Brecon Resistance Camp - Wish List

Brrrrr, getting cold already tonight, good luck with the snow forcast over brecon 10-15cm!

Keep it up, your getting lots of good press attention, and helping to protect the national park and beyond!

Thanks a lot! Jha Guzman

----- Original Message -----
Subject: Britsh Literature

I see they have hidden your request as non news. Have an essay written in he British Isles some years ago to go on with.

Ilyan

Economics Politics and Reality Entry for Amex Marjolin Essay Competition 1990

REGRESSION OF ECONOMICS

Marx made an analysis of Capitalism which many Marxists have used to make lots of money. Marx shows how to do that. He also shows an inherent contradiction in Free Enterprise Capitalism allowed a free run to its logica conclusion.

Keynes showed how to avoid Marx's inherent contradiction of Capitalism, invalidating the forecasts made by Marx. Unfortunately, in a democratic society, when there is an ill informed and media manipulated electorate, politicians are able to buy prestige, large incomes, and power, by promising ever higher living standards.

To deliver on the promise, they continually applied half of Keynes' theory. Continuous deficit financing whether or not it was called for. That misapplication of Keynes' principles destroyed the efficacy of the remedy, and produced inflation. It left room for the other half of Keynes' system to be
reworked and faked up as a new theory called Monetarism, which won a Nobel Prize.

Keynes invalidated Marx. Politicians and Monetarists invalidated Keynes, but by doing that, have revalidated Marx. We will soon have to cope with the inherent contradiction of Capitalism on a bigger scale than ever before. Politicians and Economists are as unable as ever they were, the overlent troubles of American Savings and Loans after doctrinaire decontrol proves that.

ANCIENT DISASTER
Ancient Greece had a wide variety of City States, and achieved rates of advance of human achievement in Art and Philosophy and Science which have never been surpassed. One of those City States adopted the principles of Capitalism for its economy. The wealth became more and more concentrated, the poor ever poorer, the economy ground to a halt, and great Sparta became a nonentity.

The reforms necessary to rebuild the economy were frustrated by the Rich, who put their own wealth above the strength of the State, murdering Rulers who tried to introduce land reforms.

By 235BC there were only 700 spartans able to pay their way at the mess tables.

A major military force, which had been available to defend the integrity of the Greek City States, was lost. That, together with the impoverishment of resources, overfelling of trees and the exhausting of the land sapped the vitality of Greece, which more or less collapsed into the growing Roman Empire.
The first glimmer of the World as it should be, lost, the triumph of the Bureaucrat established. The rot continued, and about five hundred years later the Barbarians ripped through the hidebound bureaucracy of Rome to start The Dark Ages.

ENABLING DISASTER
The defeat of History's most savage Leader in 1945 brought new hope to the world. Many middle sized Nations which had been enslaved were liberated, only one of the Leaders who sat down to remake the world had power without a controlling system of checks and balances to govern his actions.

Then the Rich Man's Club, the EEC, brought in fascism by the back door. Enshrined in its foundation is VAT. An iniquitous tax that is charged on poorest and most deprived, in order to line the pockets of rich overproducing landowners.

A centralised bureaucratic state is being built in the form of Rome, even choosing to be defined and established by the Treaty of Rome.

The EEC's taxation, undemocratic structure, and way of appointing Commissioners are all indications of the fundamental fascism which inspires it.

The stage is set for the nations which now escape the Potsdam settlement to fall directly into the hands of a developing centralised bureaucracy. The potential to recover Greek ideals is going to be resisted by the growing strength of the bureaucrats.

The small nations confined within other nations in the EEC are bribed, with crumbs of arty cultural subsidies, to be quiet while their souls are destroyed by the big nations swamping them with inmigrants. Policies to impoverish and drive out the natives into servitude were allowed to continue, then, when cheap empty housing attracted wealthy inmigrants, Policy reversal ensures inmigrant prosperity.

