I believe in natural law and that the prime role of government is to secure individuals rights. I believe people have the right to live and exist on land. I also believe people have the full right to the fruits of their labor. I believe in liberty, that freedom should be secured.

It seems supporters of Ron Paul believe in the freedom to steal, by doing nothing but owning land and gold, and that government should help them steal a profit by holding land and gold.

It is the hard core supporters of Ron Paul who have me confused on what Ron Paul actually believes. I would like Ron Paul to answer these questions to clarify his answers for me so I will know for sure.

1. If the government and it’s chartered banks accepted gold and silver for payment of taxes and debt, would gold and silver still be considered “free market” currency? Would such action by government be considered corruption of free markets, especially in the commodity markets for gold and silver?

There are Libertarians who believe that such a situation would be worse than even the system we have now. There are Libertarians who believe that gold, silver, and debt should be left in the free market. There are Libertarians who believe that the government should print it’s own currency debt-free and spend it into circulation. There are Libertarians against the idea of government borrowing it’s own currency and the idea of the people of the nation having to borrow legal instruments representing the value of their own production at interest from the non-productive chartered banks and from institutions of usury and economic rent in the free market. It should be noted that the Bible demands that money should not have usury attached to it.

I worded the question in the way I did since you seem to be slippery with your answer. You seem to avoid what you think would be the best monetary system. You seem to favor this notion of gold and silver as “sound” and “honest” money while when given pointed questions about your support of returning to a gold and silver standard, which history seems to have shown is unstable and dishonest, you give the answer that you support this notion of “free market” money, a silly one with paradoxes and impossible assumptions that there will be zero tax and that demonetizing current dollars and debts would be fair and acceptable to anyone who holds notes or bonds.

Unless of course you mean that you do wish to return to a gold and silver standard, where government corrupts commodity markets in precious metals and accepts payment of taxes and existing debt with gold and silver and other precious metals minted into coins, and you hope that the free market provides other currencies as it does or does not do now, after government declares gold and silver for payment of debts public and private. Of course you do not want to admit to all of that and would prefer an empty sound bite in regards to free markets since then your arguments would then be subject to historical and empirical criticism and would expose you to be a defender of crony capitalism rather than free markets.

2. Would you prefer a 5% flat tax on income (or if possible zero taxes) or a 95% land value tax?

There are Libertarians who would favor a 95% land value tax over even zero taxes since land value taxation would tax the theft of economic rent out of existence and since land values are considered the common wealth. There are Libertarians who believe the monopolization of land by individuals and corporations through government written and enforced title to land should be discouraged, making land more affordable to all, since land monopoly is the basis for servitude and land availability is the basis for liberty. It is for these reasons why there Libertarians who would also support land value taxes being used to fund a citizen dividend, to provide agrarian justice, evenly distributing land rents to the people of the nation so that all are guaranteed land to secure their rights. It should be noted such would also fulfill the demands of the Bible that owners of the land should pay a redemption for the value of the land, that the profit of the Earth is for all, and that the fruits of your toil are your own.

You seem to think 0% is the ideal tax, if such were possible. Entertaining such a notion seems to avoid what you think would be the best tax. Milton Friedman and David Nolan seem quick to recognize land value tax as the best tax. I don’t think I’ve heard you even give lip service to Henry George. You seem to be slippery when asked this question. It seems all I heard you favor was a flat [regressive] tax on earned income, which should be noted is against the demands of the Bible and natural law that your earned income, your toil, is your own.

3. What is worse? Deflation or inflation?

There are Libertarians who believe inflation is an ideal progressive tax without intrusion or burden of reporting which encourages production, if monetary origination funded the government rather than the usurer, and who believe deflation is an absolutely destructive form of theft, which discourages production while those who hold monetary units gain value at the expense of everything else of value in the economy. There are Libertarians who even believe that money, like land, is the common wealth, and should also be used to fund a citizen dividend so that an increase in the value of the common wealth resulting from growth, in terms of population and economic activity, is evenly distributed into the economy.

To put it another way, inflation steals from the lender and the idle holder of monetary units, encouraging the people to invest, produce, and create jobs. It should be noted that the interest charged by the lender accounts for inflation. Deflation steals from the borrower and the holder of anything of value other than monetary units, including the investor and those who produce, forcing people into bankruptcy and unemployment and forcing the wealthy to remain idle while they gain in wealth. You could say that inflation hurts the idle and rich and that deflation hurts the productive and the poor.

To me, the answer seems obvious. However, your personal obsession with inflation as being a hidden tax has me concerned that you actually might believe inflation is worse than deflation. Your supporters definitely seem to support the idea of gold increasing in value and being used as legal tender. Your supporters seem to believe that legal tender should be a store of wealth and means to steal wealth, rather than a means of exchange.

4. Should public infrastructure, roads, and other right of way easements be privatized?

There are Libertarians who believe the land is the common wealth and that landed infrastructure should be public in some capacity, which respects that the profit of the land is for all, and infrastructure built by the public should be kept public. Private companies can build roads and other infrastructure if the company is required to pay land rents to the public in the form of taxation and a citizen dividend.

Giving highways the public built and land to private corporations without even collecting land value taxation is the definition of a banana republic and outright theft of nation from the people of the nation.

5. Is commercial banking an institution of usury? Is insurance an institution of usury?

While credit unions and forms of mutual insurance are non-profit, for the most part, commercial banking and insurance are dominant American industries with a far-reaching hand in public policy. All Libertarians are largely against bailouts and ObamaCare, since they are forms of crony capitalism.

However, it is for these reasons why Libertarians might believe in a public option, regulation, or busting of such institutions, if adequate non-profit banking and insurance is not provided and if the corrupting influence of commercial institutions are too great.

Commercial banking is a monetary monopoly enforced by government in it’s current form. A public banking system would be much better than what we have now. A public monetary system where the government prints rather borrows the legal tender would be much better than what we have now.

While I am aware that most regulations are bad regulations designed by big business to put small business out of business, I am curious to know if you believe there are good regulations? It seems you did support the regulation against financial derivatives and do support an audit of the Federal Reserve. However, I just would like to hear that you do believe there are good regulations.

