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VII
Inflation Vis-a-vis the Explosive Age
Our nation is menaced by a complex of "explosions" of which at least three are lethal—any one of them capable of destroying us unless something is done about it, and rather soon. Named in the order of their gravity, they exist in money, in pollution, and in population.
Why is population placed last instead of first, as commonly accepted? The answer is simply because inflation, along with its consequent pollution—moral and environmental—will destroy us before the expanse of population becomes critical. As presently oriented, humankind appears more willing to accept control of population—regardless of method—rather than control of inflation.
An estimated two-thirds of the population is hungry in a world that holds God's plenty for all. Why these are deprived, and why their substance must be wantonly destroyed, is the purpose of this chapter to explore, and to plead for reason and common sense.
A frustrating issue in our own economy is that we no longer have enough meaningful work to keep our nation healthy, happy, and morally sound. Choice work is monopolized, and hours are cut and wages are raised by the "in" groups. Welfare has become big business, depending on poverty and politics for its survival. By virtue of influence and power, featherbedders abound in government and industry alike—a routine practice that would be less obnoxious were it applicable to all—which it definitely is not. Furor rises to high heaven when a meager subsistence is suggested for those precluded from participation. [p. 40]
Despite the millions occupied with weaponry and war, with consequent rebuilding and rehabilitation, with space exploration and supersonic air travel, with the ultimate in luxury that involves wholesale proliferation of "counterfeit" money the world around, we find ourselves confronted with a sticky paradox— unemployment, depression, inflation, and boom, all multiplying at the same time.
Exploding money has created an explosion of waste in the midst of exploding need—mostly because people do not recognize credit (bank credit, that is) as currency inflation, and cannot withstand the constant goading by the advertising media, and the siren call from the hucksters of credit. The unemployed must be subsidized by taxation or provided with make-work or training projects—most of which have little relevance except for the creation of new bureaucracies to dispense them. Who is better qualified to train industrial workers than industry itself? Who can do it more efficiently, and at a fraction of the cost? Under this, the sensible procedure, the cost of training is rightly reflected in the cost of the product, chargeable to those who use the product, not to the public at large by taxation. The world's real wealth is destroyed by self-defeating cross purposes and relentless oppression. Justly administered, it would feed and educate the world's destitute twice over, and provide them with the modest luxury that would make their lives worth living.
When inflation finally presses the economy into a state of collapse, as in the early thirties—and again today—the dollar is devalued (its volume increased). "Investors" rush into the stock market to hedge against the loss—to pass the burden down to the lower-income brackets (and incidentally garner a capital gain for themselves—much of it tax free). The stock market soars into the stratosphere; speculators applaud; politicians boast. Few question—or even care—that "prosperity" has been restored by an act of sheer banditry. No one seems to realize—or care—that the international bankers and their fellow-traveling speculators have just tightened—by a corresponding amount their stranglehold on the nation's wealth. Neither do they seem to realize that the bloom is off inflation, that its evils have finally [p. 41] outpaced its "benefits," that a day of reckoning is at hand.
The Administration, along with politicians and "economists," is blaming our present financial plight (aside from the war) on our obsession with world philanthropy over the past fifty years. Some recipient nations are inclined to agree, and to counsel patience and tolerance in our behalf. A cherished thought indeed, but doesn't it present something of a paradox? How have we managed to "give" so much, yet prosper so mightily and create so many millionaires in the process?
The ignominious truth is that, via inflation, our plunder has exceeded our philanthropy by a country mile. What could possibly offer greater incentive to war than inflation—its collusion and its profits? It is more than coincidental that war invariably comes to the rescue when depression strikes, that prosperity wanes when peace threatens.
The aim and purpose of inflation is embezzlement; however, deception, waste, rubbish, and pollution follow logically in its wake. To wit, twenty million tons of paper are discarded annually. Check your morning paper; check for yourself how much of it is used by supermarkets alone, not for ethical advertising, but for juggling of food prices to confuse and deceive the consumer who must finance his own exploitation through higher food prices. For the sake of deceptive and unwarranted promotional activity, we are up to our knees in rubble with no place to put it, and over our ears in debt and sinking deeper by the hour. In this cause, our forests are ravaged, and waste and pollution rise in step with unnecessary promotion.
