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Why XIV

JOHN WEYLAND

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Copyright © 2019 John Weyland. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 10/15/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-2973-4 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-7283-2974-1 (e)

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Contents

Chapters

1. Why Science Partly Ended Secrecy About Knowledge 2. Way The Cause Of Depressions Is Easy To Understand 3. How To Keep The Two Parts Of Women Apart 4. Why Helping Others Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing 5. Why You’d Have Thought The Chinese Would Have Wanted To Figure Out An Afterlife For Their Ancestors 6. Why The Pill Did Not Solve The Sex Problem 7. Why The United States Can Become A Country Where A Majority Lives Off A Minority 8. Why Allegations In American Politics No Longer Have To Be Believed Because Of Proof 9. Why the U. S. Constitution Always Had The Potential To Be Turned Into A Form Of Parliamentary Government 10. Why Better Off People Are Better Citizens 11. Why Newspapers Were Much More Credible Than Today’s Media 12. Why The Real Problem Of Democracy Cannot Be Discussed 13. Why What Made Men Great Made Them Stupid

14. Why Men Created A Problem For Themselves When They Created Yearround Sex 15. Why We Have To Sacrifice The Truth Because Of Democracy 16. Why Does The United States Try To Impose Its Morality On The World 17. Why Slavery Disappeared 18. Why Isn’t The Welfare Cost of Illegal Immigrants Made An Election Issue 19. Why Competition Causes Monopoly 20. Why A New Race Is Developing In The United States 21. Why Reconstruction Left Blacks Without Legal Protection 22. Why Learning Throughout Most Of History Was Wrong 23. Why You Would Have Thought Everybody Would Have Understood The Industrial Revolution 24. Why Communism Is Hostile To Innovation 25. Why Partial Expropriation Only 26. Why Quantum Physics Cannot Be Reconciled With Einstein 27. Why Government Debt Is Good For Business 28. Why Did Other Forms Of Life Survive 29. Why The Law Favors Rapists 30. Why Christianity Brought Back Equality 31. Why The Industrial Revolution And Democracy Occurred More Or Less Simultaneously 32. Why The Whole Anti-colonial Movement Was Based On A Fallacy

33. Why We Threw Away The Best System 34. Why One Of The Many Advantages Of Non-democratic Governments Is That They Can Adapt To Changes In Conditions 35. Why The Women’s Movement Wants Women To Get Back To Their Original Condition Of Independence 36. Why There Will Supposedly Be An Economic Catastrophe 37. Why Serfs Were Saved From Acting Like Traditional Slaves 38. Why Social Justice Finds Nowhere For Billionaires 39. Why The Welfare State Depends On Paper Money 40. Why The Christian Religion Did Not Try To Reform The Institutions Of This World 41. Why The United States Is Better For The World Than Europe 42. Why Mexico And The Rest Of Central America Think They Have Figured Out A Way To Get The United States To Solve Their No. 1 Problem 43. Why Peace Has Become Possible 44. Why The News Media Repeat What They Know Are Lies 45. Why You Would Think The Declining Birth Rate In The Developed World Would Be A Very Big Issue 46. Why Human Males Can Have Sex So Frequently 47. Why Whites Feeling Guilty Over Negroes Is Ridiculous 48. Why Anybody Who Receives Welfare Should Not Be Able to Vote 49. Why Suicide Has To Be Reconsidered 50. Why A Minority Can Change Behavior In A Democracy

51. Why You Don’t Have To Study 52. Why The Combination of Democracy And Capitalism Has Created An Insoluble And Possibly Fatal Problem 53. Why Capitalism Had A Means Of Preventing This Situation But It No Longer Works 54. Why The Essence Of Capitalism Is Competition 55. Why Socialism In The United States Is Just The Welfare State Under A Different Name 56. Why Would Anybody Doubt That Women Have A Different Heritage Than Men 57. Why Banks Should Be Forbidden To Loan Out More Money Than They Have 58. Why The Aristocracy Did The World A Great Service 59. Why Morality Is Self-Contradictory But Refuses To it That It Is