Reforming the U.S. Financial and Tax System
http://michael-hudson.com/2011/11/reforming-the-u-s-financial-and-tax-system/

My article exposing Ron Paul as a globalist seeking the old world’s one world currency is getting a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people on forums discussing the article still have not awakened to the importance of the Endgame Ron Paul represents on the Grand Chessboard of the Red Symphony.

The awakening to the crimes of the New World Order is being misdirected into the worship of one man, Ron Paul, and into a blind faith of a false economic paradigm of crony capitalism and corruption of free markets of the worst kind by government, the Austrian School of Economics, funded by the same people, the Rockefeller Foundation, who take an active part in the funding and control of the New World Order. What is really dangerous is that it is sold as the opposition to the New World Order and as the opposition to crony capitalism and corruption of free markets by the government when it was funded by the New World Order and when it is crony capitalism and corruption of free markets by the government.

Ron Paul’s various esoteric associations are irrelevant. What is relevant is Ron Paul’s role in herding the stray sheep of politics, upset at the Republicans or Democrats, towards a false paradigm of economics. What is important is how brainwashed, militant, and intellectually dishonest these supporters of Ron Paul are. They resemble fascists, promoting a crony capitalism which resembles a new type of feudalism, while calling themselves defenders of capitalism, free markets, and classical liberalism. They do not listen to what you have to say. They are not there to learn. They are there to beat a drum of free markets and anarchy while at the same time they promote corruption of free markets by the government, without even being aware that is what they are doing. You can’t even crack a joke about Ron Paul without them going ballistic.

Some people defend Ron Paul on the basis that he is a gateway to the proverbial red pill from The Matrix. This is somewhat true. I was a card-carrying member of the Libertarian Party until I left the party in 2001, mostly because I felt it had a brainwashing effect. I was amazed at Ron Paul’s popularity during the 2008 elections. I started to poke around YouTube to find out why he became so popular. What I discovered was people talking about the CFR, 9/11, the New World Order, and Alex Jones.

It was an interesting journey. It took me awhile to come to terms that 9/11 was an inside job. I did not want to believe that it was possible for such to be an inside job. However, the hard science and all the soft evidence indicated it could have been nothing else but controlled-demolition. Alex Jones opened me up to a lot of things. After I predicted the collapse of the Dow and the swine flu outbreak,  I stopped listening to Alex Jones. I had watched Zeitgeist and Bill Still’s documentary and started to really think about monetary policy. This is when it finally hit me that Ron Paul was a Benedict Arnold.

I realized that Alex Jones was allowed to do what he did because he was herding those awakened to certain things, such as 9/11 being an inside job,  towards Ron Paul. Alex Jones was a gate keeper. Ron Paul in his own right is also a gate keeper to herd those who were socially liberal and fiscal conservatives.

I already had intuitive disagreement with the Libertarian Party, specifically the Austrian School of Economics, over monetary policy and over the land issue. Dan Sullivan had awakened me somewhat to these concerns. However, it wasn’t until Bill Still and Alex Jones that I realized the true purpose Ron Paul served for the New World Order.

Anarchy is a foundation for feudalism, where lords lead knights, hold claims to land, and negotiate contracts of slavery and serfdom with the peasants where the serfs gain protection from the land baron while they are allowed to exist to work on the land and pay tributes or rents to the land barons. The land barons were the government, and they were ultimately fascist governments. Anarchy is also a foundation for tribalism, but tribalism tends to be more left-wing than the right-wing feudalism, since land and people are usually not viewed as property under tribalism and since tribal barter systems are more honest.

The system of feudalism developed in Europe when the Roman Empire fell. It should be important to note that the Roman Empire was built on cheap money, bronze and copper coins, where the value of the money was more than the value of the metal in the coins, and that it fell when Rome went onto a gold standard. This is when the idea of gold as money was started. It carried into the Dark Age of feudalism. Feudalism eventually developed into monarchism and eventually into the idea of the republic and representative government, like the Roman Empire.

However, along the way, from the Roman Empire to our modern governments, monetary and land issues were often poorly implemented, and the toil of the working classes were often taxed, leading to a crony capitalism at the benefit of the aristocrats, the land owners, the bankers, and other wealthy interests who lived off land rents and interest, despite the common religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam speaking out against the taxation of labor and the profiteering off land rents, interest-bearing money, and financial capital not produced with toil.

The classical liberals and American independence was a big leap forward in trying to address the land issue. It was the early American immigrants, who lived in Europe under the burden of land rents and taxes on their toil paid to land barons and monarchs, who had the lack of access to cheap money to engage in economic trade and pay such taxes, who had to instead borrow expensive money at high rates of interest and volatile value from bankers, who met native populations who did not even believe in money and land ownership, and who were casting off the crony capitalism of monarchism.

All the classical liberals identified land, capital, and labor as the components of production. They identified land as something unique, where the rights to land should be preserved but not the profits off the land. They all believed that land was best to have a tax imposed on it since it was unearned wealth and so that the land would not be monopolized by land barons, making land more affordable for all. The classical liberals respected earned income and did not impose taxation on wages. The classical liberals and the native Americans were your true champions of free markets, the economics of the Bible, and anarchism, where government acted to secure that all had rights to land and their labor, but not the right to profit off land rents through government written and enforced title to land.

While the classical liberals were not successful of casting off interest-bearing money, George Washington did finance the American Revolution with debt-free sovereign money, the Continental. While the colonies had problems with the colonial currencies, the colonies were successful in making use of various forms of cheap currency to pay taxes and engage in trade. Unfortunately, the colonies often relied upon gold to trade with Europe. The Southern colonies even commonly accepted Spanish gold notes for payment of taxes.

The U.S. Constitution did recognize the folly of having several different colony currencies due to commodity-based currencies, like agricultural products, corrupting free markets, money market traders profiteering off deflationary and inflationary currencies, and other problems.  This was in part due to Adam Smith writing about the problems of the colonial currencies in 1776, in Wealth of Nations. The U.S. Constitution limited the States to gold and silver coins while leaving it open for the Congress to issue and regulate the legal tender, whatever the legal tender might be. I believe the classical liberals stuck with gold since it was the one world currency at the time. Europe primarily used gold, and it was necessary to use gold to trade with Europe. They also offered silver as a cheap alternative.

