Contrarians and the Keynesian Myth

by Nelson Hultberg

There is a strange incongruity, observable throughout the intellectual history of man, that never ceases to amaze me. Why is it in the field of ideas that dramatic new visions of truth are so often met with vehement opposition from a society's intellectuals -- the very men of the mind who are most dedicated to the pursuit and demonstration of truth? How can the intellectuals of today's era -- so acutely aware of humanity's bigoted resistance in the past to Galileo, Semmelweis, Pasteur, and other radical discoverers of history -- succumb to the same blind obstinacy in face of the new truths confronting them?

There are several reasons why this propensity for intolerance to new thinking has prevailed throughout history among intellectuals. As the physicist Fred Hoyle tells us, scientists are human. They are, far more often than the lay public perceives, victims of dogmatism and the tendency of all humans to argue from pre-set ideas.

Despite their much-heralded pledge to objective inquiry, scientists are quite capable of bias and suppression in order to preserve their long-standing beliefs. When a large portion of one's life has been passionately devoted to the validation of an idea, it becomes most difficult to accept the invalidity of that idea. Therefore truth, the most highly prized goal of all, is often forsaken to protect fragile egos and support previous convictions.

This tendency of scientists to be obstinate in the face of new truth manifests itself through the paradigm shift. As Thomas S. Kuhn demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all of science is based upon the establishment of paradigms, or what can be termed an overall "way of viewing things" in a particular field. And once a paradigm is established, it becomes difficult for most thinkers to dispute its basic premises even when that paradigm is found to be in error.

For example, the 1st century Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, established the Ptolemaic paradigm of the solar system, which depicted the earth as its center with the sun and planets revolving around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo came along and overthrew this way of thinking with a truer paradigm that depicted the sun as the center of the solar system. Newton established the mechanistic paradigm in physics during the early 18th century, and Einstein followed with a much truer relativity paradigm two hundred years later. Pasteur established the germ paradigm in medicine during the 19th century, while Darwin gave us the evolution paradigm in biology.

A paradigm is thus an all-inclusive Big Picture based upon a fundamental premise in a field of study that undergirds the "why of things" in that particular field. Even when false, a paradigm often prevails as accepted truth for a long period of time because the prevailing minds and methodology of the era are inadequate to grasp reality more clearly. But falsity persists as truth also because humans fall prey to inertia. They seek mental comfort and choose paths of least resistance, which leads them to settle into a certain paradigm as if it is inviolable. For example, even after Copernicus made it obvious around 1500 AD that the Ptolemaic concept of the universe was a fallacy, it still prevailed in intellectual circles for another 180 years until Galileo drove the final nails into its coffin.

Herein lies one of the great human dilemmas: Once a "way of viewing things" is entrenched in any given field, even when new knowledge comes along to refute such a paradigm, it becomes practically impossible (because of the flaws of human nature) for most intellectuals to think outside that paradigm's constraints. They will defend the entrenched view even when its basic conception is shown to be foolish and impossible, especially if they have devoted a vital part of their lives to the teaching and promotion of that "way of viewing things."

This is presently our situation in many intellectual fields. Like the medieval dogmatists, today's academic community also clings to irrational paradigms in face of overwhelming evidence that their views are as untenable as the flat earth theories of old.

The Keynesian Paradigm

Let's take one of the most entrenched paradigms of our day as an example: Keynesian demand theory in economics. Despite severe and demonstrable weaknesses in this economic view, our establishment scholars cling to it like dependent children to stuffed animals. When presented with strong, logical refutations of this paradigm, 80 percent of our academic community reacts with bemused scorn.

Both theoretical and empirical evidence demonstrate that the Keynesian model is not just a false and dangerous way to approach political economy, it is a ludicrous sham, one of the biggest cons in history. Inflating consumer demand with fiat currency is not some kind of "new economics" as Keynes and FDR's brain trust of the 30's claimed. It is not legitimate economics at all, but just another example of powerful governments debasing the currency so as to confiscate their citizens' wealth, and in the process deluding themselves like tribal primitives dancing in front of idols to bring good fortune.

Original orthodox Keynesianism may be dead as a viable theory, but just as neo-Ptolemaic theories hung around for 180 years after Copernicus, neo-Keynesian variants still control government policy today after Mises. They are still entrenched as the basis for centralized statism and are the reasons for the exacerbated boom-bust cycles in our economy over the past decades. One observes the exasperating efforts of Austrian economists such as Kurt Richebacher trying to inform the Keynesian pooh-bahs about the falsity of their paradigm, and one is reminded of what Pasteur had to endure when he set out to explain to the ignorant physicians of his day that putting leeches on the skin was not rational medicine.

As everyone knows, Keynesian economics got its start during the Great Depression. In essence, Keynes' message to a bewildered 1936 world was this: What needs to be done is to create vast amounts of government investment so as to stimulate and perpetually maintain consumer demand at a high level. If this is done, the problems of poverty and business cycles will be alleviated. The weakness of free enterprise is that in its mature stage it lacks the ability to produce enough "purchasing power," i.e., demand among the people. The government must step in and take control of the monetary system, for Say's Law of Markets is no longer valid.

Say's Law of Markets is the brainchild of J.B. Say, the 19th century French economist. It states that production is the cause of consumption, or that the people's productivity determines their purchasing power. For example, if a man plants and harvests a ten acre field of corn, his purchasing power in the marketplace will then be whatever that corn is worth in trade to his fellowman. His production of corn has created the level of his demand for clothes, transportation, entertainment, etc.

When Say's Law is considered along with Ludwig von Mises' theory of money and credit, one can easily see the fallacy of Keynes, for no amount of paper money, injected into an economy in excess of the growth of goods and services, will increase the "purchasing power" of the people. This is because the prices of those goods and services rise in response to the increase in the money supply, which negates the effect of the extra paper money in the people's pockets and eventually even creates a situation where overall purchasing power dissipates because of the inevitable runaway aspect of all inflationary economies.

If Say's Law is valid, then the way we should have handled the Great Depression of the 30's would have been to let prices and wages seek their own level and allow Say's Law to operate. If this had been done, the natural productivity of the people would have created the necessary purchasing power to climb out of the Depression. The reason we didn't handle it in this way is because Keynes was supposed to have "refuted" Say's Law showing it to be unworkable under modern day conditions.

