Category Archives: Ideology

How the Scofield Bible Came to America

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An excerpt from “Zionism’s un-Christian Bible” by Maidhc A Cathail at Online Journal explains how one of the defining political doctrines of our time was fostered by the selective promotion of one heretical interpretation of the Bible.

Note: My comments are at the end under the heading, “My Comment”; the article is in light gray text; the quotes from the Bible have been underlined; the Bible commentary by Scofield and Hagee that the article cites are in italics, as are titles of books and reports; the quotes from all other authors, including Sizer, Adelman, and various newspapers, as well as subheadings, are bolded] :

“Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield’s notes have been italicized in the following passage:

“‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ [Bible]

In fulfilment closely related to the next clause [Scofield]

‘And curse him that curseth thee” [Bible]

Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.” [Scofield]

Drawing on Scofield’s speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims,

“The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.”[Hagee]

However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique, “Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?”,

“The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.” [Sizer]

Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, enhanced Scofield’s interpretation, by adding,

“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”[Bible]

Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.

Stephen Sizer writes,

“Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts, Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events . . . sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East . . . it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’” [Sizer]

[Lila: I am not sure if I agree entirely with the statement that “racism is inherent to Zionism.” I have made a similar argument in “The Language of Empire,” (2005) but would like to qualify it, because of the special circumstances of the Jewish people in relation to European Christianity, as well as their relatively small numbers compared to the ethnic populations around them. However, those small numbers must be balanced against the enormous power wielded by Israel and its support by the US and UK government, as well as the corporate economic structure.

In sum, without demonizing Israel, it’s necessary to ask if its exceptionalist religious narrative – in which Zionism is inextricably intertwined – isn’t ripe for modification, the same modification that state Christianity underwent during the enlightenment (and thereafter), and that Islamicism is, rightfully,  being asked to undergo today].

The incredible Scofield

In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” The incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism,” however, casts considerable doubt on that assertion.

Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Being a “born again” preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, “The Incredible Scofield and His Book,” Joseph M. Canfield comments,

“The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.” [Canfield]

That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield’s theology was

“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.” [Canfield]

Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz claims,

“Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”[Lutz]

Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine “this peer among scalawags” ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.

Atonement

If there had been no Scofield Bible, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush, would most likely have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands, and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people might have been spared the well-publicized pro-Israeli rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, not to mention the lucrative End Times “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.

But it is the people of the Middle East who have suffered most at the hands of an expansionist Israel, emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of America’s Christian Zionists, who were led to believe that Scofield’s words were God’s will.

Although much needless suffering has already been caused by the Scofield Bible, perhaps it’s not too late for Oxford University Press to publicly disavow its harmful book. Among its many victims are 3.5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by Christian Zionists, who believe that the land belongs exclusively to “God’s chosen people.” At the very least, OUP could demonstrate remorse for its role in promoting ethnic cleansing by compensating those refugees with the considerable profits accrued over the past century from sales of its Zionist bible.”

My Comment

Not many people know about the role of the Scofield Bible in fostering one relatively marginal interpretation of the Scriptures, the dispensationalist views of John Darby, a 19th century minister of the Plymouth Brethren.

Dispensationalism went onto become so influential among American Protestants that it changed the political dynamics of the country. However, while the article cited above demonstrates how financial interests actively promoted the Scofield Bible, it wouldn’t have become so influential if the culture into which it was introduced wasn’t already receptive to it at many levels.

This is the argument I make in “Language of Empire” (MR Press, 2005), in which I analyzed the influence of Christian Zionism on the practice of torture as well as on the rhetoric that justified the war on terror.

You can find the core of the argument in “Christian Zionism: An Ideological Tower of Babel” (Counterpunch, January 15, 16, 2005), finished a year before the book actually came out.  The main point I make is that while Christian Zionism is important to the justification of American empire and of Israel’s role in it, it isn’t the only source of justification. There are broader streams in American religious and intellectual history with which Christian Zionism coincides. Those streams are identified below in the Counterpunch piece, which forms a concluding chapter in the book. Note, I’ve defined them below each part of the excerpt):

“Both secular and religious exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be possible to look to them alone for salvation.