However, this brings up why Ron Paul is so dangerous. Supporters of Ron Paul claim that Ron Paul believes in “free market” currency, not a return to the gold standard, because Ron Paul simply wants the government to interfere in free markets and accept gold and silver for payment of taxes. They suggest that we currently do not have a free market in silver and gold as currency. They suggest that the government must take action to make them “free market” currency. How Orwellian. Ron Paul supporters defy reason and logic.

Libertarianism as promoted by the Austrian School of Economics is the crony capitalism of a neofeudalism. The Austrian School of Economics wants us to repeat the failures of history rather than learn from them. There is a true libertarianism which mirrors true classical liberalism. However, that true libertarianism is not the libertarianism which Ron Paul promotes.

Most Ron Paul supporters believe government is force and is always bad. I did have a discussion with one Ron Paul supporter who admitted that government force is good if it used to enforce free markets. Unfortunately, he believed free markets meant the crony capitalism of Ron Paul, that government should be used enforce land monopoly and monetary monopoly. Government force is good if it is used to enforce free market principles that labor and capital is your own, that land and the profit of the land is for all, and the public’s legal tender should be debt-free and free of the economic rent and interest of commodities.

The Bible even promotes these free market principles of true capitalism. The Bible promotes a more true capitalism than Ron Paul. Unfortunately, those who state belief in the Bible, such as Ron Paul, reject the principles of economics in the Bible in favor of the Rockefeller Foundation’s economic paradigm of crony capitalism, where land and money are treated like any other capital and where taxation on your toil is justified if done in a flat [regressive] way.

I am agnostic and am aware of the economics of the Bible. Many who claim faith in the Bible are not even aware of the economics of the Bible, other than giving through tithing the church and letting Caesar have his gold. I would say letting Caesar have his gold is a statement against hard currency, but I’m not sure the context makes that implication and is simply making a statement against materialism, as the purpose of tithing is a statement against materialism, to be willing to let go of a portion of your wealth, to have faith in God rather than materialism. The people who believe in the Bible are not aware that the Bible is in favor of the taxation of land values through the 50-year land lease and Jubilee, against the taxation of labor and real capital, and against debt-based money and financial capital.

There are supporters of Ron Paul who literally want the Anglo-American Empire to fall like the Roman Empire and enter into a new Dark Age. While I agree with them that our current system is corrupt, it is not beyond repair. While I agree that it deserves to fail, failure into a new Dark Age would not make things better. It would only make things worse. We would enter a new age of feudalism. We would repeat history rather than learn from history. We would be paying land rents to land barons, paying land rents and interest on gold to bankers of the land barons, and making tribute payments on our toil to those with the most guns who control land and gold, if we are lucky enough to survive the chaos. I assume that those who control our banking system, their corporations, and their governments, would not allow things to reach that point, as much as they work to repress understanding of true classical liberalism and true libertarianism.

If Ron Paul was elected and the Austrian School of Economics became as mainstream as Keynesian economics, those who control our banking system and their corporations would still be in control. We would repeat history with frequent banking panics, boom/bust cycles, and monetary changes to accommodate a return to a gold standard or some variant of a commodity-based and interest-bearing currency beneficial to bankers and those who profit on debt. They would even call such currency “sound” and “honest” free market money, while gold, silver, and notes of chartered banks are declared legal tender by the government. Even worse, with the Austrian School of Economics equating land and money to capital, like Marx did, we’d see a return of landed feudalism.

We’d have to watch our public infrastructure be privatized. Our roads would be sold to aristocrats and transnational corporations and transformed into toll roads for a transnational corridor. We, the People, who built the roads, would now have to pay tolls to use them to private corporations. We would see the same with the community hospitals, parks, and other public infrastructure. We already see this happening now.

We’d have to watch the states to get rid of the remaining property taxes that the classical liberals gave us as they implement flat and regressive income taxes and sales taxes to fund governments, directly enslaving us in the worst possible way, especially for the working class and youth. We’d see the wealthy and corporations buy up the land, as they even deduct the buying up of America on their taxes. We would see increased rent and decreased maintenance of housing, since the only tax incentive would be to monopolize the land rather than develop, maintain, and use land efficiently for the demands of the free market.

We’d see prices for gold and silver sky-rocket in price as the government interferes in free markets of gold and silver and free market currencies by accepting them for payment for taxes. We’d see the government become commodity traders under the banner that the government is promoting free markets. We’d see the interest on debts, public and private, increase, with the force of government interfering with free markets, and we will hear that the wealthy bankers and the wealthy are getting richer because the government stayed out of the free market. It is not right for the working class to do all the work and be loaded with more debt than they earn, while the banks have lavish buildings on every street corner and the tallest towers in every city.

We’d continue to see our jobs outsourced and off-shored due to the increased taxation on wages to the point where we will eventually be willing to work in sweat shops for China and India for wages that would barely pay land rents for a slum. We’d see increased poverty for a majority of Americans while a small minority of Americans would see increased prosperity, as we are seeing already.

We’d see another Great Depression, where first by inflation of a cheap debt-based currency and then by the deflation of an expensive commodity and debt-based currency, we’d literally wake up homeless on tax-free land monopolized by the crony capitalists Ron Paul embraced rather than opposed. We would become a pathetic banana republic rather than the republic for and by the people the classical liberals hoped we’d become. The demands for socialism would be greater, not lesser, under Ron Paul’s crony capitalism and various austerity programs.

Ron Paul is exactly what the globalists would want. That is why they funded the Austrian School of Economics. Ron Paul is the Hegelian dialect and a false paradigm that would enable the slavery of the masses, especially if he has dedicated and passionate support behind him, who falsely believe they are repressed and disenfranchised champions of free markets when in reality they are champions of the crony capitalism of King George and his gold bankers and land barons. Even if the media criticizes Ron Paul, often for the wrong reasons, the media is solidifying his support. Bad press is good press for celebrities. It increases their popularity as people try to defend their favorite celebrity.

