To: Clint Conaster, Lisa Leonard, Ed Deak, Russell McOrmond and many others on several mail lists who all want the best possible future for humanity. Hi Clint, Lisa, Ed, and Russell, Your concerned and insightful postings on the new list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> reflect your mutual interests in the general welfare. But they also reflect the effective "divide and conquer" techniques of a common enemy which regards the rest of humanity as their natural prey. My purpose in this post is to suggest a larger conceptual framework for the dialogue, with a greater prospect of our finding common ground. Bertrand Russell called this small faction of humanity "no men," and English author Paul Johnson called them "enemies of society" in his book of similar title. This common enemy has been with us for a long while, and even a very partial list of the major milestones jn his (their) perennial campaign of obstruction indicates that his (their) "divide and conquer" techniques are primarily responsible for the social pathologies which remain uncorrected in the world's present condition. Clearly, the great majority of mankind, if left to their own devices, would have constructed a better world by now. He (They) obstructed the development of humanity for thousands of years such that the authors of the Federalist Papers Hamilton, Madison, and Jay traveled at the same speed and communicated over the same distances as the biblical characters Abraham and king Melchizedek of Salem (Genesis 14, 18-20). We can fairly state that the condition of the world remained unchanged for centuries and its present greatly improved, but still unfinished, condition in all of its complexity has largely evolved since the United States was founded. Consider some of the milestones of the world's pre USA social development. He (They) persuaded King Rehoboam to raise taxes on the biblical nation of Israel and ten of the twelve tribes were lost to history, but may have planted the seeds of the worlds oldest religion in countries northwest of Palestine (I Kings 12,10-24). He (They) persuaded King Artaxerxes of Persia to saddle the Jewish remnant, after their return from exile in Babylon, with a tax exempt priesthood to keep the Jews from ever again rising to the pinnacle of wealth, power, and security they enjoyed in Israel under Solomon (Ezra 7,24-26) (I Kings 4, 25). He (They) shortened the life of Christ so the New Testament became one long lament over Christ's failure to restore the Law (Matthew 5,17-19). We might otherwise have had the industrial revolution in the first millennium, instead of late in the second millennium. He (They) terminated Classical Greece and Emperial Rome to start the dark ages from which Western Civilization finally emerged. More recently, he (They) strangled the "New School" of Richard T. Ely and Henry Carter Adams after the American Economic Association was founded in 1875, This act of intellectual infanticide assured that the US would never recover from the 4 to 10% rate of unemployment and the 2-3% per year decline in the value of our medium of exchange (also known as the English Disease), and, that the former colonies of Spain under US dominion would remain forever third world nations. Perhaps not forever, but certainly until we learn how to diagnose the systemic defect of omission that has cursed American public policy since the 1890s, as shown on Figure 10 of the global model at <http://www.freespeech.org/darves/bert.html>. He (They) sponsored the Great Inflation, as described by Harold Van B. Cleveland and W. H. Bruce Brittain in Planning Association (NPA) Report No. 148, 1976. That Great Inflation wiped out the dependent tax exemptions and family allowances that Japan and Western Europe had established by 1946 to enable their economies to recovery from World War II. You ask, what credentials do I have for painting with such a broad brush and interrupting your quiet discussion? Well, for starters, I am a 75 year old Yankee with a BSME degree based on a 2.5/4.0 grade point average on the GI Bill, with a life membership in the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers), and with three US patents assigned to the General Electric Company between 1947 and 1955 in optics, vacuum tube circuits, and decentralized analogue control systems which duplicate the price mechanism of a free market. My next nine jobs were with defense contractors where inventions are used but never patented. You may remember from your economics 101 what Paul A. Samuelson of MIT said in his 1954 paper, The Pure Theory Of Public Expenditure, about free markets: >> "3. Impossibility of decentralized spontaneous solution. So much for the involved optimizing equations that an omniscient calculating machine could theoretically solve it fed the postulated functions. No such machine now exists. But it is well known that an 'analogue calculating machine' can be provided by competitive market pricing, (a) so long as the production functions satisfy the neoclassical assumptions of constant returns to scale and generalized diminishing returns and (b) so long as the individuals' indifference contours have a regular convexity and, we may add, (c) so long as all goods are private." << >>>>>>>>>> End excerpt from P. A. Samuelson of MIT <<<<<<<<<< My strongest credential is that I wrote the technical specifications in 1953 for that "analogue calculating machine" which was installed in the electric power industry in 1954, and continues to date with the same principles of operation but now with digital, instead of analogue, hardware. I have been fascinated ever since 1953 by the way those principles have been applied, and misapplied, to public policy from the days of Abraham to the days of Bill Gates by those people who hold the public in thrall. Now folks, you are stalled in a debate which is framed by words like communism, capitalism, libertarian, socialism, local, global, right-wing, left-wing, and many others which mean different things to each person who hears the words. I suggest that the most valuable thing we could share together is a technically valid global model which could quantitatively represent each of the building blocks of industrial society, from a family farm or small family business, to a community, to a corporation, to a national economy. Let's admit, for now, that the global economy is going to remain a community of sovereign national economies for a long time, in spite of the vociferous proponents of one world government. The world cannot, and will not, risk giving absolute power to one institution. