Libera Voce

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.” Albert Einstein

We are being bombarded with endless talk about artificial intelligence, yet no one seems to be able to define it with any real clarity. Despite this, such luminaries as Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg meet behind closed doors with US Senators to discuss regulations about this as if it is an existential and imminent threat to the human race. We are warned that if left unregulated, it will eventually replace humans all together. Such catastrophizing is another example of creating a crisis where none exists, as if we don’t have enough people with such cognitive disorders already.

This is not what Einstein meant about intelligence and imagination. What he was saying is that real intelligence is the ability to create with the knowledge we have. Imagination is the cognitive ability to use what we learn through our senses; it is a uniquely human trait that can’t be mimicked by machines, even robots informed by computers. True, computers can be “programmed” for memory and logic, but only to the extent of the power in the software; all of that is human input.  However, humans make judgements about things all the time based on not just reasoning and logic, but individual values which are always subjective.

Not long ago at dinner with friends I had ordered one of my favorite seafoods, grilled octopus; what can I say, it is the Sicilian in me. I was then treated to a discourse on the fact that octopi are sentient beings. This is true, but so are all living things that have a central nervous system giving them perceptions that make them aware of their environment. I don’t know if this means they have emotions, but maybe; I know my dog does. I am not much of a beef eater, but my friends are, and the bovines in the animal kingdom have central nervous systems. I wonder if my friends will abstain from beef.

The phrase “artificial intelligence” seems like an oxymoron. While computers are becoming faster and more powerful at processing and calculating, they lack the cognitive ability to understand, including and most critically our fellow human beings. Despite all the attempts to mimic the human brain, an organ medical science readily admits we have little knowledge of, we are asked to believe our technocracy has the ability to do so. When such hubris combines with politics, nothing good will come of that. Technology is by definition the application of science to problem solving; that is not something to regulate, but contrary to catastrophizing, to nurture with the freedom to go wherever it may lead. Put another way, fear is not an alternative to imagination.

Let’s assume for the purpose of argument that artificial intelligence presents the threat to human existence these elites would have us believe; ever hear of the “kill switch”? You should as you use it every time you decide to shut the lights off. Techies are familiar with this as it’s the most obvious solution in the event that the catastrophizers are right about AI, i.e., kill the power. What if AI doesn’t allow that to happen? That is a really unintelligent question since AI is not a physical entity blocking human action. While the probability of the need to do this is beyond remote since humans program AI, the fact that we have that ability shows the ultimate reason why AI is no threat to us, i.e., we are real, AI is “artificial”.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” Albert Einstein.

“If you could imagine dissonance assuming human form – and what else is man? – this dissonance would need, to be able to live, a magnificent illusion which would spread a veil of beauty over its own nature.” Friedrich Nietzsche

While I have often criticized the Fed, I must admit that at least they have a firm idea of what they can and can’t do about inflation.  I will differ to a later post whether the Fed has gone too far with rate hikes, so for now recognizing the enormous harm that inflation does to people, and given the Fed’s mandate under law, they are utilizing the tools available, i.e., interest rates, money supply and their balance sheet. The problem is that all that only applies on a monetary level.  While their tighter policies have had some effect on inflation, that has been significantly offset by the egregious fiscal policies of the administration, which in truth is a continuation of prior administrations, only now seemingly on steroids.

While the quote by Friedrich Nietzsche is from “The Birth of Tragedy”, a work devoted to art form and not economics and politics, it captures the essence of how dissonance can be disguised.  The dissonance between the Fed policies toward inflation and those of the administration expose how these incompatible policies are being disguised with an illusion of prosperity. Time will show that this dissonance, if left uncorrected, will eventually have the same effect as if both policies ignored inflation. Should the administration reverse course and show some semblance of fiscal prudence, which is highly unlikely, it would bring us sooner to the inevitable recession economists are talking about, either as a hard or soft landing, the differences being one of degree; at least we will reach the point where the potential for cleansing the distorting effects of the poor policies of the past will occur. What will happen at that point may unfortunately rely more on politics than sound economics.

The construct for the illusion is one of circumstances and consequences. The circumstances go back to the early 20^th century during the Wilson administration and exacerbated by the FDR administration. Later on, and even further again with Nixon’s administration; subsequently the repetition of all those policies to more current circumstances like the endless wars, financial crises, accommodative monetary policies, irresponsible fiscal policies, all contributed to the consequences from these self-inflicted wounds. While this is not a blog post to address the history of all that, please see prior posts that do. What I want to do is focus on the construct of the illusion noted.

