Thoughts on reading David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”
It is one thing to imagine, to contrive, a long distant past that fits one’s myths to explain one’s hypotheses, quite another to impose one’s ideas on a current world where such ideas are daily disproven by reality. But that is what politicians and mainstream neoliberal economists do.
The history they claim, of the use of money historically developing natively from barter in ‘primitive’ societies, in order to claim some authenticity for their own liberal or neoliberal ideology downplaying the role of government, has been debunked by anthropologists who have studied such societies & found no evidence for such barter, & many reasons for why it could never have functioned.
Their claim for the current *economy* is that, in order for them to spend, national governments have to first fund their operations by acquiring a debt, by obtaining the necessary money from the people, the non-government sector, by means mainly of taxation & of selling bonds. This, despite the fact that with a fiat currency (that is, one not based on a commodity) of which they, the government, are the sole unconstrained creator, there is no sense in them taking or borrowing something which they can freely create by the simple remedy of government (in the form of the Treasury) telling the Reserve Bank of Australia (or Bank of England or whatever central bank) to mark up specific accounts in particular private banks by a certain amount.
Why would they borrow it or extort it?
There is no financial debt to the nation in the government spending, whether they are purchasing the necessary goods & services from the private sector to fulfill the government’s wishes, or even to give money & power to their mates, or to funnel it back to themselves personally, or their parties. There is no interest accruing on what they spend which is going to have any effect for future generations, that is just nonsense. They do have to pay interest on the “savings” bonds that they choose for whatever other reasons to issue to people looking for secure savings, but that interest is created in the same way as all their other spendings.
The take-home message is that there is no financial debt to the people when such a government spends.
Wealth can be gained in different ways, but however gained, whether by means fair, foul or outright fascist extortion, its ownership is seen as success, having more wealth is seen as better than having less. So much so that many people would see that statement as a pointless truism. A more financially successful person is a better person.
Someone with little or no wealth is possibly to be pitied, maybe derided. If not ignored, then either helped or stomped on according to your inclinations.
Once someone has acquired some wealth, ‘holds’ some wealth, by whatever means, it is seen as ‘theirs’ & it gives them perceived value as a person. It does not matter greatly how it was acquired. Holding more wealth is not usually seen as a negative reflection on your character.
So, wealth can be obtained in many ways, it can be gained by a person using their skills, labour or intellect for purposes desired by others in their community: they can make horseshoes, they can dig fields, grow food crops, build houses, bake bread, grow cotton, weave cloth; a million productive uses of the person’s energy, skills, intellect, purchased from them at whatever price the community deems appropriate to assist the community with its basic needs for food, clothing, shelter.
Alternatively, it might be acquired by inheritance from your family, you as representative of the family’s power which it had gained from its ownership of historic wealth, again, however acquired.
It might have been stolen from its previous owners, by trickery, subterfuge, or brute force. Maybe usury, the charging of interest, rent, for the loan of money or credit. Possibly land rent for the right to live on or use a particular area of land. Perhaps it was stolen from workers that one ’employs’ by not paying them a fair price for their skills or labour, or not paying them a fair proportion of the benefits of the production from their labour. In which case it is the ‘value’ of their input which is being appropriated rather than actual existing wealth in the form of money, currency, but it is wealth for the owner of it, that was obtained from the value of the worker’s input, going to the employer, not to the creator of it. An important point here is that only with the wildest flight of imagination or ideology is it possible to claim that the employer provided their own labour, skill or intellect in the production of whatever was produced, only the money to facilitate it. They may have utilised the social networks of those others of their ilk who had likewise acquired their wealth in a similar manner, but their one differentiating factor from those whose skills, labour & intellect actually produced whatever was produced, was the wealth that they had previously acquired by whatever means.
Let me put forward the idea of a successful person who gained their wealth by virtue of their own labours. It is entirely possible for a good successful tradesperson working for themself, on their own, or with their family, as a family, to become ‘comfortably off’, having no immediate constraints on their desire for shelter, food & clothing for themselves & their family. I suggest that that is & always has been, as long as there were people, for however many hundreds of thousands of years, the ultimate desire of humankind.
Now, at some point along the way, when circumstances permitted, the inherent acquisitional urge, in the form of greed, overtook the basic need for sufficiency, & resulted in most everything bad that the human race has ever done, all the evil in the world feeds on our one basic need for security.
Given that some level of wealth is good for society in general, a rising tide lifting all boats, a non-zero-sum-game, but also that there is a level, currently a long way short of billionaire I suggest, that is destructive of society, how do we know where the destructive level might be?
It is possible that it is not the quantum of the wealth, but the method of acquisition that is important. A worker gains wealth in exchange for the value that they have created by their efforts, the society around them benefits from their created value. Everything that a sole trader artisan has, comes to them by way of their labour & skills & is constrained by the general level of wealth in their surrounding society. This is non-zero-sum, both sides of the transaction benefits.
