Alan Watts on Gold

[doodle]

For a rational look at the nonsense that is gold, listen to the first five minutes of this talk. Comments?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE5OGBjtTVU&sns=em

[doodle]

He is talking about the difference between symbols and the reality which they are meant to represent. In other words the way in which we have comfused the menu with the meal...to put it in culinary terms. His argument is not that gold hasnt acted historically as a store of value, but simply that it is an absurd confusion in the minds of men between symbol and reality that has caused it to do so. This confusion leads to unecessary suffering as in the case of the great depression. I think his analogy between inches and money holds true. To say we havent got enough money to do something when the requisite labor and materials exist is the same as saying we havent got enough inches to build your house even though all the lumber is sitting there waiting to be assembled.

[doodle]

Watts on Money and Politics. Once again, he is dead on. He is one of the most prescient people I have listened to: http://youtu.be/ap2sx6WHons

[Reub]

Better than Karl Marx?

[doodle]

Actually, I think Karl Marx was pretty darn insightful as well into the nature and functioning of the capitalist system. I also think most people totally overlook the admiration that Marx held for the productive capacity of capitalism....as he states in the manifesto

Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

[Pointedstick]

Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. Capitalism has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.

"...that's why we need to kill the people who run it before they work you to death or destroy your craftsman's pride, and replace it with something wholly untested that a first year anthropology student could tell you will inevitably morph into a strongman dictatorship!"

[doodle]

Har!!

Although my intention was not to get into Marx here, since I have been dragged back to this topic I will play along. Before we move on, I think we should get a larger picture of the fawning compliments that Marx paid to capitalism. Not even Bill Buckley could have written such a glowing evaluation...

Capitalism, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become capitalist themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.


Capitalism has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of capitalists, the East on the West.

Capitalism keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

Capitalism, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?