Thursday 27 July 2017

Why do we have starvation in a land of plenty?

Those of you who have read my blog for any length of time will know of Ron Owen, the gunsmith in Gympie, Queensland, Australia.  He sent the following article to me a few days ago and it seems to me that it could do with a wider audience.  We might benefit if we became part of that audience.  Throughout this article feel free to imagine that he had written 'Great Britain' each time he wrote 'Australia' and £ each time he hit $. The lesson and the arguments are exactly the same.



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Economic Security Equals Personal Security
By Ron Owen – July 23, 2017
 
WHY DO WE HAVE STARVATION IN A LAND OF PLENTY?

Gympie, Queensland, July 23 - As this site is concerned with our Freedoms, our Rights and our Security; it’s time to take a broader brush and give a lot of thought to our Economic Security.

Why do we have an economic system that turns the government into an end, instead of a means, and the individual into a means instead of an end?

What has happened to the Constitutional demand that all institutions exist to serve the individual, and that the State exists to serve its citizens? Now it appears that the only reason for individuals to exist is to serve the State.

If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it. The problem is not that people are taxed too little; the problem is that government spends too much. —Ronald Reagan.

Real economic security would mean that individuals in society must have sufficient purchasing power to provide effective demand in order to consume what they produce. Absolute economic security resides in the possession of a sufficient income at all times to buy the goods and services without which there would be no demand, no production and no payments of wages.


Next, we have to ask: where do wages, and dividends come from? All incomes as purchasing power are distributed into the hands of consumers through the operations of productive industry. All real purchasing power arises in production. It takes the form of wages, salaries and dividends paid directly to individuals engaged in industry or indirectly from them, through taxation, to those bureaucrats and beneficiaries who spend the money we produce. With loans they are spending future income from production. There is no other form of purchasing power in the Western World system of economics.



Why is there never enough purchasing power in our national economy?

Government doesn’t produce; it only consumes and produces a large negative effect. Here are some of the reasons we have poverty amongst the plenty.

In 2015-16 it took $405.4 billion in taxation, but its total expenses for 2015-16 were $434.5 billion, so the balance was a further debt of 29.1 billion. Just paying the interest on that is taking spending from our future earnings, or the earnings of our children.

In 2012 Australian Households spent a total of $642 billion on general living costs but in the same year only earned $521.3 billion in wages and income. So again the balance goes in a $120.7 Billion dollar debt which has to be paid from our future earnings. 

The manufacturing industry in Australia has declined from 30% of GDP in the 1960s to 12% of GDP in 2007. Yet in 2012 we still donated $7.7 billion in Foreign Aid.

From the figures above we can understand that although Australians earn over a Trillion dollars annually their government masters, remove over $400 billion in taxation which is used to pay their governments interest on its debts. (According to a report released in October 2013, the nation’s poverty rate increased from 10.2 per cent to 11.8 per cent, from 2000/01 to 2013.)

The above general formula is endemic to most countries in the Western World, the governments are run in debt to the banks and so too are 90% of their populations.

There is no single cause operating in the western world today which is of such importance and is so fraught with the possibility of world disaster, as is the disparity between purchasing power and prices. The longer it continues unchecked the more certain and with more speed approaches either Depression, or War, or both.




What causes that disparity, that lack of spending power? It is simply that when any item is being produced only a part of its final selling price is the wages and income factor. Say with a packet of .22 ammunition, (Ron’s example) the cost of production can be split into:
A. The cost of lead, powder and brass,
B. The cost of wages and dividends,
C. Taxation and Interest.
Only the earnings, wages and dividends go into the economy to allow income to be spent on purchasing what they produce.

Governments Sell Tomorrow, To Pay for Today.

Taxation and Interest remove money from the economy, so instead of economic security you have economic slavery. All Government spending is borrowed from the four major banks, and all of the Taxation (Government Revenue) goes to pay the Bank interest on the Government Debt. The Governments Principle Debt just increases annually.

Look at your electricity bill only a part of your payment will go back into the economy in wages, the rest will be negated by government tariffs and interest. Though these costs, representing profits, interest and depreciation, are all loaded into prices, the money to liquidate them is not distributed to the public neither as wages, salaries, nor dividends. So to afford them the public have to borrow from the banks.