Chapter 1

Science did not only advance knowledge. It ended—partly—secrecy about knowledge. Science is always praised for advancing knowledge. It is much less frequently praised for spreading knowledge, which is equally important. Before science the kind of knowledge science deals with was kept secret when possible. Those who discovered it wanted to make money from it or gain some other advantage. There were no patents. There were no institutions devoted to providing knowledge. It was done by tradesmen or amatures. When tradesmen made a discovery they kept it to themselves. They were not going to share it with their competitors. Some discoveries could not be kept secret. It was easy to steal them. That was how much new knowledge was spread, But this was not so with many discoveries. Greek fire is a famous example. It was a great advantage in war. The Greeks were using it centuries before Christ. They were still using it during the Crusades. Other countries never found out the secret of it. Which was eventually lost. Science was different. General knowledge was shared. Nobody owned it. At the beginning the sharing was done amongst individual scholars. The sharing was easy to do because they had a common language. Latin. But the big breakthrough with science did not come until the establishment of universities. Universities were meant at first for the training of the religious elite. The Church had accumulated doctrines which could not be acquired without extensive studies. That was provided by universities in Europe. Science was developed largely through the efforts of individuals working separately. They shared their knowledge writing to one another. They did so well that the universities started including them in their studies. This was all freely accessible. The modern world became possible. The modern

world happened. There is a multiplier here. One man working alone can learn very little. One man working with others can learn a great deal. Progress depends on sharing knowledge. Science promoted sharing knowledge —as nothing had before.

Chapter 2

When the cause of depressions is easy to understand. The cause is the sudden reduction in bank loans. The sudden reduction in bank loans is caused by the sudden collapse of an economic bubble caused by those bank loans. Bank loans are like money. They are used to buy things. When there is a sudden reduction in bank loans there is a sudden reduction in demand. That causes the failure of many businesses. The failure of many businesses causes the failure of many more businesses. The effect snowballs. The process is worse because of leverage. With leverage banks loan out more money than they have The economic bubble that causes crashes results from leverage. Prices can go up so much and so fast in the bubble becauses of leverage. It is because prices are going up that people want to get into the bubble. When that is going on they can make a lot of money in in a hurry. But prices can go up only so much. There is a limit on leverage. Banks have to pay off some some of their s with real money. They have only so much real money. Whenever they cannot pay off all those who ask for real money they are bankrupt. This is when the bubble bursts and the depression begins. The economy is in big trouble. So if the process is easy to understand why didn’t economics understand it? That is the question. Economics’ position was let matters take their course. The economy will correct itself eventually. But conditions were so bad in the 1929 depressions that governments had to intervene. The welfare state had arrived.

There is a temptation to say that the banks bought off economics. But that doesn’t seem very plausible. How would they do it? The banks have certainly bought off governments. They don’t want change. Banks like things the way they are. They can wait out the bad times. They more than make up during the good times. Bankers are never sent to prison. But economics professors? They resisted exposing banks in the 19th century. Banks practices did not fit in with their perfect competition theories. In the 20th century economists wanted to blame capitalism. That was the popular thing to do. They came up with a theory which supposedly showed that something about capitalism prevented demand from keeping up with supply. So they ed governments giving out money to to increase demand. But they seemed not to look at the figures. Governments could not possibly give out as much money as banks created with their leveraged loans. So economists still don’t understand depressions.

Chapter 3

How to keep the two parts of women apart? Women have demonstrated they are made up of two parts. They have done this by successfully competing with men. People had thought that women were made up only of the traditional part and could not compete with men. This is what they had apparently shown for tens of thousands of years. You couldn’t blame them for behaving like this. It seemed natural. Women gave birth to children. That was their purpose in life. They did things by instinct. They did not think them out. So you would expect instinct and later feelings to determine most of their behavior. Men, on the other hand, had to think many things out. This meant that men and women behaved and thought differently. And that women were unsuited to men’s world. But there was a surprise. Some women showed they were capable of competing successfully in the men’s world. There was an explanation for this. Given the facts of life, women get half their inheritance from men. So they inherit the capacity to think. The difference was that men had to use this capacity but women did not have to nearly as much.

With the Industrial Revolution women could start working outside the home. Men’s strength and endurance were no longer required for many jobs. Women showed that in many jobs they could compete with men. That did not mean they were equal. Their heads were smaller. So their brains were smaller. But this varied from individual to individual. So some women, despite the brain size problem, were mentally superior to some men. The bigger problem was emotion and instinct. Women had to overcome that. Not many were willing to make the effort. Instinct and emotion told them not to. So the result was that some women competed successfully but only a minority.

Chapter 4

Helping others is a good thing. No, it isn’t. All societies help others. The welfare state is an extension of this. There were too many needy people during the Great Depression. Governments had to intervene. They could not let them starve. People had always believed helping others was a good thing. Look at the Christian religion. That is what it is all about. People believed that because of agriculture. With agriculture the land contributed almost everything to production. You couldn’t grow anything (or pasture anything) until you had land. To get more for yourself you had to have more land. To help others you had to give part of your income from land. The Industrial Revolution brought a change in the situation. With the Industrial Revolution you could increase production with machines. That was what it was all about. So you could do something for others without giving to them. You could provide things cheaper to them. You could provide things that had not been available before. So you could help others when you sold them something. There was more to go around generally. The world became more prosperous. The welfare state makes the world poorer. Less is produced. Things cost more. So helping others is not necessarily the best thing. It used to be. But it isn’t anymore.