Have we polluted the good earth beyond the point of no return? "A British scientist reports that British breastfed babies consume at least ten times the recommended maximum of the pesticide dieldren alone, and West Australians even more" (Awake, April 27, 1971).
Aside from pesticides and assorted pollutants from modern manufacture, strontium 90 permeates the atmosphere, the high seas, and deep into the bowels of the earth. The plutonium plant at Hanford, Washington, has 150(*) huge, concrete, carbon-steel— lined tanks, bubbling and deteriorating with hot radioactive [p. 41] waste—a 500,000 year impending threat to planetary life with no conceivable means of containing it. Still, the volume of this hellish material increases with expanding use of atomic energy.
Ponder the waste and pollution generated by built-in obsolescence, by discarding major appliances that could be easily repaired, and the reservoir of idle hands that could be trained to repair them. Visualize the pile of junked automobiles amassed by the average American in a lifetime. Add to this his travel homes, campers, and boats; his snowmobiles, dune buggies, motorcycles, and minibikes; his riding mowers, tractors, and a myriad of power tools that have become a must in his suburban home; and finally his exerciser, to supply the bodily needs denied him by labor-saving devices.
Ponder further the pollution motivated by advertising alone—by instilling a yen for new styles and models of every known commodity; by stimulating the desire for a multiplicity of gadgetry much of which we would be better off without; and, shoddiest of all, the wholesale promotion of medical nostrums and cosmetics—many of which are not only worthless but often detrimental.
Nothing—but nothing—is any longer sacred when a dollar is to be made. Ironically, in our insane economy, it's produce or perish, with little regard for the product or its consequences.
What, then, is to blame for our economic and ecological debacle? Food markets and advertising have been singled out only as examples of what is happening in virtually every area of business endeavor. All are victims of a grossly inflated money supply; all are debased by a brand of competition that must follow counterfeit money as a logical consequence—making the line between legitimate business and racketeering ever harder to distinguish.
Although the U.S. contains only 5.7% of the world's population, it consumes 40% of the world's production of natural resources.
—Time, February 2, 1970
This is a global atrocity. While we feign to protect the world [p. 43] politically, we destroy it ecologically. Geared as we are to destruction and waste, can life on this planet be sustained more than a few more generations? A definite possibility exists, but the likelihood of our implementing it is remote—in fact, impossible with an inflation-oriented economy. For the lack of honest Constitutional money, and Judeo-Christian ethics, we are leading the world headlong in a plunge toward oblivion.
Recycling? Hardly. True, with full cooperation (virtually impossible), recycling would preserve precious resources of forest, field, and mine, and reduce litter to a minimum. But, the process (collecting and reclaiming) would increase rather than diminish the drain on our most vital commodities—air and water. The solution then, and the only solution, is not recycling, but curtailment of about 75% of our gross national product and all unnecessary advertising—bearing in mind that "economists" somehow reckon higher prices as increased product.
But, you protest, and rightly so, this would hurl the nation into unprecedented depression, bloodshed, and famine. And so it would—and will. But why? Why, indeed? Only because ruthless competition, spawned by an unjust and larcenous money system, requires that we waste our substance, and destroy our environment in order to earn what is already our own, just as our government must borrow its own money and pay usury to private interests who create it out of thin air. Small wonder we have wars and rumors of wars. We shall continue to have them both until every major government becomes responsible for the creation and control of its people's medium of exchange, until it "drives the money-changers out of the temple" as Franklin Roosevelt vowed to do, but yielded to pressures from the international bankers.
It was never intended that man should gratify his every desire. Our Lord-taught us how to feast and how to fast. Presently, with a deluge of bank credit (counterfeit money) at their disposal, Americans have rejected fasting. And—to paraphrase Ecclesiastes—"whatsoever their eyes desire, they refuse them not," only to discover that "all is vanity and frustration of spirit."
While Congress flounders in bureaucracy and red tape, inflation continues to undermine the socioeconomic structure. We [p. 44] have been transformed from a nation of happy working people into a two-class society with robbers at the top and chiselers at the bottom, not chiselers by nature or by choice, but chiselers by necessity, and becoming entirely too adept in the art. Inflation defies every principle of economics; it raises prices and unemployment at the same time—disregarding the plight of the unemployed, of minimum wage earners, and of more than twenty million in old age and fixed-income brackets. Of course, the most attractive wage hikes are commanded by the most advantaged groups. Politicians vote themselves salary increases that often exceed the former total pay of many of their dismissed subordinates. In labor, the most powerful groups demand exorbitant wage and benefit hikes, while the unemployed sink deeper into debt and bankruptcy.
