Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

An Email we just received from AARP (the insurance broker that passes itself off as the voice for the upper age groups) contained this:

Now that President Obama has sent his 2014 budget proposal to Congress, three blueprints for the nation’s fiscal future are on the table.

Here are the three (and only three) plans AARP says are “on the table:”

See anything missing?

Right, AARP doesn’t even mention the possibility of debt increases.

Why doesn’t AARP acknowledge that federal debt reduction (aka “austerity”) always is economically destructive, and has been destructive everywhere in the world it has been tried, and is especially destructive of AARP’s membership, the elderly?

Why doesn’t AARP mention that austerity has failed in Greece, failed in Italy, failed in Cyprus, failed all over the eurozone, even failed in Scotland and England, failed everywhere — and is failing in the U.S.?

Why doesn’t AARP discuss the damage caused by removing dollars from the economy? Why do they simply parrot the upper .1%’s mantra that the federal government debt is “unsustainable” and the government must “live within its means.”

Why doesn’t AARP acknowledged the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty?

Why doesn’t AARP tell its members the truth — that austerity has failed and always must fail, because austerity removes dollars from an economy, which causes recessions and depressions?

Why doesn’t AARP tell its members that the upper .1% income group wants austerity to punish the lower income groups, widening the gap between the rich and the rest.

Why? Because AARP is a big insurance brokerage, owned, controlled and funded by the rich, whose primary goal is to widen that gap, which gives them more power over the middle and lower-classes.

AARP does not represent the elderly. It represents the very rich.

The .1% have bought the Senate, bought the House, bought Obama, bought many so-called “think tanks” and lobbyists. They own much of the media and are buying more. (The Kochs reportedly are trying to buy the Chicago Tribune’s stable of papers).

The rich own AARP, too.

In years to come, when all the “Whys” have been asked and answered, AARP will be remembered for its treachery.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

We long have argued that the gap between the rich and the rest is too large, and growing. There are two ways to narrow that gap: Bring down the rich or lift the rest.

A human being of normal intelligence, would opt to lift the lower- and middle-income groups, so that every citizen could have a happier, more fulfilling life. But these are not normal times, as the world, brainwashed by the rich, has turned austerian.

We also have argued that the rich have fostered warfare between the middle- and lower-classes as a “divide and conquer” method for increasing power. Here is a successful example in Scotland:

HeraldScotland
Call for pensioners to ‘share the pain’ of cuts
Gerry Braiden, Senior reporter, Monday 22 April 2013

Pensioners should share the pain of austerity cuts and pay more tax to promote fairness between the generations in the housing market, a think-tank has warned.

The Fabian Society claims high levels of home ownership among older people threatens fairness, as the wages of middle-income workers stagnate and they cannot afford to buy a home.

It argues pensioners’ taxes should increase, their benefits should be cut, and a tax on property wealth should be introduced.

The Fabian Society is a socialist group, which reminds me of the old line: Capitalists want everyone to be equally rich. Socialists want everyone to be equally poor.

The “logic” of the Fabian Scociety, and of all austerians is: If many people are poor, don’t help them. Instead make those in the middle class poor – “for fairness.”

How such idiocy can survive, demonstrates the power of envy over the power of reason.

It also demonstrates the cleverness of the .1%, for re-directing the envy, normally reserved for the rich, instead to be aimed at the elderly. Thus is the power of money to sway minds.

The report follows previous warnings that the range of universal benefits for pensioners in Scotland such as free care and bus travel may lead to conflict between the generations.

According to the Fabian Society, more than three-quarters (76%) of pensioners now own homes, compared with just over half (58%) 20 years ago, while in the past decade there has been a “dramatic fall” in home ownership among under-45s.

How awful! More elderly own homes, while home ownership of the younger has fallen. Is the cure to help young people afford homes? No, the cure is to make sure the elderly can’t afford their homes. And this will prevent “conflict between the generations.”

The Scottish upper .1% surely must be laughing.

In 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher came to power, middle-income working-age households enjoyed an income 93% above that of middle-income retired households. That figure is now 37%, the study showed.

The society said this had profound implications and there should be a presumption of equality as “old age is no longer a proxy for poverty”. It says the key policy should be to raise £7.2 billion by hiking taxes on pensioners so the 27% they pay as a portion of their gross income would rise to 33%.

Yes, indeed. Let us impoverish our elderly, as that somehow will help our younger people, who then will be saddled with the responsibility to house and feed their newly poor parents. That’s what we call “fairness” in Scotland

These Scottish folks must have received their ideas from President Obama and the U.S. Congress.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY

Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
=====================================================================

Can there be an economy in which no one owns anything? Is there a difference between “own” and “possess”?

Recently, I read an article in NewScientist Magazine, titled “Lost in the cloud: How safe are your online possessions? (02 April 2013 by Douglas Heaven) Here are some excerpts:

In the digital age, your files and memories are not truly yours any more. They belong to the cloud.

To keep his valuable footage safe, Kyle Goodwin had placed it in a popular storage facility. On 19 January last year, all those assets disappeared without warning. As did everything put there by more than 150 million others. When he asked for his livelihood back, he was refused.