An instructive peak behind the veil of illusion is with the GDP. The official government report is a 5% GDP month-over-month. How this will translate on an annual basis is much debated, but what is not debatable is the huge size of government both in costs and expenditures; that this is being included in the GDP data is a distortion disguising the fact that government has no production but only consumption of the nation’s wealth; in effect the government is an example of the economic concept of a “rent seeker”, i.e., an entity that takes wealth without earning it. (This is not to be confused with rents due under a real estate lease.) We can see this in the reciprocal transactions between government and corporations through grants, subsidies, bailouts, tariff protections, political campaign donations, etc., usually practiced through the lobbying efforts of those with access to the powers that control the purse, the money in which comes from taxes, fees, and often from monetary inflation.

As acceleration is a rate of change in velocity, inflation is a rate of change in currency value. While the interest rate and money supply actions by the Fed have decelerated inflation, we still suffer the burden of decreased purchasing power until such time as we have deflation; that usually comes as part of a recession, unless of course we have a similar circumstance as we had with “Stagflation” in the 70’s and 80’s.  A consequence of increased interest rates is decreasing credit availability. This primarily affects households and small/medium businesses as banks can’t attract the capital to lend; traditionally that came from savings account deposits, but now households and small/medium businesses find far better returns in stocks and bonds or rely on what used to be “disposable income” just to make ends meet.   

A friend recently argued that the government’s policy of increased interest rates is intuitively illogical as it increases the interest due on its ever-growing debt. True the debt service increases, but what that friend and many Americans misunderstand is that the government doesn’t pay the debt service because the debt is ours and so we will pay it. Understanding that helps explain why there hasn’t been more of an impact on inflation; given its outsized position in the data used for GMP, and how that weight is erroneously included in that data, government has no incentive to kill the illusion created.

The consequence of such an illusion is the displacement of capital in the economy from the productive investment households and small/medium businesses require to grow, or even survive, to the nonproductive consumption of an ever-growing government behemoth; in effect it is destroying the economic backbone of a free society, and likely the very freedoms that come with it.  As noted above, when we reach the end game of these inherently flawed policies, we will have the opportunity to change those policies and cleanse the distorting effects; the issue is will that be based on sound economics or more corrupt politics? That may very well depend on an election next year, which at this time appears headed for a repeat performance. While I am an eternal optimist, I am tempered by Mark Twain’s famous adage that “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”

“Ours may be the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”  Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell likely never imagined the atrocities advocated in current education or the political support for chemical or surgical sex changes for children. That some states legislatively provide for doing so, even without parental consent, is morally malignant, but deemed a “progressive” policy is beyond any humanistic concept of decency. Among the animal species on this planet, you can’t find a more repugnant treatment of offspring. It was Alexandre Dumas who said “How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.”

Back in 12/31/20 I wrote a post titled “Twisted”, which included a reference to the term “comprachicos” in Victor Hugo’s novel “The Man Who Laughs”; it was a term referring to the 16C to 18C horrible practice of buying children for the purpose of disfiguring them for the amusement of royalty in the carnival shows of freaks in European courts. One of the great horrors of the Nazi death camps were the obscene experiments performed on children, yet here in America we have the bizarre practice of indoctrinating our young about gender affirming surgery; how this country has sunk to a level equivalent to the barbarism of such psychopaths is extremely disturbing.

Even without the horrific results of such insanity, we have had the disastrous results from the social isolation during the mindless lockdowns during COVID. Just a couple of years back the report from the CDC confirmed that social isolation for children is linked to poor outcomes; in 2021, emergency rooms in 38 children’s hospitals saw a 47% increase in the number of suicide and self-injury cases in the first nine months of the year among children 5 to 8, and a 182% jump among kids ages 9 to 12, compared to 2016. There was a 22.3 percent spike in ER trips for potential suicides by children aged 12 to 17 in summer 2020 compared to 2019.