Our only hope is in educating the masses on true classical liberalism and true libertarianism to reform the system with a populist message of no taxation of toil, no national debt, public debt-free money, and land value taxation. Henry George and the classical progressives had great success in the late 1800s as the classical liberals in 1776 had great success. There is an opportunity for classical progressives to reform our system towards a more robust implementation of classical liberalism.

We do need to break the monopoly the banks have on our government and our economy. We do need to break the monopoly the banks have on our understanding of political economy given to us by them with Austrian School of Economics, Keynesian economics, and Marxism. We would need to break free of the three neoclassical schools of economics which equate land and money to capital and regain a true understanding of classical liberalism and true libertarianism, where land and money are not capital of the free market but unique creatures of the state with unique economic concerns which can be used to fund government, rather than the slavery of taxation on wages and real capital.

The debate, after the national debt is ended with public debt-free legal tender, after wages are untaxed, and after land values are taxed, should be on when capital ceases to be real capital of earned income and when it becomes usury and economic rent of unearned income. The debate should be on whether there should be a public option in insurance or not. The debate should be on how small government should be and how much land rents and monetary value should be returned to the public as a citizen dividend.

The debate should not be about the worship of Ron Paul, the blind faith in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Austrian School of Economics, and the crony capitalism of the Austrian School of Economics, modeled on the crony capitalism of the Old World’s feudalism and sold in an Orwellian way as being the classical liberalism and opposition to crony capitalism. The last thing we need is an ignorant mass in blind worship of a man and in blind faith of his false economic paradigm. Progress towards free and fair markets requires reason. Blind faith leads to a dark age of austerity and crony capitalism.

Unfortunately, Krugman does not recognize the dismal economic facts and observation of widening income disparity and undeserved poverty among ill-gained prosperity, which is what current Occupy Wall Street protests are protesting, despite a lack of understanding of debt. The government is taxing earned income while allowing others to gain unearned income through the deficit spending of Congress, which leads to many things, including the outsourcing and off shoring of jobs, debts, and the wages paying interest on such debt exported to China.

What Krugman proposes is what Reagan did. Reagan used the national credit card to bring about an American prosperity. Krugman is like those he opposes. Krugman, like the funded stooge he is for the top 1% who pays his salary, falls short of resolving this concern with the proposal of a public debt-free money system, like the money George Washington used to fund the American Revolution and Lincoln used to fund the Civil War. Instead he credits the national debt used to fund World War II for bringing us out of the Great Depression, with no mention of the monetary changes, such as the Gold Reserve Acts of 1933.

He claims that we are paying interest to ourselves, if you ignore that growing leak of interest flowing into China and other nations and the fact that the working class are paying income taxes to make interest payments to wealthy individuals. I hope that Krugman will make clear in the future that when he says “ourselves,” he means the people who own his mind and soul.

The working class is paying income taxes on their labor, reducing their wages and ability to compete with foreign labor, at the benefit of wealthy people around the world. While it is true that Americans hold most of the U.S. debt, such is still leading to the outsourcing and off shoring of not only the jobs of the working serfs but is also leading to the outsourcing and offshoring of the aristocratic class collecting tribute payments from the American serfs. Krugman should ask himself how much interest he is personally collecting on national debt. It is likely that Krugman is earning more through his writing than the interest he collects from the American tax payer. Krugman should try to do some independent thinking in 2012, or learn to write in Chinese.

I appreciate the Left’s compromise with the bankers that if we’re going to have a debt-based monetary solution, we should at minimum get something for it, such as public infrastructure. However, the  solution of exponentially increasing national debt to keep our economy growing is starting to fail from the giant trade deficit with China and the tribute payments we make to China as we export that debt, not to mention the increasing amount of interest we owe to “ourselves, “the top 1% among us. The ship of deficit spending with interest-bearing debt paid to the wealthy by the working class is sinking. The American serfs are outsourced and off shored and has paid all the interest they can pay to the usurers, especially when the banks idea of fixing the credit crunch is offering credit cards with 23% interest rates and new banking fees. There is no more blood to squeeze from the American working class, even if you are able to give some of them jobs building bridges and the rest of them some new bridges to sleep under. Let us hope that Ron Paul does not get his way, and that the homeless would not have to pay rent to a Spanish corporation to sleep under the privatized bridge.

The best thing we can do is to free the American working class, like Lincoln and George Washington did, from usury. We can stop the export of national debt and stop making tribute payments to the wealthy. We can free up trillions of dollars for private investment if we paid off the national debt with true debt-free Greenbacks, if the government actually printed the money supply rather than borrowed it. Eliminating the income taxes used to pay interest on national debt and redirecting the trillions towards private investment would rebuild America’s manufacturing base and make American labor competitive with foreign labor.

We can also stop taxing earned income and start taxing usury and rent, so that we can avoid another real estate and credit bust. If we must have deficit spending to finance something like a war, inflation is much more fair and affordable tax which actually encourages domestic production unlike the income tax on wages which punishes domestic labor.

“Finance And Currency,” Congressman Benjamin F. Butler, Massachusetts, Address to the United States House of Representatives, Tuesday, January 12, 1869.
http://savingcommunities.org/docs/butlerbenjaminf/finance.html

“Thirty Years of Labor,” Terence Powderly, Chapter 9: The Circulating Medium.http://savingcommunities.org/docs/powderly.terence/30years09.html

I took a look at the candidates running for President in the Libertarian Party. I did not see a single candidate who I recognize, with the exception of Bill Still, until Gary Johnson decided to run for President as a Libertarian.

Bill Still is not your usual Libertarian Party candidate. He does not promote the usual Libertarian economic message as promoted by the Austrian School of Economics. Bill Still vehemently opposes the Austrian School of Economics for their promotion of the gold standard. As mainstream pundits laugh at Ron Paul for his support of the gold standard, the Libertarian Party has their own William Jennings Byran derailing the gold standard.

The Libertarian Party is no longer your dad’s Libertarian Party, as a political arm for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Austrian School of Economics. The vacuum left by Bob Barr gave rise to Libertarians such as Carl Person who is concerned about the mainstream media trust as a creation influenced by the government rather than blindly supporting the mainstream media trust as ordained by the free market.