But as Steven Kates' demonstrates in Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution, Keynes gravely distorted Say's Law in order to "refute" it. 1 He created a straw man, and then denounced it. Such intellectual legerdemain allowed Keynes to pose as some sort of super-savant with a brilliant new theoretical insight into how the world works.

Many years ago, Henry Hazlitt also saw the fallacy of Keynes and pointed out that his allegedly "brilliant refutation" consisted of declaring Say's Law invalid because it is invalid. 2 This is akin to a physicist suddenly declaring that the Law of Gravity is no longer applicable to humans because it is no longer applicable, and then expecting men to suddenly be able to flap their arms as wings and fly through the sky upon the utterance of such a declaration.

Why it all sounds absolutely marvelous, one can almost imagine FDR replying to his brain trust when informed of the wonders to be worked with Keynes' "new economics." If capitalism has reached its mature stage and can no longer produce enough purchasing power, then we in Washington must step in and get the system going again. If people don't have enough money, then all we have to do is print up more and our problems will be solved. It's really all very simple, isn't it? Our growth can actually be as great as we want it to be. Our wealth will be unlimited. The power to create that wealth lies with benevolent leaders such as us in Washington. We can usher in an unbounded future of government managed prosperity. Oh, happy day! How could we not have thought of this before?

Stripped of all the eloquent conceptualizations and slick technical jargon, this was the great "innovation," the great "revolutionary insight" of Keynes: If we want to become wealthier as a nation and avoid economic recessions, then all we need to do is print up more money.

The outrageous folly of such a proposal and the willingness of learned men to fall for its lure when encased in sophisticated verbiage, are terribly embarrassing when one thinks through the basic principles involved and projects into the future what the long run ramifications will be. Nevertheless, the most powerful office of the most powerful country in the world accepted such fiscal flimflammery as valid economic theory. And every administration since FDR has been doing the same thing -- printing up more money to make us all more "prosperous." But as any legitimate economist knows, money itself is not wealth. If money was wealth, then the government could just print up a million dollars for everybody and wipe poverty off the face of the earth. Money is just a substitute for wealth. True wealth is the goods and services that we have produced. It can never be created with a printing press.

Contrary to all the technocratic government wizards and advocates of "new economics" that have descended upon us since 1932, Say's Law of Markets has not been refuted, and it will never be refuted as long as there is a universe and a thing called human nature to exist within it.

Actually the Keynesian intellectuals knew all this. They just conned themselves into believing that Say's Law would not work quickly enough to get us out of the Depression, and that they would only print up a little bit of money whenever they needed it (to prime the pump so to say) and always keep the boom of prosperity going whenever it was showing signs of slipping into a recession.

This is the reasoning of the drug addict though. He also cons himself into believing that he will only take a little bit of his drug whenever he needs it (to pep himself up so to say), and always keep the boom of a pleasant high going, whenever it is showing signs of slipping into a depression.

The problem with such self-deception is that neither drug addicts nor federal bankers can ever stop with just a little bit of the drug they have become accustomed to. They always need ever increasing doses to maintain their high, and invariably they continue such injections to the breaking point of either death or massive depression.

Why We Bought into the Keynesian Con
If one wants to know why we got onto the inflation-deflation roller coaster of Keynesian economics, this is the reason. Ideologically warped intellectuals, with grandiose dreams of ushering in a utopian economic order, succeeded in convincing the American people that their economy is dangerous if left alone. Adopting the rationality level of witch doctors, these cerebral parvenus taught two generations of pundits and politicians that all modern economies need the regulatory guidance of government's "benevolent" hand to smooth out the rough spots and continually "increase" the purchasing power of the consumer through inflation of the money supply so as to create a prolonged boom of prosperity.

What has taken place during the past 65 years is a prolonged boom all right -- the most ungodly and unrestrained inflationary spiral that America has ever seen throughout her entire history. Keynesians proclaim that their theories and policies cured us of the Depression of the 1930's and gave us all this beautiful "economic growth." But here's the rub. It's not genuine growth! It's a pseudo-stimulated growth created with excessive paper dollars.

Crashing addicts taking heroin to get rid of their withdrawal symptoms don't delude themselves into the fantasy that they are curing themselves and that everything will be all right the next morning. They know very well that what they are doing is simply consuming more of the very poison that jacked up their body's system in the first place, which can only bring about a deeper addiction and more severe complications later on. They continue their destructive habit because they are hooked, but they don't delude themselves with fantasies of physiological propriety. Keynesians lack even this semblance of rationality.

What we have done to our economy under the name of Keynesian economics is to inject the heroin of paper dollars into its bloodstream, and now we consider ourselves cured from the Depression of the 30's. This is what Keynesians teach in the schools. But the truth is we never did get out of the Depression genuinely, because we didn't produce our way out -- because we didn't have the wherewithal to let Say's Law of Markets operate. Instead, we rid ourselves of our economic malaise with nothing but a giant fix. We stimulated into being a huge economic boom of technological might and false prosperity on a foundation of collapsible paper money and massive debt.

When Keynesian liberals attribute our recovery from the Depression to Roosevelt and his supposedly ingenious New Deal policies, they are speaking the moronic nonsense that communist ideologues utilized to promote their Potemkin villages under Stalin. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression. In 1939, after seven years of massive government intervention into the marketplace from a phalanx of ABC bureaucracies invented by Roosevelt's planners and a convoluted array of opportunist economic programs, we were as firmly and as deeply mired in the Depression as before.

"[I]n his first two full terms of eight years," writes biographer John T. Flynn, "President Roosevelt never produced any recovery whatever. When he was elected there were 11,586,000 persons unemployed. In 1939 -- seven years later -- when the war struck in Europe, there were still 11,369,000 persons unemployed. These figures are supplied by the American Federation of Labor. In 1932 when he was elected there were 4,155,000 households with 16,620,000 persons on relief. In 1939, seven years later, there were 4,327,000 households with 19,648,000 persons on relief. In the presence of these undisputed facts how can any sober-minded citizen suppose that Mr. Roosevelt brought recovery to the United States?" 3

It is difficult to believe scholars of any stature can continue to claim that Roosevelt and his New Deal legislators got us out of the Depression, for the "undisputed facts" certainly tell a totally different story. None of the policies put forth by these disgruntled collectivist schemers did anything but further confuse an already dismayed business world. In 1939, the country was still floundering deep in the throes of the Depression. Confidence in the economy had failed totally to materialize, for how could businessmen have any confidence to act and plan when they had no idea what the administration in Washington was going to do next. Roosevelt's pervasive interventions into the market to manipulate and suppress its forces through Mussolini style planning bureaucracies shut down the entrepreneurial risk takers that create productivity. Staffed with rabid collectivists like Rexford Tugwell and Alvin Hansen, his brain trust effectively destroyed any hope of recovery that only the free flow of prices, wages, interest rates, and profits could bring.

