The Cancer Cartel and Alternative Treatments

“It is scarcely possible to touch on any subject, that will not suggest an allusion to some corruption in governments.” — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Note 24 

“Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current.” — Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, 1943

Whether the man who swims against the current is a creator or a fool depends, of course, on whether he’s headed for undiscovered truth or a plunge over the falls.  What’s important and almost never allowed is the freedom to let the man swim.  

Thomas Edison had a good thing going with his invention of the incandescent light bulb and his own direct current electricity system, but a 28-year-old immigrant he hired off the boat in 1884 showed him a much more efficient way to transmit electricity over long distances, using alternating current.  Edison dismissed Nikola Tesla’s idea as impractical and refused to compensate him for his discovery, having promised him a $50,000 bonus then reneging on it, claiming he was only joking.  Tesla resigned, found odd jobs that included digging ditches at $2 a day, and finally sold his ideas to Edison rival George Westinghouse, who in 1893 provided AC current to light the World’s Fair in Chicago.  

Previously, during what is known as the War of the Currents, Edison had staged numerous public displays of the lethal power of AC, electrocuting stray dogs and once even a circus elephant before a large crowd on Coney Island, hoping to scare the public away from AC.  Edison even lobbied Congress to have AC banned on the grounds that it was a public hazard.  Tesla, though, fought back with demonstrations of his own, as well as a landmark lecture in 1888.

Today, alternating current delivers electricity to homes and businesses, though direct current is staging a comeback of sorts with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC).  

I invite you to imagine the consequences if Edison had succeeded in getting the state to ban AC.  

Corruption of the Cancer Industry

We may cringe at the thought of the iconic Thomas Edison killing stray dogs to protect his investments, but how do we view the human lives lost to cancer when the iconic medical establishment prohibits treatments that could have saved them?

On December 23, 1971 President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, diverting $1.6 billion in taxpayer wealth to the NCI to conduct a “War on Cancer,” thus launching another government crusade.  ($1.6 billion in 1971 is equivalent to $10.13 billion in 2019.)  It was a big deal at the White House when Nixon signed it, with heavy media coverage.  Even Nixon enemy Senator Ted Kennedy was optimistic about sending the federal behemoth out to slay the cancer monster.

There was even talk about eradicating cancer by the bicentennial in 1976. 

Forty-seven years later we find that cancer is still a leading cause of death in most regions of the world.  According to the National Cancer Institute, “In 2012, there were 14.1 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths worldwide. . . The number of new cancer cases per year is expected to rise to 23.6 million by 2030.”  Apparently, the experts don’t expect an effective means of prevention for the foreseeable future.   

Again, according to the NCI (as of December, 2015), only about 5% of cancers are hereditary, “which means many cancers may be preventable.” NCI’s recommendations for reducing your risk of developing cancer include such novel measures as: Eat well, be active, don’t smoke or use tobacco, and lastly “get screened and talk with your doctor about your risk.”

It can’t be prevented, which is why cases will rise, but it can be prevented if you do the right things. . . which you probably won’t do.  Or maybe you would do them if you knew what they were.  “Eating well” is rather vague, isn’t it?  Your doctor may be different, but mine reads my blood specs and if anything is at all suspect I get referred to a specialist.  And the specialist is not paid to lecture me on nutrition or exercise.

Furthermore, the NCI reports that “rates for new cancer of any site cases have been falling on average 1.1% each year over the last 10 years. Death rates have been falling on average 1.5% each year over 2006-2015.”  Meanwhile, the percent of cancer patients surviving five years or more has risen slightly from 1975-2015.

These statistics acquire a green tinge when considering the billions of taxpayer dollars shoveled at the NCI, the multi-billion-dollar uptake of the big pharmaceuticals and the many millions collected through donations and celebrity "fight cancer" events.  

Government Steps Up

The war on cancer is a government boondoggle taking cover behind a moral crusade.  Government wars on poverty, drugs, alcohol, illiteracy, illegal immigration, and terror stand as monumental successes but only from the state’s perspective, for fostering its expansion.  In terms of their stated goals, they have done what any first-year student of economics could have predicted: made matters worse. 