The vacuum also gave rise to a new type of Libertarian, one who opposes the Austrian School of Economics. Georgists, who have long skirted the Libertarian Party and who consider themselves the “Real Libertarians,” in opposition to the “Royal Libertarians” at the Austrian School of Economics, are supporting Bill Still, since Georgists, like America’s best-selling and self-published American economist, Henry George, are also opposed to the gold standard and debt-based monetary systems as government interference in free markets, allowing private individuals who were granted the privilege to provide the public money supply to steal earned income from those who give money value.

Gov. Gary Johnson might be in for a surprise, since many Libertarian delegates, including the Georgist Libertarian faction, have already pledged votes for Bill Still. Bill Still, like Henry George, gained in popularity with a self-published populist message in his his documentaries, The Money Masters and The Secret of Oz, where he brushed with top economists like Milton Friedman to figure out how to fix the financial problems of the United States.

Henry George’s populist message, as described in his best-selling book, Progress and Poverty, was ending taxation on earned income and replacing it with a single tax on land values, to break the cycle of poverty among progress, to tax the land monopoly and the unearned income of economic rent out of existence, a monopoly created by government granting title to land as private property.

Bill Still’s populist message is to pay off the national debt with debt-free Greenbacks, printed into existence by the government rather than borrowed from bankers as interest-bearing debt into existence under our debt-based fractional reserve banking system, and to have the Congress regulate the value, as the U.S. Constitution demands, by controlling the quantity of the legal tender to meet inflation rates set by the Congress. Bill Still’s message is to end the monopoly and control the government-chartered banks have on our public money supply, to end the boom/bust cycle caused by mismanagement of the money supply by private, unaccountable, and “too big to fail” banks with credit expansions and contractions, resulting in periods of inflationary booms, deflationary busts, and in our increasingly global markets, stagflation recessions.

Bill Still is not alone in his message. George Washington funded the American Revolution with public debt-free legal tender. Lincoln funded the Civil War with public debt-free legal tender. L. Frank Braum promoted debt-free legal tender in the thinly veiled metaphors of the Wizard of Oz. Milton Friedman promoted the idea. Dennis Kucinich promotes the idea in his bill (HR2990), the NEED Act of 2011. However, Bill Still is the one who made the idea popular today in his documentaries which have been viewed millions of times on-line.

Gary Johnson’s decision to run as the Libertarian Party candidate will surely bring new people to hear Bill Still’s populist message. The goal of the Libertarian Party candidates for President have realistically been to promote ideas rather than win elections. I seriously doubt Gary Johnson will get any traction and win the election running as a Libertarian. However, he will help bring exposure to Bill Still and his populist message to reform the monetary system. It would be nice if Bill Still won the nomination, but I am sure if he did, there would be silence in the media anyway. Gary Johnson’s supporters would have the opportunity to meet Bill Still and be exposed to his message.

Libertarian politics just got interesting. There will actually be a debate rather than just a flocking of the sheep around the biggest name. The cowardly lion, Williams Jennings Byran, has found his voice and courage to debate the wicked witches of the globalist bankers and their Austrian School of Economics in the Libertarian Party, to help the scarecrows of agriculture, the tin men of industry, and Dorothy, with her tightening ruby slippers of debt, to find the Emerald City of debt-free Greenbacks. The Wizard of Oz just gave Bill Still a big ticket name to help promote his message. We just hope Dorothy won’t have to find her silver slippers if we have to travel down the yellow brick road again. The journey could get bumpy.

The use of free market currencies and free market banking, whether based on full, partial, or no reserves, and whether based on hard currency, legal tender, or other collateral, should be allowed. However, I do not believe the government should declare any free market currency, including gold, as legal tender. For the government to declare any free market currency, including gold, legal tender for payment of debt and taxes, is to make it fiat, corrupting the free market in that currency, including gold.

The use of gold to store wealth should be supported. However, my support ends when the fake “Royal Libertarians” want the gold to be used for the payment of taxes and debt. Any bank should be allowed to use gold. However, it should never be used to coin or issue legal tender for payment of debt or taxes, unless of course it is for debt originally loaned in that particular currency or with a specific form of collateral.

Free banking is useful for local communities to promote local business and as a poor man’s form of credit. It is also useful to store wealth or to provide a back-up to the legal tender if for some reason there are problems with the legal tender.

As Adam Smith pointed out in 1776, the problems of colonial currency and use of foreign currency as accepted legal tender was prone to money market manipulation. Financial institutions and other interests would dump certain currencies and buy up other currencies. Some governments and their citizens would be left with deflation while others would be left with inflation. The usurers would profit at the expense of the states and their citizens.

You can also look at the history of the U.S. Dollar. The Congress was having to change the laws every few years to use gold as legal tender. Free market currency should remain in the free market if you do not want the corrupting hand of government manipulating the value. The government should provide it’s own legal tender so that the government can stay out of free markets.

The government’s legal tender would be commonly accepted if it is well-regulated, if government pays employees and contractors in the currency, and if governments only accepts the currency for taxes and debts originating in the currency.

I support free banking, but my support ends when you want free banking currencies to be corrupted by government accepting it as legal tender. Free markets cannot be free if the government corrupts free banking and free market currency. Free markets cannot be free without a government legal tender.

This article instead tries to identify the two core issues which leads to systematic poverty during prosperity, and which makes economics known as the dismal science. Economics does not have to be dismal if the two roots of the dismal science are exposed and understood. It are these two roots which could also be considered the roots of tyranny itself.

Henry George and others believe labor to be the basis of property rights. Wages earned through labor and interest earned through capital produced with labor are considered earned income. Other sources of income exist which are considered unearned wealth. Rent or unearned increments of wealth acquired through the value of land is considered a primary source of unearned income.

Henry George expanded that if the right to land is not secured, then the right to your wages would not be secured, that it would be stolen through rent. Having your labor stolen through taxation of labor and through rent was considered a primary source of poverty and social problems. His remedy was to tax away the rent to fund government while at the same time eliminating taxation on earned wealth and eliminate the need for the government to violate your right to your earned income.