[Legalism – the tendency to turn every moral/political/social debate into a courtroom drama over technical legality]

Both groups share the heritage of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record of legal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose favored status has been granted by the law.”

[Voluntarism – the belief that the essence of divinity is not rationality, but will, and that God’s acts are beyond or even contradictory to reason]

“Dispensationalists read the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.”

[Dispensationalism – the belief that Biblical prophesies can be seen unfolding in history today and that God’s promises in the Bible relate to the political state of Israel]

“Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation, an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written contract, whether made between one nation and another or between nations and God.”

[Literalism, Anti-intellectualism – the acceptance of the literal meaning of texts, the devaluation of interpretation, and a dislike for intellectual theories and intellectuals]

“From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.”

[Dominionism, Puritanism, Apocalyptic Millenarianism —  the belief that society should be ordered by the Christian religion working through the state; the belief in the essential depravity of human beings and the need for salvation by grace that is unearned and not universal; a belief in the return of Christ as prophesied in Revelations, accompanied by a world-wide confrontation with the forces of evil, followed by a golden age of a 1000 years]

How these beliefs impact policy-making in the west can be seen most clearly and stunningly in the  Declaration of the first  Jerusalem Summit (October 12-14, 2003) which reads in part thus:

“ISRAEL AS THE KEY TO THE HARMONY OF CIVILIZATIONS

Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity.

Israel’s unique geographic and historic position at the crossroads of civilizations enables it to reconcile their conflicts. Israel’s unique spiritual experience enables it to find a golden mean between the fault lines dividing civilizations: between tradition and modernity, religion and science, authority and democracy.

We call upon all nations to choose Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, as a center for this evolving new unity. We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”

Note: Many religions and nations have exceptionalist narrratives.

The unique problem at work here is in the lack of self-awareness of this innate chauvinism and the role it plays in the political positions taken by the US, UK, and Israel (the Anglo-sphere), as well as by their allied and client states.

This unique problem becomes a global one when the chauvinists, disguised as universalists, possess extraordinary nuclear arsenals and corporate power, and when the “deep capture” of the media and of legal and academic institutions has reached the point when there is no internal check whatever to its pretensions. The threat posed then is no longer simply to immediate victims of specific policies (say, Iraq) but to the entire world (the global financial crisis), and, indeed, the future of humanity (control of the gene pool, food and water and the dangers posed by bio-weapons and nuclear contamination).

How The Scofield Bible Came To America…

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An excerpt from “Zionism’s un-Christian Bible,” at Online Journal explains how one of the defining political doctrines of our time was fostered by the selective promotion of one heretical interpretation of the Bible:

“Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3. For the sake of clarity, Scofield’s notes have been italicized in the following passage:

_____________________________________________________________________________________

“‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ In fulfilment closely related to the next clause, ‘And curse him that curseth thee.’

Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew — well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Drawing on Scofield’s speculative interpretation, John Hagee claims, “The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.”

However, as Stephen Sizer points out, in his definitive critique, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon?

____________________________________________________________________________________

“The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.”

____________________________________________________________________________________

Apparently unaware of this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, enhanced Scofield’s interpretation, by adding,

“For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Reading such tendentious comments, a bible-believing Christian could easily assume, for example, that God will punish the 114 countries which endorsed the Goldstone Report.

Stephen Sizer writes,

—————————————————————————–

“Sustained by a dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts, Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events . . . sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East . . . it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so.’”

—————————————————————————

The incredible Scofield

In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” The incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism,” however, casts considerable doubt on that assertion.

Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879, the Atchison Patriot was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster generally,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.

Being a “born again” preacher, however, did not preclude Scofield from becoming a member of an exclusive New York men’s club in 1901. In his devastating biography, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Joseph M. Canfield comments,

————————————————————————

“The admission of Scofield to the Lotos Club, which could not have been sought by Scofield, strengthens the suspicion that has cropped up before, that someone was directing the career of C. I. Scofield.”