Instead of addressing the issues underlying such horrors, we have states like Michigan passing legislation making it a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment for misusing pronouns; it is likely that other progressive dominated legislatures will follow. Should anyone object to this mindless woke ideology, they will be labeled extremist, oppressors, or some such nonsense, in order to marginalize them. There seems to be a growing discontent with these hateful policies as some states are banning gender affirming surgery; this issue has been politically harnessed creating even further polarization. The welfare of children should never be a political, but a societal issue, a common ground against these evils perpetrated by an ideology of hate of human virtue in favor of human vices; we are faced with the Nazi and Soviet like practice of brainwashing children with the politicization of education.

It was Goethe who once said that “Unlike grown-ups, children have little need to deceive themselves.” In that spirit a rock group from the late seventies wrote lyrics in the song “Another Brick In The Wall” promoting a revolt against indoctrination in education, the lyrics of which I always found inspiring:

“We don’t need no education – We don’t need no thought control – No dark sarcasm in the classroom – Teachers leave them kids alone – Hey, teachers, leave them kids alone – All in all it’s just another brick in the wall – All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.”

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”  Mark Twain

According to Psychology Today, “Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.” The term itself was first coined by Dr. Albert Ellis in 1962 regarding patients with high anxiety and depression affecting their cognitive abilities. While the term and definition is relatively modern this phenomenon has many historical contexts, most notable was in 1798 when the English scholar Thomas Malthus argued that human population growth would soon outpace the ability to feed it, which would lead to war, disease and famine ending the species. This is called the Malthusian Theory, which has been empirically proven wrong. 

Despite the fact that Malthus was wrong on both the growth of population and technology, we have doomers like famous biologist Paul Ehrlich basically espousing the same thing, with such dire predictions in 1969 of mass starvation in the 1970’s and other calamitous outcomes, unless there is a serious enforced reduction in population growth. Inevitably he has had to update his prediction on a regular basis to keep up with an ever growing population maintained by the advances in science and technology. This past May is the 50^th anniversary of Ehrlich’s famous book “The Population Bomb”; he celebrated that with another update on the end of humanity.

However, disciples of Malthus such as Ehrlich need not worry as their catastrophizing has produced a result that will likely cause a decline in the rate of population growth. By 2042 all US Population growth will be a result of immigration as the size of American families continues to decline, as does the very number of families themselves due to new generations avoiding marriage and/or having children, or at best no more than two, which results in a net zero or negative growth. Europe is in a similar situation and China even worse given the lag effect of the one-child/family policy. With the exception of India, much is the same for the rest of the world. With China the causal effect is policy driven, but with the US and Europe it’s psychological; if you indoctrinate youth with catastrophic mentalities regarding just about everything, why would anyone consider bringing children into such a world?

In the US “Baby Boomers” currently comprise about 21% of the population, down from 28% in 1999. The alphabet generations that followed, i.e. X, Y (Millennial) and Z, all range at about the same percentage as current Boomers; in effect, it appears as a flat line of growth but actually it’s negative as none reached the peak that Boomers did. Coupled with disastrous government policies that have caused irreparable damage to the economy with inflation, lack of productivity, increasing scarcities and growing violent conflicts, it’s understandable that we will see a decline in population growth, and at some point a decline in population. While I believe that such a trend is reversible, it is more a hope than an observation; hope is not a plan, so for that reversal to become a reality we common folks should and can address this catastrophizing trend in our culture.

Since Malthus’ dire predictions, the world population has increased seven fold, but per capita wealth, knowledge and overall prosperity has increased to the point that poverty has been cut to less than half what it was when Ehrlich made his predictions. In effect, the more people, the more production in just about everything. The problem has been that people have not been allowed to be free enough to do even better, and keep more of what they create, and that problem is getting worse as governments become ever bigger, sapping the life blood of society.  Governments produce nothing, so they have to rely on those they govern for their existence; this is a parasitical relationship that unless reversed will have worse catastrophic consequences than Malthus or Ehrlich predicted.   

We should start with education, and there are hopeful signs there as parents become ever more involved, as they should. It is parents who need to be accountable for what their children are taught, responsible for their welfare and have the moral right and authority to decide how and where they are schooled. The last thing we as a free society should tolerate is a government in charge of education; we’ve seen the dire consequences of that in history with Soviet Russia, Khmer Rouge, Nazi Germany and the CCP, just to name a few. Thankfully the Supreme Court declared in 1997 that the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees the parental right regarding the welfare and education of their children.