“For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce.” — Henry George

“Charity is false, futile, and poisonous when offered as a substitute for justice.” — Henry George

“At the bottom of every social problem we will find a social wrong.” — Henry George

It should be noted that taxation on labor and the theft of earned income is wholly destructive. The more earned income is taxed or stolen in other means, the worst the conditions. Furthermore, the taxation of earned income is the worse possible trade tariff. A tax on earned income is a negative trade tariff, a trade tariff on domestic production, and a trade tariff against yourself. There is no wonder that jobs are being outsourced and off-shored while we increasingly impose a trade tariff on our own labor and real capital produced with our own labor while we compete with slave labor and crony capital in nations with even less economic justice. The less earned income is taxed or stolen, the more people are able to solve their own problems to prevent poverty, the more able we will be to compete with foreign production, and the better the prosperity. There is no dismal nature of creating poverty among prosperity when it comes to untaxing earned income and stopping the theft of earned income.

It should also be noted that taxing away land values stops speculation in land values, which prevents a speculative boom and bust cycle in land values.

The Bible also made this same distinction between labor being earned wealth of the person who labored and the unearned income of rent being the shared wealth of all in Ecclesiastes.

“Moreover the profit of the Earth is for all….” — Ecclesiastes 5:9

“Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion. Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God.” — Ecclesiastes 5:18-19

Albert Nock sums up the observations and the problems of the land problem.

“This imperfect policy of non-intervention, or laissez-faire, led straight to a most hideous and dreadful economic exploitation; starvation wages, slum dwelling, killing hours, pauperism, coffin-ships, child-labour — nothing like it had ever been seen in modern times…People began to say, if this is what State abstention comes to, let us have some State intervention.

“But the state had intervened; that was the whole trouble. The State had established one monopoly — the landlord’s monopoly of economic rent — thereby shutting off great hordes of people from free access to the only source of human subsistence, and driving them into factories to work for whatever Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bottles chose to give them. The land of England, while by no means nearly all actually occupied, was all legally occupied; and this State-created monopoly enabled landlords to satisfy their needs and desires with little exertion or none, but it also removed the land from competition with industry in the labor market, thus creating a huge, constant and exigent labour-surplus.” — Albert J. Nock

The importance of solving the land problem is summed well by Winston Churchill.

“It is quite true that the land monopoly is not the only monopoly which exists, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies — is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. It is quite true that unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit which individuals are able to secure; but it is the principal form of unearned increment which is derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but which are positively detrimental to the general public. Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position — land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions.” — Winston Churchill

Henry George explained the problem and provided a remedy. The remedy of George was a single land value tax on land, which would tax 95% of the undeveloped rental value of land, and remove all other forms of taxation.

The Bible had a similar remedy of Henry George in Leviticus with the 50-year land lease, which is essence a 100% land value tax, combined with a jubilee to turn over and revalue the land.

“The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is Mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me. And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land.” — Leviticus 25:23-24

Thomas Paine introduced the idea of one-time citizen dividend funded with collected land rents with his remedy in “Agrarian Justice,” which is a literal interpretation of the demand in Ecclesiastes that the profit of the Earth is for all.

However, the prevailing remedy was the fundamentally flawed remedy of Thomas Jefferson that progressive property taxes should be used. While the prevailing remedy did prevent outright monopolization of land, it still resulted in the problems which Henry George observed, that development and efficient use of land was stunted because developed values were taxed and the land was still being monopolized and unearned wealth of rent on undeveloped land values were still being stolen since undeveloped land values were not being taxed enough.

George, though he did not go into the issue at length, also believed money issued as debt by banks and the issuance of hard currency, which is money issued as debt with interest, rent, and wages owed to the person who found the precious natural resources, to the person who produced the hard currency, and to the person who stores and loans the hard currency, to be a principle source of unearned wealth.

The Bible mentions that money should not be issued with interest and also makes statements against interest earned through financial capital.

“Thou shalt not lend upon usury (interest) to thy brother, interest on the money, or on anything that is lent with interest.” — Deuteronomy 23.19

Georgists, classical liberals, and others believe that money issued as debt to be a primary source of unearned wealth which robs those who labor and a principle cause of poverty and most notably the boom/bust business cycle.

It was also observed that during credit expansion and prosperity, that there also existed a growing condition of poverty. It is for this reason why economics is considered a dismal science in that progress creates both prosperity and poverty.

It is George who identified the mistreatment of land values as earned income to be the principle source of this dismal duality of poverty increasing with prosperity, with monetary issues playing a minor role. Today, more people believe land and money to be equal partners in creating poverty among prosperity, and they join many others in history of the great concern of the monetary problem.

In my Georgist circle of friends, it has been discussed which issue was most important to solve. The short answer is that both need to be solved since solving one would make the other worse.

If you solve the money problem, another land and housing bubble would be created, leading to poverty of the youth and less fortunate, among prosperity. Land would reach values where the young and less fortunate, whether through mistake, disability, or lack of skills, would find it more and more difficult to afford land. Well-educated and young professionals could even find it very difficult. Only those with land wealth or inherited wealth could afford the land. This would eventually lead to a bust in the real estate market.

If you solve the land problem, development would increase as developed values are untaxed, leading to rapid credit expansion, leading to poverty as debt exponentially increases to pay interest on debt, and leading to the same problems associated with a housing bubble, where the young and less fortunate are less able to afford the cost of living among the prosperity of credit expansion and development boom. This would eventually lead to a credit crunch and contraction.

Builders would not speculate on land values. They would speculate on the landed development, placing a greater emphasis on high-end development rather than affordable development. Builders would also put a premium on credit, making credit less affordable. All but the wealthy and banks could afford such a boom, until a crash, where people would be left unemployed, still unable to afford the empty and developed land even though land values have dropped. It happened with just property taxes. It would surely happen with LVT. A development boom and crash would be fine if it were not tied to money supply.

Both situations would lead to a bust. The newly created prosperity from solving one problem would make the other problem worse. When this paradox is understood, you understand why economics is called the dismal science. However, it does not have to be paradox if both problems are solved. Thus, it is important when speaking of fixing the monetary problem to talk of the land problem. It is important to talk of the land problem when speaking of the monetary problem.