Thirty-eight years after he stood behind President Nixon at the signing ceremony Ted Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer, under care of the best oncologists money could buy.  Forty-seven years after government got heavily into cancer research, we’re told it will still be around 11 years from now, and probably much longer.  Then there was this, posted in 2009, when President Obama applied the SOP of throwing more money at the problem:

In the US, according to a gloomy analysis in The New York Times, cancer death rates have fallen just 5 per cent since the 1950s, compared with a 64 per cent fall in heart disease mortality and a 74 per cent decline in the death rate for stroke.

Many thousands of people depend on the cancer industry for their jobs.  An actual cure would force most of those people into a new line of work.  Patentable drugs for treating cancer without curing it has become a lucrative revenue source for the big pharmaceuticals.   

Amid the staged war on cancer is a cutthroat political war on unapproved cancer treatments.  Any physician treating a cancer patient in any manner other than the big three of surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation (cut, drug, or burn) can count on being harassed by the government, especially the FDA.  Not only do they face criminal prosecution, but physicians using alternative treatments will be smeared as frauds, conmen or quacks.  

By 1952, Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, Jr. had developed the theory that cancer was a deficiency disease — that something essential was missing from modern diets.  The missing nutrient, he claimed, was a nitriloside found in over 1,200 edible plants around the world. 

Krebs understood cancer as a chronic, metabolic disease, meaning it does not pass away on its own and is not transmittable to others.  According to Krebs, there has never been a chronic, metabolic disease that was prevented or cured by drugs, surgery, or mechanical manipulation of the body.  The cure or prevention always came from adequate nutrition.  (Source, pp. 56-57)

In his research Krebs (along with others, including his father) did impressive work on the thesis that all expressions of cancer are characterized by biological uniformity.  Those curious about the quality of his research or his integrity are invited to study his 1950 paper, The Unitarian or Trophoblastic Thesis of Cancer.  Yet, the Wikipedia entry for Krebs characterizes him as an “American conman, who promoted various substances as alternative cures for cancer, including pangamic acid and amygdalin.”  

Krebs promoted amygdalin in its modified form, Laetrile, as a cancer cure, but according to Wikipedia “studies have found it to be ineffective.”  Not merely ineffective but a “canonical example of quackery.”  To organized medicine “quackery” is another name for competition.

The Big Cover-Up

Notwithstanding the disinformation about Laetrile, people with cancer were drawn to it because of claims from Laetrile patients that it worked.  (See Laetrile Case Histories for details.)  In 1972 the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City (MSKCC), the embodiment of conventional medicine, decided to bury Laetrile once and for all, and had it tested under direction of Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura, their most experienced and reputable researcher.  People who knew Sugiura readily acknowledged that “he was the very picture of a careful and scrupulous scientist. . . . He would not tell even a white lie in order to save a friend from embarrassment.”  [Source]

The board of MSKCC, whose leading members represented corporations that would lose a lot of money if the “cancer war” turned against them, viewed Sugiura’s testing in a less-scientific light.  

When Sugiura’s final report was published on June 13, 1973, it was a win for Laetrile.  Sugiura found that Laetrile:

1. Inhibited metastasis in mice  

2. Improved their general health 

3. Inhibited growth of small tumors 

4. Provided pain relief 

5. Acted as cancer prevention

Two biochemists at SK, Dr. Elizabeth Stockert and Dr. Lloyd Schloen, confirmed Sugiura’s results.  Schloen added proteolytic enzymes to his Laetrile injections (commonly done by Laetrile doctors) and reported a 100% cure rate among his Swiss albino mice.  [Source, p. 43]

Needless to say, these findings did not please the MSKCC board.  Subsequent tests confirmed Sugiura’s findings, but eventually, by altering the manner in which the testing was done, the SK board found deliverance.  The findings showed no difference between treated mice and controls.  Laetrile, therefore, was ineffective and SK announced it as such in a major press conference held in June 1977.  

