"Where Panentheism, Revisionism, and Anarchocapitalism Coalesce"

January 6, 2010

Dear Mr. Leonhardt,

The title of your column on the Fed asks an excellent question ["Fed Missed This Bubble. Will It See a New One?," The New York Times, January 5, 2010], framed as it is within the ambit of respectable opinion. With Mr. Bernanke you seem to take for granted the necessity of a central bank, as though it actually were the weapon against "runaway inflation" of its self-serving public image.

Not that it is a good excuse, but you are not alone in reinforcing the popular misconception that inflation is, not the increase in the money supply, but only that increase’s effect on prices. Besides confusing effect with cause, this error obscures inflation’s less obvious, but equally harmful, impact on production. In the late Soviet Union, nominal prices were held steady, i.e., there was (in common parlance) “no inflation,” but there were relatively few goods on store shelves.

An incremental across-the-board rise in prices—“creeping inflation,” if you will—is just as unacceptable (and as unnecessary) as is a precipitous increase ("runaway inflation"). Both represent attacks on the property of the many for the benefit of a few. They are not “facts of life” that we all must accept, but rather foreseeable consequences of the Fed's power to inflate, i.e., to print Federal Reserve Notes.

The devaluation of the unit of currency decreases everyone's purchasing power, but it proportionately hurts more those with less rather than more currency. It is a racket for the politically connected (e.g., government contractors who get the newly minted money first) and a scourge of the poor. The Fed is empowered to increase the supply of "legal tender," and the Treasury Department supports this enterprise by defining the latter. (So much for the Fed’s vaunted “independence”: it wouldn't last a day unless there were severe penalties for using anything but FRN's for "all debts, public and private.")

You mentioned Congressman Ron Paul's "once marginal" audit-the-Fed proposal, but not his book, End the Fed. No participant in this debate, and certainly no journalist covering it, should allow the impression that Mr. Paul believes Congress is more competent than the Fed to determine the price at which money should be lent. It should be repeated in every article on this story that Mr. Paul would not only abolish the Fed, but also scrap those legal tender laws. If that were achieved, Treasury would be free to print FRNs promiscuously, and we would be free to devalue them accordingly.

As I understand Mr. Paul’s economic theory (we had the same teacher), all economic actors conjointly determine the prices at which all commodities clear the market, but not deliberately, not by design; that is, they do so through their market transactions, and only that way. That is, prices are the objective "resultants" of the "vectors" of those subjectively motivated transactions. So is the rate of interest.

When we actors on the market dislike a particular resultant, however, some of us are tempted to put on our political caps and set price floors (or ceilings) by statute and decree; when we give in to that urge, we create only gluts (or shortages), be the commodity labor, housing, money, or whatever, contrary to our benign intentions, of course. The consequences are particularly harmful, however, when the supply of money is increased via the printing press (subsequent to an edict announcing that “the rate of interest” has been “lowered”), because such tampering distorts the signals of the exchanges of goods and services mediated by money.

We're seeing a lot more of the literary side of Mr. Bernanke these days, because he is trying to forestall a fundamental debate about the nature of money and banking, a philosophical contest that Mr. Paul and his allies are itching to have. The secretive, even conspiratorial, process by which the Fed was sold to and then foisted on the American people, commencing a little over a century ago and culminating in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, ought to be better known. The Fed's current operational secrecy is an extension of that shameful narrative, and Mr. Bernanke is the moral and intellectual heir of those Jekyll Island "duck hunters."

The much-needed popular education ought to come from writers in your position, among others. I recommend The Case against the Fed by Mr. Paul's and my teacher, Murray Rothbard, especially for the history beginning on page 90. For your convenience I have attached (and linked to) a .pdf of that short book.

We won't need anyone to predict "bubbles" once we dismantle the bubble-blowing enterprise.

Sincerely,

Anthony Flood

Should I ever hear from Mr. Leonhardt about this, I will report at once.--A.F.

Only today did I discover your column on Van Jones, ["The Van Jones Matter," Washington Post, September 11, 2009], but I trust that when weighed against the gravity of the issue, you will overlook the tardiness of my comment.

Three complaints made against Mr. Jones merited your rea-soned assessment. His having signed a petition [calling for an investigation into 9/11 open to the possibility of its having been a governmental “inside job”], however, provoked only blind out-rage. You offered not one reason for banishing from “polite so-ciety” anyone who would dare accuse of an American govern-ment of murdering its citizens, as though such a thought were on the level of fantasy. The many books, lectures, and articles by David Ray Griffin—against whom your string of gratuitous descriptors (“political psychosis,” “malignant paranoia,” “dan-gerous”) would be manifestly impotent—demonstrate that such a charge is utterly without evidentiary merit.

