#57.20: Perspective – Attitude, Work and Perception

Isn't it crazy to expect people, who can barely function past 65 years old or before 18 years old, to be able to establish their own monetary system, which of course requires their own economy to support it? (No I don't mean THEIR economy) You can't build an economy in a person's life span. It takes many generations. You keep hammering the same point, Its not your money! Never was! I wonder why that is :( Spongy Iris

Or is it more crazy to continue to allow someone else to do for us what we should have been doing for ourselves all along? What have we said about money? That it's an accounting machine, with the various circulating tokens as mere instances of what is recorded “on the books.” Why have we said that pieces of paper with denominations printed on it works better than anything else? Because of Gresham's law reversed, which is a real law, which means that Nature and FORCE has something to do with it, like the FORCE of gravity which does not permit you to step off a cliff and walk in mid air. Remember that as we move forward with this essay. The cheaper the means of exchange, the easier it changes hands and eventually drives everything else out of circulation as money tokens. 

Due to the inadequacies of our present education system, most people are completely unaware of the actual situations surrounding the making of a living. It's never taught in school. Neither is very much taught about the common uses of money. Those things, in most places, one finds out on one's own. 

This essay concerns the obvious. If it is of interest to you, perhaps you'll be entertained. Maybe I'll not be all that entertaining, but I promise you, everyone you've ever been entertained by – aside from those among yourselves personally – that's right, through the media, that constant source of interruption that schools prepare you for, all those entertainers were of course PAID by someone, to keep you entertained. 

Those paid entertainers were working to entertain you, while being paid by someone else for doing so. The time spent by them was remunerated to them in money. That money came from somewhere. Do you ever bother to consider the source of the money you are paid with? You assume it's yours too, I don't doubt. Your name on one of THEIR bank accounts proves that, doesn't it? 

For many more obvious reasons, among the entertainers, I have to include the vast array of musicians of all genres, as well, anyone connected with the visual arts, any of the technicians connected with these tremendous enterprises; they are all paid to do what they do and it has a purpose. This represents a considerable swathe of wealth in most modern societies. 

In the United States, a lot of it emanates from the state of California, a place with roughly twice the area of Great Britain, half the people and about the same sized economy. Great Britain of course has perhaps a quarter of its economy emanating from London. The same pattern is found in all major developed countries. Patterns of work are generated by streams of money, flowing and directed to attain certain goals, always to sell you something, whether it's a product, service or just an idea. 

What are the implications? Of course, you know them. Just pay more attention to them and – responsibly, I would say to each one of you – decide when and where to pull away from THEM. Why? Because you don't need THEM. Are they paying you to entertain you? No. You pay for all kinds of services to allow THEM to intrude on your time and space to entertain you. What's THEIR message? Figure it out. Is it real? Is it fake? Especially if it's fake, you would perhaps be more concerned to know. 

We've said that work is the time out of the rest of your life that you spend being paid to do something. This takes all kinds of forms and terms of barter, one's time and labor for what one really needs and wants. Some are in money payments on specific dates. Some are settled in deliveries of agricultural or industrial products for which one is paid in money at a particular time. The terms of barter settled by money are still barter, which never goes away. Money performs the task of splitting the barter, so that a far wider range of exchange is possible. But before charging forward, let's briefly consider just how exactly much of humanity lives. 

There are people who live on the land and are totally dependent on what they derive directly from the land, some actually live as hunter gatherers and have indigenous societies that go back deep into time, measured as we measure it. But these people do not measure time as we measure it, not at all. They may know some of the annals of their people, should there be any. These people may be some of the luckiest on earth, as some have romanticized them. But among such people, any who have been exposed to the modern world, its modern conveniences they seek would invariably bring about the destruction of their primitive societies. 

Primitive people, if they trade with others or not, settle matters within their tribes, based on some rules involving barter. Someone gets something for doing something or provides something for getting something else, and so on. Nothing about their interactions has anything to do with time as we know it. They neither measure it, nor have much in the way of an interest in the use of numbers beyond counting the number of their fingers and toes. They have plenty of interest in reading natural signs. As we understand the skills of reading and writing, they have no interest whatsoever. 