Roosevelt and his aides had no understanding of this need at all. As a result, every one of their suppressive controls and redistributive programs only made matters worse. The Federal Reserve's previous expansion of the money supply in excess of the growth of goods and services during the 20's was what created the collapse because such fiat money expansion cannot be continued indefinitely. But the severity of the collapse was compounded by FDR's moonshine economics following Hoover's disastrous price, wage, and tariff follies. The primary point to be learned from all this is that excessive monetary expansion and contraction brought on the Depression, which was then intensified by the failure of the government planners to realize that it was their pre-1929 policies that had caused the crash in the first place and their post-1929 policies that were extending it. 4

In end, it was World War II and its accompanying inflation that got us out of the Depression, not any of the New Deal fiascoes that welfare statists are so proud of. It was only after the war with Japan and Germany began that "recovery" took place. Roosevelt did nothing to aid recovery with his economic programs! What he did was what all statists do when their domestic programs are self-destructing -- he maneuvered his country into war, which requires millions of men and armaments to be paid for with massive fiscal deficits that are monetized by the Fed. It is this "monetary drug stimulant" that gave us the appearance of getting America moving in a healthy economic way again. Today's statist meddlers will, of course, attempt the same thing again. Our War on Terrorism will be monetized.

As for our situation today, we have quite simply never come down from that inflationary high generated by World War II. We have pumped massive doses of paper money into the economy for over six decades now at an arbitrary rate decided by federal bankers. Where it will all end is anybody's guess. How long it can be sustained without incurring either runaway inflation or another devastating depression is impossible to say with certainty.

We can say this, however: The distortions and malinvestments over the past 65 years (brought on by Keynesian theory) have become so grotesque that a severe protracted liquidation of the resultant massive debt must now take place before any kind of genuine health can be restored to our economy. Because the Fed is fighting this severe liquidation process at every step along the way, it will take many years to complete, and it will result in far more misery than if it were allowed to take its natural course.

What the grand pooh-bah Greenspan cannot bring himself to face is that our Keynesian "boom-bust" economy will never be improved as long as government (and its corruptible policy makers) try to control and manipulate the financial workings of the marketplace from behind their mahogany desks in Washington. To face this, Greenspan would have to admit that he and his fellow pooh-bahs are not only irrelevant, but actually the primary cause behind our present plight. The chance of such an admission tumbling forth from these bureaucrats is about as good as Bill Clinton making a guest appearance on O'Reilly's "No Spin Zone" to confess how sleazy his life has been.

The most important insight to be grasped from this 65-year Keynesian travesty is that there can never be a full-scale depression in any economy without a full-scale deflation of the money supply. But there is never any need for a full-scale deflation of the money supply unless there has first been a full-scale inflation of the money supply. Economies only crash AFTER they have been hyper-stimulated with fiat money inflation. In light of the fact that it is only the federal government and its fascist central banking monopoly that can create a full scale inflation, would it not be prudent to suggest that we get the government and the Federal Reserve out of the money creation business? If we want stability in our economy, providing power seeking bureaucrats and bankers with the means to arbitrarily inflate the dollar is hardly the way to bring it about.

The Modern Rationalization

Here is where our dilemma lies, however. Neo-Keynesians, who control political-economic policy in Washington today for both Republicans and Democrats, justify their relentless monetary inflation over this past century with the claim that such policy is necessary to "create economic growth." Without the steady expansion of paper money throughout the economy, they tell us, our society would never be able to achieve prosperity. This is one of the most egregious self-cons in the history of man! And it is readily seen for the lie that it is by simply investigating our economic history.

I have presented the following figures in previous articles, but they are so important to be aware of, they bear repeating over and over again. As recorded in The Statistical History of the United States, real wages for the workingman tripled in the years 1850-1913, and the GDP increased over 500% averaging 4.3% annual growth from 1870-1913. 5 This was all done without any inflationary infusions of fiat money from the Fed because there was no Fed. This highly productive era, based upon the "barbarous relic" of gold, was accompanied by an actual deflation of prices. From 1800 to 1913, there was an overall 30% reduction in the Consumer Price Index from 43 to 30. 6 That's right, we had 4.3% annual growth amidst gently deflating prices all without government fiat money, all without FOMC pooh-bahs, all without today's Gargantua on the Potomac.

Despite these irrefutable facts, Keynesian statists still maintain that government inflation of the money supply is mandatory for a productive economy. This in face of the total destruction of the dollar since 1913. This in face of the fact that average GDP growth is only 2.5% annually today. This in face of the fact that real wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years because the combine of monetary inflation and government taxes negates the workingman's increased wage income. This in face of the fact that hundreds of thousands of the elderly on fixed incomes have the sunshine ripped from their lives by the insidious theft of inflation.

What is so upsetting is the difficulty involved in getting establishment intellects to focus on these travesties? Teaching the facts of reality to Keynesian statists is like trying to train a cat not to mess up the living room rug with its excretions. You have to rub its nose in its mess repeatedly and then show it the litter box over and over. I fear we have a lot of nose rubbing left to do with Keynesians. They haven't a clue as to what a fetid mess they have created.

It is easy to understand why the Keynesian establishment does not want to face the economic facts of reality regarding this issue. It would mean that its revered paradigm is (and has been for 65 years) theoretically wrong and thus responsible for the financial chaos that plagues us today. Accepting such a truth would mean the same thing that accepting Copernicus' discoveries meant to the Catholic Church in the 16th century -- relinquishment of substantial power and prestige. In this case, Washington's neo-Keynesian bankers and politicians would have to relinquish substantial power to the private sector, which of course is anathema to government establishments.

Therefore, Keynesian and neo-Keynesian irrationality is not dead by any means. The idea that governments can direct their economies for the betterment of the citizenry by manipulating interest rates and injecting relentless rounds of "paper liquidity" into the marketplace continues to hold sway over today's intellectuals, even though such a centralized planning paradigm is slowly evolving into economic fascism. It lives in the minds of statists everywhere as the ruling economic dogma of modern times, and they cannot (or will not) think their way out of it. As a result, mankind continues to suffer needlessly, and is now facing a possible financial apocalypse of unimaginable horror.