MONEY

A society which lets money take control becomes a sick society. Money should be just a tool used to facilitate exchange, and be a fundamental measure of value. It is indisputable that misused money can cause social chaos, and the ancient injunctions against usury show that the evils inherent in money were well understood from very early times.

We now live in a society which has put money in control, uses usury, and at the same time destroys the fundamental value of money. That is so ridiculous that we must ask the question "Are the money masters secret Marxist Leninists?"

Lenin said that if you wished to destroy a state, you should first debauch it's currency. The response to the stock market shake out of 1987 by the British Chancellor, and the American Secretary to the Treasury was a flood of liquidity. In effect they fled the field of battle and armed their enemy as soon as the big guns on their own side opened up. They deserve the Order of Lenin.

That seems to push it too far, but Lawson trained as an economist, It is incredible that he is so stupid that he could not see the inflation built into all his policies. There must have been an overiding ulterior motive.

The honourable reason is that he saw, but failed to see any solution for, the Chancellor's Dilemma.

THE DILEMMA'S ORIGINS

The British Conservative Party removed exchange controls, giving Capital freedom to go where it will. The decontrol was introduced despite Britain's basic industrial weaknesses.

The Japanese have established a stranglehold on the world's financial markets. They have used some good practical management and undercover centralised planning to build a very effective business offensive. By forcing their own stock market to astounding price to earnings ratios, they have funded a machine to take over the world.

DILEMMA
That presents the dilemma that a deflationary jolt sufficient to eliminate the built in expectation of inflation, would collapse the stock market, and give Britain Ltd and USA Inc to the Japanese and the Arabs.

The jolt has to be severe enough to break both a major Bank, and a Building Society (Savings and Loans), or inflation will continue feeding on inflation. It will be counterproductive if the state prints money.

Tax-payer's money should only be used to maintain essential industries and services by buying them out at bankruptcy prices.

PART SOLUTION

The Nikkei Dow dropped some months after a discreet circulation of this: The way the Japanese .. driving their stock market to such ridiculous price-earnings ratios, gives them so much financial power that the ratios are almost justified. Yet they are fundamentally weak, because the rest of us cannot allow Japan to buy up the world. So individual citizens will have to make and enforce a boycott of Japanese goods. Such a boycott was very effective in China in the 1930s.

That thought should produce a crash in the Nikkei Dow deep enough for the West to get on with the overdue correction essential for economic health, without the Japanese buying up all our industries at knock down prices.

If that reached Japan, and they deliberately started the correction, then inflation can be stopped, so long as the Nikkei Dow comes down in step.

ALTERNATIVE MOTIVE

The other reason for keeping the economy boiling along on a clearly inflationary course was to ensure the Denationalisation program went ahead, together with the Antirenationalisation program. This is just as stupid a policy as bigoted Nationalisation, unless we view the State as a master market trader who buys up bankrupt and unfundable businesses, puts them right, and then sells them at a profit.

ETHICAL QUESTION

People who vote in favour of a Denationalisation Government, and then buy shares discounted below the true value are being unethical. Buying would be criminal if they voted knowing that the price would be discounted.

If a Government were so elected, and did not reduce the National debt by the true full value of the Denationalised Industries, then it's members should be penalised with a surcharge to make good the National loss.

Faced with the actions of such people, the State as Market Trader has the power to play the market, becoming the market maker. Bad times will return, discredited money will compel a tax on assets to overcome the depression. If that forces the Denationalised industries to liquidation, the State could
pay bankruptcy prices to renationalise.

Such policies, used with Keynsian economy managing techniques could enable the complete abolition of income taxes. Denationalise in booms, create a crash, crippling tax enables free renationalisation in the deep trough, create a boom... denat...we have a denat renat denat renationalisation plan which might even work.

That ridiculous plan is rational in relation to much that goes on in the present system, where the poorest pay taxes to subsidise the rich, irreplaceable assets are wantonly wasted, and the Earth's capacity to support Life is being destroyed..