Everywhere else, one must earn one's living by a means of barter involving money. You put in your time, you accomplish your job, you get paid according to the satisfaction of who's paying you, your ability to do or to stand the work, etc. This is the time out of the rest of your life for earning your living. The rest of your life, you sleep, you eat, you take care of your personal needs and you're entertained. 

You might be able to afford to buy a car, a boat, a house, a farm, some land, some animals. In most cases, you won't have all the money to buy it in cash, so you'll have to finance it; borrow / rent the rest of the money you'll need to buy whatever it is. 

You were never taught in school to regard everything you own as an asset. You were probably even scolded into thinking something like that considering anything an asset was somehow reducing it to its value as mere things in terms of money and that whole attitude has clouded your perception. Some of you bought very overpriced products that you thought were going to be assets to you, but they aren't.

Check out the advertising and entertainment you've been exposed to, lately, last month, last year, ten years ago, etc. You had to do this, else you wouldn't be happy. Who said so? It was some combination of things that all came from the entertainers. You see what I mean? In fact, there are some things about you that you decided to emulate or succeed in because of something you got from some entertainer, even if it's as seemingly insignificant as the way you'd play a song, because you heard someone else do it that way.

So anyway, we all acquire assets and these improve, or supposedly improve, our chances of success at one thing or another, always with the intention of improving our standard of living. No primitive human, no matter how happy or unhappy they are, would find any of this to his liking. We all remember the film about the bushman who found a coke bottle one day. He was never happier than when he threw it over a cliff. Primitive people generally like the way things are, as long as Nature cooperates. 

But we have to earn a living. There's just this little problem; there's never enough money and most of it is never in the hands of the common people. By THEIR own admission, THEY hold 97% of all the monetary assets on earth, leaving the rest of us who care about trying to earn a living, with the remaining 3%. 

Most of the stuff you hear or read anywhere of an economic nature presumes that 1) you already have a lot of money and 2) you are willing to surrender it for the purposes of gambling on the future prospects of this or that chain of productive operation. Most of you don't have any money, you never have and you never will. Increasingly, it will be difficult for you to pay your bills, have decent living conditions, do much of anything, all because there isn't sufficient money for you to do them. You've relied all your lives on someone else's money that you must have in order to support your life, your food, water, electricity, heat, the roof over your head. And you wonder why there are so many homeless people? 

So along comes E. C. Riegel and he says that only those without money may be allowed to issue it, he comes up with a perfectly obvious and sensible idea upon which to base the monetary unit, realizes that it would be international in scope and stumbles over the fact that fiat (will) has been stolen from us by all the illegitimate issuers of THEIR money (which doesn't even belong to us).

So then, each of us may have something we can willingly do for someone else and if it's reasonable, a certain amount of Valuns would naturally start flowing through all the local communities everywhere and build a parallel economy that would outlast THEIRS. I'm letting everybody know that THEY can't keep THEIR economic Titanic afloat much longer and with much that's being revealed, well, it's only a matter of time.

What are you going to do when there is no gold, no silver, none of THEIR STOLEN fiat money floating around? This would happen if the value of the asset base crashed and was not recoverable. Where again did all that money go? Come on students! Those who said depreciation of assets win the cigar. It's the death of all money and incidentally it's also the reason why THEIR limited quantity commodity theories of money are GARBAGE, and I'm being extremely kind. That instantly rules out ALL cryptocurrencies, because they are all based on this scarcity of the trading commodity concept. And all one needs do to erase them is pull the plug. Bye bye now!

So Trade Genius or not, and there are dozens of other investor services out there, when the doors of the stock exchanges close because nobody has any confidence in them anymore and all that money has disintegrated, and deflation savagely sets in, no, there won't be any gold or silver floating around, because it will be too valuable compared with everything else. And what's the value of labor under these situations? It falls through the floor. Massive unemployment occurs, all because there is never enough money. 