————————————————————————

That someone, Canfield suspects, was associated with one of the club’s committee members, the Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. As Canfield intimates, Scofield’s theology was

————————————————————————-

“most helpful in getting Fundamentalist Christians to back the international interest in one of Untermeyer’s pet projects – the Zionist Movement.”

—————————————————————————-

Others, however, have been more explicit about the nature of Scofield’s service to the Zionist agenda. In “Unjust War Theory: Christian Zionism and the Road to Jerusalem,” Prof. David W. Lutz claims,

—————————————————————————–

“Untermeyer used Scofield, a Kansas city lawyer with no formal training in theology, to inject Zionist ideas into American Protestantism. Untermeyer and other wealthy and influential Zionists whom he introduced to Scofield promoted and funded the latter’s career, including travel in Europe.”

—————————————————————————-

Absent such powerful connections, it is hard to imagine “this peer among scalawags” ever getting a contract with Oxford University Press to publish his bible. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery why OUP chose to endorse such a sectarian work.

Atonement

If there had been no Scofield Bible, American presidents influenced by Christian Zionism, such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush, would most likely have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands, and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people might have been spared the well-publicized pro-Israeli rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, not to mention the lucrative End Times “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye.

But it is the people of the Middle East who have suffered most at the hands of an expansionist Israel, emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of America’s Christian Zionists, who were led to believe that Scofield’s words were God’s will.

Although much needless suffering has already been caused by the Scofield Bible, perhaps it’s not too late for Oxford University Press to publicly disavow its harmful book. Among its many victims are 3.5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by Christian Zionists, who believe that the land belongs exclusively to “God’s chosen people.” At the very least, OUP could demonstrate remorse for its role in promoting ethnic cleansing by compensating those refugees with the considerable profits accrued over the past century from sales of its Zionist bible.”

My Comment

Not many people know about the role of the Scofield Bible in fostering one marginal interpretation of the Scriptures, the dispensationalist views of John Derby, a 19th century minister of the Plymouth Brethren.

Dispensationalism went onto become so influential among American Protestants that it changed the political dynamics of the country. However, while the article demonstrates how financial interests actively promoted the Scofield Bible, it wouldn’t have become so influential if the culture into which it was introduced wasn’t already receptive to it at many levels.

This is the argument I make in “Language of Empire” (MR Press, 2005), in which I analyzed the influence of Christian Zionism on the practice of torture as well as on the rhetoric that justified the war on terror.

[Because my publisher had actually set a limit to the number of pages and characters I could use, I had to prune each sentence so the writing ended up a lot denser than it might have been].

You can find the core of the argument in “Christian Zionism: An Ideological Tower of Babel” (Counterpunch, January 15, 16, 2005), finished a year before the book actually came out.  While Christian Zionism is important to the justification of American empire and of Israel’s role in it, it isn’t the only source of justification. There are broader streams in American religious and intellectual history with which Christian Zionism coincides. Those streams are identified below in the Counterpunch piece, which forms a concluding chapter in the book:

“Both secular and religious exceptionalists also share a unique relationship to the law that suggests that law and legal institutions are themselves implicated in the policies of Abu Ghraib and clarifies why it may not be possible to look to them alone for salvation.

[Legalism – the tendency to turn every moral/political/social debate into a courtroom drama over technical legality]

Both groups share the heritage of covenant theology which reads holy scripture as the record of legal contracts between God and man, a heritage which both privileges the law while simultaneously also promoting a sense of not being subject to it. The written contract binds us, but the interpretation of that contract remains with the state whose favored status has been granted by the law.”

[Voluntarism – the belief that the essence of divinity is not rationality, but will, and that God’s acts are beyond or even contradictory to reason]

“Dispensationalists read the final book of the Bible, Revelations, as a literal account of a post-war progression to a world-consuming conflagration, Armageddon. In doing so, they discount the importance of reason, learning, or social consensus in their interpretations in favor of what they see as a literal reading of the Biblical text. Parallel to this is their reading of the unfolding of human history as also a literal record where that text transparently reveals itself.”