INTERNATIONAL DEBT

Countries which thought they could climb onto the development gravy train by borrowing money, now face problems. The loans, and charitable gifts, have been spent inappropriately, distorting development, and creating an unsound economy.

Paying the interest on the debts could recreate the conditions that led to the rise of Hitler as the Versailles stupidity destroyed the German economy.

There is a proposal that Third World debt be forgiven by the rich nations. That puts a burden on tax-payers to reimburse the Banks. It is important for the financial health of the world that the debtor countries unilaterally renounce the debt.

Renouncing Governments, returning to a minimal self sufficient agriculture could arrange that home generated National development and defence takes a sufficient percentage of GNP to keep the national diet low enough to reduce the rate of conception.

It is entirely proper that Banks which overlent to poor risks, often supporting Dictatorships and Tyrants, should suffer the consequences of their greedy rush for commissions and profits. A good way to mop up the ocean of surplus profit, turned to free Capital, which is swamping the world economy, will be for the owners to have to use it to recapitalise the Banks, or lose the money in Bank failures.

GOLD

The main value of Gold is to buy old men the favour of young women. Once these modern emancipated M/ses realise that, much of its value could disappear. It costs to buy, to sell, to store, and to insure. It attracts violent thieves and kidnappers. The basic problem of how to synthesize it has been cracked. Gold is not a real measure of value, or a consistent medium of exchange. It is basically flawed as a money. Speculate a dirty nuclear bomb on the Fort Knox of a Nation with a gold based currency.

CARBON

Diamonds are a rigged market, and jewel quality stones might be cheaply synthesized in space, but Carbon has a very important economy of its own:

The original atmosphere of Earth was almost all carbon dioxide. Very primitive life forms worked for millions of years to lock up carbon and release oxygen so that life as we know it could evolve. Carbon was stored in the form of coal, gas, oil, and limestone.

Now man burns the gas, coal, and oil, it took billions of years to store. Apart from the returning toxic atmosphere to debit in that ledger, Coal and Oil are too precious as industrial raw materials to be burnt.


There are different economies to balance, and some balances are ultra top priority. If either the heat or the atmosphere balance cannot be guaranteed, then the sooner we have a total economic collapse destroying industrialised society, and killing nine in ten of the human population the better.

NEW TAXES
There were proposals for new taxes. First the Chernobyl Tax! (Ilyan 14 1 1988) proposed a tax on nuclear power to cover the cost of potential fallout damage, and the costs of decommissioning. There should also be a tax on imported goods proportional to the amount of nuclear power used in the country of origin, and its distance from our shore. A true monetarist clearly has a duty to introduce such a tax.

Then there was the Oxygenation Tax! (Ilyan 13 2 1988) proposing that tropical hardwoods should be taxed heavily enough to purchase enough land in the country of origin to grow two replacements, to plant them, and to preserve them to maturity. That was later extended to a tax on beef reared on land taken from the forest.

Two of our serious problems are the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere, and finding a sound currency.

The sound currency fans are idealists with no conception of the power of the greedy who prosper on inflation. They have so much power that sound money would not be used. Knowing the certainty of non use, it is safe to make the proposal:

A new currency that anyone can make, and use to pay taxes. The Carbon Currency and Tax! A tax on using peat, gas, coal, and oil. The tax to be carbon equal to the carbon content of the fuel. It could be in CO2, when the tax-payer provides the permanent container, or it could be the same weight of carbon in some solid form. Coral contains quite a bit of carbon, so there could be coral farms. And legal wooden nickels !

MONETARY AUTHORITY

The only authority with sufficient clout to enforce the tax is the UN. They will have to be the assayers of the carbon, but will be able to sell collected carbon for other currencies, so will be well funded for the other essential world scale enterprises now necessary for survival.