E. C. Riegel saw this and it is one reason why this blog exists. We feel PASSIONATE about employment and work and desire to foster a solid work ethic, because we WILL it! Understood? FIAT IS WILL and without it we are all THEIR slaves! 

Let's again put this as mildly as we possibly can, ok? Most know the famous jibe that opinions are like anal sphincters and everyone has one. So you want the facts? There are some clowns out there who similarly say that the ultimate value of any fiat currency is zero, and they may be right, but always for the wrong reasons. Fiat? Fiat currencies? It's WHOSE fiat that matters. 

Yes, the same mistake has been made over and over and over again, down through time. The Chinese are said to have started it, others followed. WHAT DID THEY ALL HAVE IN COMMON? Come on students! That's right, they were all issued by either a government or a bank. That's the right answer. 

So we say squarely to the clowns, it's not our fiat, stupid, it's THEIRS that's illegitimate and THEIRS always fails because non producers issue it. There are a few complementary currencies that are still around that are based on some form of barter valuation and yes they are all fiat currencies. They are PRIVATE fiat currencies and in order to issue any, you have to be a member that has something to sell to the community of others that use that currency. 

We understand that most of us can't just walk away from THEM and THEIR money, because we are carrying mountains of debt. You know what will eventually happen with all unsecured debt? It will default. That will cause the Ponzi like structure of THEIR financial system to collapse, and since THEIRS never separates clearing transactions from lending money, when THEIRS fails, it takes everyone's wealth with it. There won't be any money after that, because it was lost in the depreciation (fall in prices) of the assets it purchased, which can no longer be sold for even a fraction of their original prices.

Now hyperinflation. That's when there is so much money floating around that prices of everything rise until it costs you a month's rent to buy a hamburger. Long before that, your money has become toilet paper. Think a Weimar meltdown isn't possible in any number of countries? All it usually takes to bring down a government is a sufficient rise in food prices. How do the governments usually cope with this situation? They hand out more money for no work. They appropriate expenditures over taxes for their friends. They just give money away without ever expecting any to return, because they as issuers are illegitimate to begin with, they produce nothing anyone wants to buy.

As we have further stated, grifters and grafters are usually behind all of this corruption and that's what this is. Think hyperinflation wont happen? You have been living through it in every advanced and developing country. It's just been going on in slow motion due to the tremendous amount of used stuff that's a break on rising prices. Hyperinflation has already run its course in various countries, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela. The weather too, all about whatever is behind it? Who knows? 

So this is a strenuous time and it will require strenuous and precision efforts; always work smart not hard. Has anyone seen that series on the Russian fellow who built his own log cabin, etc.? He worked smart as well as hard. It seemed every action was precisely timed and thought out. His tools were in tip top condition too. He used physical leverage a lot, etc. Above all, he had the right attitude about his work and wasn't being paid for it, though his videos I'm sure are paying him a little and he claims he has a regular job. Entertainment again. What's the message? See America? Do as this Russian guy is doing. And maybe more of us might do so, because we want to distance ourselves from THEM and THEIR entertainments. 

What's the difference in doing something for money and doing it for nothing? For one thing, a level of expectation is usually part of a paid situation. The employer has certain requirements and expectations that must be met or the situation doesn't last too long. There's usually some sort of fit or chemistry involved as well. One usually has to be socially liked or accepted by the other people one works with or for. Having to earn a living makes it far more important to be able to go outside your own personal focus and actually interact with other people. What do the entertainers promote? The stay at home by yourself meme is catching on and it's got some definite downsides.

School never taught us anything about basic attitudes we would need to succeed, because maybe they didn't even know what these were or ever considered them important. As a bare minimum, education would have enabled us to acquire the abilities to read and write in at least our mother tongue and to count things using numbers. Reading, writing and arithmetic (hope you never had Common Core) are still the basic skills required in the modern world. If you still don't have them and aren't living among hunter gatherers, these would be the very first skills to acquire as soon as possible.