Sugiura, who stood quietly in the shadows at the press conference, was asked by reporters if he stood by his results.  His reply: “I stick.”

Ralph Moss, the Assistant Director of PR at SK, recognized the cover-up and held a press conference of his own six months later in which he blew the whistle on what had really happened at SK.  He was fired shortly thereafter.  He has since written books about the corrupted findings, including “Doctored Results: The Suppression of Laetrile at Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research” and “The Cancer Industry: The Classic Exposé of the Cancer Establishment.”  There is also a movie about the cover-up, Second Opinion: Laetrile At Sloan-Kettering, released in 2014. 

Unfortunately, Moss blamed the “profit system” for the cover-up.  There would be an open field for profits and losses if Congress hadn’t been for sale.  On a free market, and with a government not possessed of the power to confer favors, there would be no favors to buy.  The butcher, the brewer, and the baker (along with most everyone who works for a living) will always be seeking a profit — where profit is understood in the subjective sense as the difference between the value of the costs incurred and the goal attained (Source).  

On a free market, Laetrile and other cancer treatments would compete in the open with the medical establishments’ regimens.  May the best one win, the winner to be chosen by the patients, not the politicians.

When we someday eliminate the political means for achieving profit, “profit” will lose its undeserved stigma.  And the numerous cartels that favor their members at the public’s expense will be a dark memory.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article should be interpreted as encouraging anyone to take Laetrile/amygdalin or any other purported cancer treatment.  If you suspect or know you have cancer, you are urged to seek treatment from qualified medical professionals.  

George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty.  He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a five-minute documentary about the Christmas Truce of 1914, A Christmas to Remember.

   

Nikola Tesla Demonstrates AC Power

In the late 1800s Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse engaged in what became known as the War of the Currencies, here referring to the question of which was better for power generation, direct current or alternating current.  Edison was heavily invested in DC, whereas Westinghouse was looking at the more efficient AC for transmitting power over long distances, which the young inventor Nikola Tesla had developed while briefly working for Edison.

Edison tried to turn the public against AC with demonstrations of its killing power, using stray dogs and even a circus elephant as its victims.  Exactly how Tesla responded to the challenge of proving the safety of AC is unclear but is emphatically dramatized in the movie, The Secret of Nikola Tesla, an excerpt from which is shown below.

For more information on Tesla please see Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla.

Our Hell-Raising Founding Father

“… if the journalistic credos of speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable have a godhead, that would have to be Paine, whose writing was so provocative and so uncompromising that he faced the gibbet and the blade everywhere he published—in England, and in France, and in the United Colonies.” — Craig Nelson

Thomas Pain (later changed to Paine) was born on January 29, 1737 in Thetford, England, his 40-year-old Anglican mother the daughter of a popular local lawyer, his 29-year-old Quaker father a destitute master craftsman staymaker.  In Thetford the Pains lived within sight of the local hanging ground called Gallows Hill.  Paine biographer Craig Nelson tells us:

The most popular entertainment of the age was the thrill of the hangman’s noose, with executions the only public holidays for workers besides Christmas and Easter, thus allowing apprentices, servants, and the working poor to mull the consequence of villainy.

In eighteenth century England “villainy” among the politically powerless included some 200 crimes punishable by death.  Steal a box of tea or a handkerchief and you could be facing the hangman’s noose, even if you were starving.

As was true in England as a whole, 5 percent of Pain’s neighbors were aristocrats and gentry (doctors, lawyers, and landowning yeomen and clergy), while 95 percent were rural paupers trying to survive the enclosure movement, when common folk were suddenly forbidden to graze their herds, hunt, or forage on 3.4 million acres of now private grounds.

Though baptized as an Anglican, Thomas Pain would often accompany his father to the local Quaker meetinghouse, adjacent to which were “the cage, pillory, and stocks for the condemned overflow of Thetford prison.” Thus, the prayer and testimony of the Quaker gathering would be mixed with “bellowing wails, screams for mercy, and the taunts of locals having a grand old time tormenting the criminals on public display next door.”