Salvation Comes Only from Contrarians

Sadly, this kind of blindness and dogmatism in face of error is the inevitable nature of the discovery of truth. The great majority of a society's intellectual community becomes locked into its established paradigms even when those paradigms are shown to be as moronic as treating disease with leeches and creating wealth with paper money. The great majority sees only what is established, never new truths to be discovered. Only a select few who are contrarian thinkers can see the truth and are willing to endure the inevitable ostracism to promote it.

It is to such contrarian minds that the world owes its advances (i.e., its paradigm shifts) -- socially, politically, morally and scientifically -- for the contrarian is possessed of the vision to see beyond his fellows and the courage to challenge firmly entrenched error. He has the ability to mentally encompass wider vistas and integrate more profoundly the vast conceptualizations necessary to get at the truth in any given field of inquiry.

Most importantly the contrarian mind is not plagued with the desire to be popular and acclaimed in his own time. He cares little for establishment acceptance. Not that he will shun acclaim if it happens to come to him, but it is not the primary motivation driving him. Truth is what compels him. Herein lies his strength and one of the important reasons for his acute clarity. The contrarian is not obsessed with popularity, and therefore does not delude himself with the entrenched dogmas of the herd as the more common minds do.

There is a law of life that is identifiable here, and it can be stated thusly: Truth will always reveal itself only to the contrarian, for his is the only mind open enough and creative enough to see it. Not that all contrarians speak truth, for the world is chock full of nuts wading in delirium. But the truth will always come to us only through contrarian minds -- thinkers like Socrates, Galileo, Adam Smith, Pasteur, Einstein, Ludwig von Mises. Establishment intellectuals are needed to solidify and disseminate already confirmed truths, but they are not capable of promoting new truths (or they are not willing to). And because of the flaws in human nature, they invariably become roadblocks to those contrarians that are capable and willing.

Such is the condition of our intellectual fields today. As always, the contrarians are at war with the establishment, and there are profound revolutions going on. Old established paradigms are being shattered. New discoveries and visions in economics, physics, philosophy, biology, medicine, etc. are pouring forth to stir up elemental debates presumed to be settled by those who argue from pre-set ideas.

Every advance that mankind makes throughout history is accomplished because small groups of contrarian thinkers are willing to challenge the old order. In doing so, they foment a mental revolution and teach their fellow men a new way of thinking.

This is the paradigmatic nature of intellectual progress; the great majority of thinkers in any given era is forever imprisoned in the old order and need to be enlightened. If one wishes to know truth, he must understand that the established order will seldom provide it for him. He must possess the power to think for himself, or as Ayn Rand put it, "see through his own eyes." He must cultivate a totally independent curiosity, and he must be desirous of whatever the truth turns out to be -- even when it spoils his fondest, previous convictions. The reason why human civilization advances so haltingly and laboriously is because there are only a few intellects capable of such independence in any given generation.

Our great danger today is that the Keynesian paradigm is not relegated to just one specific academic discipline such as medicine or astronomy. Because Keynesians control money and economic policy, they also control political policy, which means they link up with the State. Because they control these three all-important areas of our lives, they possess the power of Samson to pull the entire house down around us. Because their poisonous ideas have become so entrenched over the decades and have extended the debt pyramid to such stratospheric levels, we are now faced with a choice like Ulysses between the monsters Scylla and Charybdis. We can go cold turkey by cutting off the "fiat money stimulant," which would bring several hard years of deflationary misery, but would allow us to rebuild our economy on freedom and gold. Or we can succumb to illusory hope by trying to reinflate a comatose economy and pray that somehow the laws of reality can be suspended, which will compound our addiction and stretch the crisis out over a far longer time span with far more misery. The grand witch doctor Greenspan is obviously bent on doing the latter. Heaven help us.

Notes:

Steven Kates, Say's Law and the Keynesian Revolution, Edward Elgar, 1998.
Henry Hazlitt, The Failure of the "New Economics": An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, D. Van Nostrand, 1960.
John T. Flynn, The Roosevelt Myth, Revised Edition, Devin-Adair, 1956, p. 426.
See Murray N. Rothbard, America's Great Depression, Mises Institute, 2000. For a less technical treatment of the subject, see Gene Smiley, Rethinking the Great Depression, Ivan R. Dee, 2002.
The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present, Fairfield Publishers, 1960, pp. 91, 141, 409, 413.
The World Almanac 2002, World Almanac Books, 2002, p. 103.

Corruption of the Markets

by Nelson Hultberg

The corruption and the investor exploitation, so widespread in the business world today, are being denounced by everyone and understood by almost no one. What is most exasperating is the robotic ignorance with which our U.S. Attorneys, our politicians, and our professorial cheerleaders in the colleges and universities approach this issue.

The rash of corruption, not only on Wall Street, but throughout the entire economy today is said to be inherent in the capitalist system itself. The system of free enterprise naturally leads to malfeasance, our scholars tell us. And thus it is the capitalist system that must be restructured with much stricter regulation from Washington. A laissez-faire marketplace is dangerous because it unleashes individuals to exploit their fellowmen with greed and misrepresentation. What are needed are larger and more powerful bureaucracies to oversee this potential danger to the people. Prosecutors must be given more leeway and less strict guidelines in legal procedures. Bureaucrats must be given increased funding. The State must be enhanced.

This view is totally upside down! Corruption in the markets is not the fault of capitalism; it is the fault of government intervention into capitalism! Government is not our savior; government is our biggest and most nefarious corrupter.

Listen to what Mr. P. Ogden writes about this issue recently: "So Mr. Greenspan wants the corporations to re-establish trust in the markets...by straightening out their ethics and bookkeeping. Well what wonderful role models corporations have in Mr. Greenspan and the FED, and the US Federal Government (especially the Treasury).

"These institutions and their chief executives have for years been actively involved in 'influencing, supporting, making orderly' and in recent years flat out FIXING the markets. Through their departments and practices they interfere with the major stock indexes at key junctures, cap the precious metals markets, run the printing presses at prodigious rates, cancel 30 year government bonds, make extended and excessive rate cuts to manipulate interest rates, manage the financial news, mount astounding levels of debt, and constantly 'adjust' the official inflation and employment indicators to downplay any less than positive news.