[Dispensationalism – the belief that Biblical prophesies can be seen unfolding in history today and that God’s promises in the Bible relate to the political state of Israel]

“Just as fundamentalism disdains mediation, an anti-intellectual culture might find an oral tradition based on a continuing interpretative dialogue between past and present actually less attractive than the fixed guidelines of a written contract, whether made between one nation and another or between nations and God.”

[Literalism, Anti-intellectualism – the acceptance of the literal meaning of texts, the devaluation of interpretation, and a dislike for intellectual theories and intellectuals]

“From Biblical righteousness, the Promethean sense of the state as virtue incarnate; from Christian dominionism, the impetus to expand; from apocalyptic ruminations, the Promethean obsession with terror. And through all of these runs an unexamined sense of supreme moral satisfaction, a Puritan certainty about the nature and precise physical location of evil in the other that is translated not simply in the messianic language of Americanism but even in the shibboleths of liberalism. Evil is outside, out there in the world, radically disordered, deserving of eradication.”

[Dominionism, Puritanism, Apocalyptic Millenarianism —  the belief that society should be ordered by the Christian religion working through the state; the belief in the essential depravity of human beings and the need for salvation by grace, that is unearned and not universal; a belief in the return of Christ as prophesied in Revelations, accompanied by a world-wide confrontation with the forces of evil, followed by a golden age of a 1000 years]

How these beliefs impact policy-making in the west can be seen most clearly and stunningly in the  Declaration of the first  Jerusalem Summit (October 12-14, 2003) which reads in part thus:

“ISRAEL AS THE KEY TO THE HARMONY OF CIVILIZATIONS

Billions of people believe that Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity.

Israel’s unique geographic and historic position at the crossroads of civilizations enables it to reconcile their conflicts. Israel’s unique spiritual experience enables it to find a golden mean between the fault lines dividing civilizations: between tradition and modernity, religion and science, authority and democracy.

We call upon all nations to choose Jerusalem, the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel, as a center for this evolving new unity. We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.”

Refuting Kucinich’s Funny Money Platform

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Kaj Grussner, a tax-adviser in Finland, has a piece at the Mises blog that responds to Stephen Zarlenga. Zarlenga is the director of the American Monetary Institute and the author of “The Lost Science of Money.” He had previously criticized the Austrian position at Gnostic Media.

The critique is important because Zarlenga’s ideas have been adopted by Dennis Kucinich and they may very well bear fruit in policies (the American Monetary Act) that could make things worse (if you can imagine that). Here’s Grussner:

“Zarlenga criticizes economists for many things. One of these is that economists have taken morality out of the science of economics. He also says that economists have tried to hide this exclusion of morality, because if people were told about this atrocity they would be outraged.

Of course, morality has no place in the science of economics.

[Lila: I see where Grussner is coming from, but actually he’s mistaken, mainly because economics isn’t a science, but also for other reasons].

Science is, by its very nature, value-free.

[Lila: Actually, this too isn’t quite right. Science has a different set of values, but I take his point].

When you try to explain why action A had consequence B, you should examine theory and fact. It is only when you start too advocate certain actions or programs, such as the 100-percent-reserve solution, that morality comes into play. Let us therefore examine the moral aspects of Zarlenga’s monetary reform.

From the very outset, printing dollars out of thin air, declaring them legal tender, and purchasing goods and services with them is tantamount to theft. The printer acquires property without giving anything of real value in return. After all, the money is merely ink on paper with no value of its own except what it derives from the violent force of the government.

In addition, it is always those who get the new money first who benefit the most. In this instance, it would be the government. But those who are second in line will benefit too, while the new money still has most of its value. The recipients of the new money can turn around and again acquire something for nothing. The amount that can be acquired diminishes over time, so those who get the money last are the ones who pay for the early recipients’ gains.

Zarlenga explicitly mentions healthcare and education as being areas of government spending, as this would benefit the masses, who otherwise couldn’t afford such services. What he fails to understand is that it isn’t the students and patients who benefit, but the hospitals and universities. It is the medical professionals and academics who are the true recipients of the money. It is to them that the money is paid for the services they provide, and the constant influx of new money into these sectors will of course raise prices significantly over time.