On the other hand for those who derive their income from rent, (rent being any form of unearned income), in any of the forms of theft mentioned above, it is definitely zero sum, others lose what they gain, they have not contributed anything to the general good in exchange for the acquisition of the wealth, they are not creating any value. What is loaned must be repaid, land rent does not give the renter anything tangible, whilst giving the rentier, the landlord in this case, power over the renter in addition to the rent.
People who gain their wealth by their personal contribution to the value of the society are limited in what they can gain by their own physical & mental capacity, there are only so many hours in the day & all effort involves using energy. They are also limited by the amount of wealth available to those around them to purchase their output.
Usurers & other rentiers are not so limited, as they need put no great physical or mental investment into their financial gain.
Just looking for a level of income or wealth that might differentiate between possibly virtuous wealth & definitely destructive wealth, I cannot imagine anyone dependent on their own labours being able to earn $1,000,000 a year, US$ or A$, or GBP1,000,000.
To reinforce the obscenity of the levels of wealth held by the most wealthy in our world, if you were to be able to save, beyond your living expenses, $1,000,000 a year for 1000 years, you would then be borderline billionaire. If you had achieved this feat, saving the current equivalent of $1,000,000 a year since the dawn of modern humanity, even Archaic Homo Sapiens, say from 300,000 years ago, you would not have the wealth of the richest person alive today.
And that discussion is just on the financial wealth, which is actually subordinate to the overweening power that holding such wealth endows on the holder.
That is why we are in the sorry pickle in which we currently find ourselves.
Through all of human existence, people have lived their lives immersed in ignorant myth & delusion. The content of the myths & delusions may have varied with time & place, but the certainty of the belief in them has been universal throughout all of time.
Now, in this time & place at least, that has changed; people have gone from passively, unknowingly, drowning in nonsense to being actively waterboarded with obviously absurdly false mis- & dis-information with the deliberate intent of destroying all faith in anything, so the perpetrators can get away unscathed from imposing whatever dystopic regime they wish for their personal gain.
What they have done is to replace universal certainty, a false bedrock if you will, with a deliberately created quicksand of uncertainty.
[As proof of the intended effect, the United States of America, 300 million people, has now reached such a point in this descent into the quagmire that they are actively considering the presidency of a multiply proven con-artist, an openly criminal, deliberately obnoxious sleazy villain.]
Currently reading the introduction of Globalists: The End of Empire & the Birth of Neoliberalism.
My thoughts on global, supranational, control, stem from my Australian experience, & are based on perceived political corruption, not some overriding global ethos, I don’t see how the latter could function.
The plutocrats have to corrupt the politicians to utilise their constitutional powers.
The nation states create their own currency, not the plutocrats, not the bankers, not business, the nation state has sole creation of currency in its own realm.
The nation states control their military & either directly or via subordinate states control the police forces.
Likewise the judiciary.
All the power that the plutocrats have gained lies in their ownership of state governments or their politicians & the only way they can apply it is through their corruption of those granted state control.
It makes no difference to you if you are bog poor, cast(e) out, discarded by society, destitute, denied any acceptable place in society, for whatever reason that society deems fit, or unfit; or a productive worker, tradesperson, producer of wealth for all in society; or some petit bourgeois small business owner, landlord, soaking up the local wealth with others’ underpaid help; or a banker, executive , actively helping the billionaires to acquire the wealth created by productive workers.
At some point all non-billionaires must come to terms with the fact that the insanity called Neoliberalism, Trickle Down, Economic Rationalism, which is the dominant ideology in all or nearly all nations is totally inconsistent with any benefit for 99.99% of the world’s population, exactly the opposite, it seeks the enslavement or destruction of the 99.99%.
It only benefits the 0.01%, the billionaires who own, lock, stock & barrel, particularly barrel, all the ruling political parties & hence governments & the armed forces, military, police, paramilitary (in Oz, Border Force).
Looking at the way that the oligarchy, the plutocracy, is using the national politicians that it owns, as puppets to their own commercial or political power seeking ends.
At first glimpse, the fact that the oligarchs own the politicians & use them for their own profit & rent seeking ends might imply that the oligarchs are using their multinational status to rule the world.
Here are a few example of the way that national politicians accept financial help from corporations. The first one makes some kind of sense, in that New South Wales, as a state of Australia, is not a sovereign currency creator, so is ultimately reliant on the Federal government, who is the only sovereign currency creator in Australia, so NSW is responsible for funding its Police Force.