In some societies, conformity to particular standards of dress, sociability and composure are required, else one easily becomes dismissed as an antisocial or deviant. THEY have social services to take care of those people, so they are rarely seen. In the worst cases, THEY have prisons where those who won't follow the conformity can be taken out of regular contact with others. The proposed social credit systems are intended to accompany all usage of THEIR cryptocurrency, when or if it appears (all others will simply be devalued or turned off so you wont be able to get to them and since they were ephemeral to begin with, too damn bad if you spent too much of THEIR stolen fiat currency on any of them). As we have always said, it's THEIR internet and when it goes off, bye bye.

The basis of this conformity stems from the same source as the entertainment. Just sit back, relax and enjoy, pay and consume. You can't afford it? You want it bad now too, don't you? You can't live without it, right? How much more would you be willing to pay over time to have it right now? Wait. Do you have a job? Are your prospects good for keeping your job or even getting a promotion? How much more time and energy are you willing to exert in future to have that whatever right now? And THEY just love the idea of you living way above your means, even if THEY never do, because even when THEY (come on, usually synonymous with the top 5%) have all the money in the world, THEY still require servants (slaves) to help THEM do the most basic chores.

Consumerism was born the minute someone could finance something they couldn't afford to buy. The rest, always involving some form of entertainment, was punctuated by interruptions for commercial advertising to get you into that craving for something to make you happy when nothing around you is doing the job.

You need to start asking some serious questions that might put you at risk of becoming an antisocial or deviant. Who are you? What are you? What about yourself is really your choice? How would you choose, from what you honestly know about yourself, to change about yourself to become more the person you want to become? How does an audience, a market for your skills enter into all of this? What style of life would you prefer to become accustomed and how much is that likely to cost you in time, effort (your energy) and money?

This blog has never advocated anything as ridiculous and foolish as political revolutions or activism intended to overturn the existing structures. Never! What obvious foolishness! We have plenty of history to prove that all of these efforts, some ongoing even today, were always intended to benefit THEM, never the people at or near the bottom. Most of these would be leaders refer to the people as “the masses” the better to depersonalize them for later elimination when THEIR masterful social schemes don't work out, when enough people wake up to realize they have been cheated once again. E. C. Riegel would never have advocated anything of the kind.

Riegel recognized that economies to scale require effort to build and set up, that they can't always spring into action to take up the slack that THEIR economies have eliminated as they became “too big to fail.” By the way in the process of merger and acquisition, wealth was actually destroyed because streams of income were eliminated for more regular folks. The hubris behind many of THEIR acts of defiance of Nature runs centuries deep.

Do you know what hubris is? HEW-bris. Hubris = excessive pride or self-confidence, lacking the basis for either genuine pride or confidence, frequently associated with arrogance, conceit, conceitedness, haughtiness, pride, vanity, self-importance, self-conceit, pomposity, superciliousness, feeling of superiority, imperiousness; hauteur; in informal usage, uppitiness, big-headedness and also by direct inference, NARCISSISM. The biggest ploy of THEIR entertainers is to equate your happiness with some very profitable form of mass narcissism. And of course narcissists attract predators, more of THEIR legions.

By any likely comparison, E. C. Riegel was a very humble man, merely asserting the obvious and wishing to bring it to our attention. You will (fiat) have to consider the best wishes for your fellow men as you pursue your own attainments and happiness. The rugged individualist, another of THEIR favorite memes, will not help you long term. So this isn't about you just becoming someone you'd be proud of, it's about being involved with other people, based on something real, the exchanges of time, labor, services and products.

Obviously the entertainment we have been exposed to has left certain impressions on us that THEY intended to use to further THEIR goal, to take over the world. In that scheme, perhaps you count as a consumer of economic product, perhaps you are used as part of some public policy effort, to make some politician or political party seem more intelligent, enlightened or compassionate, when none of this is the true objective and to whatever extent you personally are involved, it has nothing to do with you.

When it comes to earning a living, what most of us require is knowledge of what other people want or need doing and whether or not we might be qualified to do what is required and of course for the price offered. The proposal is built around a new institution we call an exchange. Of course we exchange our goods, services and time among our members and these are measured in Valuns instead of THEIR money. Meeting other real people through local exchanges is something THEY have tried to make uninteresting to the vast majority. Would it have been better had we said we were going to establish a network of private clubs? That's what this proposal looks like, but we'd prefer calling them exchanges. 