"These unethical and unwise tactics remove the warning canaries from the economy, create bubbles in stocks, bonds, credit, housing, debt, the US dollar and substitute their personal views and goals for the discipline of the market. And then Greenspan has the audacity to tell corporations to clean up their act! Yes, we've been poorly served by many of our major corporations but the standard has been set by our federal government and the Federal Bank. The US public has been duped and misguided in the most important and fundamental ways by the latter, not the former."  [LeMetropole Cafe, April 16, 2004]

Amen! The real criminal today is our omnipresent Federal Government! Its criminality permeates every facet of our lives through its inflation of our currency that insidiously steals our wealth; through its damned lies and statistics of hedonic calculation; through its brazen use of the PPT to manipulate the prices of equities and precious metals; through its egregious fabrication of intelligence reports to justify war and global hegemony; through its violation of our right to equality under the law via its progressive income tax; through its buying of millions of votes with pork and privilege to perpetuate its power; and most despicable of all, through its relentless proliferation of cancerous debt which must reduce the future lives of our children to poverty and misery. The list of corrupt acts is endless. The criminality of our "Washington protectors" is eroding our society like drug lords decimate a clean and thriving neighborhood. Devastation and depravity spring up where freedom and hope are supposed to prevail.

Leave the Marketplace Alone

The important point to grasp about all this is that corruption is not naturally inherent in the free-market as our intellectuals and our politicians so disingenuously tell us. Capitalism is being used as a scapegoat to further enhance the power of government by leftist ideologues and political one-worlders. Capitalism is freedom, and thus it must be smeared as a system of economic organization if the modern day power elites are to succeed in attaining their authoritarian goal of world domination. Economic freedom is not by nature corrupt. On the contrary, it is corrupted by political men of zeal who have lost their moral compasses in a nihilistic modernity that worships the power of raw pragmatism. Let's take a look beneath the surface events to the real roots of corruption.

Left alone in a true free-market, businessmen must sink or swim, produce at a profit or get into some other business. Where there are no government subsidies to prop one up and no government price controls to protect one from competition, the best product for the lowest price wins the consumer to his door. Bribery gains no buyers. Only quality products and lower prices will. But enter the government with its special privileges, its pro­tective legislation, its arbitrary licensing procedures, its endless regulatory boards -- and you have set the perfect stage for corruption.

Few businessmen will resist the temptation to urge, cajole, endlessly lobby, and event­ually bribe their elected officials into handing out subsidies, or passing protective legislation to safeguard their markets if those elected offi­cials have the power to do so. This is especially so when such businessmen are taught from birth that subsidies to failing businesses and favoritist legislation for their markets are the "proper duties" of a government.

When politicians hold the power of life and death over a business because of legislative controls they decide to pass, or a license they will or will not grant, then businessmen must become corrupt in order to survive. The government, through its power of intervention (and the arbitrary use of that power), has forced them to take part in political pay­offs, or go out of business.

A centralized government controlled system must, by its nature, evolve into a sordid game of lobbying, bootlicking, favors granted and bribery, with its rewards going to the sycophants, the inept and the amoral -- in contrast to the free-market system of competition, that rewards skill, efficiency, innovative daring, and ever increasing productivity.

Thus, the answer to the corruption, so rampant among our elected officials and corporate heads today, is all too obvious: Get the government out of the economy! End the "mixed-economy" of corporatism and statism, and restore the Founders' vision of a laissez-faire economy. This means ending the "economic fascism" that is taking over our country.

Mr. Greenspan, you are part of the largest, most corrupt and criminal agency in America, and you have the effrontery to tell corporate America to clean up its ethics! This is rank hypocrisy! You and your government friends are destroying the entire foundation of a free society with your wanton disregard for the sacred principles of our Constitution, the eternal laws of Nature, and the most basic tenets of economics. You know very well that, as slimy as some of our corporations are, they by themselves are not the cause of our crashing and decadent society. You know very well that it is the MANIPULATORY policies that you and your bureaucratic comrades are systematically carrying out that is our undoing.

You know that corporations and banks become threats only by combining with the power of government bureaucracy to receive special privileges -- the very power that you so exuberantly wield from Washington. You know that this kind of "corporate-state merging" is ECONOMIC FASCISM. You know this because you and your Objectivist colleagues wrote extensively about it back in the sixties. So Mr. Greenspan, let us not hear from you about corporate responsibility, or capitalism, or freedom. You represent a criminal agency -- the Federal Government -- that cares not one whit about responsibility, or capitalism, or freedom.

Lest I be misunderstood here, this is not an appeal for economic anarchy. Government has a definite role to play in society. Its duties are to punish criminals who violate the laws of the land, and this means businessmen like Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski and Enron's Jeffrey Skilling. But it means that the government should stay out of the area of attempting to control the commerce and the money of a nation. Men work far more productively and honestly when their decisions are left unencumbered to be judged by the rigors of the marketplace and not by the corruptible souls of regulatory bureaucrats. Their efforts are far more magnanimous when their wealth is not stolen from them through currency debasement.

The Moral Factor

Government intervention thus lies at the root of the economic ruin sweeping through our society today. But there is another vital dimension of this evil that needs to be understood. Government intervention is only one-half of the problem. The other half of the blame for today's corruption belongs in the realm of philosophy, most specifically to the concept of moral relativism that has worked its way into the fabric of our society during the 20th century. Much of what we are reaping today stems from decades of teaching to Americans the doctrine that there are no objective rights and wrongs, that ethics is a matter of personal and cultural preference.

As an example of this, let's scrutinize further the stock market meltdown of 2001-2002 and its accompanying accounting scandals on Wall Street. Collectivists are converging upon this issue like fleas to a filthy dog to lay the blame on "unbridled capitalism," and an ignorant media is powerless to dispute their false explanations.

The fervency of the collectivists on this issue (from the academy, to the pressroom, to the courtroom) can be summed up with a bit of Shakespeare: "Me thinks thou doest protest too much." These institutions of our establishment are screaming bloody murder about the Enron-Tyco-Wall Street accounting scandals when it is collectivism itself that has brought such tragedies about. Is there a bit of scapegoating going on? Me thinks so.

