gold coin. With
such a monetary system, prices for particular items could fluctuate based
on supply and demand, but overall
price inflation is literally impossible, absent a huge influx of new
gold or silver (how?) or a dramatic tightening of supply through the
market (food, energy, manufactured goods, etc). In fact, market
efficiencies, technological advances, and the generation of wealth in this
country meant that a dollar typically bought MORE in 1900 than it did in
1800. The calculator at measuringworth.com
tells us that: $66.89
in the year 1900 has the same "purchase power" as $100 in the
year 1800. So
a hundred years later (starting in 1800), the dollar had become worth
significantly MORE than before. That's not because of bank interest or
stock dividends or anything else: it is the return you (or your heirs)
would get for just putting cash under the mattress and waiting a hundred
years. Your wealth grew substantially in that period. Now
plug in "2006" as the ending year, and the answer becomes: $1656.53
in the year 2006 has the same "purchase power" as $100 in the
year 1800. We
will discuss how that disaster
was arranged in a moment. For
those interested, here is the government's own CPI calculator, at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.**
The "start" year begins at 1913, oddly enough . . . and this
calculator shows $100 from 1913 having the same value as $2,036.36 in 2006 (or $2055.55 in 2007). So,
if your grandfather had put $100 in Not
bad for a hundred bucks. Had
your grandfather put $100 in paper
money under the mattress – assuming it didn't get eaten by moths or
otherwise destroyed – it would now be worth (drum
roll, please): $100. Somehow,
your grandfather's $100 bill lost
$3161 in purchasing power. Well,
that old $100 bill might have collector value. Or not. But the face value
would have lost nearly all of
its purchasing power. You'd have roughly 3% of the original value
remaining. Questions worth pondering about the issue: Who
does this hurt? Who
does it benefit? How
was it made to happen? Why
was it made to happen? One
final question before we continue: what IS the actual value of a modern
dollar? What, other than "a unit of How
much longer will the world use an inherently worthless, undefined cipher
as reserve currency? How much longer will the world send us oil or
anything else of real value in return for dollars that *
Back to the timeline: 1913 is a
pivotal year in our journey, because it sees creation of both the Federal
Reserve and the income tax. How
did The
Federal Reserve is not a federal agency, nor does it have any
"reserves." It is a private
bank chartered to issue money for the The
Fed is famously shrouded in mystery, and nearly everything one sees or
hears about it seems designed to obfuscate rather than clarify the Fed's
actions and effects. This alone should be a huge red flag, even were one
not aware of the incredible loss of value the dollar has suffered under
Fed management, or of the Constitutional prohibition against fiat
currency, or of the vile history of central banking generally. A
page at HowStuffWorks says "In this article, we'll visit the
mystical world of the Fed. . ." – and backs up that
characterization with nineteen sections that go into excruciating detail
without really getting to the heart of the matter. Their second section,
"Why we need the Fed," makes it sound as if the pre-Fed monetary
situation was disaster, and the well-run, scientific institution of the
Federal Reserve was created simply to, as the article puts it,
"organize, standardize and stabilize the monetary system in the I
would argue that causing the dollar to lose 97% of its previous and highly
stable purchasing power is a poor example of "stabilizing the
monetary system." What
the Fed has been especially good
at is providing money for wars and government expansion generally, and at
making lots and lots of money for the banking cartel and all those
corporate interests that have grown fat on federal mandates and contracts.
Since this is a short column (or so I keep telling myself), I'll encourage
you to poke around in the InfoSphere for more detail. A few places to
start, with the URLs visible for those reading this in hard copy: The
Story of the Fed Is a Story of a Crime
by George F. Smith Money,
Banking and the Federal Reserve
by the Ludwig von Mises Institute (video, 41 min 25 sec) Will
The Federal Reserve Create The New Socialist Man?
by Karen De Coster and Eric Englund The
Mystery of Central Banking
by Robert Murphy *
Again, back to our timeline and the income tax: as
mentioned, the income tax is created (via the 16th amendment)
in the same cursed year as the Federal Reserve. An amendment is necessary
because the Constitution, as written by the Founders, prohibits an income
tax as we have today. Why,
one might ask, was an amendment not
deemed necessary to insert the Fed
into our lives when the Constitution prohibits fiat money just as clearly
as it does an income tax? The answer seems to be "because the Fed was
a stealth attack." Until 1933 (the next point on our timeline),
the dollar remained freely exchangeable for gold at the original rate. It
was only in 1933 that the Fed's inflation of the money supply could no
longer be sufficiently hidden. Foreigners were becoming reluctant to
accept our money at face value; they wanted gold in trade, not
depreciating greenbacks. No
government in history has ever resisted the chance to inflate a fiat
currency into the ground, and the Back
to the income tax: For the first 137 years of our history, the Once
the Fed and the income tax came into being, things changed, at first
slowly and then much faster. The dollar became ever-more-worthless and the
percentage of a typical family's income taken by government at all levels
has grown from one or two percent in the first half of the 1900s to over
55% today (this includes FICA, Medicare, and, in most states, a state
income tax). Then there are sales taxes, property taxes, and many other
taxes, in ADDITION to the 55%. Let
me say that again: tax rates on a typical family have gone from almost
nothing – in the range of 1% to 2% – to well over 50%, and they
continue to grow. This incredible increase in the rate of income
confiscation has largely been concealed by the increasing bounty that
technology and a free market have created for us, but – as we have
already seen – those factors are being overwhelmed by the crushing
burden that government has imposed and which it continues to increase. Our
markets are no longer so free, and neither they nor high technology can
create enough wealth to counter today's massive cost of government, in