Senior NSW Police proudly showing off their affiliation with the Santos Fossil Fuel Corporation
Likewise the same Santos Fossil Fuel Corporation in, of all places, the Australian stand at the Climate Change Conference, COP26
The Fossil Fuel Corporation Santos sponsoring the Australian stand at the Glasgow Climate Change Conference COP26 in 2021
Not only Australia, obviously, here two London “Bobbys” stand next to their owner’s logo, Serco
The second two however are less obviously necessary as they both relate to national sovereign governments, Australia & the United Kingdom, each of which is the sole unconstrained currency creator in their particular realm, Australia of its A$ & UK of the Pound Sterling respectively. No-one else can create it & they can create as much as they need of it, as long as there is something available by way of goods or services that it requires for purchase.
They, as a government, have no need of their donor’s money, but therein lies the rub, the government needs no money from anyone, it can freely create whatever it needs as a government, but the political parties who constitute the government & the individual politicians who constitute the political parties are specifically forbidden from accessing the public money that their government can freely spend, so as to stop the obvious corruption that such access would afford.
So the politicians give the oligarchs, the corporations, the power to reap money by giving them control over institutions previously owned by the people, allowing them both to take rent from those institutions & also to sell off their resources & run down the services until they no longer have any value to anyone. They only have value to the corporations as long as they return an income, after that they can be discarded.
The corporations who have been so gratuitously enriched repay the public servants by donating to them, both personally & to their parties, & by employing them in some sinecure, well recompensed jobs for the boys requiring no work or intelligence, once their political careers are over.
Such is the way Neoliberalism works at a national level.
However, it is only of value to the oligarchs as long as the politicians in their thrall hold power in the nation, over the law making, & control of the police & military forces that the oligarchs can employ.
This potential problem was taken care of in the first instance by the corporations purchasing both or all the parties capable of winning popular power. This obstacle was largely overcome back in the 1970s or early 1980s when the fondly imagined parties of the left, Democrats in the US, Labour in the UK & Labor in Australia quietly gave up their ghosts as the protectors of the people & democracy & joined with the fascist Neoliberal barbarians, the Republicans, the Tories & the Australian Liberal National Coalition, in ransacking their respective civilisations.
In the US, Jimmy Carter, in Britain, James Callaghan & in Australia, Bob Hawke & Paul Keating.
These Quislings, Benedict Arnolds, Lord Haw Haws, take your pick, traitors to the people, opened their respective City Gates to besieging barbarians in the form of Reagan, Thatcher & Howard to rape & pillage civilisation for the sake of their oligarch masters & mistresses by initiating privatisations.
These privatisations sold, or gave, the people’s wealth, their equity in government institutions run entirely for their benefit, to corporations; oligarchs or would-be, soon to be oligarchs, some with headquarters in beach huts or foreign tax havens who saw them, not as services to the people, but as opportunities to increase their obscene wealth at the expense of the people. (Because, where else does wealth come from, other than the labour & skills of working people?)
In this situation however, the oligarchs & their corporations require the continued existence of the nation states they parasitise upon in the same way that mosquitoes require warm blooded animals or viruses whatever their host may be.
They all, oligarchs, corporations, corrupt politicians, all require that the people continue thinking that their votes have any value, any use, any benefit to them.
To this end the media, subservient to, or complicit with, possibly even superior to, the oligarchs bombard the people continuously with propaganda pretending opposition between the parties, & hence pretending democracy.
Were the people to realise the pantomime that is being played out for their benefit, the Roman pleb pacifiers, Bread & Circuses, opiates of the people, then the entire edifice would be at risk.
What would happen to the structure of society should this smoke & mirrors clear enough to be recognisable is beyond my imagination. Luckily for them, this is extremely unlikely, people will cling to their delusions as long as they can & the media will feed them Bread & Circuses & Pantomimes for ever.
However the bottom line is that the oligarchs & their multinational corporations still require national governments to act as their proxies, even with their direct corruption of politicians & their Investor State Dispute System, this is not Global Government, just Global Corruption.
It appears that my lot in life is to upset gatekeepers, be they fascist or avowedly antifascist.
Three Fediverse instances now have decided that they don’t want me to be a part of them, or so it would appear from my current lack of access to Kolektiva Dot Social.
Such is life in the Oh So Precious Fediverse, I can imagine the delight that would be experienced by the first ignorant fascist Dickhead who reported me & got me banned from Aus Dot Social for challenging his “friendly suggestions” to hide my abhorrent “#Auspol” from his gentle eyes. Not for ignoring them or going against them, just for questioning his right to make them. (“I am a friendly reasonable person, so please do as I suggest or I’ll get you thrown into the Outer Darkness”, only without the warning.)
Since then I have been banned from Aus Dot Social’s sister instance The Dot Blower for merely telling them in an introduction that I was the person that Dickhead had got banned from Aus Dot Social. So much for openness & honesty in the Fediverse.
However I no longer really sweat on getting banned by them, they are after all just ignorant Aussies exercising their inalienable Australian rights to ignorance & arbitrariness. They know no better. I do admit that Aus Dot Social did initially set me back on my heels a bit by banning me following my first interaction post leaving Twitter.