While Henry George spoke of monetary reform, he did not do so at the length of solving the land problem. The land problem was perhaps more obvious in the days of Henry George than the monetary problem. The land problem was easier to observe and understand the problems. Also, as Winston Churchill also indicated, the land monopoly differs from the monetary problem or other problems in that the need for land is more fundamental than money or other concerns in securing the rights to the fruits of one’s labor. However, the fundamental reason why the monetary problem is equal to the land problem is that legal tender is necessary to pay land rents  to the government or the land owner. Thus, the need to secure one’s right in land is equivalent in nature to the need to secure a stable monetary system free of usury.

The difficulty of solving the land problem over the monetary problem is that there are more participants in land tyranny than monetary tyranny. There are more land owners and those who live off rent, than there are chartered banks and those who live off the interest in the issuance of money. Those who do live off rent are not necessarily living off land values but the investment into developed land. Those who support fixing the land problem do not want people to lose their investment in the developed value.  Georgists do not want to discourage the building and maintenance of property. They are just asking to give up the unearned increments in land value, which is still a difficult thing to ask from those who found unearned wealth in increased land values.

Today, you have even more land owners but more people who live off financial capital rather than people who live directly off rent (undeveloped land values). Financial capital is indirectly related to living off rent, since it is financial capital which purchases land and natural resources to produce products. The land problem is as much a tyranny of the landed majority than a tyranny of a few, and is still as difficult, if not more difficult, to solve today.

Since the housing market recently collapsed, the tyranny of the land owner is much less since it is the land owners who have distanced themselves from their losses in land values as fault of their own. Today, they realize the value of the land is not their fault. It is much more difficult for individuals to let go of their unearned and undeserved profits than it is to let go of their undeserved losses. Today, we do have an opportunity to tax away land values since land values are at a bottom, so it stays at the bottom and remains more affordable for all when a new prosperity comes about, and the unemployed are once again employed and able to afford land.

The difficulty of solving the monetary problem is in that it is more difficult to understand and that the bankers work hard to make sure people do not understand the problem. If widespread understanding of the problem is achieved, the problem would be more easy to solve since it is a tyranny of a minority. The majority would surely join together quickly if the majority understands the problem.

Solving the money problem in America would at once relieve Americans of paying interest to the bankers for the value of their own economic productivity. It would also relieve them of the burden of income taxation and the interest they pay on national debt to aristocrats around the world, including the Chinese government, if the government actually did print the money interest-free to fund government and to provide for the public good of having a stable medium of exchange, rather than allow the banks to print the money as interest-bearing debt. It would end the grip the big banks have over our government, eliminating a lot of the corruption.

Several people throughout history identified the problems and identified how the control of the issuance of the money is control over a nation. The control of a nation should be in the body elected to do so. The control of the issuance of legal tender should be in the body elected to do so. It should not be in the private control of banks chartered by the government.

Thomas Edison sums up the problem and solution in a newspaper article.

“It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30,000,000 in bonds and not $30,000,000 in currency. Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens the usurer, and the other helps the people. If the currency issued by the Government were no good, then the bonds issued would be no good either. It is a terrible situation when the Government, to increase the national wealth, must go into debt and submit to ruinous interest charges at the hands of men who control the fictitious values of gold.” — Thomas Edison

Modern economist, Stephen Zarlenga, from the American Monetary Institute sums up the simplicity of the solution.

“According to this theory, it is possible to avoid a collapse following a period of credit expansion simply by converting the existing volume of bank credit into actual money having an existence independent of the debt, and at the same time take away the banking system’s privilege of creating any more credit, i.e., force the banks to confine their lending operations to the lending of existing funds.” — Stephen Zarlenga

The benefits of course would be that the the conversion of interest-bearing credit to public debt-free currency would mean the government could use the money to pay off the national debt, saving the tax payer trillions in interest payments while also providing tax-free revenue to fund the government.

The monetary problem is obviously a problem for the national government to solve. It is already the constitutional duty of the American government to do so. The savings and tax-free revenue would enable to the national government to eliminate the income tax.

The question remains where it would be best to solve the land issue, on the state level, where property taxes are often already collected, or on the national level? George’s populism was the simplicity of his single tax, the land value tax, to fund national government while also solving the land problem.

However, this would leave the state governments to impose less-favored methods of taxation, including property taxes, driving up the cost to develop land, income taxes, driving labor and capital out of the state, sales taxes, reducing consumption in the state and imposing a regressive tax structure, or corporate taxes, driving corporations out of the state. The sales tax would probably be the most favorable tax if it were made progressive with a rebate, granting a minimum amount of resources to each citizen. Like the land value tax, it would reduce demand and drive down prices to where prices would be more affordable.

The question still largely remains if it would be better to reform state governments to a land value tax system and the national government to a progressive sales tax, or would it be better to reform the national government to a progressive sales tax and the states to a land value tax system?

I originally argued that the state governments should implement land value taxes while the national government should implement a progressive national sales tax since the states already tax real estate and the Fair Tax plan already exists for the national level.

Given the importance of solving both problems, fixing the monetary and land problems as a package at the national level would be desired. There would be time to solve the other problem after one of the problems are solved. However, the pain and difficulty of doing so would be greater as a boom from solving one problem would immediately give birth to tyranny and poverty among prosperity before the inevitably bust because of the other unsolved problem. It could be sold as a populist package, monetary reform and the single tax.

The states would then be forced towards a progressive sales tax as they deal with the problems their individual dismal tax packages cause. They could also explore more direct taxation of natural resources, such as excise taxes on oil, or explore the use of state banks like the Bank of North Dakota to supplement the financing of state government. The national government could also keep a corporate tax and distribute revenues of the land value tax to the states in proportion to the amount collected from each state.

A national LVT would create great resistance among states who use property taxes to fund their governments. It was offered that the national government could allow deductions for land value taxes paid, which would be a way to motivate the states to reform their tax systems towards LVT. However, this would defeat the purpose of LVT.