Collectivists are concentrating on just the slimy individual perpetrators and ignoring the basic causes of such corruption. And there is a good reason for this ignoring of the deeper causes and concentrating on only the actual perpetrators. The deeper causes can be traced to the philosophy of collectivism and its economic manifestation in Keynesian economics. We must always ask what are the root causes? Why did such a seedy lot of entrepreneurs spring up on Wall Street? Is this the real nature of free enterprise? Or is it the inevitable result of instilling false moral and economic truths into several generations of Americans?

It is this writer's view that the roots of the accounting scandals lie in collectivism's two most fundamental policies -- 1) the teaching of moral relativism throughout our schools, and 2) the inflation of the money supply throughout our economy. When the Federal Government intervenes into the economy to flood it with billions of dollars in fiat money (which it did throughout the 90's), a large portion of that money flows into corporate CEO hands via the stock buying public. When we teach several generations of Americans the ethical dictum that there are no objective rights and wrongs in life (i.e., moral relativism), we create large amounts of corporate CEO's without any inner moral compasses to guide them in their decisions. Corporations, run by men with no objective morals and flush with the false paper profits of Keynesian economics, will not be rigorously straight-arrow in their financial dealings -- that you can be sure of.

Fail to instill moral compasses into businessmen's minds in their youth, then stuff their pockets with excessive paper dollars in their adult years, and we have created an almost certain mixture for corruption. This is because inflated paper dollars create an illusion of wealth in the minds of the corporate CEO's, which turns a certain percentage of them into wheeler-dealers who then search out vehicles in which to invest such paper dollars. This creates what is called in economic parlance malinvestment. Mix in a bubble stock market that results from the massive inflation policies of the Fed, and many of these corporate wheeler-dealers are going to start falsifying the earnings and profit pictures of their malinvestments so as to try and impress Wall Street and the bubble frenzy of buyers who are also flush with paper dollars. This is because rosy profit pictures attract buyers for a company's stock, which increases that stock's share price. Higher share prices increase CEO salaries and stock option revenues.

It doesn't take a genius to grasp this. If adequate profits fail to come forth from certain malinvestments, and if there are no moral compasses in the minds of the wheeler-dealer CEO's who launched those malinvestments, then as sure as outhouses create a stench, we have created a situation that induces bogus accounting. This is the nature of men. Without an objective moral code to guide their actions, they become devious and irresponsible. And if the economy is flush with Fed created paper dollars, they will become all the more devious and irresponsible in pursuit of those paper dollars.

Study the results of the 1929 stock market crash, and you will see the same patterns of corruption -- induced by expansionary monetary policy and the acid rain of moral relativism showered upon a new 20th century generation of Americans. Feed paper money (i.e., false wealth) into an economy, combine it with the belief that there are no absolute rights and wrongs for human behavior, and human greed will turn ballistic as sure as politicians speak out of both sides of their mouths.

Modern psychologists tell us that the reasons for human greed are many faceted. It's a very complex problem, they explain. Baloney! The most important motive is plain old human nature. As the philosopher Richard Weaver so eloquently put it, man has an "immemorial tendency…to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing. The fact of this tendency everyone should be able to testify to, not only from his observation but also from his personal history."  [Richard Weaver, Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, p. 146.]

What Weaver is saying is what all great intellects of history prior to the 20th century understood -- there is a profound flaw born into men, which is their capacity to blank out on acts of malfeasance in the midst of performing them. The fact that modern intellectuals are oblivious to this flaw is why they can neither understand, nor offer any solution to, the pathologies and corruptions of today's world.

The present corruption of Wall Street is not automatically built into capitalism as an economic system. It is brought about by mixing human nature with inflationary monetary policy and philosophical relativism -- two of the more destructive pillars of political collectivism. Allow such a mix to dominate a society, and a vast, corrupt cesspool in Washington and on Wall Street is guaranteed. To clean up such a mixed-economy cesspool will require elimination of the pipelines that feed it, which means we will have to forsake inflationary monetary policy and restore the teaching of an objective code of ethics in our schools.

In conclusion, the major share of the blame for today's corporate corruption lies in the nature of government manipulation of the market and the teaching of moral relativism. Capitalism as an economic system is certainly not to blame. Capitalism, left unfettered by bureaucratic manacles and the necessity to buy off the leeches of officialdom, works its miracles regularly and dispenses its rewards fairly -- to those who produce the most efficiently. Get the government out of its workings, combine it with an objective moral code, and it would be a clean and superior form of socio-economic organization.

The Cassandras and the Optimists

by Nelson Hultberg

In response to a question about an upcoming pennant race back in the 1950's, Leo Durocher of the New York Giants once replied, "Whom knows?" This charmingly crude retort pretty much sums up our best answer today to how the great economic upheaval looming ahead of us will unfold. The thousands of convoluted variables shifting in and out of importance daily, that comprise the global economy, make human efforts at forecasting about as reliable as our predictions on the weather. Still, despite the exasperating uncertainty over it all, there are several strong probabilities that we can glean from the political-economic tea leaves if we are good enough students of history and human nature.

I engaged in debate the other evening about these probabilities with some acquaintances who held the view that I was an unreasonable Cassandra spreading undue alarmism. As they saw it, deflation was impossible, the economy was robust, America had endured far worse before, and she would do so again. What follows are some answers to their optimistic scenario.

Deflation Not Possible

Their first objection to my "alarmism" was that deflation is not possible with a paper currency.

This is probably true, I replied. It would be difficult for the money supply to deflate as long as the boys at the Fed have access to a printing press and the willingness to use it. But bubbles can, and will deflate. For example, Basic Investment 101 says that the bond and Dow bubbles must burst and deflate in the face of intense dollar inflation on the part of the Fed. (The real estate bubble is a wild card in this scenario and could go either way.) The problem that many people have with this issue is that they see the clash of inflation and deflation as an either-or kind of thing. This is a false picture brought on by viewing deflation in only its narrow monetary definition and ignoring its relation to prices (more on this later). In my last article I said we would see both Scylla (inflation) and Charybdis (deflation) in tandem, which is a more accurate picture of what must unfold.

How precisely the tandem will come upon us we can't say with precision, of course. But as I see it, there will be wild dollar inflation from the Fed because that is all they know how to do. And they will feel that they have to do something in the face of a melting down economy. But their dollar inflation will not sustain the Dow; it will kill the Dow and send it to the bottom of the charts around 4000. Thus, we will have dollar inflation and Dow deflation. The same scenario will take place with Treasury bonds. As the dollar inflates, bonds will deflate. Greenspan's two major bubbles (the Dow and Treasuries) will burst in a slow motion collapse that grinds down over the next 5-10 years. And since the Dow is such an integral aspect in the people's perception of how wealthy they are, there will be a catastrophic transformation of mood among the millions of investors that look to the Dow as the indicator of "how we are doing economically in America."