Thomas began grammar school at age six and quit at age 12 to begin an apprenticeship in staymaking.  Seven years later (1756) the Seven Years' War was underway, with the English and its allies fighting the French and their supporters.  Pain left home and joined the crew of a privateer warship that succeeded in capturing “the treasure of eight enemy vessels in as many months,” providing him with a handsome commission for his service.  

While most successful privateers spent their winnings on women and clothes, Pain bought a pair of globes and began attending philosophical lectures in London. 

Historians have long wondered exactly how this lower-class rarely-do-well became the most popular author of the eighteenth century and famed citizen of the world. He did it, we now know, in a signature American fashion—a rigorous course of self-improvement leading to personal reinvention—inspired by one of the most remarkable transformations of thought in world history. Thomas Pain would spend only a few years in London, but they would make of him a central figure in the creation of the modern world.

Pain later married but his wife and child died during childbirth.  He married again but following a financial collapse he and his second wife Elizabeth Ollive agreed to a separation, though they were never divorced.  Pain’s bankruptcy came during his stint as an excise taxman when he abandoned his post in Lewes and went to London to petition Parliament for better pay for excise tax collectors.  There he distributed copies of his pamphlet The Case of the Officers of Excise, which though compelling in many ways stood in contradistinction to his later essays against government and especially its taxes.  It was largely ignored. “Between the public’s loathing of the Excise and the government’s interest in paying its employees as little as possible, this noble campaign was a fool’s errand,” Nelson writes.

When he returned to his post in Lewes, Pain was fired and arrested for debt.  He sold assets in a business he and his wife ran to pay his creditors, and Elizabeth went home to live with her parents.  Neither one ever remarried, and both lived into their seventies, dying only eight months apart.  

When Pain in later life learned that the Ollives were having financial troubles, he would anonymously send Elizabeth money, and when Elizabeth had the opportunity to pocket a tidy sum by agreeing to take part in the British government’s drive to vilify her ex-husband, she would categorically refuse.

With personal bankruptcy, loss of his job, and the breakup of his marriage, Pain, age 37, had reached the nadir of his life.  

He did not know it at the time, but this seemingly unconquerable mountain of failure would force him to risk all, to take a very great leap of faith that would lead to his immortality.

Or as another biographer said about him with memorable flair: “When the British fired Thomas Paine, it cost him his marriage, but it cost the British their American colonies.”

Shortly after and with Ben Franklin’s blessing, Paine ventured to America, began writing, and achieved everlasting fame and notoriety.  His 1776 pamphlet Common Sense set the colonists on fire for independence.  According to Wikipedia, “In proportion to the population of the colonies at that time (2.5 million), it had the largest sale and circulation of any book published in American history.  As of 2006, it remains the all-time best selling American title, and is still in print today.”

He followed Common Sense with a series of essays called The American Crisis that attempted to raise American spirits during the war. 

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Returning to England after the war to find a builder for an iron bridge he had designed, he wrote Rights of Man, in two parts, as a rebuttal of Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmond Burke.  “Like Hamilton, Burke believed that only the nation’s elite should be involved in the affairs of state, which in his mind meant not just the rich and the landed but chivalric nobles, and clearly not common tradesmen,” Nelson explains.

In Rights, Paine points out that government by elites or anyone is unnecessary:

For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American War, and to a longer period in several of the American States, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defence to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet during this interval order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resource, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act: a general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

Later as a condemned prisoner under Robespierre, he penned the first volume of his The Age of Reason in which he presented his deistic view of the Bible and organized religion:  

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, bythe Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. 

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian
or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to
terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

He died all but forgotten at age 72, on the morning of June 8, 1809, in Greenwich Village, New York City, after suffering from a long, devastating illness.     

As an afterword, Paine published his final installment of The Crisis on April 19, 1783, coinciding with the firing of the first shots in Lexington eight years earlier, saying that "The times that tried men's souls are over.”

No, they are never over.