However I would have, did, assume that Kolektiva was more adult, intelligent, reasonable than them.
My current apparent unofficial exclusion from Kolektiva reminds me of a church youth club I wandered into in my youth, only to be asked to leave half an hour later, my questions were not acceptable unto them either apparently. However at least the church asked me to leave.
One person, not to my knowledge officially, did reply to a post in which I had stated that I approved Big Government, as in socialism, asking if I was in the right place to be expressing such heresies, my term not theirs, but no-one from Kolektiva Dot Social at any time questioned me or warned me that such deviationism would result in my exclusion, officially or unofficially. It is as if the village or factory Soviet had decided to punish a perceived dissident, someone making trouble by expressing thoughts not approved by the Soviet, not by exiling them to Siberia, or throwing them out of a window or poisoning them, but by just ignoring them & pretending that they don’t exist & hoping that they will just go away.
It may well be that I am slandering Kolektiva Dot Social because I have heard nothing at all from them, it is just that one day, my password no longer worked, & no normal “Forgotten your password” response worked. Sending them messages as @admin @kolektiva.social elicited the same lack of response. The account is still there, but I no longer have the ability to log into it.
Perhaps one has to be a card carrying anarchist to be a member of this social club.
“Wot” I hear you say, “Do anarchists carry cards?”
No, of course not, that would be silly wouldn’t it?
“Then, how do they know if you believe what they believe? In fact are their anarchist ideas uniform & unchangeable & unchallengeable? Do they not include any shades of anything other than “no rulers” & “voluntary association”?
Voluntary Association, now, there’s a thought, if you don’t allow voluntary association you can hardly describe yourself as one who bases their life on that principle.
This is unfortunate because as far I can see, the anarchists are the only ones possibly capable of seeing the global problems & asserting themselves against the oligarchy, the plutocracy.
If Kolektiva is representative of anarchy in general & they were the only possible remedy, then things do not look good children.
Just analysing the financial aspects of the life of a hypothetical billionaire.
Let us say our hypothetical parasite is 62 years of age & has amassed $33bn
If they were the most industrious of workers creating useful goods or services for the benefit of themselves & the community of which they are a part & the economy in general & had worked all their adult life, 44 years, 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, never had a day off in that time & somehow managed to demand a wage of $100 per hour, which would be an extremely generous stipend going back to 1980 when they started earning, they would have earned in that time $19,219,200 before tax, a very significant crust.
Now, after living expenses over all those very well remunerated years, our hypothetical leach has somehow managed to save $33,000,000,000; does that not strike you as somehow a tad suspect?
“But” I hear you splutter “but …. he has exported trillions of dollars worth of dirt to people overseas for them to make things for us to buy. We are all so much richer for that. Why are you denigrating this worthy citizen upon whom so many depend for a job?”
However, apart from the very dubious idea that selling our nation to foreigners is good, what did this bloke or blokess actually do to earn their $33bn?
Did they own the dirt that they loaded onto ships & sent overseas, or the widgets that they imported from overseas & sold at a very significant markup, made with the dirt that another worthy citizen had exported?
Back to basics, the dirt. Who owns all the dirt in Australia? The Crown. Who is the Crown? Well they are the next step up the parasitical ladder, but that is another story.
So, we can assume that our billionaire doesn’t own the dirt they sell, depleting this nation of resources that it could use for its own benefit, employing its own workers to make the desired widgets.
Maybe they dig the dirt out of the ground? No, they employ others to do that, machines & people, & incidentally, less & less people all the time as machines are more capable of doing their job without the people, if they could achieve their end without employing people at all, they would.
So, they don’t own the dirt, they don’t dig the dirt, they don’t load the dirt onto autonomous or semi-autonomous trucks, trains & boats, what else is there?
Where does Their wealth come from?
Well, we know where it comes from, the people overseas who take our dirt & make something useful out of it, the question really is, “Why does the money end up specifically in their foreign tax haven accounts handily avoiding tax in Australia?”
I don’t know why, I cannot see any reason for it. However I can see that they are doing very nicely thank you very much for whatever it is that they do do.
Back to the top again, working out their earnings again using the hours mentioned above this worthy parasite has earned, or somehow acquired $171,703 per hour for each of those working hours they have so devotedly put in.
Of course, in the unlikely event that they did not put in 84 hours a week for every week of those 44 years then you can multiply that figure in proportion to the hours that they actually did work. Were there such a thing, a really lazy billionaire could end up pocketing millions of dollars an hour for the hours they worked.
Incidental thought, our hypothetical billionaire will be making more money per hour than the hypothetical politicians are paid per year. Then remember that we pay said hypothetical politicians so well so that they will not be corrupted by the wishes of such a one as our hypothetical billionaire. That alone explains almost everything that is wrong with our society.