{Aside: UN.Article 17 should be extended with "The right to property, like all other rights is limited by the obligation to regard the rights of others. Property may not cause any detriment to security, or to liberty, or existence, or to the property of our neighbour" (Maximilian 1793)}

To ensure tax compliance, the UN would have to have an independent army, possibly manned entirely from nationalities without UN membership. Gypsies, Kurds, Palestinians, Eskimos, Naga, Aborigines, Welsh, Basques, Apache etc.

To protect democracy in the member Nations, all citizens should have to follow Swiss requirements of military service and arms holding as a duty. That is better than the American right to bear arms which turns cities into shooting alleys. The duty makes citizens responsible.. Both sexes should have the same duty, which is where the Swiss fail. Heavy weapons should be reserved for the UN.

The soft sentimentalists within the UN will have to go, for to protect the currency, there will have to be severe penalties for taking wild coral and suchlike. Taking it on a commercial scale could extend the penalty to whole extended families.

POPULATION

Too many people and the Earth is damaged. We must reduce the population. A steady reduction has few drawbacks. While there will be more aged for the workers to care for, that will be balanced by the reduction in child care. When the population has reduced enough, it will be easier to carry the
increased burden of enough children to maintain balance. The problem will be eased by the capital investment left by the larger populations.

If people can reduce and control the population, then the sort of economic change that produced Capitalism from feudalism after the black death could occur and produce a much better economic system.

One way to control population is by reducing the diet to the point where fertility declines. This is the natural means of control designed by God for use in Catholic countries. Its premature use is appropriate, avoiding famine, and releasing food to barter abroad for essential turnkeys. If there can be no foreign barter, then building food reserves, as Joseph advised Pharaoh, is an even more appropriate action.

CHAOS

The potential for chaos is great. If people allow the tornado of inflation and the whirlpool of debt free play, then Chaos is certain. It is time to take control of the forces the Moneymasters no longer have the ability or the guts to master.

Rich Westerners thought that they could get out of economic trouble at home by lending money to Communist Governments. That enabled the Bureaucratic Centralists to extend their grip on power for years.

COUNTER TO CHAOS

People in East Europe owe no debt to the Capitalists who funded the chains. Party out .. debt out. Capitalists must be taught a hard lesson about supporting authoritarian pigs who oppress the people. The Capital lost will stop the tornado.

For example, if Poland were to take control, and instead of sending Lech Walesa out with a begging bowl, renounce the debt, the world would be healthier. Poland can feed itself, heat itself, and care for its people. We saw good healthy Polish Youth in Wales in 1989. They were a credit to their country. They will thrive if not drowned in the whirlpool.

It is the work of a Nation's people's hands and heads that create a sound economy, giving the base for building a healthy society. That cannot be done with foreign loans or aid, or the smart alec jiggery-pokery of financiers, macro economists or micro economists. Those are the recipes for inflation and disaster.

CHOICE

The West's workers are rich. The majority is rich, they have solidarity among themselves and vote to their short term self interest. They squander the real economy.

The World should not follow them, but live frugally, and use mutual aid and co-operation by choice, if not, they will become a necessity for survival as economic disaster destroys the social fabric. By the time that lesson is learned, many will have perished.

Mutual Aid and Co-operation are not indigenous in Cities, they are found in Rural areas, rarely surviving more than a few generations as civilisation infects decent people rots them in the cities. As long ago as 1889, Edward Carpenter was seeking to find a society which had been infected by the disease Civilisation, survived, and passed on to a more normal and healthy condition.

Western civilisation is certainly heading for big trouble.

GREEKS OR ROMANS ?

The great hope is to abandon the centralised Roman style development leading through metropolis, and megapolis, to the ultimate necropolis which destroys society and the world.

The Greeks consciously limited the size of their cities to preserve their democratic social structure, they understood the dangers of metropolis. It is a tragedy that they did not have an equal understanding of the need to keep the population small enough to maintain a permanently fertile soil.