George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution, and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty.  He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a five-minute documentary about the Christmas Truce of 1914, A Christmas to Remember.

Thomas Paine blasts fake money

The paper money that funded the American Revolution led to post-war grievances, the most well-known of which was Shays’s Rebellion in backcountry Massachusetts.  For years after the war the Boston legislature imposed taxes, falling mainly on those least able to pay, for the full payment in specie of the highly-depreciated notes issued during the war and held mostly by well-to-do legislators and bankers.  As a further aggravation, the war was fought mostly by those on whom the taxes fell, while the elites stayed home.  (See the Nobel-worthy Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle by Leonard L. Richards)

Petitions for redress having been ignored by the legislature for several years, town leaders in western Massachusetts organized marches, beginning in August 1786, to shut down the courts, demanding that the state constitution be revised.  Eventually, through force of arms, the government put a halt to the uprising while mischaracterizing it as a refusal of the poor to pay their just taxes.  

Shays’s Rebellion became a propaganda ploy to lift George Washington from his retirement at Mount Vernon to lend his prestige as father of his country to serve as president of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  Meeting in secrecy from May 25, 1787 to September 17, 1787, representatives from the various states formed a new federal charter in violation of the agreement to amend the existing one, the Articles of Confederation.   

The result was a constitution with enough loose language and new powers that Alexander Hamilton and subsequent Hamiltonians exploited into the document today that is largely ignored or corrupted through political double-talk.  Thus, for example, we have a central bank with a monopoly on the issue of fiat money the rest of us are forced to use, while the Constitution prohibits states issuing “any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” (Article 1 Section 10)

Today, people don’t know or care enough to protest government's fake money, but in early 1786 Thomas Paine was one of those who did.  The author of Common Sense and The American Crisis essays, who as a soldier in the Continental army lifted the spirits of fellow soldiers and civilians alike with the opening words of his first essay, These are the times that try men’s souls, understood the theft that the Continental Congress had committed with its paper emissions.  

As part of his essay Dissertations on Government, etc. , published in February, 1786, Paine included a scathing condemnation of paper money that is Austrian School-consistent in most ways.  (“The pretense for paper money has been, that there was not a sufficiency of gold and silver. This, so far from being a reason for paper emissions, is a reason against them.”) 

In honor of his upcoming birthday on January 29 and the publication of Common Sense on January 10, 1776, I present Paine’s insightful essay on paper money.

* * *

I shall enumerate some of the evils of paper money and conclude with offering means for preventing them.

One of the evils of paper money is, that it turns the whole country into stock jobbers. The precariousness of its value and the uncertainty of its fate continually operate, night and day, to produce this destructive effect. Having no real value in itself it depends for support upon accident, caprice and party, and as it is the interest of some to depreciate and of others to raise its value, there is a continual invention going on that destroys the morals of the country.

It was horrid to see, and hurtful to recollect, how loose the principles of justice were left, by means of the paper emissions during the war. The experience then had, should be a warning to any assembly how they venture to open such a dangerous door again.

As to the romantic, if not hypocritical, tale that a virtuous people need no gold and silver, and that paper will do as well, it requires no other contradiction than the experience we have seen. Though some well-meaning people may be inclined to view it in this light, it is certain that the sharper always talks this language.

There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes.

But why, since the universal custom of the world has established money as the most convenient medium of traffic and commerce, should paper be set up in preference to gold and silver? The productions of nature are surely as innocent as those of art; and in the case of money, are abundantly, if not infinitely, more so. The love of gold and silver may produce covetousness, but covetousness, when not connected with dishonesty, is not properly a vice. It is frugality run to an extreme.

But the evils of paper money have no end. Its uncertain and fluctuating value is continually awakening or creating new schemes of deceit. Every principle of justice is put to the rack, and the bond of society dissolved: the suppression, therefore, of paper money might very properly have been put into the act for preventing vice and immorality.

The pretense for paper money has been, that there was not a sufficiency of gold and silver. This, so far from being a reason for paper emissions, is a reason against them.