Bottom line, although I know how much money is flowing into their coffers, I still have not a clue as to why it flows to them, rather than to the people who actually do the work. But I know that they put it to good use, furthering their interests at the expense of everyone else’s.
Just imagine that you were a person who had the prescience to see virtue in gaining wealth, not your wealth, not yet anyway, obviously, you were much too busy using your innate abilities to acquire other people’s wealth to create any of your own & it was obvious anyway to anyone as clever as you, that even if you had the skills to do so, that no-one actually creating their own wealth ever earnt enough to make the difference such as you sought.
So, you, the worthy one, one of the obviously intrinsically elite, who is thereby permitted to do anything, by virtue of your innate, inborn or acquired, worthiness, saw ways to gain wealth from the unworthy. Either by monetary interest, directly from the money that you had previously acquired by whatever means, usury, (helping the unworthy to do anything they wanted by loaning them money at interest) or say as rent on properties that you had purchased with money that you had previously acquired by any means (helping the unworthy have a roof). Or maybe by capitalist investment (helping the unworthy have a job). Maybe you acquired other people’s ideas, ideas which they did not have the ability to capitalise on themselves, or which you managed by your cleverness to acquire the rights to by whatever means at your disposal, whichever way, you became the legal owner of those ideas & were able to capitalise upon by virtue of your ability to help lots of people by employing them
You managed to acquire their wealth, from your help by whatever means, either from their greed or need or unwillingness to wait for them to accumulate enough earning to purchase whatever they desired, or their wish to have a roof that was for whatever reason beyond their means to purchase for themselves or their loved ones & dependents, or their wish to earn money from their hard acquired skills & labour by contributing to the national economy, but which was beyond their financial means, once again for whatever reason. They are the unworthy, what further thought needs to be wasted upon them?
So there you are, this worthy person, wealthy beyond any reasonable expectations of the unworthy, with all the power that this wealth bestows upon you, being able to put your obviously worthy ideas & intentions & justifications into effect. Being able to employ other people to protect you & your wealth from those other starving unworthy wretches around you, those who had needed a loan or a roof or a job, or who were unable to develop their own ideas, who totally unjustifiably seek to gain some of your wealth from you, those terrorists. With the power to direct those in government who made the laws to protect themselves & you, their benefactors, from the smelly, unwashed unworthy peasantry that surround you both.
Nobody earning their own wealth by whatever skills they had at their disposal ever controlled government of the people who create wealth by their own skills, it takes capitalism to do that.
So, there you are, & here we are, 2023, Oz, UK, US, Earth.
I see almost everything said by other people, all other people, as wrong, being based on ideas that I see as myths, even or especially, with those who I agree with in general emotional terms.
What does that say about what I believe or propose?
Is there some hidden esoteric stream of thought that enlightens only me, or only a few like me?
This has to be at least extremely unlikely.
One simple possibility is that I am insane, & that I live inside my psychoses. That is entirely possible & I would have no way of knowing or finding a way out of my private parallel universe. No Turing test for me, that assumes an objective observer. For that I would have to seek outside thoughts, maybe yours.
Another possibility is that we all live within our personal psychoses, which vary from each other. I could live with that. Individual parallel universes.
I will do my very best to explain one of my bases, one of my psychoses. There are others, economics, religiosity that will have to wait for other days, but first & foremost, that there was, historically at least, the basis in Australia of what would have maybe passed as a democracy, even given the racist colonial nature of the national formation, that given education & enlightenment, the non-Indigenous people of Australia, the descendants of the settlers, the colonialists, the invaders, together will all those who came later, such as myself, would come to recognise the savage brutality that our ancestors imposed on the Indigenous people that they encountered & massacred.
That from this racist origin there emerged a white (western) working class exploiting the Indigenous people to the same extent as the ruling colonist classes & that this working class fighting against their oppression by the colonial government who saw them as little different from the Indigenous people set up unions & that some politicians of the time saw these unions as beneficial to their ambitions.
Thus was the Australian Labor Party formed, as racist as anyone in the country, as misogynist as anyone in the world.
As a personal admission, claim, I have a huge respect for the work of my 3rd cousin (once removed) Henry Lawson who, as a socialist was apparently as racist as anyone, & presumably a supporter of the early Labor Party in whatever guise they presented themselves. Henry after all, published his work in a magazine, the Bulletin, with the banner “Australia for the White Man”, I don’t know when, if ever, they removed it.
So returning to the Australian Labor Party, these racist people purporting to represent Australian workers continued on their merry, or not so merry way through religious schisms (more myths) to 1972 when they finally, after many years “in the wilderness” won government under Gough Whitlam.
This Whitlam government attempted to bring Australia back into the modernity, the post war world that had established National Health & national everything in the parent nation, the ‘mother country’, the UK.