[Lila: All this is true, and, in addition, cheapening will actually strengthen big business, because it is big business that takes on the most debt. This is an act that will win the approval of the underclass that doesn’t pay taxes; debtors, who get to see their debts diluted;  the governing class and all its clients, who live on public money; and the corporate class that pays taxes, but extracts much more back from the government in the form of subsidies and the use of infrastructure].

Every bout of new money will draw value from the existing amount of money, which means that after the initial theft of property by the government and its preferred interest groups, the debasement of the currency will continue at an ever-increasing rate; the more devalued the dollar gets every year, the more dollars must be printed every year to pay for the same things. For people far away from the printing press, this means that the value of their savings and income is transferred to the money printers and first recipients of the new money, much as it is today.

Another obvious problem with having the government print money is that it creates rent-seeking behavior. With fresh supplies of money coming from the government at an increasing rate, it becomes more and more reasonable for private corporations to lobby for a part of the public-spending cake than to appeal to consumers. In the long run, this means that an ever-increasing part of the private sector will become dependent on the influx of new government money.

From a moral point of view, it makes no difference who counterfeits the money and acquires property for nothing. It is still fraud and theft.
Conclusion

There is no point in making the Austrian case for commodity money here. There are many easily read books that do that. The purpose of this article is to explain that no matter how bad a system is, it can always get worse. Not all reforms are improvements. As we have seen, the 100-percent-reserve solution is ripe with unintended consequences.

When this economic crisis evolves into a currency crisis, which it most probably will, reform will become inevitable. The question then is what ideas for reform are lying around for the people and the politicians to choose from.

The reform advocated by Zarlenga and introduced to the Congress by Dennis Kucinich may very well appeal to politicians and bureaucrats. Also, the increasing animosity toward both the Fed and the banking establishment as a whole will likely encourage ordinary Americans to support Zarlenga and Kucinich’s initiative. On the face of it, the solution sounds rather reasonable and has the support of a very popular congressman.

Just think about it. It would strip the banks of their privileges and put the money power back into the hands of the people through their elected representatives; it would break the bankers’ secretive monopoly racket, which enables them to pay out billions in bonuses while ordinary people suffer. Doesn’t that sound familiar? Isn’t that how the Federal Reserve system was sold to the American public following the Panic of 1907?

For Austrians, it is easy to dismiss Zarlenga as a crank, which, based on the ridiculous claims he makes, he undoubtedly is. So why should we pay attention to someone like him? Because if we don’t, we increase the risk of him being successful in making the American Monetary Act become law. After all, similar monetary systems have been tried before.

This is why Austrians need to expose the real dangers of such a system. It would be a mistake to simply assume that that everyone will recognize its inherent problems and reject it. If the government can pass a constitutional amendment to sign the Federal Reserve Act into law and thus create a private central bank, they can certainly do this too.

So in addition to making the case for the free-market solution in money and banking, Austrians need to take up the debate with all their intellectual opponents. Zarlenga is one of them, and he should not be taken lightly.”

I’m posting a response to Grussner I saw  here.

I can’t say I was impressed by Zarlenga’s original criticism of the Austrians or the response to Grussner. The monetarists seem completely mistaken on fundamental economic principles, and I’m appalled that they are being taken so seriously.

In the first place, Zarlenga does not seem to understand that both money and debt represent claims to real goods. But while debt is a claim to real goods not yet produced, money is a claim to those goods in the present. That is, money represents production.

If a bank (either private or public) issues money without sufficient real goods to back that, the money is essentially “funny money” and it represents a theft from people who have savings based on real production. That’s what’s happened already. Savers have lost the high interest rate they ought to have received for the past two decades, and have subsidized an orgy of debt and spending by other people. Now the “other people” are using the force of the law (the gun, really) to make the savers give up more, so that the debtors can walk away from their debts. If the debts were fraudulently contracted, the defrauders should pay, not innocent savers who had nothing to do with the fraud. And if the debts were fairly contracted, the debtors should pay up.

