As far as i know this problem – these problems – arose over two centuries as the federal government – all post-napoleonic governments – increasingly took on the role of “insurer of last resort”. In other words, the presumption of the utility risk mitigation provided by fiat money, federal credit, and income taxes was valued over the sovereignty both individual, local and federal of our assets. And the empirical evidence is that this strategy was not only competitively necessary, but resulted in vast increases in our standards of living.
I am just working through Anna’s writings now and I’ve noticed a few things that I want to explore:
CONSTRUCTIVIST
I am having a bit of trouble decomposing the logical (legal) dependencies of Anna’s arguments, but I think they are to natural law (individual sovereignty).
Sovereignty, which requires reciprocity, which requires truth(testimony), which is itself a duty(cost), and which together leave us no other means of cooperating other than markets in association, cooperation, production, reproduction, and the production of commons, adjudicated by the common law of tort (property).
This (markets in everything) is the secret to the west’s success, because both in the ancient and modern world, this system of self government adapts to changes (socks, windfalls) faster than all other known (or possible) systems of government. It makes the optimum use of human incentives. But we must understand it is an *economic* system of government: it forces continuous innovation which constantly reduces prices and increases choices.
ECONOMIC
1 – After the civil war, and up through the creation of the federal reserve we converted from a government concerned with sovereignty of property of individuals and states under rule of law (the gold standard system of government) justified by either natural law or common traditional law, to government concerned with the economic condition of individuals and states under discretionary rule (legislative law). Making this change was not without voluminous debate and significant conflict.
2 – My opinion is that the court lacked sufficient economic knowledge (and under FDR sufficient sovereignty) to reform the law (demand legislation) so that rule of law was preserved AND insurer of last resort functions of the federal or state governments could be created. One of the failings of our common law system is that judges do not specialize outside of family, civil, and criminal as they do in the continental (napoleonic) system. (there are good reasons for and agains). But the court has a myopic view of history as a legal without grasping that our legal systems have poorly adopted to a world consisting almost entirely out of interests in property (distributed possession), rather than possession of property (monopoly possession). I have come to see this as the fundamental problem of adapting our ancient legal systems to the information era (post 1911).
3 – Fiat currency is functionally nothing more than shares in the federal treasury, which in turn is merely an asset of the federal corporation, which in turn is merely a construct of the federal constitution. The problem is that (as Anna illustrates), we have opened up a host of opportunities for predation upon our individual sovereignty, and our personal property, and even our community property, thereby transforming all assets to the state, and only making use of them by license. In effect we have restored feudalism (serfdom) – just serfdom that is comfortable. And the frightening fact is that comfortable serfdom is in demand, and contrary to historical propaganda was in demand in the past also – as was voluntary slavery. Many people are happy to enter into contemporary serfdom and slavery if they have some protection of law. Yet our system no longer distinguishes between the sovereign, the serf, and the slave – thereby ignoring the differences in risk we wish (or can) bear, because of our abilities, our skills, our assets, our families, and our associations. We are taxed by income but not by risk. We are governed by serfdom not by sovereignty. And this is because the law has not kept pace with the economic structure of polities. And to a large degree I blame the Judicial community for failing to grasp the relationship between the demands upon law, and the economic “technology” that we live under.
CLOSING
The mistake I see in Anna’s writings is the same mistake I see in ‘gold bugs’ or other people that want to return to hard money. Hard money is a terrible limitation upon the people for no reason – resulting in hard and fast shocks that cannot be insured against (the jury is in on cyclicality of corrections but it is hard to take the position of allowing shorter devastating depressions rather than longer softer recessions) That said, we no longer make use of money as other than debt instruments (all money is merely a token without any backing other than fiat demand for it).
The question isn’t return to gold standard, or return to fully private property (which merely weakens us from producing the higher returns of the commons). The question is how to restore sovereignty and markets in everything by rule of law given that we have a new monetary technology available to us that is no longer physical – how can we restore the state to its only necessarily useful function: as the insurer of last resort both economic(positive) and judicial (negative).
And we must recognize that the enlightenment experiment with equality has been a failure and that the upper classes will always seek rents, the financial classes (distributors of liquidity) are now entirely unnecessary (really), and are by their very existence parasitic, and the underclasses, grown more numerous while the middle shrinks – have only serfdom as their desired order.
There are only two social sciences: the law of tort (property), and its facility and measurement economics. The problem is macro economics seeks to circumvent the law, and the law is ignorant of macro economics.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine.