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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