The Greek understanding of the essence of Democracy is now forgotten, and no human civilisation has learned how to care for the soil. Once economic development gets beyond a basic peasant economy, then the destruction of the true basis of wealth starts, we are now continuing that to destroy the basis of Life.

"Farmers of forty centuries" might seem to disprove that. But the Chinese are clearly superhuman. The reason Indonesia massacred the million ?

CELTIC OPTION

The Romans happily coexisted with all the local religions until they came to Britain. Druidism was the one and only Religion the Romans could not tolerate. We know that the Romans had an authoritarian centralised bureaucratic regime beloved by fascists. The ancient Britons must have had the opposite. The Druid religion would have been an integral support built into a decentralised liberal culture, the antithesis of Rome, so it was an imperative for the Romans to destroy it.

We know about managed news, and disinformation, so it is easy to read the truth between the lines the Romans wrote. The subsequent History of Wales supports that interpretation:

Christianity was perverted by the Romans to create a State Religion. Celtic Pelagius returned the religion closer to its origins.

Merlin's round table was an attempt to displace an hierarchical order.

Congregationalists invite or dismiss their own Ministers. Opposing a central power selecting a Priest to wield authority and indoctrinate conformity, made them popular in Wales.

In 1912 the Welsh Miners reorganised the South Wales Miners Federation to put
the power directly in the hands of the men, not the leaders. Ballot before strike, ballot before accepting terms became their constitution.

So for two thousand years the soul of Wales has struggled for survival and expression. The dispersed decentralised nature of celtic society never overpopulated, and never destroyed the soil fertility,

RETURN TO REALITY IN ECONOMICS

The engine driving Western prosperity has been the arms race. The military necessity to find and fund fundamental new ideas ends. The West produces all it can sell, now has surplus capacity, and an overborrowed people. So the prospect of continuing prosperity without accelerating inflation is practically nil.

Talk of a soft landing just maintains accelerating sales. The necessary lesson on the value of money is unlearned. The necessity of teaching the lesson is not understood by Politicians, though the collapse of the Communist threat now gives a real opportunity to get on with the essential correction.

The East has huge surplus work force, and the wrong sort of factories to meet their own demands. They have little cash, and are not credit- worthy.

REPLACE WAR, GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY

The west needs an economic crash as a lesson for the greedy people who make inflation. The Soviets need things to sell to satisfy their people. (Realise that Soviet means elected council, and that Lenin and Trotsky transferred Power from the Soviets to the Central Committee of the C.P. when they massacred the Kronstadt sailors and eliminated the Insurgent Army of the Ukraine in 1921.)

The Soviets will do Space research far more economically than the West. So let us pay them with our oversupply of cassette radios, personal computers, food etc for building a space colony. That has to be done now before the window of opportunity closes. The chance lost through space debris, resource exhaustion, or overpopulation.

The colony should be designed to be self sufficient, and self reproducing, and should have a population representative of all earth. Any duty we owe to God to spread life through the Universe is then being done.

There is also the pure self interest of building a sunshade in space to stop earth overheating.

Space construction would give the USSR a chance to get its economy working for peaceful production, and a chance to find another economic system without turning into a very real Capitalist threat to the West.

The problems for the West are more intractable. There must be sound money, so there must be more taxation than state expenditure. The poorest must have bread and circuses, and education and health. Bread and circuses to keep them quietly occupied, education because the world cannot afford not to find and use talents, health for the public good.

And we must prepare backups for the space sunshade: Immense balloons in the Stratosphere to reflect sunlight back out, and a system to take the excess heat and store it down in the depths on the oceans.

Millennia ago the ocean deeps were warm, and provided the reserve of heat necessary to break the ice ages. Cold water from melting Polar Ice has chilled the ocean depths, so that the reserve of heat to break a future ice age no longer exists.

The heat pump system could form part of a floating coral farm which would permanently lock up carbon to help balance the CO2 damage of forest burning, peat decay, and fossil fuel burning.