Tragically, for whatever reasons, over-eagerness, incompetence, whatever, they crashed rather than crashing through, & they were ousted in a bloodless coup by the UK & US that installed their then opposition, the Liberal Party, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser.
That point, 11 Nov 1975, proved to be the end of Parliamentary opposition in Australia, that had previously assumed that political opposition, “His or Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition” & hence the end of what had been at least fondly imagined as democracy in Australia.
From that point on this previously presumed democracy has not existed.
From then, or at least since 5 March 1983 when the Australian Labor Party was elected to government to replace the coup makers or acceptors, this party accepted their place in the scheme of things, recognised that everything that Gough Whitlam had stood for was no longer desirable or possible to attain, so they elected a party led by Neoliberals, or as they then presented themselves “Economic Rationalists”.
These Economic Rationalists, Bob Hawke & Paul Keating, the darlings of Australian Labor introduced Australia to Neoliberalism, that ideology formulated by fascists in Austria pre-war which had been previously insinuated into the American left by Jimmy Carter & the UK by James Callaghan. [See the establishment of the Institute of Public Affairs in Australia in 1943 leading to all the other similarly fascist Institutes around the world later, in Uk the Institute of Economic Affairs, in the US, you name it, it is neoliberal]
Bob Hawke, who had previously been the Secretary of the Australian Congress of Trade Unions, the very voice of the people, brought in the Accords, by which the unions had to abide by the government, their traditional enemies, thus deliberately setting in motion the process of wage suppression that has resulted in wage stagnation that so oppresses us now, 40 years later.
His Treasurer, Paul Keating, following the same ideological urge, started privatising, handing over of government’s, the Australian People’s assets, to the private sector, corporations, oligarchs. To make whatever profits they could from them before abandoning them to be paid out by public funds, to the greater benefit of the private sector & the detriment of us, the people.
From that point on, the natural believers in this ideology, the so called Liberals, took these actions & capitalised on them, made money from them. The weasel John Winston Howard, copying Margaret Thatcher in her ignorant arrogance, adopted the Neoliberals’ concept of their innate superiority over the people, they were wealthier, therefore they were superior. This went along with the Neoliberals’ ideology that the “worthy” ie. those already wealthy, deserved to have their wealth further enhanced by government, or any means possible, & that the unworthy, the poor, needed to be further oppressed for the benefit of the worthy.
This was the perfect vehicle for the oligarchs, allowing them to purchase political parties, hence government & power. They donated to the neoliberal politicians & parties, ALP & LNP, which then passed legislation which resulted in the feeding of vast amounts of public money back to the oligarchs. [There is a major problem for a venal politician seeking wealth, the government has no money, but they create all of it for the legislated benefit of the nation, & there are many protections in place to prevent them feeding it to themselves. Hence corrupt schemes like the Liberals’ Parakeelia rort by which they harvested public expenses paid to politicians to feed back to the party].
This effective ownership of the parties gave the oligarchs power over the government, it didn’t matter which one, it is always one of two possibilities, & they own them both. The parties are effectively similar, one pretends to be civil & one doesn’t, but neither are. Any apparent difference between the parties is just a smoke & mirrors exercise by the mainstream media, also owned or heavily influenced by the oligarchs, to give the false impression of an opposition between them to obscure the reality of the duopoly which has existed for 40 years.
It is no longer a case of “whoever you vote for, a politician always wins”, it is now “whoever you vote for makes no difference of any kind, a neoliberal politician representing the corporate oligarch thugs to enrich then & oppress the people always wins”.
You may think that Liberals are the bad guys & Labor the good guys, which is fine as a myth, a true believer’s dogma, & as long as you only hear Labor’s words you can keep pretending that it is so, but should you be silly enough to ignore the words & look at what Labor has actually done, or not done, & then try to form a thesis of why they might have acted in the way they did, then the whole edifice collapses. Labor eventually got the Treasury seats again & there have been changes, but we have yet to see any effect from them. We saw what happened to Labor ex-PM Kevin Rudd who had half a million signatures for a petition to get a commission to look into Murdoch in Australia, he was given, & accepted, the job of Ambassador to Rupert where he can say or do nothing, in his gilded cage in Washington DC. Or maybe the Federal Crime & Corruption Commission that they joined with the Liberals in opposing, but we have yet to see any results upon which to judge it. My prophesy from back before the 2019 election was that if Labor were to be elected, that nothing other than token changes would happen, that they would undo none of the police state laws that they had supported the Liberals to pass when Labor was the supposed opposition, they would just keep the seats warm until the oligarch’s A Team, the LNP got back into the seats again & reverted to the type that we saw in 2013-. Was I, am I, wrong?