This second bursting of the Dow (and the dramatic mood change it evokes) will bring on a painfully STAGNANT economy along the lines of the 1970's stagflation. Only this time it will develop into hyper-stagflation, or what Franklin Sanders has termed a "hyperinflationary depression." This will be the Kondratieff winter of 2000-2015. It will manifest differently than the last Kondratieff in the 1930's, just as that one in the thirties manifested differently than the prior winters of the 19th century. This difference of manifestation is due to the cultural and technological differences of our era and also to the fact that we have learned from the past. Unlike our predecessors in the 1930's, we now know about the Kondratieff cycle. And because we do, we will take defensive action to try and avoid its winter season as it descends upon us. All we will accomplish, however, is to delay and exacerbate the winter's ultimate intensity. We will not prevent it from its highly deflationary, debt-purging role.

A final crushing blow will be some sort of ruinous restructuring of Social Security that will be painted by our government as a "new realistic plan for America's seniors in the 21st century." But the public will perceive it for what it is -- a royal screwing by our oleaginous windbags in Washington. And their mood will further reflect such a perception by turning darker still.

Therefore, inflation is coming in a big way because the manipulative charlatans at the Fed have nothing else in their arsenal. But their "dollar" inflation will NOT keep the ravages of deflation from afflicting the various bubbles of our economy. The Dow and Treasury bonds are headed south to Antarctica. The jury is still out on real estate; it might escape deflation in the meltdown because the public will have to have some place to funnel their depreciating dollars that the Fed is so benevolently printing for them. Of course, gold will benefit greatly (and probably silver also).

So we will have an economy in which some sectors are deflating, while other sectors are inflating. The key is to get our money into the ones that are inflating. While the establishment lemmings will get fleeced by the Wall Street-Washington touts hawking the idiocy of bonds and equities to the bitter end, those of us in the hard money community know better than to listen to snake oil spin to sell paper illusions. The choice for us will not be difficult at all. We will stash our wealth in gold (and in silver for those who are certain it will become the "poor man's money").

Why the Optimists Are Wrong

Part of the problem for today's punditry is that they define the term "deflation" as only a shrinking money supply. Consequently, they insist that a depressionary scenario is impossible because the Fed can print money whenever it wishes and will dispense that money to whatever extent it needs to. Therefore in the eyes of the Keynesian establishment, no deflation can ever take place with the Fed primed at the printing presses and their helicopters gassed up at the airport.

The flaw in this kind of thinking is that deflation has other connotations. There is "monetary" deflation, and there is also "price" deflation. There are two types of deflation just as there are two types of inflation. All free-market advocates realize that monetary inflation brings on price inflation. It is the prior increase in the ACTUAL SUPPLY of money that brings on general price inflation. The monetary increase causes the price increases -- elementary cause and effect that sadly escapes the Keynesians. Deflation operates in a like manner, only in the opposite direction.

There is a far more essential point about all this, however, that is vital to understand. The strict cause and effect relationship between money creation and prices that leads to general price inflation does not always apply to the deflation scenario. For example, once an economy has reached an advanced stage of monetary inflation, it can experience a "price deflation" without a decrease in the ACTUAL SUPPLY of money. All that has to take place is a decrease in the RATE of monetary expansion on the part of the Fed, and prices will start nose-diving. The actual money supply itself does not have to decrease; there just has to be a slowing of the speed with which the Fed is expanding the money supply. For example, if the Fed has been expanding money at an average annual rate of 6% over several years and then slows the expansion to an average rate of 3% for several years, it will bring on price deflation in sectors that are vulnerable (i.e., asset classes such as real estate and equities).

Since monetary creation today is primarily debt creation, the Fed's monetary policies to regulate the economy are putting the American people deeper and deeper into debt with each passing year. The speed of this debt creation is increasing at an alarming rate, yet it is bringing less and less increase in national income and GDP.

For example, Michael Hodges shows us in The Grandfather Economic Report that the amount of debt creation needed to generate national wealth today is almost 2 times what it was just 20 years ago. In 1983, it required $11.5 trillion in debt to generate $5 trillion in national income. Today it requires $37 trillion in debt to generate $8.7 in national income. http://mwhodges.home.att.net/nat-debt/debt-nat.htm

What this means is that debt has to be created at a faster and faster rate in order to keep the economy growing. If the Fed does not continually increase debt at a faster rate every decade, it runs the risk of the economy slowing to a halt. The vulnerable sectors of equities and real estate will start to deflate. The bubbles will start to burst.

Twenty years ago, we needed $2.3 in debt to create $1 in growth. Today we need $4.3 in debt to create $1 in growth. How much debt will we need next year? Next decade? This is a monstrous debt spiral trap that we have climbed onto. This is why the Fed has to keep inflating the money at prodigious levels. If it doesn't, we face an economic meltdown.

More and More Credit Needed

The question is: How much more debt can be loaded onto the American people? The Keynesian credit train that we boarded in 1936 is no longer just chugging along creating mild amounts of debt as in the fifties and sixties. The train is now streaking down the tracks in order to keep the economy afloat. At some point the debt load it is creating will become insufferable to the consumers and businesses of America. They will then undergo a dramatic change in mood. They will then stop borrowing and start saving. They will start paying off debt instead of incurring more debt. This will slow the rate of monetary expansion and bring on price deflation in those asset sectors that are vulnerable.

It is at this point that the Fed will be forced to ratchet up its "liquidity injections" to a fever pitch in order to induce enough monetary growth to avoid crashing the economy. They will have to start monetizing heavily. They will have to gas up the helicopters. They will have to run the risk of bringing on hyperinflation and the terrible fate of Germany's Weimar Republic of the early 1920's.

Eventually the Fed's choice will be either to continue onto Weimar, or attempt to slow the speed of credit expansion so as to avoid collapse of the currency. But if the Fed engineers do attempt to slow monetary growth, then just the slowing itself will induce the prices of various sectors to DEFLATE. Thus serious price deflations are coming to our economy in the upcoming years even though the Fed will be pushing credit/debt expansion and outright monetization to ever-higher levels.