While there’s no guarantee that all parents will always make the “right” decision regarding their children’s welfare and education, there’s no better way to instill a positive life outlook and self-esteem than in the love and care of a family. A positive policy that we should demand from government is to do whatever it takes to make sure that the family is always placed ahead of any agency, beauocracy, school board or teacher’s union; those institutions have been the source of the catastrophizing ideologies dominating our educational institutions for generations now, and the growing trend for parents to choose alternatives is the best hope for the future.

“I was educated once; it took me years to get over it.” Mark Twain

“There has now been created a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example.” Thomas Sowell

The word equity has traditionally referred to the amount of money the owner of an asset would be paid after selling it and any debts associated with the asset were paid off. An example is a mortgage that increases in equity for the home owner as the loan is paid off until eventually they’re fully vested. Politically it now means a guarantee of outcome; you can’t expect an equal outcome among people unless they’re the same in all respects. It is theoretically and empirically obvious that no two people are identical; it then follows that in order to guarantee an equality of outcome people must be controlled or you risk a variance in outcomes.

The sinister reality of equity in the political context is that it requires the malevolent manipulation of society to assure that no one exceeds the least common denominator; it is the antithesis of meritocracy wherein people are judged and rewarded based on performance. An example of this manipulation is the withholding of National Merit Scholarship notices by the Fairfax County school district, starting with the administrators of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the top rated high school in the country, actually admitting to parents that they did this in order to avoid hurting the feelings of students that did not qualify. While the Virginia Attorney General is investigating this on the basis of a violation of civil rights, the harm was already done as it affected those students who qualified but could not include that in their college applications.

The genesis of equity begins with the misunderstanding of equality of opportunity; no two people, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation or political association, can possibly have the same opportunities as anyone else because no two people are the same. Therefore, it’s empirically obvious that we should not expect an equal outcome among people unless each and every human being is the same in all respects. This equality of opportunity under the law is guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, and repeated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which specifically forbids discrimination in employment. Under the law, opportunity does not mean the right to anything else, and certainly provides no equality of outcome.

It is this equity, this guarantee of outcome that is such a dangerous concept in a free society. As the great economist Friedrich Hayek explained, “From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time.”

What we actually have with this equity is a disdain of liberty because it does not yield an equality of outcome; except in regards to the law it can’t do so, which is the basis for the very concept of liberty to begin with. Of course there is the ultimate alternative to liberty known as slavery. That such evil ideas as equity originated among the university elite in society should not be a surprise, which led George Orwell to observe that “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell

Daniel Ellsberg died yesterday, the man who committed one of the great revolutionary acts in American history that did more to expose the deceit of multiple administrations regarding the Viet Nam War with the Pentagon Papers than anyone else. His work was a direct link to what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed later in the Watergate scandal. These guys were relentless pursuers of the truth regarding very sinister and destructive policies and practices. They all came under intense criticism and criminal charges for their efforts, which in the end did much to preserve the liberties and rule of law enshrined in our constitution.

What their work did is hold the government accountable for its actions by exposing the truth, and in politics, and now journalism, that is a revolutionary act. If someone is working to prevent people from hearing the truth, then that someone is likely not telling the truth. This is what Ellsberg discovered, both as a Marine in Viet Nam, and later a consultant to the government regarding that war. Ultimately Ellsberg was exonerated of all criminal charges basically because the judge found that the government had acted with egregious misconduct.

Unfortunately that is not the case with Julian Assange with Wikileaks on illegal activities in the Pentagon and Edward Snowden on illegal government surveillance. It’s apparent that both of these people are in prison or exile because they exposed the truth, and as Ron Paul so wittingly noted, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.” Apparently the empire has never changed its evil ways as it continues to strike back against the exposure of the truth. Ellsberg was very vocal about his support for Assange and said “I’ve sort of been waiting for somebody to do this for forty years.” He was equally vocal against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars as another sad chapter in our government’s never ending false narrative to justify patently unconstitutional aggression, and equally so regarding the Ukrainian War that had no legitimate security benefit for the US but could lead to a nuclear confrontation with Russia.

However there is little to no criticism in the press regarding the revelation of government secrets about the Ukrainian War. This was not actually an intentional whistle blowing disclosure but an almost comical display of inept security regarding classified U.S. intelligence by IT support technician Airman Jack Teixeira on a social media gaming and chat group platform. The focus was all about how it happened, but curiously little about the content of yet another false government narrative. Why the silent press?  While the disclosed documents show that Ukraine will inevitably loose the war without direct NATO involvement as the loss of life in Ukraine is so drastic that at the current pace of slaughter there will soon not be enough able bodied Ukrainians alive to fight Russia much longer, a case of attrition leading to annihilation.