Now, to return to the original theme, my putative insanity, I can see all this as clear as day, & nothing has happened in the time that I have seen it, since maybe 2015, to disprove it. I have Labor friends who sometimes come close, just getting a glimpse of it, before falling back on optimism, somehow after 40 years of this working for them they are going to change to be more like what they were that got them thrown out on their necks in 1975. Yeah, Nah.
This is just one of the ways in which my understanding of life is at variance with that of most everybody else. There is almost nothing of any substance that I would agree with the rest of the world about, all religions are obviously patently absurd, the economics that drives everything is a nonsense, is that insanity?
There is an extremely widespread misconception of how money comes to exist & the part it plays in society.
How money doesn’t work
The misconception, popular amongst economists trained by neoliberals, which is most economists, has government needing taxation or revenues from issuing bonds before they can spend. Another of their mistaken thoughts is that when governments issue bonds they are borrowing money from the people in order to spend, that will somehow have to be repaid [be a problem to repay¹] in future years. This is presumed to be a great impost on the future generations. People holding this idea think that if a government spends more than it receives in revenue (called a Government Fiscal Deficit) then the inevitable result will be inflation. They think that the opposite is somehow preferable, that when the economic cycle takes a downturn, thus depriving the economy of the money it needs to purchase & support its products, that a government spending less into the economy than they take out is the way to go, even though it runs the economy further down. (This incidentally is called a Government Fiscal Surplus, even though in reality it is not a surplus of anything to anyone).
This same group of people think that money is created by banks issuing loans from their funds of depositors’ accounts.
Another misconception is that money the government spends is “printed”. Only a small proportion of money is printed or coined, I think about 8%, so that people can have cash in hand & it is a totally different process to money creation / spending, they just need to have so much cash in the economy, everything the government spends is created by typing numbers into a keyboard to mark up accounts in private banks.
This mistaken way of viewing economic reality causes huge sociological effects, inequities & damage. It causes people to look in exactly the wrong direction for solutions to problems.
How money really works
Australia, or for that matter, the US or UK, Canada, New Zealand, most countries in fact, have their own, freely floating, fiat (that is, not based on any commodity such as gold or shells) currency that is created when the central government spends it. The central government is the sole issuing agent of the currency, not the banks, not any subordinate states or municipalities, no-one else but the central government. They issue their own currency, in Australia’s case the A$, no-one else in the world can issue the A$ other than the Australian Government via the Reserve Bank of Australia. What is more, there is no constraint on how much the government can create, if they create too much then they might cause inflation by having more money in the economy than there are goods & services to purchase with it, but there is no limit to what they could create. (The Debt Ceiling in the US is just a political convention that they politically choose to be limited by briefly every now & again, & any talk by US Presidents or Australian Prime Ministers of having “Maxed out the Credit Card”, is just blatant nonsense). This money is not created from anything, it comes into existence when the Reserve Bank of Australia, at the request of the Treasury (the Government) adds numbers by keystrokes to the accounts that the banks hold with the Reserve Bank, nobody prints anything, nobody has to go out & somehow find the funds to transfer, the new money, like all money in the banking system, is just numbers. Every A$ that the Australian Federal Government spends for whatever purpose is a new A$ created from nothing.
Taxation
Taxation is just the reversal of the creation process, the destruction of money in the economy by removing, subtracting numbers, from the banks’ accounts with the Reserve Bank. It does not go anywhere, it just ceases to exist. One analogy is the scoring of a game of darts. You start out with a score of 101 or 301 or 501 or whatever, then your score is gradually whittled away to (hopefully) zero. Where has the score gone? Come to that, where did it come from in the first place? Cricket scores are another analogy, where do the scores come from that the scorers put up on the scoreboard? When Bradman was doing his prolific run-scoring thing did they have to stop playing cricket until the scorers could borrow some runs on the international market (bonds), or get people to return some of their previously earned scores (taxation)? The idea is of course absurd, they didn’t have to find any, they just add numbers, you could imagine them as having a Magic Run Tree if you were that romantic. So it is with money, they just add numbers & they subtract numbers.
Taxation does have its purposes, but it is just that funding government spending is not one of them.
One reason, the basic reason, for taxing is to remove money from the economy to lessen the risk of inflation that might be created by having more money to purchase the goods & services produced in the nation than there are actual products to purchase. These purchases are by the government & non-government sectors, it doesn’t matter whether it is them or us doing the spending.
Taxes can also be targeted to result in either more or less equity across society depending on the government’s political ideology. A fascist government could tax the less wealthy & not tax their own patrons so that wealth moves more preferentially to the already wealthy. Governments that follow this sort of ideology will give massive tax cuts to the wealthy. A government that favours the people would tax the wealthy more than the poor so as to spread the wealth more evenly across society, keeping the wealth created by the workers in the economy rather than locked up or sent off-shore.
Yet another use of tax is to discourage anti-social, damaging behaviour like say a tax on tobacco.