Therefore, prices are always greater than the money available to buy them. In other words, there is always a disparity between the flow in the generation of purchasing power and the generation of prices in any one productive period. As can be seen, this is due to accounting all costs into prices without making provision for liquidating all of them.

This is the flaw in the finance-economic system, and is the main cause of all the economic troubles in the world. It is directly traceable to the use of debt for money and to the policies and practices of the monopoly of credit. Under the present financial system, there is no sound means of bridging the gap between purchasing power and prices.

Now I am not suggesting that the current position of some of the people doing well and the majority struggling in debts should be swapped for socialism.

Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990, summed up socialism nicely: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Socialism takes income away from productive people and gives it to non-productive people. When a percentage of your hard-earned money is confiscated, you have fewer choices and a lower standard of living. If a larger amount of money is confiscated in taxation, you’re a slave and your only reason for continuing to work is to lessen the depth of the debt.

Socialism is simply a camouflaged Communism.


The once-mighty USSR fell apart in 1989 due to iron-fisted socialistic policies that destroyed the economy while taking away virtually ALL freedoms from its citizens.

People who have recently visited Cuba report that it’s like time has stopped in 1959 when Castro and communism took over. Literally all the cars on the road were manufactured in, or before, 1959. Cuba today still looks like 1955. Unemployment is 48 percent and 80 percent of those who have jobs work for the government, making Cuba’s economy a disaster.

Venezuela is a bigger disaster, their hospitals are germ-infested trash dumps and they’re currently rioting over food. Venezuela’s hospitals are horrible. In less than 20 years they’ve gone from the most prosperous South American nation to the poorest, all because it elected a socialistic government that did away with good economic policies.

North and South Korea are perfect examples of the difference between a free economy and communism (slavery). In communist North Korea, 2.5 million people starve each year. In capitalistic South Korea, her GDP is the 10th largest in the world.

The application of science and technology to production now enables mankind to ensure a reasonable sufficiency of material needs to all, without continuing economic servitude. But the existing financial system is fundamentally flawed. It is endangering the planet through ruthless exploitation of its limited resources in pursuit of financial profit and its wish for ever greater power over the people.

Industry, to be successful, must get back from the public in the prices of its goods more than it pays out to suppliers of materials and labour involved in their manufacture. Otherwise, it could not make a profit. Then the GST factor takes a great slice out of the available spending power.

As industry by necessity distributes all incomes as purchasing power, where does industry, in its turn, get the money for its infrastructure? A brief examination will show that industry is financed from savings, or from loans or overdrafts from the banking system.

Let us follow logically the results flowing from the disparity in which the producers, wage earners, farmers can never find the money or means of exchange to purchase the goods that they produce and need.

It must be evident at the outset that in every cycle of production a proportion of the goods must remain unsold. As further cycles are completed, the unsold portions must pile up till it is useless and dangerous to produce more for the time being, so banks restrict credit, production slows down, and men are laid off.

When workers are laid off, wages cease, purchasing power further diminishes, fewer goods are sold, and credit is further restricted or called in and cancelled. There is a rush to sell below cost and bankruptcies occur.

Standards of living now fall rapidly; there is further unemployment; dole conditions and acute depression appear; governments start relief works, and the banks readily lend to governments the credit they refuse to industry. Debt and taxation grow apace. As the spending power decreases much of the surplus goods remains unsold, and we have starvation and poverty in the midst of abundance. Goods are wantonly destroyed by oversized banana, oversized pigs etc. and production is forcibly restricted. With mass unemployment everywhere, we are told to work harder, save more, and spend less. Saving and spending less is also a negative.

Parallel with these manifestations is the struggle to find markets abroad for the goods that cannot be sold at home. As all nations are doing the same thing, and are in the same economic plight from the same cause, this leads to commercial hostility, international friction, and finally and inevitably, to WAR.




Government is not a solution to our problems, 
government IS the problem

Government does not solve problems; it is the root source of the main problem. Government gives the nations right to create credit, to the four main ‘Banks of Issue’ and allows them to create it and charge us all for the privilege to borrow it from them.

As a simile imagine that all the oil and gas beneath the land mass of Australia, which is really the public credit, or wealth of Australia owned in title by the Commonwealth Government on behalf of all its citizens, was given away to a private company at no charge, and then every time the government, or the people wanted some oil and gas the private company lent it to them and then charged an ever increasing interest rate, plus demanding the full return of the oil and gas.