Invoking imaginary golden ages where “the people” simply gave themselves whatever they wanted doesn’t cut it. Ain’t no such thing. Proof? Look at countries where there is “public” money. Inflation runs even higher in India than in the US. Corruption is rampant. A resource-laden, skilled and manpower-rich country has a per capita income no better than some of the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The banking mafia is a symptom, not the root cause of our problems. The root cause is the state, and the philosophy that allows the state to set aside natural law because it is “the lawgiver.”

Peter Schiff said it in a nice way:

“We Americans also must be honest with ourselves and recognize that we have been living beyond our means and that our lifestyle has been largely financed by austerity in China.”

And here, Peter Gorenstein (who, amazingly, seems to approve) states the obvious – the Fed wants to inflate away debt because it believes it will grow the economy (I kid you not):

“The Fed can’t admit that one reason it wants high inflation is to reduce the real burden of our debt, but you can bet that that’s one of its objectives.  What’s more, says Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman, inflation should be one of the Fed’s objectives.  Because that’s how we’ve gotten out from under debt burdens in the past.

Here’s Krugman:

So how did the U.S. government manage to pay off its [World War 2] wartime debt? Actually, it didn’t. At the end of 1946, the federal government owed $271 billion; by the end of 1956 that figure had risen slightly, to $274 billion. The ratio of debt to G.D.P. fell not because debt went down, but because G.D.P. went up, roughly doubling in dollar terms over the course of a decade.

In other words, after World War 2, we didn’t “pay down” our debt.  We grew into it.

And, importantly, this growth came from a combination of real growth AND inflation:

The rise in G.D.P. in dollar terms was almost equally the result of economic growth and inflation, with both real G.D.P. and the overall level of prices rising about 40 percent from 1946 to 1956.

So inflation is an important tool in getting us out of this mess.  It’s painful and unfair–those who have been responsible and saved money will pay the price for those who borrowed money, racked up huge debts, and spent more than they could afford.  But it’s what the Fed is (quietly) aiming for.”

Someone might say that the system where I do the borrowing and spending, and you do the saving and working is a version of slavery.

[That isn’t an anti-American statement either. It was made by a rather plain-speaking CEO of an American company…]

Debtors are demanding that savers work for them, through foregoing their own consumption and the market- price of money. Monetarists are demanding that people walk away from the obligations of their government with a slow-motion dilution of the currency. People on fixed income will be destroyed. People dependent on wages in industries where wages are not rising (nearly every industry) will find prices rising beyond them. Responsible workers and savers, here and around the world, will get stiffed. Future borrowing costs will soar. The US will suffer retaliatory treatment from foreign countries. Other countries will default on their debt or renege on their contracts. So will citizens everywhere. Corruption will rise. Gamblers in the stock market will benefit, as their portfolios of cash now get plumped up.  That is banana-republicanism.

Aldous Huxley On How “Scientific Dictatorships” Induce Compliance

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Aldous Huxley, novelist and social critic, gave a talk at the University of Berkeley  on the dictatorship he saw in the future of the United States, a “scientific” dictatorship, he termed it. In it, control would be maintained by narcotizing the population with conveniences, entertainment, consumerism, and drugs. Ultimately, compliance would become pleasurable..

‘Today we are faced, I think, with the approach of what may be called the ultimate revolution, the final revolution, where man can act directly on the mind-body of his fellows.”

(Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution, University of Berkeley, March 20, 1962)

Whistleblower Reports Precious Metals Manipulation By JP Morgan

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Bill Murphy, chairman of The Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) reports that on March 23,2010, GATA director, Adrian Douglas, was contacted by a London metals trader, Andrew Maguire, who had been told directly by JP Morgan traders how they manipulate the precious metals (PM) markets on non farm payroll data release, COMEX contracts rollover, and similar recurring occasions, to make money.

Maguire had previously contacted the enforcement division of the CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) to report this. On February 3, 2010, he gave a two-day advance warning of PM manipulation on the release of the non-farm payroll data on February 5 that took place as predicted.

Read more at GATA.