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and smaller is not only better, it is also safer for all concerned! What could be simpler than to model the universal building blocks of society which always consists of the same four elements; a patch of earth, a population of people, the capital improvements (or injuries) which the people added to the earth, and a circulating medium of exchange which measures and facilitates the operation of the life support system of every society? The model should be well known by now because the nature of the active element in the model, the people, has not changed since 1670 when Benedict DE Spinoza described the universal law of human nature, which "is so deeply implanted in the human mind that it aught to be counted among eternal truths and axioms." >From your experience, don't most people select the greatest of the goods and the least of the evils that are presented to them, except when they are deceived by "no men" or "enemies of society?" In conclusion of this post, I would invite your attention to the question: Can a simple model provide a useful frame of reference for evaluating complex public policy proposals? I believe it can. My idea of a simple model is the biology experiment which students usually perform on a stable and healthy colony of laboratory rats. A single external imposition, restricting their food supply, evokes a different response in each rat. To put that experiment in scientific terms we would need for each rat, one equation which related the unique function of the individual rat to the external imposition. As Samuelson said, with (n) equations and the (n) rat data to fill them you could never discover the nature of the single external imposition. But, as long as the simple model is drawn to include the notion of an adequate food supply, there is no need to solve (n) equations to discover that the food supply has been less than adequate during the experiment. Common sense will provide the solution. And so it is with a power system of a few hundred boiler-turbine-generator plants, with a corporation of a few hundred product lines, with a national economy of 270 million people at $50,000/year per head, or a global economy of six billion people at $4,000/year per head. But a recent post to list [EMAIL PROTECTED] quotes an excerpt from Wm. Krehm's "Economic Reform" monthly newsletter, which proscribes simple solutions to complex public policy questions. ~~~~~~~ BTW, "ER" is the newsletter of COMER, the Committee On Monetary and Economic Reform that addresses Canadian and world wide monetary and economic issues. ~~~~~~~ The excerpt reads: >> If you can identify ‘n’ independent variables in the problem, then you must have that many in your solutions. As our society becomes more complex - and even a controlled degree of globalisation is bound to make it so - the very notion of "one blunt tool" to keep it stable is stupid to the point of obscenity. The Tinbergen principle on the contrary requires an ever broader menu of contrasting and complementary policies to keep our society functioning and in reasonable balance. << Now Mr. Wm. Krehm was quite properly and correctly pointing out to his readers that "the 'one blunt tool' (interest rates) chosen by the philosophers of neo - liberalism happens to be the revenue of the moneylenders and the battering ram of financial predators." Nevertheless, Mr. Krehm's valid arguments are all too often taken out of context to obstruct public access to the simple solution for keeping "our society functioning and in reasonable balance." The simple solution is obvious, of course, but only when our present condition is examined within the conceptual framework provided by the global model hosted at these three web sites: <http://www.freespeech.org/darves/bert.html> <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/3142/IR/items/19990119WesBurtSustaina bleFuture.html> <http://plaza.powersurfr.com/Usalama/economics.html> In a very few years, Ed Deak and I will be pushing up daises, and the collective inability of those left behind to find a simple solution to the world's complex problems will not be our problem! But if the left behinds don't begin to talk about the problem and find a solution soon, the human species will become dog meat in the third millennium. To get your thinking headed in the right direction, I propose that we rename our hundred year old English public policy, and call it: THE SOCIAL SCIENTISTS FULL EMPLOYMENT ACT OF 1892. This policy of 4-10% unemployment and 2-3% inflation must have been enacted by a parliament composed of vicious mother-in-laws, gays, lesbians, celibates, and WHIPs who thought the public was doing something "dirty" and should be punished for raising too many children. How long will the dead be allowed to hold the living in thrall? BTW: WHIPs are that few wealthy, healthy, intelligent, and powerful members of society who are persuaded that working people are not of the same species as themselves, and should be forced to live under different laws than the WHIPs. PSALM 23 A Psalm of David 1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. ~~~~ snip ~~~~~~ 4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for I have illuminated the valley before me. ~~~~ snip ~~~~~~ 6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever. Kind regards and Merry Christmas to Clint, Lisa, Ed, Russell, and many others, Wesburt