It’s apparent that Putin could care less as he’s banking on the simple fact that there are more Russians than Ukrainians, so attrition works for him. It’s also apparent that such a scenario makes inevitable either a direct confrontation among nuclear powers or an eventual Russian victory. Either way, as Mark Twain said, “The truth hurts but silence kills.” While President Biden uses the Ukrainian War as an opportunity for virtue signaling as the protector of democracy, he seems either ignorant or dismissive of the fact that we are supporting a Neo-Nazi regime.

Ukraine is hardly a democracy, nor is Zelensky a beacon of liberty. The Ukrainian oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Mykola Zlochevsky are the main source of funds for the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, funded and directed Zelensky’s presidential campaign, and own the media conglomerate that made him famous. They also control Burisma, the source of funds that paid Hunter Biden. It’s almost cartoonish that Zelensky is being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize while actually declaring all other political parties illegal but his own, controlling Ukraine’s media, and suggesting the use of nuclear weapons against Russia.  While it’s true that Putin is an aggressive dictatorial autocrat, Zelensky has shown himself more like him than not.

One of the cruel truths that Ellsberg exposed about the US policy in Viet Nam was that the Pentagon knew the reasons for the conflict that it fed Americans were lies, that the war could not be won, and that the people of Viet Nam, and Cambodia and Laos, were suffering as much under the regime we were supporting as were those in North Viet Nam. Yet we continued to send our youth to die for nothing, to the tune of about 58K. We can only hope that someone in the government will do for the Ukrainian War what Ellsberg did for the Viet Nam War.

“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.” Thomas Paine

“On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity.” Adam Smith

Some time ago a friend commented to me that Fox News was not a reliable or truthful source during a dinner discussion about news reporting in general.  What provoked such a comment was not clear as he also said he never listens to Fox, which made it confusing as to how he came to his conclusion. I had written off Fox as just another partisan rag like MSNBC and CNN with little journalistic merit. However, this ambiguity got me looking for clarity. I am a long time viewer of Bloomberg and occasionally CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”. The former is heavy on statistics, but either ambiguous or overly quantitative on analyses, and the latter is given to bombastic pronouncements with little context. I needed a new outlook.

My friend’s statement about Fox in the context of not being a viewer, and my focus being on economics and finance, prompted me to give Fox Business a try. The likes of Stuart Varney in the morning and Charles Payne in the afternoon were a revelation. Varney’s byline is “When you’re talking about money, you had better be clear.” Charles Payne is equally direct about the purpose of business and investing is to make money. It was refreshing to hear intelligent and knowledgeable people cut through all the noise and speak with directness and clarity.

I still listen to Bloomberg, but they are less inclined to call out the US Treasury and Federal Reserve on their often contradictory and/or ambiguous policies that anyone with reading comprehension skills is left asking what was it that they were trying to tell us? It’s clear that many in the news are fumbling to connect the dots while those in “control” were lost, their economic GPS clearly offline. Varney and Payne call that out for exactly what that is, but they do not dwell in the “City of Skepticism” and quickly pass through the “Valley of Ambiguity”. Like Bloomberg, they both have the charts, graphs and guests interviews to provide a context for the subject at hand, but in the end provide a positive attitude and clarity as to where they stand on the issue.

Case in point was Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s press conference this past Wednesday; as expected, he announced a “pause” in rate hikes, but expressed the Fed’s commitment to reduce inflation to the long stated 2%, and so the likelihood of additional hikes to come, but all the while assuring maximum employment. Varney and Payne were clear about that being a contradiction in terms and policy. The “pause” is pure politics as the Fed has been under extreme pressure from both major political parties to ease up on the rate pedal and softly touch the rate brake, that delusion of a “soft landing”, a term that is at best difficult to define, but ambiguity is an occupational requirement in politics.

A discomforting reality contrary to popular belief is that the Fed had paused and then resumed rate hikes before, with disastrous results. This happened during the Carter administration under Fed Chairs Burns and then Miller, who was forced to resign in favor of Volcker, who resumed rate hikes to an all-time high of 20.5%. Volcker reduced inflation to about 3.4% from its historical high of 9.8%, but it caused a major recession where unemployment exceeded 10%; history does tend to repeat itself, so why do we think this time is different?