GOOD INTENTIONS

Over and over again, people with the very best intentions have become inspiring leaders, with dedicated and determined followers. They spread their good word and their wonderful vision. Then it starts to be realised and the dream turns into a nightmare. Utopia into Hell.

It is very dangerous to turn any dream into reality. The end result is too often the opposite of the intention.

Economists are necessary to keep the economy working, having abandoned Keynes they have to do anything to keep things running, and inventdevices to circumvent the natural cycle of events. They have good intentions, yet their work could produce catastrophe.

Catastrophe could be on a logarithmic scale, every year the correction is postponed might need five further years before recovery, and before long, each year postponed might add ten years. Then a hundred. Or may never recover unless saved by a breakout into space providing a new continent of resources to overcome the destruction of Earth, totally changing the economic prospects.

But remember that an Oil find can destroy the natural economy of a country, and it ends up in debt. It was gold from America that enfeebled Spain. An economics of bonanza management is needed.

Superconductor produced magnetic fields to divert radiation should make a space colony far more practicable.

DISPLACED OPINIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

It is sheer folly to gamble the foundations of subsistence on the chance of a space resource bonanza.. People must go flat out for space, but must also maintain sound money, and a livable Earth.

If money is not a stable measure of value used to facilitate exchange, then to Hell with money. Money can be a mechanism of slavery, and inflation is a mechanism of the young to loot the savings of the old. In fact, inflation is theft. What does the Koran say about that ?

Unfortunately, in the world as it is, what has to be presented as real is probably the opposite of Robert Marjolin's intended objectives. Even more unfortunately, this is probably the only entry to even begin to address problems in this area, where economics, sociology, and politics all merge because they are an indivisible whole.

Different social structures probably have to have different theories of economics. Much of the economics taught today unconsciously reflects the prejudices built into the social structure, and very little thought and study is given to an economics of contraction and shrinking.

The problem of the money from the oil boom, which led to the third world debt disaster, demonstrates the lack of economics for managing a bonanza.

NEGLIGENT ECONOMISTS

The neglect in the fields of economic contraction as well as economic bonanza is reprehensible. I cannot claim to be beyond criticism, but at least my neglect of writing "The Dialectical Synthesis of Marx and Malthus" since the 1960s is in part because those damned superhuman Chinese have already applied the practice, although too late, and with insufficient severity.

IDENTIFYING IMPLICATIONS

By presenting forgotten truths, and unorthodox views, this essay frames problems, and only offers partial solutions. The intention is to illuminate the road that the world has embarked upon, to make people aware of the problems which will destroy their hopes, to bring abstract theorists back to reality, and to overcome some bigotry.

If our vocabularies are compatible, economic and financial policymakers now have the keys to some of their problems.

International investors need this as a guide of what to study if they do not know what I am talking about.

For the uninvited politicians I have dragged in: In 1980 it was clear that the worst thing that could happen to the USSR would be for the Americans to collectivise their farms. Contrariwise, the worst thing that could happen to the USA would be for the Soviets to turn the Lublianka into a Stock Market.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a debt to Central Labour College London for the education inherited from my father, which enables me to see the problems the world now faces. I owe a debt to Paul Bloomfield and Sam Mainwaring for extending that education, and to them and my father for the freedom from indoctrination. And a debt to the Mechanics Institute Neath for the effects, passed on to me by John North of Alfred Russel Wallace's essay on The Advantages of a Varied Knowledge. That is the Wallace whose independent work compelled the cowardly Darwin to publish.

I owe a debt to Amex, for putting up an incentive to write, and the open definition that enabled the writing.

I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Everything should be fun.

Ilyan, 1990.

And I forgot the debt to Isidore Berkhof who gave me The Plebs' League book "Outline of Economics" to read when I was about ten..

Sorry about that, it is in the wrong place altogether. mp3 CDs with it hidden on were distributed at the Trebanos Camp with some good EF! songs fronting it..