part because high-tech and the markets have been increasingly hobbled by
government regulation, interference, and funding (funding=control). For
a good visual presentation of the data, here's a Federal
Income Tax Inflation Chart that shows how dramatic this crunch has
really been, in terms of both dollar inflation and inflation of the tax
rate. This
tsunami of money – from taxing the wealth created by hard-working
Americans and from the massive and illegal creation of fiat money (section
10 of the Constitution, again) – did more than impoverish American
citizens; it did more than merely take money directly from them and erode
the value of every dollar they earned. This largest
inflow of wealth ever seen by any government in history was used in
ways that most often harmed Americans instead of benefiting them. In
the months and years ahead, that truth will become ever-more apparent. -
4 - Healing by Paradigm My
title for this essay – "Destruction by Paradigm" – is meant
to highlight that the overall mental framework most Americans now use to
understand government (and society generally) has kept Americans from
objecting to the destruction of their own liberties and prosperity. The
faulty paradigm so widely used actually leads Americans to call for more
of the same policies and programs that have brought this country to the
brink of disaster. Paradigms
are tools – frameworks – for understanding broad phenomena (e.g., the
paradigm of science versus that of superstition) – and a paradigm can be
more accurate or less so. A paradigm that excuses tyranny, that praises
coercive centralized control and the people exercising that control, that
makes the coercion of forcible government appear decent and normal and
even positive, and which asserts that compassion
can be expressed by coercively-funded government programs – such a
paradigm is nothing less than a weapon against the great mass of people,
wielded by the power elite. Such
a paradigm blinds people to the evil of coercion and to the harm it
inevitably causes; such a paradigm disconnects people from their own
rights and responsibilities and strengths; such a paradigm ensures that
– since "more government = more compassion" – people will
clamor for ever-more government, until inefficient and corrupt government
programs, regulations, and mandates crowd out honest and efficient
non-government efforts. Eventually, such a paradigm, if severe enough and
widely-enough held, must lead to a government so large and so controlled
by corporate and other powerful interests, that the rights and welfare of
the people themselves become crushed under the weight of so much tyranny,
well-meant though much of it may be. Nearly
every problem discussed in this essay is the end result of the slow
corruption of a paradigm that held genuine freedom in highest regard, into
a paradigm in which "patriotism" has morphed into
"obedience to authority" and in which freedom itself has become
increasingly suspect; a paradigm in which almost nothing is beyond the
control of congress, and thus in which almost nothing is left to the
people themselves; a paradigm in which even if government could grow to
500% of GDP it would not be enough to do all the things ordinary people
are hoping and clamoring for government to do, not to mention all those
things that defense contractors and other corporate interests are hoping
and scheming for. The
founders of this nation (in which I include the average person) held a
paradigm in which "freedom" meant something more than doing what
you were allowed to do, or forced to do, by your masters. They held a
paradigm in which civil society was nearly everything in life, and
coercive government was a very small "necessary evil" – a
mistake, we now know, because as
I have said before, coercive government is not a "necessary"
evil but merely an ancient one. Nonetheless,
freedom in early Why
and how did that change in such dire fashion? In
large part, because of flaws in the original paradigm, and in the too-low
levels of both love and freedom
within the Love
and freedom literally require
each other, and high levels of both
are required for a health society. Love provides the anti-corrosive and
lubricant for the market and for a free society generally; freedom
protects human rights, emotional health, and life itself – a police
state is never conducive to love and compassion, nor safe for the lives of
its subjects. For more on the topic of love and freedom, see my archive
(linked at the end of this column) or my website at http://www.paradise-paradigm.net.
Early
That
Frankenstein is about to fall.
This will be a disaster, yet it is also a great opportunity. How are we to
respond? There
can be no quick fix; no magic cure for the political and economic dilemma
Americans have gotten themselves into, but there IS a solution. It is
imperative that more people hear and begin to understand that solution,
else they will encourage the further destruction of their nation by the Two
Great Evils (as I have called them previously) of government coercion
and widespread emotional damage. For an extreme and horrifying example,
study the rise to power of the National
Socialists in Germany during the 1930s. The
solution – the only real and
permanent solution – is to widely spread the understanding that love
and freedom are the two most important fundamentals in life; that
these fundamentals are connected to
and dependent upon each other;
and that any system which denies either love or freedom is simply evil. Belief
systems guide behavior, and only a paradigm that clearly and
whole-heartedly embraces the duality of love and freedom will guide people
to the healthier, saner, more free and compassionate world that every new
human life is born expecting and needing. Such a world may also be the only
world compatible with a human future. Twenty-first century technology is
advancing at a dramatic, non-linear rate, and will hugely empower either
health or sickness; either freedom or tyranny. This may be our last chance
to get things right. The
The
list of such crimes by the As
the coming storm gathers, and as it breaks upon us in the months and years
ahead, remember that any approach which denies or subverts love
and freedom can only lead us astray. Love
and freedom: we'll have both, or we'll have neither. - - - - *
John Hancock, the seventh
of these pre-Constitutional Presidents, was too ill to serve, and David
Ramsay ( **
For information on how the CPI is manipulated to downplay and obfuscate
price inflation, see The
Core Rate by Jim Puplava, Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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