Like the power to tax, the power to inflate a nation's currency is the power to destroy that nation. In the shadow of our stifling National Debt, the homeowner is no longer sure he owns his home, or the small farmer his farm. That decision will be made by the international bankers under the leadership of the Federal Reserve.
Dr. Quigley vis-a-vis Dr. Skousen
Dr. Carroll Quigley of Harvard, Princeton, and Georgetown Universities, is an historian of international repute, and writes from a wide background of research into the history of international banking, into the lives of those who made that history in the past, and of those who are making it today. His findings are compiled in massive 1300-page book, Tragedy and Hope(1)—the "tragedy" of our present state of national and world affairs, and the "hope" that sanity and justice will finally prevail. The book reiterates what scores of money critics have alleged since the early days of our Republic—that international bankers are engaged in a combined effort to concentrate all wealth into their own hands to subvert the world to their domination. Wherein, then, does Dr. [p. 45] Quigley differ from other critics of banking?
After describing in detail the banker's plot, Dr. Quigley proceeds to give it his blessing on the grounds that the great body of the people have neither the intelligence nor the responsibility to govern themselves; he believes that a dictatorship with title to the world's wealth will eliminate corrupt bureaucracy and provide equitable treatment for all.
Dr. W. Cleon Skousen of Brigham Young University wrote The Naked Capitalist, a review of "Tragedy and Hope."(2) Dr. Skousen left nothing to the imagination in presenting his case for freedom versus dictatorship by international bankers, and compared the latter to the Beast of the Apocalypse. Few will disagree with his thesis; yet the present state of American mores and politics would indicate that Dr. Quigley's estimation of middle-class mentality might well be correct. If we are indeed a "nation under God," if we do indeed have the intelligence and responsibility to govern ourselves, it is high time we proved it.
Freedom is fundamental to Judaism and Christianity alike. Today, that freedom is suspended in the balance opposite the money powers of the free world. Both church and synagogue remain amazingly silent. Were Moses and Jesus both wrong? Hardly! The answer is evident to any who would observe.
In the wake of inflation we find a multiplicity of conflicting and self-incriminating circumstances that not only defy common sense but every Judeo-Christian concept of what its adherents proclaim to do and be. We have dire poverty and ignorance in the midst of preposterous affluence and waste; unemployment and need side by side in the midst of a potential for plenty; soaring prices and curtailed production in an age of automation. We have frustration, drugs, crime, collusion, and utter chaos exploding simultaneously in the Free World. Multiply this by an exploding population, and you should arrive at a fair estimation of our not-too-distant future. Activists are engaged in futile combat with these effects rather than with their common cause, inflation— legalized extortion and plunder. [p. 46]
Communism—as we know it—has no monopoly on godlessness. Russia's Nikita Khrushchev shared a vision with many of the great humanitarians of our time—a vision of our world if all the money spent on war in the present century had been invested in the welfare of the people. No, my friends, godlessness is about equally divided between Communism and capitalism. They differ only in method: the one uses force, the other finesse; the one hate, the other deceit. The end result is the same in either case. To the discredit of the Free World, "we have the Law and the prophets." We are not listening.
Surely the billions spent annually by the United States and Russia on the Cold War alone would much better serve the poor of both, and their ecologies as well. The people of neither country want war—hot or cold. Why, then, must they have it? They must have it only because inflation requires it. No? Examine the history of war and peace in our own country, especially since 1913, our year of infamy when—on the day before on Christmas Eve— Congress delegated to private interests the creation and control of our money.
Seers are divided on the next phase of human development. Their prognostications range from the millennium to oblivion. No guess is hazarded here; but if the well-accepted rule of cause and effect remains operative—as it probably will—and if we persist on our present course, oblivion must surely be our destination. Many believe that, despite moral decay, the millennium will yet blossom, but only at the hand of God alone—preceded by events that only the Apocalypse can describe. We shall see. [p. 47]
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