Vatican Moves Away from Frankenfoods

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The head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson, has moved away from his predecessor’s support for developing genetically modified food to alleviate hunger in poor countries. Instead, he argues that adoption of the “precautionary principle” is warranted:

“There are a lot of claims that are disputed (like) that GMOs never call for the use of pesticides or insecticides or anything because they are resistant,” he said. Such claims have been challenged, he said, and some say “at a certain point (these crops) require insecticides whose chemicals break up later in the soil and render the soil less fertile.”

Given the disputed claims and doubts, “I think that we should go easy and probably satisfy all of these objections to the full satisfaction of those who raise these objections,” he said.

Because of the companies’ control over the patented seeds, “what is meant to alleviate hunger and poverty may actually in the hands of some people become really weapons of infliction of poverty and hunger,” Cardinal Turkson said.

Previously, opponents of GM carried the burden of proving that some harm was being inflicted. Under the PP, companies that planned on introducing genetic changes into an organism would have to bear the burden of proving that it was safe.

While this might seem counter-libertarian, I would argue it is not.

1. Since changes in genetics are impossible to regulate post facto, they cannot be subject to the usual economic arguments available to libertarians. The potential devastation is so irreparable that the principle of liberty demands that the bar be raised ahead of the event.

2. Biotechnology as an industry is concentrated in so few and such large companies, that free market conditions do not prevail at all in other respects. The companies owe their position in the market to their influence on government regulations and laws, to begin with. That suggests that there will be little in the way of normal market forces to check their natural profit-seeking from turning into rent-seeking based on preferential treatment, captive markets/monopoly, and government enforcement.  PP is simply a thoughtful mechanism to prevent profit from careening into plunder.

Bottom line, PP prevents looting or theft.

That makes it libertarian.

Climate Scientists: Academic Barrow Boys

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Climate scientists are fighting back, reports The Washington Times.

Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher says:

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”

Of course, climate skeptics (or rather, critics of anthropogenic global warming, AGW) would argue that it’s the climatistas who’ve brought Barrow boy (street-wise) tactics into what ought to be a nice, genteel gathering of Harrow alumni.

Popular British TV writer and eminent free-speech QC, John Mortimer, author of the serial, “Rumpole of the Bailey,” saw through this convenient sentimentality about “gentlepersons” a bit more keen-sightedly than most.

In one episode of the serial, Rumpole, Mortimer’s aging, scruffy, Shakespeare-quoting Old Bailey barrister, defends Nigel Timson, a youthful member of a clan with an inelegant and chequered past, a true Barrow boy, who’s accused of insider- trading at the silk-stocking firm where he’s a broker.

It doesn’t help things that Nigel is living with the daughter of the head of the firm, who isn’t keen on a Barrow boy for a son-in-law. The plot-twist is that the Barrow boy, despite his spotty family history, is actually innocent. I won’t tell you the rest, but the larger point is that clever crooks know how to play to their advantage on public preconceptions about class behavior.

The same holds true for university intellectuals. They also usually enjoy the general presumption that they hold to higher standards of behavior and ethics than the ‘baser sort’ outside the ivory towers.  What the climate fracas shows is that that presumption might be just as outdated as the presumption about the virtues of Harrow boys that Rumpole overturns…

Israel-Palestine Problem Exhibits Wound Of PTSD

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At Forward, Leonard Fine puts his finger on the emotional trauma underlying the intellectual and political impasse in the Middle East:

“From time to time in this space, I’ve made passing reference to the post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts Israelis (and the Palestinians, too). It may be a bit of a stretch, but there is a growing literature that suggests that not only individuals, but social institutions, can suffer from PTSD. Thus, for example, Loren and Barbara Cobb, in an article entitled “The Persistence of War,” argue that “specific symptoms of untreated PTSD are particularly troublesome for the social institutions of a society suffering from epidemic levels of these disorders. These symptoms are: hypervigilance, emotional numbing, denial and avoidance, seeing the world in black and white, magical thinking, and apocalyptic thinking.”