This ambiguity creates all sorts of problems; it’s well known that markets hate uncertainty and this press conference was a clear indication that the Federal Reserve is flying blind. This has caused confusion to the extent that short term rates are higher than long term rates, known as an inversion, and indicates the market’s lack of positive conviction for the future. Further, what Varney and Payne at Fox, and Mike McKee at Bloomberg have pointed out is the obvious contradiction between the Fed’s monetary policies and the administration’s fiscal policies; while the Fed’s focus is on reducing inflation, the administration’s spending mania mitigates the effect of higher rates. While the rate of rise in inflation has slowed, which Powell cited as a consideration for a pause, inflation is still with us, which he also cited as a consideration for future hikes. In the same press conference he admitted to a slowing economy, with 2023 GDP falling from the projected 2% to 1.3%, and perhaps even lower in 2024. That’s some soft landing. As the old saying goes, you’re only confused when you’re paying attention.

I don’t support mandated rate hikes in any event as no one, least of all governments, should dictate interest rates. The most important metric in economics is price, and like anything in economics money has a price; we call it interest, the very simple and clear definition of which is the time preference for money. There are so many things that go into people’s preferences for anything; in general when people have clarity as to what’s going on, coupled with a positive outlook for the future, they tend to forego immediate consumption in favor of investing in production for the long term. This is true of families and businesses.

However, when interest is manipulated as the Fed constantly does, the price is distorted, and along with it the perception as to what is going on and the prospects for the future. It is an axiom of ethics that evil hides in ambiguity, hence the need for clarity. We need more like Stuart and Charles to bring clarity to this situation, showing not only how the free market is being manipulated and why people then tend toward consumption versus production, but also to provide a positive approach in this age of ambiguity.

Also, thanks to my friend for inciting me to look where I did not expect to find clarity.  

“Why have a national debt ceiling if it doesn’t really put a ceiling on the national debt?” Thomas Sowell

Since the debt ceiling was created via the Second Liberty Bond Act of 1917, Congress has raised it about a hundred times. To better appreciate Sowell’s quote above consider the fact that in 1980 the federal debt stood at $908 billion, an increase of $537 billion since 1970; in 1990 the debt reached $3.2 trillion, in 2000 $5.6T, in 2010 $13.5T, and in 2020 $27.7T. The US national debt currently stands at $31.4T; compare that to the GDP of the US at $23.3T. In summary, the US is now at a point where its total economic output is about $8T less than its debt, and that is federal only, not counting state and local governments, corporate or private debt.

The rate of increase in the debt has not been linear; if graphed, which you can readily find online, it is exponential, such that by the end of this decade the interest alone on the national debt will exceed the total of federal tax revenues. While we hear much about the SSA trust fund going broke, just think about the fact that a virtual bankruptcy of the US Treasury looms even sooner. In this context, the spending cuts that the House is seeking, while long term insufficient to meaningfully address this debt crisis, is at least a hopeful start, but even with an eventual and inevitable deal being made the debt ceiling will still rise again.

The debt dilemma is not the creation of any one party, but both of our national political machines.  When Trump was given a brief on America’s growing debt crisis in 2017 and its impact on the future of the country, he callously responding that “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Debt apparently is an addiction that transcends partisan principles, contradicting the belief that the GOP is more fiscally responsible than the Democrats; it’s only a question of degree, and it inevitably leads to the same outcome.

It’s not that politicians don’t recognize the problem; consider what Barack Obama said during the debt ceiling crisis in his administration that “There’s no doubt that we’re going to have to address the long-term quandary of a government that routinely and extravagantly spends more than it takes in. Without action, the accumulated weight of ever-increasing debt will hobble our economy, it will cloud our future, and it will saddle every child in America with an intolerable burden.” The problem and the consequences of ignoring it are well known, but little has been done about it.

So desperate is the current administration in its non-negotiable position that it entertains bypassing Congress all together with a dubious play on the 14^th Amendment. This post-Civil War amendment was enacted to assure equal protection under the law, but also included provisions to assure paying off the federal debt resulting from financing the Union’s war effort; invoking this as a way to bypass Article 1 of the Constitution, which reserves such powers to Congress alone, illustrates both the ignorance and cynical nature of our national politics.