How does one meet or associate with people anymore? On what basis? The local exchange focuses this key human need for cooperation and interaction to achieve both for ourselves individually and as communities, what we each might want. Of course any core product involved with the basics of life; food, clothing, eventually lodging, housing, capital goods (machines, vehicles, etc.) is already going to be there operating in THEIR system. Many operators are aware of the problems with THEIR money and will want to seek a hedge against the failure of THEIR money, etc.  

How do we connect then? Assume the internet is down or no more. Even if it's up, it's time to move in the opposite direction. All the way back to hunter gatherer societies, as are currently springing up even in advanced countries, because there's not enough money where it is most needed? No, back to what we have always spoken about, the size of each enterprise always operating within its own scale; production, customers, revenue, finding that place where further growth would result in diminishing returns to scale, a fundamental law of Nature itself which THEIR economies always defy to OUR peril.

We did mention Herbert Stein's law, “trends that can't continue, will stop.” If a company expands at the wrong time, they may be doomed. If they expand at the right time and then fail to scale back when the trend fades, they are likely doomed. There are structural changes in technology and custom that can also doom various kinds of businesses. Whole areas of consumer products that used to be sold as “this is what you need to make you happy or at least more satisfied,” are long gone out of business because the trend could not go on, so it stopped. Some things once stopped can never be restarted. Once automobiles became more feasible, horses and buggies were never coming back, etc. 

The connection with each other as members of the proposed local exchanges are 1) by dropping by the exchanges on a regular basis to check out all the offers for jobs that our members would be offering and 2) by seeing advertising on the backs of our money, letting us know who will take it in exchange for goods and services we actually want or need to buy.  

In order to ensure the vast majority of humanity from THEIR fully intended genocide or obsolescence, we must make it our deliberate business to care a little bit more for each other and less about our own narcissistic preoccupations, many of which if we look more carefully at them, will reveal themselves to be foisted upon us by THEIR entertainers.

Many discussions over the years about this proposal have convinced me how few people actually understand their situation in life, how to make it better for themselves or avoid making it worse. We are often propelled through life on the expectations of others, but more often the ideas we have about our own aspirations come directly and indirectly from THEIR entertainers. And we PAY for THEM to entertain us on top of it! But there is often truth in observed irony.

As for building economies that take several lifetimes, we have all lived through situations where economies were created overnight by THEM, - remember the dot com bubble? - only to be smashed to bits (pun partially intended), when THEY had made enough money on THEIR money without work. That's THEIR goal.  

Meanwhile, we need to band together, figure out who we are, where we are, what we can do, what we can't or won't do, etc. and it's best to begin with already existing businesses that have been going on for a long time already that serve as models. We know the difference between wholesale and retail. We know that the difference has to do with efficiencies to scale. We are also aware of many structural changes that make and break industries. We are aware of THEIR gadgetry, all intended to make human effort seem more worthless. What happens when a job is always paid in money issued by the employee not the employer? What happens when nobody buys what THEY are selling and instead buys locally from people they know and trust? What happens when the trust of those in distant places falls away so much that THEIR long term trends can't go on? Those trends top out and fall or just stop in mid stride as has happened dozens of times when some technology got too far ahead of actual usefulness or other hazards were discovered that rendered the technology useless.

Don't for any instant be fooled by the so called power of any technology. These are tinker toys of adolescent narcissists who usually have very little use for anyone but themselves. Having been occupied in the computer technologies most of my life, I've run into quite a few of them. I suppose that when a computer program of their choice finally says “I don't need you anymore,” perhaps they'll have sense enough to pull the plug and for good measure purge the program, so it can't be spread further. Remember, the choice to be whatever you want to become is bounded by your attitudes and your information before you ever set out to acquire any skills. 

All the best, 
 

David Burton

dpbmss@mail.com