The US government, who confiscated his material, is essentially claiming that he forfeited his rights to his property the minute he uploaded it.

Clusters of servers thousands of miles away now hold our favourite music, photo memories and vital correspondence. We are headed for a world in which we will live our entire digital lives in the cloud, but these developments are poised to change our basic assumptions about ownership in surprising ways.

The article continues on that theme – the idea that in the digital age, ownership will not be clear cut. For instance, do I own this blog?

Everything you’ve read in the past 1000 posts is stored on servers managed by something called “Wordpress.” I don’t know who actually owns those servers. Perhaps there are multiple owners. So, if the owners, whoever they are, decide to charge you — or even, me — for access to my own posts, do I have recourse?

Shared computer resources now sit in vast data centres owned by the likes of Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Amazon alone is thought to own 450,000 servers around the world, providing storage and other services to thousands of websites and. According to one 2012 study, every day a third of US internet users visit a site that relies on an Amazon server.

It is widely thought inevitable that by 2020 the cloud will run all digital life. Though you technically retain copyright if you have created the photos, videos or text you upload, the reality is that agreeing to the service terms generally means you forego many of the rights you might reasonably expect. For example, the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, recently changed its terms after it was acquired by Facebook, giving itself a license to use people’s uploaded photos for advertising.

And it gets even more complicated:

If your file has already been uploaded by someone else – a digital copy of a Radiohead album, for instance – then Dropbox will just link you to the existing files rather than waste bandwidth and space by uploading a duplicate. Are those files uploaded by that other person now yours? Surely not. Untangling relationships with your possessions in the cloud quickly gets confusing.

Buy the NewScientist or go online (the cloud) to read the rest of this intriguing article, which continues to expand on the central point: Ownership of anything online is questionable, and may be resolved in favor of whomever owns the servers. Amazon might own the world.

And this belatedly, brings us to the point of this post: Money, having no physical existence, is nothing more than numbers on accounting spreadsheets. (See:A dollar bill is not a dollar and other economic craziness)

You never have seen, held, touch, tasted or smelled a dollar. That green piece of paper in your wallet simply represents a dollar. Just as a car title is not a car, and a house title is not a house, a dollar bill is not a dollar. It is a title.

You do not possess any of the money noted on your bank’s servers. You may own shares of General Electric or AT&T, but you do not possess these companies. Your ownership is stored on servers somewhere – servers that might have multiple owners – and your ownership depends on vagaries of the law – which also might be stored in the cloud.

Consider what happened in Cyprus:

Big depositors in Cypriot banks to lose 8.3 billion euros

Cyprus and international lenders decided that depositors who had more than 100,000 euros in the two banks will lose some of their money to contribute to the recapitalization of the institutions, along with shareholders and bond holders.

With the press of a computer key, 8.3 billion euros will disappear from depositors’ accounts. The banks made the unilateral decision that these euros did not belong to depositors, but rather are owned by the banks or by the banks’ creditors.

And lest you believe this was an anomoly, Fed governor Jeremy Stein said:

If a (big bank) does fail I have little doubt that private investors will in fact bear the losses. Dodd-Frank is very clear in saying that the Federal Reserve and other regulators cannot use their emergency authorities to bail out an individual failing institution.

There is an old expression, “Possession is nine tenths of the law.” While not literally true, it shows that historically, ownership was related to possession.

Now, fast forward to a couple decades from now, when all documentation might be online, and a case could be made that no one will own anything in the cloud. After all, the U.S. government made that very case about Kyle Goodwin’s materials.

If ownership of a house is determined by its title, and the title will exist only in the cloud, ownership of the title will be questionable. Then presumably anyone having access to a server can change the title, in which case, no one would own the house.

Can there be an economy in which no one owns anything? If so, what would such an economy be like? Would it be some sort of communism on steroids?

Without ownership, can there be motivation? Without motivation can there be progress or even survival? Can there be economics without ownership?

Perhaps it all seems far-fetched, today. But Cyprus questions ownership of euros deposited for safe storage in their banks. And the U.S. government questions ownership of files safely stored on line.

When all your records are spread over hundreds of thousands of servers around the world, and these records continuously swirl in microscopic, electronic packets, among all those servers, who owns the electrons that make up your files? Anyone?

For all I know, someone has downloaded a dictionary containing every word in the English language. Or more simply, has downloaded all 26 letters used in every English word. And rather than storing my words, the addresses of those letters are stored.

So, the words in this sentence may consist of nothing but addresses and may exist on many servers. They might be just as a series of references to that original list of letters, and ten seconds from now, may have moved to many different servers. How would I claim which words are mine if I can’t claim ownership of that original list of letters?

Now may be the time to visualize what economics can be, without clear ownership.

Is such an economics even possible?

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

====================================================================================================================================================

Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

No nation can tax itself into prosperity, nor grow without money growth. Monetary Sovereignty: Cutting federal deficits to grow the economy is like applying leeches to cure anemia. Two key equations in economics:
Federal Deficits – Net Imports = Net Private Savings
Gross Domestic Product = Federal Spending + Private Investment and Consumption – Net Imports

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY