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EDITORIAL

Capitalism Is Not Secure -- Unless Everyone Is

© 1998-2000 Macroknow Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  • When people and their governments are indentured with gargantuan debts
  • When their economic well-being can be destabilized and their wealth cannibalized, with ease and at a distance, by speculators
  • When usury permeates, directly or indirectly, each and every economic transaction
  • When the "free" marketplace is a rigged "game of catallaxy"
  • When air and water - the stuff of life - are being polluted or poisoned
  • When the "rule of law" enframes "net advantages" for monopolists and quasi monopolists
  • When financial, commercial, technological, and media powers are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands
  • When people cannot afford justice

people rouse themselves, and secure to themselves the power to rule their own lives. John Locke's warning and Voltaire's "écrasons l'infâme" still hold true today.

World War III Against the Money Trust? is not a figment of my imagination. When people could no longer afford justice and 'cake' they sharpened their guillotines. For those who do not remember history, Voltaire returned from exile triumphant. It should not be surprising that thinking Capitalist billionaires like George Soros are worried about the future of the global Capitalist system -- and welcome change. But financiers like Soros who believe that "[f]inancial markets are not immoral; they are amoral"1 are deceiving themselves. While reason and morality are separate dimensions in economic space, they form an indivisible totality in our Being. Any philosophy that posits the amorality of financial markets is fraudulent at best, because it distorts truth and causality, and, therefore, responsibility and accountability.2
In Capitalist societies, economic security is national security. So what could threaten the economic security of the United States? Air Force 2025 3, a report tasked in 1994 by the Chief of Staff of the United States Airforce, identifies many possible threats. These include, ironically:
  • The insecurity of money;
  • A global recession;
  • The national debt;
  • "[S]imple, everyday, corrosive corruption" - "the human kind" or "the electronic kind";
  • A currency markets panic;
  • A "banking system or currency crisis"; and,
  • Believe it or not, "vendettas of wealthy individuals or corporations" [my emphasis].

Financiers and bankers may be able to destabilize customers -- one borrower at a time. But the people can destabilize the whole Capitalist system in one fell swoop -- with double runs on banks and on the justice system. Of the two, the run on the justice system is the most decisive. Of course, it must be avoided -- if possible.

Dr. Edward E. Ayoub

 

1 For Soros's views on market values vs. social values, see George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism [Open Society Endangered], 1998, at 195-213. Published by Public Affairs™, New York, NY.

2 See Edward E. Ayoub, The Essence of Capitalism, published by Macroknow Inc., Toronto, ON, 2000.

3 Air Force 2025. Study chaired by Lt. Gen. Jay W. Kelley, Commander, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, June 1996, at http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025. See, especially, External Paths to Extinction for the USAF at http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume4/chap01/v4c1-2.htm.

 
 

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