This is what I mean when I talk of deflation visiting us in tandem with inflation. I mean that prices will be seriously deflating in various sectors, not the actual supply of money throughout the economy. The two most crucial sectors susceptible to price deflation will be the asset classes of equities and bonds.

Does this mean then that an actual deflation of the supply of money is impossible? Not at all. Actual monetary deflation could take place also. For example, if things get bad enough, if prices deflate far enough in such sectors as equities, bonds, and real estate, then all businesses and consumers could draw in their horns drastically. There would take place a catastrophic mood change throughout the economy. Velocity of money would slow to a crawl. People would cease to borrow and spend. They would become very cautious and rush to pay off debt. Those who couldn't handle their debt load would default. Bankers would tighten up their loan qualifications to protect their bottom line. If severe enough, these actions could bring about an actual shrinking of the money supply because modern day money is basically credit/debt. It is not cash. It is all merely computer entries of promises to pay. When those promises dry up, then what we now consider to be money dries up.

This would be a classic deflationary spiral in which the total money aggregates for the economy actually shrink. It would be a disaster. While unlikely, it is not impossible. The collective mood of the billions of spenders and investors that make up modern day economies cannot be predicted with certainty. Monetary deflation could happen. It all depends upon how vigorously the Fed is willing to pursue the outright printing of new money, and then how vigorously the people will be willing to spend it. 

The Terrible Choice We Face

What are we to conclude from all this? The level of credit and debt that we are now creating CANNOT continue to be increased at a faster rate indefinitely? Eventually the credit/debt expansion on the part of the Fed will encounter what a runaway freight train with ever-increasing speed must encounter. Either its engineers slow the speed, or the train flies off the tracks. It will be the same for the Fed; either it slows credit expansion, or it flies off the tracks into a Weimar-style oblivion. But if it slows the speed of money/debt creation, it puts the economy in terrible jeopardy because the Dow cannot survive such a slowing. The fact that all optimists think it can is one more example of how men hide their heads in the sand in face of uncomfortable truths.

The paramount question before us then is how long before the Fed's money/debt train must begin to slow in speed so as to avoid a Weimar-type scenario? Impossible to say, but hopefully the reader can see the dilemma we are now in. The Fed must continue to expand credit and debt at an ever-increasing rate because just slowing the "speed of expansion" will bring on price deflation in the crucial asset sectors such as equities and real estate that have been expanded into bubbles.

This is why Scylla and Charybdis will descend upon us in tandem, and why eventually the crisis will be horrendous. Contrary to the grand Keynesian illusion, the Fed cannot just moderately inflate and maintain a steady expansion of debt in the economy over time! Credit/debt creation loses its power to stimulate over time as the total debt of society increases. This leads eventually to the necessity of helicopter money, i.e., massive printing of new money that doesn't require the multiplier effect of fractional reserve banking to be effective. It is just injected straight into the economy via monetized deficits for military, pork and welfare spending. It is actual cash that ends up in the pockets of consumers and doesn't require them to apply for a loan. This is the last straw grasped for by a desperate Fed trying to maintain a decent GDP growth rate. This step will, of course, lead to rapidly rising prices, and if done too vigorously, runaway inflationary prices and the complete collapse of the currency.

The only alternative will be to bite the bullet and accept the necessity of a ravaging meltdown in order to work off all the debt. The reason why the meltdown must be ravaging is because the level of "debt creation" we have engaged in for the past 30 years has been gargantuan, and its growth is now accelerating like a heroin addict's dosage levels. This must bring a severe corrective phase to balance such insanity. This is the way the laws of nature work; actions bring reactions in proportion to the size and intensity of the original action.

This is the horrific dilemma that now confronts the boys at the Fed. This is Scylla and Charybdis starkly staring them in the face, and saying, "Which one of us do you prefer? You must choose; you cannot have an inbetween scenario! You have broken the laws of nature with too much abandon for far too long! Your greed and power lust are now coming home to roost. You must pay with suffering."

Not Yet Rome

This type of talk did not endear me to the optimists at all, so they changed tactics and zeroed in on what they felt was the real lunacy of the Cassandra scenario. They protested that even if we are in for some hard times, we are not yet Rome and we will not see that happening anytime soon.

I agreed. But what we will see, I said, is a velvet-glove dictatorship taking over America in the next 20 years under the guise of a "new kind of freedom" that will very subtly attempt to smuggle us into a one-world tyranny. Yes, we will get through this massive debt problem. But the question we must ask is, "In what form will we get through?" As I see it, martial law and a rewriting of the Constitution to accommodate the jack-boots natural propensity to bang down doors is quite possibly the way in which we will "get through the debt problem."

Optimists must sooner or later come to realize that there is no moderate, soft-landing scenario that we can bring about between Scylla and Charybdis. It is too late for that! We must choose, and both alternatives bring with them a high probability of some kind of ruthless dictatorial takeover of our country. This, a rational person gleans from history and human nature. Men will opt for tyranny when chaos is clawing at the edge of their survival. They will forfeit their liberty in hopes of establishing stability.

This is why our role in the gold community is not just to try and profit from the meltdown scenario, but also to educate the people as to how we must climb out of the maelstrom. We, who have been blessed with a sounder grasp of the cause and effect relationships taking place here, must try to help our fellows understand the nature of the crisis descending upon our society. We must try and explain to them the true nature of the chaos and its Federal Government-megabank origin. We must educate them that liberty and economic chaos do not go together. On the contrary, liberty and economic order go together as Adam Smith and the Founding Fathers understood. It is our centralized, manipulatory government that has brought us to the chaos. It is government that is obliterating the harmony of our economy in the way that a bear disrupts an industrious beehive in pursuit of the honey that those bees are producing. Government's paws are large and clumsy, and they wreck everything they touch in the path of their greedy reach.

Thus it is a fallacy to say that we must bring about a more centralized and more interventionist government in order to alleviate the chaos that is descending upon us. A true free-market will alleviate the chaos and still allow us to retain our rights and our freedom. It is not capitalism that has wrought our misery; it is government intervention into capitalism throughout the 20th century beginning with the Fed and World War I that has brought us to such a chaotic dilemma. Government is not the solution; government is the problem!

Can such a message be accepted in time? Whom knows? But a man must try to fight the forces of evil that he sees rising up around him. Even if he is doomed to defeat, he must fight. What kind of life have we lived if we let the black limousine boys win by default? If we have to go down, let us at least go down fighting with all the intellectual vigor that we possess, all the activist passion that we can muster.