Current governments have never dealt with the root problem, the monopoly of credit creation by the international banking system; they take the donations from banks into their party election funds and consider themselves lucky. The first government that ever succeeds to handle this problem might never be given an election donation by a Bank but would be elected forever by the people.

The Black Heart of the Problem.


The banks only lend money/credit as a repayable interest-bearing debt, with number one priority over the assets of the borrower, so it is clear that the banks entirely control production in this way. In the national economy of ever increasing disparity between prices and spending power, as loans are paid back and the credit crossed off, and as the interest is paid the spending power within the community decreases, and only increases when the Banks create and issue more debt. The Banks choose who wins and who goes without, who succeeds and who fails.
Ron Owen

There is no Spring without Winter, without Mistakes there is no Learning. There is no Life without Death, without Doubts there is no Faith. There is no Peace without War, without Fear there is no Courage. For without Mistakes, Doubts and Fears there are no pathways to Wisdom.
Ron Owen.

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 (reproduced with permission)


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Friday 21 July 2017

The Story of 'O'




“The government is my shepherd; I shall not want.”


Interesting concept, isn’t it? We, with all our supposed rights, still turn to the government to grant them. It seems to me that in doing so we surrender our own powers. Surrender is NOT a sign that we live in a healthy democracy. Instead, it is the unhealthy sign of the popular (people’s) acceptance of an oligarchy and possible imminent tyranny.




 I put it to you that ‘rights’ that can be granted or not granted aren’t truly rights. They are better described as privileges. 

Now a definition: OLIGARCHY (noun) (1) a form of government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique; government by the few; (2) a state or organization so ruled; (3) the persons or class so ruling. (www.dictionary.com)




It is interesting to observe that opposition to an oligarchy isn’t a sign that we live in a healthy democracy either. The power is with the holders of power, not those who oppose (or opposition). Those who give the oligarchs their power are those who already have the power in the first place – by that I mean the citizens (in a republic) and subjects (in a monarchy) – most of whom fail to recognise what they have.  Let’s admit it; you can’t give what you don’t have, unless you are a banker, but that's another story.




Because this truth isn't generally acknowledged, we have been brought up to think it is normal to give away our power, thoughtlessly in most cases. And we teach our children to do the same. That’s a bit sobering, don’t you think? Care-less-ity is a dreadful condition, arguably worse than ignorance. Not knowing is one thing; knowing and not caring is quite a different matter.




I’d like to change the attitudes, beliefs, and misconceptions of as many of those suffering from carlessity as I can. If I can’t change them, so be it. Maybe I can provide them with food for thought. That would be a worthwhile achievement in my autumn years.




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Now, as the man used to say, pull up a chair and sit. I wanna tell you a story. Imagine, if you will, a country, long, long ago, that was ruled by a king. He wasn’t an especially benevolent king and he didn’t always treat his subjects fairly or equally, but he was still the king.

Over time his subjects became a bit ticked off and, eventually, they plucked up courage and joined together to tell the king that ‘up with it they will no longer put’. That was brave of them, given his position as absolute ruler. Very brave.

The more outspoken and forceful of those subjects agreed to make the king an offer he couldn’t refuse. They told him: ‘There are more of us than there is of you; so if you (and your heirs) want to carry on being king you had better start by being nicer and fairer, and listen to us. We’re on your side but you need to lighten up’. This gave the king a great deal to think about. Clearly, he didn't have enough men-at-arms in his inner circle to resist the equally well armed subjects who wanted to him come to terms with the situation.


A few of them met him in a field one day. It was a good idea to meet in a field because there in a field nobody could creep up on them. The archbishop of Canterbury was the referee of the day.  For weeks and probably months, he had shuttled backwards and forwards, between the king and the spokesmen for his subjects, to find the basis for an eventual agreement. After all, there was  much at risk.

When the negotiations were over, all of them met in that field and the list was laid on a table so the agreement could be signed and witnessed. It was the greatest 'jaw-jaw rather than war-war' moment - EVER.  It was a treaty like no other treaty.

So, as solemn evidence of his acceptance and agreement with their proposals the king applied his Royal Seal at the bottom of the document. In return, the spokesmen on behalf of the king’s subjects agreed that the king (and his heirs) should continue on the throne and there would be no civil war. Understandably, the archbishop wanted some of the protections to extend to the church, too.