As gold and silver are not the productions of North America, they are, therefore, articles of importation; and if we set up a paper manufactory of money it amounts, as far as it is able, to prevent the importation of hard money, or to send it out again as fast it comes in; and by following this practice we shall continually banish the specie, till we have none left, and be continually complaining of the grievance instead of remedying the cause.

Considering gold and silver as articles of importation, there will in time, unless we prevent it by paper emissions, be as much in the country as the occasions of it require, for the same reasons there are as much of other imported articles. But as every yard of cloth manufactured in the country occasions a yard the less to be imported, so it is by money, with this difference, that in the one case we manufacture the thing itself and in the other we do not. We have cloth for cloth, but we have only paper dollars for silver ones.

As to the assumed authority of any assembly in making paper money, or paper of any kind, a legal tender, or in other language, a compulsive payment, it is a most presumptuous attempt at arbitrary power. There can be no such power in a republican government: the people have no freedom, and property no security where this practice can be acted: and the committee who shall bring in a report for this purpose, or the member who moves for it, and he who seconds it merits impeachment, and sooner or later may expect it.

Of all the various sorts of base coin, paper money is the basest. It has the least intrinsic value of anything that can be put in the place of gold and silver. A hobnail or a piece of wampum far exceeds it. And there would be more propriety in making those articles a legal tender than to make paper so. . . .

The laws of a country ought to be the standard of equity, and calculated to impress on the minds of the people the moral as well as the legal obligations of reciprocal justice. But tender laws, of any kind, operate to destroy morality, and to dissolve, by the pretense of law, what ought to be the principle of law to support, reciprocal justice between man and man: and the punishment of a member who should move for such a law ought to be death.

When the recommendation of Congress, in the year 1780, for repealing the tender laws was before the Assembly of Pennsylvania, on casting up the votes, for and against bringing in a bill to repeal those laws, the numbers were equal, and the casting vote rested on the Speaker, Colonel Bayard. "I give my vote," said he, "for the repeal, from a consciousness of justice; the tender laws operate to establish iniquity by law." But when the bill was brought in, the House rejected it, and the tender laws continued to be the means of fraud.

If anything had, or could have, a value equal to gold and silver, it would require no tender law: and if it had not that value it ought not to have such a law; and, therefore, all tender laws are tyrannical and unjust, and calculated to support fraud and oppression.

Most of the advocates for tender laws are those who have debts to discharge, and who take refuge in such a law, to violate their contracts and cheat their creditors. But as no law can warrant the doing an unlawful act, therefore the proper mode of proceeding, should any such laws be enacted in future, will be to impeach and execute the members who moved for and seconded such a bill, and put the debtor and the creditor in the same situation they were in, with respect to each other, before such a law was passed. Men ought to be made to tremble at the idea of such a bare-faced act of injustice. It is in vain to talk of restoring credit, or complain that money cannot be borrowed at legal interest, until every idea of tender laws is totally and publicly reprobated and extirpated from among us.

As to paper money, in any light it can be viewed, it is at best a bubble. Considered as property, it is inconsistent to suppose that the breath of an assembly, whose authority expires with the year, can give to paper the value and duration of gold. They cannot even engage that the next assembly shall receive it in taxes. And by the precedent (for authority there is none), that one assembly makes paper money, another may do the same, until confidence and credit are totally expelled, and all the evils of depreciation acted over again. The amount, therefore, of paper money is this, that it is the illegitimate offspring of assemblies, and when their year expires, they leave a vagrant on the hands of the public.

George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty.  He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a five-minute documentary about the Christmas Truce of 1914, A Christmas to Remember.

Moore’s Law has replaced the gold standard

I collect gold in the form of important insights, and in this article I’d like to share some of them with you. 

Until a few years ago I never thought of Moore’s Law and a gold coin standard as having an important connection, but they do.  Gary North lays it out (8/17):

The gold standard was an institutional restraint on the expansion of government spending, and central banks were designed to thwart the gold standard. We live in an era of the triumph of central banking. We therefore live in an era of the comprehensive defeat of gold coins as restraining factors on the expansion of the government.

Here is the good news: we no longer need gold to do this. 

I favor a gold coin/digital standard established by the free market -- not any government -- but we no longer need it. If we did, then liberty would have been lost after 1971 or 1933. 

Moore's law has replaced the gold standard as a means of restraining civil governments' central planning. . . .

The escalating effect of Moore's law in reducing the cost of information is changing the whole world in ways we can barely perceive today. There is no way that any federal bureaucracy can keep up with the social, economic, educational, and political transformations that are taking place as a result of Moore's law. . .

People are finding ways to participate in the world economy that are outside the jurisdiction of the administrative state.

The inevitable bankruptcy of every national Western government because of compulsory government medical insurance programs and old-age retirement programs will complete the destruction of the Hamiltonian movement in America and the Keynesian welfare state everywhere else.

Since states are involved in just about every area of our lives, and since few people talk about whether they’re necessary or not, it’s always refreshing to read Murray Rothbard.  In Anatomy of the State he explains how the almighty state operates to support itself:

The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.

States, however, are not the same as government, as Albert Jay Nock tells us in Our Enemy, the State:

Based on the idea of natural rights, government secures those rights to the individual by strictly negative intervention, making justice costless and easy of access; and beyond that it does not go. 

The State, on the other hand, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. 

It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

The trouble is, all governments today are states.

Robert P. Murphy, author of Chaos Theory, a highly-readable primer on anarchy, has long defended the idea of a stateless society.  In this article he addresses a common concern of critics that under anarchy warlords would take over.  Murphy claims that,

for any given population, the imposition of a coercive government will make things worse.  

The absence of a State is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to achieve the free society.

To put the matter differently:  It is not enough to demonstrate that a state of private-property anarchy could degenerate into ceaseless war, where no single group is strong enough to subjugate all challengers, and hence no one can establish “order.”  After all, communities living under a State degenerate into civil war all the time.  We should remember that the frequently cited cases of Colombia and now Iraq are not demonstrations of anarchy-turned-into-chaos, but rather examples of government-turned-into-chaos.

For the warlord objection to work, the statist would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized. [His emphasis]

Why does almost everyone accept the existence of states as axiomatic, when judging by what they actually do they’re nothing more than bandit gangs writ large?  Are we the propagandized adults in The Emperor’s New Clothes?

The American state is a burden and a threat but so far it hasn’t completely regulated the American economy -- to our great benefit.  Gary North (7/2015): 

Economists define economic growth as follows: "An increased range of choices at the same income level." 

Using this definition, Americans are the richest people in history. 

We have more liberty, income, and geographical mobility than any nation on earth. We live in a huge free trade zone. We have the same language. We have a common monetary system. We have a highly developed road system. We have an airline system almost devoid of price fixing. We have more housing options than anywhere else. We can buy a home with a 30-year fixed interest rate at 4%. We can start a business in one hour -- two hours, at the most. We have the best higher education system in the world . . . and it's going online for free. We have a common law system, where everyone is innocent until proven guilty, except when dealing with the IRS. We have the right to own as many guns as we want.

“Money is the whole thing,” said a bitter Rod Steiger in The Pawnbroker, claiming it is the only thing that matters in life.  It’s so important some people would counterfeit it to get what they want.  And this turns our attention to the government and its central bank, the federal reserve.  

Gary North (1/2016):

The secret of retaining the public's confidence in any currency unit is simple enough: convince users of the money that the issuers are responsible, reliable, and trustworthy. 

Government and its licensed agents have a monopoly of money creation. Private competitors are called counterfeiters. 

Sadly, in our day, it is very difficult to understand just what it is that counterfeiters do, economically speaking, that governments are not already doing. Fiat money is fiat money. 

(Perhaps the real legal issue ought to be the illegal use of the government's copyrighted material. Copyright infringement makes a much more logical case for Federal prosecution than counterfeiting.)

Central banking is one of the greatest cons in human history.  