While this debt ceiling crisis occurs during a time of so many other crises, all of which are self-inflicted, we should not be distracted from the root cause of the problem, which is the fraud at the heart of our contemporary financial system; it is the fraud of debt-based money, and the dire consequences that result if we refuse to change the way our money works. The US dollar is a fiat currency, meaning it is not commodity money so it has no intrinsic value; it has value only as long as people “trust” that it will be accepted by others as a unit of account and a medium of exchange. The moment that trust is questioned, such as in the case of a default, the US dollar’s value will fall drastically, even more than it already has. If we think that inflation has become entrenched now, imagine what it would be like with a default.

We always hear about some politicians justifying some draconian proposal as an issue of national security, when in fact it just another partisan power grab. Why don’t we hear more about the debt crisis as an issue of national security? How can the economic wellbeing of Americans be any less an issue of national security than TikTok, misinformation or Ukrainian Sovereignty? While the field of presidential candidates grows daily, who among them will make debt and budget reform a cornerstone of their platform? Many choose some culture war issue, or increased entitlements to harvest votes, but who has the courage to tell the American people that the debt party will end if they are elected, and that they will push for a balanced budget, and not the same old political game that will Rogers so wittingly described when he said “The budget is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out.”

“Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.” Hannah Arendt

This post title is an excerpt from Hannah Arendt’s report for the New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Her description of Eichmann as an ordinary man, “…terribly and terrifyingly normal…” struck many as odd considering his role as the chief director of the Holocaust. In her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” she makes various observations that won her both acclaim and condemnation. Many found her conclusions about the evils of totalitarianism as deriving from both the presumed elite and the easily manipulated mob harsh, despite her astute observations as to how and why it occurs.

Arendt did not dwell much on the philosophical topic of moral responsibility; she was empirically inclined and focused instead on her observation of people who were not distinguished by any superior intelligence or sophistication in moral matters but “…dared to judge by themselves.”, thus deciding that conformity would leave them unable to “…live with themselves.” Sometimes even choosing to die rather than become complicit in evil, such ordinary people create “The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not; this strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences.”

What is not emphasized by Arendt is from where such evils as she wrote about arise. That is not a criticism as that was not the object or purpose of either her report about Eichmann’s trial or her book; it was already a question she understood answered by others, like Augustine, Aquinas, Aristotle, etc. who had concluded from empirical perspectives that evil arises from envy. It was Locke who defined that for humans a virtuous state of nature is devoid of such things as elitism, envy, or coercion; further, for a society to be considered to be in a virtuous state of nature it must embrace a polity that protects individuals against such things.

Arendt’s view of evil as a banality is quite insightful and unique, devoid of any fantastical concept as some kind of Marvel Comics’ evil superpower character. What it takes for someone to unwittingly embrace evil is simply not to think, just to accept and conform to whatever those in power, the elite or the mob say to do, that mindless desire to be part of the “we” and not be one of those that “…dared to judge by themselves.” This phenomenon seems to persist despite the resulting horrors like the Holocaust; it does not always result in such horrific extremes, but usually starts off with those seeking power to manipulate the mob to focus on someone to blame for whatever the crisis of the day happens to be, real or imagined.

What needs to be created is a sense of envy in order to create blame. Those who have this insatiable thirst for power usually rely on the pretense of providing some form of social justice, the ultimate anti-concept as Thomas Sowell so eloquently put it when he said “I never cease to be amazed at how often people throw around the lofty phrase ‘social justice’ without the slightest effort to define it. It cannot be defined because it is an attitude masquerading as a principle.”

This attitude creates all sorts of societal distortions as envy is a feeling of discontent and resentment of someone else’s possessions, qualities, or simply luck; this is exactly what the power monger wants to arouse, an irrational desire for that which belongs to someone else without the necessity to earn it. The target of the envy created is often a minority, like the Jews in Europe, the ethnic Chinese in SE Asia, prosperous African Americans, Armenians in Turkey, and now successful Asian and Hispanic Americans, or anyone who has achieved success or fortunate enough to benefit from their family that has. Again, Thomas Sowell has succinctly identified this trend when he observed that “There has now been created a world in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example.”