Another option would be use the national LVT as a funding package for state governments. This might meet constitutional resistance, though it would be in the spirit of the Constitution in that the national government would be acting to make sure individual property rights are more properly protected from the actions of government. The populist package in that regards would be a more complicated monetary reform and tax reform package.

I am starting to favor the use of monetary reform to include eliminating wages as taxable income as a populist package to address both concerns. This would allow unearned wealth to be still taxed as earned income while eliminating the taxation of wages. This would not be ideal, but it would be a pragmatic way to bring about monetary reform and indirectly replace the taxation of earned income with the taxation of unearned income.

In all, since the solutions would likely not implement complete economic justice, I still favor the use of a citizen dividend, like Milton Friedman, MLK, and Thomas Paine all proposed, funded with the national monetary reform and single tax on land as part of the national populist package. This would provide a good role model of good risk management and best practices in the guarantee of economic justice where economic injustice will exist and persist, especially at the state and local level, even in the best attempt to understand and address the issues, helping all to deal with the consequences of economic injustice in a flat and universal way, whether needed or not. It would help guarantee the Biblical demand the profit of the earth is for all and that issuance of money is a non-profit institution free of usury.

Solving both problems at once with a  simple and populist package would go a long way in correcting the economic injustice caused by state intervention in the granting and enforcement of land titles and the legal tender chosen to fund such enforcement, especially when combined with a citizen dividend to help ensure the new science of economics free of dismal choice works. Some may argue that the citizen dividend would result in many living off the bottom. That would be their choice. However, I am certain that most of humanity will want more out of life, expect more of themselves, and try to achieve more with economic injustice out of their way, and the citizen dividend would give them the safety net to encourage them to try without them calling for the state to intervene to provide social programs if they should fail to do so for whatever misfortune might cause failure. It is then that we may start to isolate and address these other events of misfortune after economics solves the root causes of the creation of poverty among prosperity.

I consider myself to be an agnostic. There are things I recognize to be complex beyond conventional logic and understanding of the physical world, such as self-awareness, which leads me to conclude that it is impossible for me to understand everything, and it is being intellectually honest to say I do not know the full truth of the world. I believe it is impossible to know absolute truth. However, I can make reasonable attempts to better understand things about the world, with the awareness I could be completely wrong about something. That is the scientific method.

I am a man of science in the Age of Reason. I use observation and critical thinking skills to determine what is right and wrong, recognizing the risks and limitations of applying such beliefs, and am willing to reject and adjust my own political beliefs if there is sufficient evidence to do so. That is why I fly the flag of Benjamin Franklin, a man of science, to bring about a union from the Left and the Right.

After I stopped reading propaganda from the Austrian School of Economics, started to independently think about economics, and reached my own independent conclusions, I searched to find who else reached the same conclusions. In that search I found the Bible agrees with me. That was quite a surprise to me considering the churches never taught economics, and most people who claim to believe in the Bible do not believe as the Bible does when it comes to economics.

The Bible is fully against taxation of labor and real capital. The Bible is against owning land and believes the land owner should pay rent to the community. The Bible is also against interest-bearing money and the institutions of usury.

I also found many who believed this way throughout history, from Chief Seattle, the Founding Fathers, and J.S. Mill to Thomas Edison, Einstein, Milton Friedman, and Winston Churchill. It was looking like a universal economic theory if infidels, men of science, and the Bible were in agreement.

Thomas Paine was one of those who believed this way. Thomas Paine also had strong criticism of the church. Many believed he was an atheist, but really he was against what churches did or in the case of teaching economics, did not do.

Today, there are many people who claim to be atheist who believe in the economics of the Bible, who believe in the principles of classical liberalism and Georgism. They just happen to reach the same conclusions as independent thinkers.

Henry George himself did not rely on scripture to demonstrate his theories. He observed and just happened to reach the same conclusions. Then, he was able to demonstrate his conclusions in clear language without having to use the words of the Bible or of others who also believed the way he did.

I have my doubts about the Bible, that it is just a book written by men. It might have divine inspiration. It might be ordained by God. It might have gained in popularity just because the men who wrote it were just right about the world. Nonetheless, to find the Bible reached such economic conclusions gives me comfort that I’m in good company considering the popularity of the book. It also gives me hope that if the Bible is divine or ordained by God, that God is perhaps not a tyrant (Lord Acton’s proverb indicates God is corrupt absolutely), and that heaven just might be the promised land of a fair and just political economy, where political economy is not dismal but serves men with a productive and agreeable common sense.

The economics of the Bible is not taught in churches. The economics of the best-selling and self-published American economist, Henry George,  is not taught in schools. The economics of classical liberalism and Georgism are not taught on television, nor with any significant funding in other media to even be noticed. The only chance you have to be introduced to this knowledge is to stumble across the rantings of a blog like this or to have discovered it yourself through independent thinking and independent reading. That is why this agnostic writer appears to be on a mission from God, to inform the faithful and infidels alike, that the Bible supports Georgist political economy, whether divine and ordained by God or not, whether a mission of David against Goliath or a Mission Impossible. It is my duty to inform others of my observations, whether from God or not.

Furthermore, if you’re a Libertarian, you would want separation of government and commodity markets. No Libertarian should want government to be commodity traders, to collect taxes in gold, to mint gold, and to warehouse gold. No Libertarian should want the banks chartered by government to emit bills of credit to corrupt the commodity market of gold either. You do not want government deciding that any commodity should be money. All commodities, especially a rare natural resource like gold, should remain in the free market where Libertarians can buy and sell the commodities without the corrupting influence of government. No Libertarian should want a gold standard since that is state intervention in free markets in the worst possible way. If you want to use gold as a store of wealth, you do not want gold to be declared legal tender. You only have to look at the long history of the dollar in the United States to see how many times the government corrupted gold markets.

Libertarians who fear inflation should lobby to end the printing press of private banks, should lobby to end the government’s power to borrow, and lobby for the power of government to print money. The invisible hand which drives wasteful spending and inflation would work to end wasteful spending and inflation if government had the power to print interest-free money rather than borrow it from the private banks which print the money as interest-bearing debt.

Libertarians should support HR 2990, the NEED Act of 2011, and support Bill Still to top the Libertarian ticket in 2012.