Walter Williams (12/2008):

The justifications for Federal Reserve Act of 1913 was to prevent bank failure and maintain price stability. Simple before and after analysis demonstrates that the Federal Reserve Bank has been a failure. In the century before the Federal Reserve Act, wholesale prices fell by 6 percent; in the century after they rose by 1,300 percent. Maximum bank failures in one year before 1913 were 496 and afterward, 4,400.

With a record like that it's no small achievement that it's still around.  But don't sound the trumpets because the public won't understand.  And people don’t care.  As long as their digital or paper dollars continue to buy stuff without too much pain, they’re okay.

As consumers they want high quality and low prices. But who’s going to give them a deal like that?  Big business.

There is a slogan about American big business wanting to hire low-cost immigrants. Don't blame big business. Big business caters to the vast middle class. Big business wants to cut prices to penetrate new markets. Middle-class people buy from Amazon and Walmart and Target for a specific reason: to get the best prices. Big business is responding to consumer demand. 

It is consumers, not big business, who demand low prices. Big business would like higher prices, but consumers won't let them impose higher prices. 

So, big business goes out to find ways to cut costs, so that big business can cut prices. Cause-and-effect is not from big business to the consumers; it is from consumers to big business. 

This is the logic of free market economics. — Gary North (1/2016)

George Ford Smith is the author of eight books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic and The Fall of Tyranny, the Rise of Liberty.  He is also a filmmaker whose latest work is a five-minute documentary about the Christmas Truce of 1914, A Christmas to Remember.

A Christmas to Remember

The Christmas Truce of 1914 is remembered today as something of a miracle, and based on letters the soldiers had written home it struck them much the same way.

How could it be that men can stop killing each other for a day after five months of mutual slaughter on the battlefield?  Nor did they merely take a time out, but fraternized, much to the displeasure of their high command.  They exchanged gifts, played European-style football, and generally behaved like men do when they get together during peacetime. Were they suffering from a form of psychosis? Didn't it penetrate their brains that they were celebrating with men who had killed many of their comrades?  Where was the hate, the lust for revenge?

For many of those celebrating that day it would be the last Christmas of their young lives.  Surely, some of them had to be aware of that possibility, given the heavy casualties incurred to that point. And some undoubtedly let that thought darken their day.  But not all of them.  Their letters home reflected a kind of school's-out attitude.  No thoughts about what was waiting for them the next day or week.

When the armistice was declared nearly four years later, at 11 o'clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, US flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker disobeyed orders and flew solo over the trenches to see what would happen at that precise moment.  Here's what he wrote:

On both sides of no-man’s-land, the trenches erupted. Brown-uniformed men poured out of the American trenches, gray-green uniforms out of the German. From my observer’s seat overhead, I watched them throw their helmets in the air, discard their guns, wave their hands. Then all up and down the front, the two groups of men began edging toward each other across no-man’s-land. Seconds before they had been willing to shoot each other; now they came forward. Hesitantly at first, then more quickly, each group approached the other.

Suddenly gray uniforms mixed with brown. I could see them hugging each other, dancing, jumping. Americans were passing out cigarettes and chocolate. I flew up to the French sector. There it was even more incredible. After four years of slaughter and hatred, they were not only hugging each other but kissing each other on both cheeks as well.

Star shells, rockets and flares began to go up, and I turned my ship toward the field. The war was over.

Maybe the men realized their enemies weren't always the guys shooting at them.  Maybe they understood that the ones at the top had everything to do with what was happening on the field.

If so, the Christmas Truce of 1914 was indeed special.

A Christmas to Remember

New anti-state movie

My new movie on Amazon Prime Video is called Audition, the tagline for which is "Sometimes success depends on the chemistry of strangers."

While this has romantic implications, the question before them is whether their acting inexperience can fulfill demanding roles in an anti-state movie.  Is it possible they have an edge that veteran actors don't?

The Amazon link has a trailer, and I've put together another one here.

The movie runs close to 19 minutes.  Check it out when you get a break.