'It’s a deal', said the king. (As I’ve written already, it wasn’t just ‘a deal’. It was a treaty sealed (and later signed and, later still, amended) between the king and his subjects. The treaty was intended to last, as the document made clear, ‘in perpetuity’ – meaning, forever.

This is major stuff. An absolute ruler made a treaty agreement with his subjects to limit his powers and those of his successors, and to respect and protect all his subjects equally and fairly – forever! In return, his subjects – forever – agreed that they wouldn’t begin civil war to overthrow him and his heirs. Think about that.

Let me repeat myself. This deal wasn’t struck overnight. There must have been months of negotiations before it could be written and presented. Take heart, then, about the present negotiations to disentangle UK from the Treaty of Lisbon. (The Treaty of Lisbon is an international agreement which amends the two treaties which form the constitutional basis of the European Union. You can’t just walk away from these things).

There was no internet in those days so they made copies of the treaty and took them to English county courts around the kingdom to enable everyone to know and understand what had happened on their behalf. It became known in Latin as Magna Carta Libertatum; in English - Great Charter of Liberties. 

Again, to avoid misunderstanding here is another definition: Treaty (noun) – 1. a formal agreement between two or more states in reference to peace, alliance, commerce, or other international relations.  2. the formal document embodying such an international agreement.  3. any agreement or compact. ( www.dictionary.com )

A treaty may also be known as an agreement, protocol, covenant, convention, pact, or exchange of letters, among other terms. Regardless of terminology, all of these forms of agreements are, under international law, equally considered treaties and the rules are the same.

Treaties can be loosely compared to contracts: both are means of willing parties assuming obligations among themselves, and a party to either that fails to live up to their obligations can be held liable under international law. (Wikipedia)

It takes all parties to agree that the treaty has failed before it can honestly be regarded as failed. In other words, it takes two to tango.

Another name for a document such as this is: ‘constitution.’

A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i.e. constitute, what the entity is.

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That wasn’t a funny story after all, was it? It was too serious to be funny. BUT IT IS A TRUE STORY NEVERTHELESS.  It is a true story about England and the English, and copies of the original treaty can be found in the British Library (two copies) in London, and Salisbury Cathedral, and Lincoln Cathedral. 

Magna Carta (Great Charter) is widely viewed as one of the most important legal documents in history, enshrining the concepts of government accountability and protection of individual rights. It forms the basis of the constitutions of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, amongst other nations. I ask you, who, in their right mind, would want to give it up or discredit it unless they also have hidden, ulterior motives? Who would be so arrogant? You tell me.

One of the issues that prompted the treaty to be drawn up was that of excessive taxation – no surprises there. 

Another recognised the wrongfulness of jailing a man and taking him away from his work and his means of sustenance for himself and his family without those who would have to pick up the pieces providing a major contribution to the decision making process. A decision like that by someone appointed by the ruler or the ruler's friends, with little empathy and, possibly, little understanding, impacted not only on the guilty offender but also on his family and those who lived nearby. The family could be destitute. They insisted to give their own agreement to any judgement rather than have it imposed. That was the way the people of northern Europe had applied justice for centuries.

Similarly, another importantly decreed that no crime should be punished without first a trial before the man’s peers. And those 12 peers had to agree unanimously, every time, firstly that the accused was guilty. Then they could determine the sentence to be meted out by the legislature, meaning those who the people had chosen to act on their behalf in such cases. If the peer group/jury couldn’t agree UNANIMOUSLY, their decision as to the fate of the accused could be only NOT GUILTY. Better to err on the side of caution rather than wrongfully jail or harm the accused.

Ever since Magna Carta was signed and published politicians, lawyers and churchmen all over the world have tried to sidestep these terms without actually taking the people back to the king/queen to have the treaty annulled – because it still takes two to tango.

And now it is up to us and our children to understand what we have been given AND TO DEFEND IT against all those who would destroy it if they could. 

(Signed - The new Uncle Bulgaria)

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And the Story of ‘O’? What was that all about?  That was an attention grabber. The ‘O’ stands for ‘ovine’, which means ‘sheeplike’. As another man said: ‘All we like sheep have gone astray.’

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