Consider the Seven Deadly Sins, which are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth; while the news is filled with stories about people who became overwhelmed with most of these sins, envy seems to go unnoticed while it in fact has become a virtue under its disguise as social justice. It’s alarming that much of the public buys into those narratives that seemingly on a daily basis promotes some new example of oppression by anyone deemed “privileged” in some way; it’s that “Going along…” that Arendt speaks to, the desire to be part of the “we” and to avoid being different for fear that you will be condemned as extremists, racists, homophobes, or whatever is the derogatory label of the day.

This lock step trend is supported by a supplicating media and defunct academia, suffocating any real civil discourse. While such behavior is trite, boorish and just plain “banal”, it is exactly what Arendt meant for people to understand; this attitude of envy that morphs into a social and political movement becomes the origin of totalitarianism. One of the consistent and perhaps most dangerous elements of such movements are the attacks and suppressions of free speech. We must never be afraid to speak out against such things because we modestly think of ourselves as just ordinary people, but remember that even ordinary people need to understand what George Orwell meant when he said “Even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong.”

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” George Orwell

The recent disclosure of classified documents by U.S. Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira was only part of the real scoop; he had been doing so since February of 2022, yet it took more than a year for the intelligence community to realize it.  While the NY Times and Washington Post made much of the fact that it was they who discovered who was doing it, few focused on the content until afterward, as if the real story was just about the security failures; the majority of the documents were mostly about the war in Ukraine, exposing facts, analyses and evaluations that were contrary to what the administration and the media had been telling the American people.

This is not new stuff as we have the ongoing case of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who in 2010 published a series of leaks provided by US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, which included the infamous April 2010 “Collateral Murder” video of US soldiers fatally shooting civilians and journalists from a helicopter in Iraq. Assange remains at Belmarsh Prison, UK pending extradition to the US; the charges basically are for exposing war crimes.

Then we have the case of Eric Snowden who in 2013 exposed a global surveillance program by the NSA, of not just criminals and terrorists, but also American citizens and US allies; he’s a guest of Russia who has given him asylum. Despite the fact that a US appeals court has found the NSA program unlawful, it continues, even though the US says it’s ineffective. The news has focused more on Snowden, and his whereabouts, than the unconstitutional government-run surveillance program of its own citizens.

The question arises as to why, unlike journalists of the past, do we have the legacy media so complacent, if not alarmingly accommodative to the corruption and deceit of the political class. The prosecution, if indeed the persecution, of whistleblowers exposing the misrepresentations and outright lies about the illegal actions by our government should be the real scoop, headline news blasting such misdeeds as we had back in the 1970s. 

Most relevant are the Pentagon Papers, leaked by intelligence analyst Daniel Ellsberg to the press in 1971 that exposed US actions in not only North Vietnam but also Cambodia and Laos, an expansion of a “war” that was never even declared, constitutionally illegal regardless of the Congressional abdication of its responsibilities; none of this had been reported by the American media prior to this. Subsequently this revelation ignited a journalistic tsunami that eventually led to the Watergate investigations.

Journalists Bod Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post began an investigation of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee offices at Watergate in Washington, D.C., eventually exposing the involvement of President Nixon and leading to his resignation. Fittingly, the focus was on the documents found that exposed the criminal actions and who was ultimately responsible.

These are great examples of how a free, objective and insightful press serves the best interests of the American people, an essential element of liberty; the complacency and accommodation by our current legacy media does nothing of the kind. The old newspaperman’s hound dog persistence to get the real scoop has been replaced with advocacy journalism, which is nothing more than the very absence of getting the facts in print should those facts not support a preferred narrative.

Now back to Jack Teixeira, an IT geek who is no Daniel Ellsberg, but whether wittingly or not exposed facts about a war that is illegal, misrepresented by our government, and likely will result in a similar outcome, if not worse. Ellsberg had conducted intense research into US activities in Indochina from 1940 to 1968, the conclusion of which was detailed analyses and evaluations that the war was illegal, a waste of both capital and human resources, unwinnable, and therefore detrimental to the interest of the America people.

While Ellsberg was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, all charges were eventually dismissed given the evidence of gross governmental misconduct. Hopefully similar justice awaits Jack Teixeira and the American people with an end to the US proxy war in Ukraine, which has nothing to do with defending democracy, and everything to do with corruption and yet more deceit by our government, with whom, as Ron Paul so succinctly observed, “Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”