They go on to quote Dr. Jonathan Shay, widely regarded as among the giants in the study of PTSD: “Democratic process entails debate, persuasion, and compromise. These presuppose the trustworthiness of words. The moral dimension of severe trauma, the betrayal of ‘what’s right,’ obliterates the capacity for trust. The customary meanings of words are exchanged for new ones; fair offers from opponents are scrutinized for traps; every smile conceals a dagger.”

In the American military experience, PTSD most often arises when a soldier has witnessed the deaths or terrible wounds of his or her comrades. That happens in Israel, too, of course.

But in Israel, whole societies are the witnesses, and the word “post” is, alas, premature. The traumas are very much ongoing, and we do not yet have the clinical vocabulary to comprehend them.

For Jews, the great trauma is, of course, the Holocaust itself, the systematic and ultimately incomprehensible slaughter of one-third of world Jewry. That left a wound that will never quite heal, but that might by now have formed a bearable scab.

But mini-traumas ever since have picked at that scab, rendered the wound ever-raw. The excruciatingly painful list of suicide attacks, the hateful rhetoric, Sderot and the entire aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza, and now, around the corner, Iran.

And then there have been and are the politicians who whether out of conviction or for purposes of dreadful exploitation pick at the scab and refresh the trauma. For Menachem Begin, Beirut was Berlin and Yasser Arafat was Adolf Hitler; for Benjamin Netanyahu, this is 1938, Tehran is Berlin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. It was ever thus, it will ever be thus, hence it is here, now: They hate us. “Never again” may be our common oath, but “always, everywhere” is our common belief. The wound will not heal.

And the Palestinians? Betrayed by the corruption of their own leadership, theirs is not only the Nakba of defeat and displacement in 1948 and again in 1967; it is daily humiliation both thoughtless and intended, new bypass highways for the Jewish settlers in their midst, still more than 500 checkpoints and barriers to clog or block their own roads and travel, a security fence that slices and snakes through their fields and their farms and their villages and their cities, reminding, reminding, insulting.

Over Gaza, a sky from which at any moment death may be launched; in the streets of the West Bank, raids and roundups. Ongoing trauma, ongoing disorder. The wounds will not heal.

The Palestinians say: Without justice, there will be no peace. The Israelis say: Without peace, there will be no justice. Both sides are stuck with their wounds and their traumas; they need not only diplomacy, they need therapy. Their empathic capacity has been battered. They cannot place themselves in the shoes of the other, nor can they see themselves as the other sees them.”

India Changing…

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Jayant Bhandari in Liberty Unbound:

“Now, as I travel through India’s smaller towns and villages, I gather many impressions, both of change and of continuity.

I stay in rooms that cost me $2 a day, and purchase all-you-can-eat food for 50 cents. I pay my driver the princely sum of $7 a day. To Westerners, these prices will appear astonishingly low, but inflation of food prices in India is close to 20%. Food is very expensive for regular folks, and speculators are being blamed. I am constantly amazed that there is never any mention of the fact that the Indian government still runs one of the most efficient printing presses in the world — printing money, of course. The only thing that limits inflation is the high rate of real economic growth. Yet the Indian government is getting extremely addicted to increasing expenditures. The government’s fiscal deficit is about 12% of GDP. To me this is like addiction to heroin. What will happen if the growth rate falters?

In an isolated place, a woman sells me a 15-kilogram bag of fruit for a total of 60 cents — fruit worth about $15 in Bhopal. Her companions think she’s won a lottery. These wretched women chase me and beg me to buy some from them. I feel sorry for the little girl who had tears in her eyes. Yet I am repelled by the fact that so many Indians easily grovel and beg. The worst is when well-off people do this. A visit to a government office in India is essential if you want to understand the degradation that the Indian public accepts even today.

I meet the top management of a company constructing a major highway. The highway was deemed uneconomical, so the government and the company agreed that they would use eminent domain to confiscate a lot more land than was necessary from the farmers, at 5% of the market value. The extra land would be converted into condos or commercial space. The poor people would subsidize development. Why should they subsidize the development of the country? This is socialism in practice, although the farmers are branded communists when they rebel. Meanwhile people in the West believe there is something romantic about poverty — a view that is not only hypocritical but pathetically wrong..…”