Bond Sales
Bonds are an extremely secure savings option. What could be more secure than to hold a debt issued by the sole & unconstrained issuer of the currency, which can never be involuntarily insolvent in its own currency?
Bond issuance results in a reduction in the currency circulating & an increase in the secure assets of the bond holders.
I had a cousin, name of Henry, penner of poems an’ stories Australia’s favourite son they say
Threatened by the state for supposed Sedition, but finally buried with the full palaver of that same young state
He trudged unhearing but allseeing the streets & tracks from Darlinghurst to Bourke Interpreting all he saw
I briefly trod those same hard city streets A newchum callow youth I even crossed paths with Delilah in the street, though I didn’t then know her name (Well, my path at least, her yard of pavement) Before I hurried on abashed Just another passing face in her William Street
But, introductions over, to the purpose of this tale Our common little dash of Gypsy blood, as claimed by Harry
This blood was a little of that which had flowed in the veins of Mary, daughter of Nichols In Kent, when Henry’s land was still hidden from England’s sight A land of gold & dragons, still a future dream
To be precise Mary was Henry’s Mother’s Father’s Mother’s Mother’s Mother My Father’s Father’s Father’s Father’s Mother’s Mother Daughter of Nichols of somewhere unspecified
What little we know of Mary came by the words of the oh so righteous Reverend Noble Mark Noble, antiquarian, the erstwhile vicar of Barming Much given to making judgements, despite the presumed wishes of his deity He committed his thoughts to history through the pages of his building’s register
Mary was much despised by the Reverend Noble Seems she was a dirty drunken person, a careless mother who, shame of shames, had been a parent even before she was churched Our clue to her origins was that, as a girl, she famously played violin at country fairs, now, who but a Gypsy does that?
Her brother William was equally despised, “The Greatest Liar Who Ever Lived”, our faithful reporter was not enamoured of this family
Despite her moral failings, her sins & those of her parents & siblings, our Mary was rescued from total damnation in his judgemental eyes by the manner of her death, for she humanely nursed her husband’s sister & her twin babes, before the fever took them all.
Of such are we made, regardless of judgements, ours or others
Extract from the Burial Register, East Barming, Kent, England 1788
It is very hard to understand the actions of politicians when every idea that you have of them is wrong.
There is no blame to be assigned in misunderstanding, that is their very intention, & they have very powerful influential associates to encourage you to think in that way, to make you think that the politics that you thought you understood in earlier times still prevails; that we have two opposing parties whose mutual opposition prevents either of them from taking total control.
This may or may not have ever been the case, but it certainly is not now. It hasn’t been the case since at least the time that Neoliberalism took over the thinking of both sides.
This happened in the 1970s & 80s; it happened in the US with Jimmy Carter; in the UK with James Callaghan; in Australia with Bob Hawke & Paul Keating. Elsewhere you may be able to work out who & when it was imposed on you, but assuredly, it happened almost globally.
Neoliberalism took over the mindset of all those ruling you, so what is Neoliberalism?
Neoliberalism began in the thoughts & wishes of a school of libertarian philosophy in Austria between the last two declared world wars. It was embodied in the words of Frederick Hayek & Ayn Rand
How is it possible that in a human world that has survived for 100,000 + years, only surviving by virtue of people forming cooperative, self-reinforcing communities & fighting against the primitive individualist barbarians on the outside who have from the very beginning assaulted the communities to rape & pillage & satisfy their child-like urges to power without repercussion.
That the current “world power”, the so-called United States of America, is a bastion of fascist individualist ignorance, where many of the people appear to fear that concept of community that has served to get them where we are now is at least frightening.
How it is possible for such an anti-social mindset could survive in a society I do not know, but I suspect that it must include some kind of cult-like acceptance.
How at least the majority 300 million people could exist in this cult is far beyond my head, but such is the appearance.
![Counts, Mercy, wife of James Counts, Mary Counts, Sarah twin daughter of James and Mercy these were inhabitants of this parish, but resident in Maidstone; the mother was taken with a fever, which was fatal to her and the children, they died within hours of each other, and were all buried in one coffin: the daughters were aged about nine months. Paupers August 16 [Scrase, Elizabeth; Spinster aged 21, daughter of James. August 29] Brook, Mary, wife of Henry clerk of this Parish; she caught the fever of which she died of her sister-in-law Mercy Counts, whom she humanely nursed; this made her death lamented, for otherwise she was an indifferent character, as he [sic] was dirty to extreme, a drunken wife, a careless mother and had been a parent before she married; she was the daughter of Nichols of [blank] and in her younger days had been famous for playing upon the violin, at country feasts, and other such jovial [.... ....], she was buried September 5 [1788]](https://i0.wp.com/relph.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/BROOKMary_nee_NICHOLSCOUNTSMercychildren_Burial_Barming-1024x568.jpg?resize=750%2C416&ssl=1)