When you’re ready to take him on—apart from which test no defender of the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory can hope to earn credibility—you will need to do more than fulminate in the style of a Grand Inquisitor.

On November 27, 2009, as part of its television series, “The Fifth Estate,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour program featuring critics of the official version of 9/11, a long-overdue “first” for the mainstream media. The YouTube page that posts the whole program (in segments) is here.

Those unable or at least unwilling to concede the evidentiary case to the critics are represented. One will listen in vain, however, for anything from them except protestations of what they psychologically “cannot” believe. The spectacle of such “real-world” types hurling evidence-evading objections to a philosopher-theologian's evidence-based hypothesis is most ironic. That philosopher is, of course, David Ray Griffin :

If one reasonably concludes from evidence E that fact F was the intended result of an implemented plan, P, one's present inability to retrodict details of P does not give another the epistemic right to ignore the significance of E.

“How could so many have kept silent for so long?,” is their common refrain. Well, let's find out! Griffin's willing to revise his hypothesis in the light of the evidence that a proper investiga-tion might yield. What is so outré about recognizing that there hasn't been one? Where is the reciprocating willingness from the other side?

What does Griffin think of John Farmer's new book, The Ground Truth? Not much. In fact, "deeply flawed." Read his Amazon review.

The following is my response to “Go Gently into That Good Night,” renowned film critic Roger Ebert’s eloquent expression of agnosticism in the face of his probable death from cancer. In his brief response, he graciously overlooked my lapse from mindful-ness of the personal context of his thoughts. I tried to make amends in my follow-up. All this may be viewed on his blog. I encourage my visitors to become his as well.

If everything is burnt up in the inevitable collapse of the universe, what, in the end, are we contributing to? What does our “kindness” matter? As Bertrand Russell famously wrote in 1903:

“That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”

Henceforth? Safely? The impregnability of Russell’s (and your?) position is superficial, momentarily tenable only if one ignores the stake of contradiction driven through its heart (and the untenability of the empiricism that cannot make sense of the science it depends on). Russell may have written your credo, but how can it not drive you either to madness or despair? There may be, as you believe, nothing for us on the “other” side of our deaths. Unless, however, there is an everlasting divine life to which we contribute, a repository of experience that cherishes every worthwhile experience, then in the end nothing means anything, because a universe in ruins that began as “accidental collocations of atoms”—albeit ruins in a future distant enough for us to evade—stamps an expiration date on all value.

To consider the case for such a theistic ethical “contributionism” would, of course, require you to grapple with the arguments of a philosopher like Charles Hartshorne. It’s much easier to take the agnostic way out and suggest that that’s the best human beings can do.

A wonderful quotation. I believe Russell is correct, and he has not driven me to madness and despair. To the contrary, he helps me to understand.

Mr. Ebert, thanks for commenting on my post of May 6. What I should have done there and belatedly do now is salute the courage and honesty with which you are facing more immediately what we all face eventually. Apparent oblivious-ness to personal circumstance marred my expression of disagreement with your agnosticism. You seemed prepared for what Socrates said it was the office of philosophy to prepare one for [Phaedo 67e]. I find the spirit of your reflections Socratic, not Stoic, and therefore encouraging of dialog. I’m gambling, therefore, that you will receive this follow-up Socratically.

I appreciate your appreciation of Bertrand Russell’s eloquent confession of faith, but don’t understand your “understanding.” In seconding his thoughts, you are following the logician’s equivalent of a chess grandmaster. A grandmaster can blunder, however, inadvertently inviting checkmate. I claimed that his description of the universe’s ultimate heat death as a firm foundation for human living [“only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built”] plunges a “stake of contradiction” through the heart of his worldview (and yours) and shatters the facade of its serenity.

I can see that it has not driven you either to madness or despair, neither of which, of course, I wish on you. As your interlocutor, however, I asked how you avoid either, logically how. Russell’s eschatology is but a protracted version of Sisyphus’s boulder-rolling exercise, whose existentialist point Camus sharpened to perfection.

I therefore surmise that a “blessed inconsistency,” a logical lapse, an intermittent forgetfulness of what one believes about this when one turns one’s attention to that, spares you the aforementioned mental afflictions. It cannot, however, spare your position the fate of basic incoherence, to which the only alternative is silence, a dilemma to which a man of letters like yourself cannot integrally be indifferent.

On a positive note, I suggested that an escape from the dilemma might lie in a worldview that made sense both of one’s virtually ineradicable ethical contributionism and one’s rationality. The latter human traits and Russell’s worldview are like matter and antimatter.