Chapter 5

You’d have thought that the Chinese would have wanted to figure out an afterlife for their ancestors. Those ancestors were all-important to them. You can’t very well have ancestors unless you have some form of afterlife for them. The ancestors were like the gods of the Ancients and the Saints of the Christians. They intervened for the Chinese in daily life. They brought them health and prosperity and whatever else they wanted. (At least some of the time.) Here the Chinese showed a special trait. They are willing to accept something useful whether it is believable or not. They are extreme pragmatists. The unity of the family has been extremely useful to them. It gives them an extra strength. They combine against the rest of the world. No other nationality can match them in this. Confucius is their spiritualy leader. He is treated in the West as a religious type. He is not. He is secular. He preached the family—the family ed by the ancestors. He did not explain why or how the ancestors were supposed to survive. He just took that for granted—like the other Chinese.

Chapter 6

The pill should have solved the sex problem. But it didn’t. The sex problem is that sex can cause babies. Babies have to be raised, which costs a lot of time, money and effort. Unwed women normally don’t make enough money or have enough time to raises babies by themselves. That’s why marriage was instituted. A man and a woman together are necessary to raise babies. Marriage was universal. It was generally assumed when the pill was introduced that with the pill women would stop having babies outside of marriage. Historically, such babies were regarded as a great disgrace. They were a disgrace themselves and they disgraced their mothers. This did not happen. Women took advantage of the welfare state. They got money to help them raise their children. The child without a legal father became common in the western world. Many women showed that they did not want to have husbands. These women did not seem to be bothered by the burden they put on society. Which was considerable. And these women did not seem to be bothered by the adverse effects on on their male babies. Which were likewise considerable. Sons needed a father to help raise them—both financially and psychologically. So instead of solving the sex problem the pill worsened the sex problem.

Chapter 7

Can we become a country where a majority lives off a minority? It would seem so. We are a democracy. There are more poor people in the country than rich people. It takes a majority to win an election. The poor people have the majority. They could vote themselves enough money to live without working. Poor here does not mean what poor did traditionally. There are not that kind of poor in the United States. Our poor are the envy of the traditional poor. Our poor are only poor in the sense that they have less than our affluent. It is not that they are living badly by world standards. This whole situation started with the Great Depression. That was what brought the welfare state to the United States. Before the Great Depressions there was no welfare state in the United States. The government did not any class of the population. The economy was a competitive economy. A competitive economy is an economy that runs itself. It is an economy that produces as much as it can with the available resources. Those who do not do well enough in such an economy have to be looked after by charity. The labor movement vilified this economy. It did that because it wanted better wages and better working conditions. The population tended to side with the labor movement. They found working people more sympathetic than well-off people. But the population accepted the economy because it produced good results. The country was prosperous. The full blame for the Great Depression lies with the business community. Anybody with the slightest acquaintance with business should have known that selling stocks at 10 per cent margin would lead to a gigantic crash, and that crash would take a long time to recover from. The business community did not stop the stock market boom because they were

making a lot of money out of it. They ignored the longer-term consequences. The crash of 1929 caused many people to lose their jobs. And there was no automatic procedure to bring about a recovery. The government had to intervene. It could not let people starve. This was the beginning of the welfare state in the United States. The Great Depressions was ended by World War II. The post-war period was one of great prosperity for the United States because it had world production to itself. But this did not last forever. Other countries recovered. The United States had to compete again. The United States changed politically. The two parties had been very much alike until the Great Depression. Then the Democratic party became the party of those who were getting the worst of things. This was principally workers. The arrangement suited the Democratic party well until the unions got entrenched. Their officials became complacent and self-serving. The workers came dissatisfied and quit them. This stranded the Democratic party. It was left with Americans whose thinking had been shaped by the Great Depression. But the numbers were not enough. So it turned to minorities. The principal minorities were blacks and Mexicans. They were poor and lacked education. They needed help. This began the practice of buying votes. The Democratic party kept the blacks alive in the big cities. And it let the Mexicans come into the country against the law. Government help had contagious appeal. Single moms came as a surprise. Until the sexual revolution nobody expected young women to willingly have babies when they were not married. This had been such a condemned act. But young women did this in large numbers once the government began helping them financially. Then there were people with health problems. Treatment for these problems had improved spectacularly during and after World War II. But so has the cost.

People wanted the government to pay for health care. Which the government did under the Democratic party. It turned out there were all kinds of people who wanted the government to pay them. And these were part of the majority in a democracy. There did not seem to be any limit on how far this could go. So why wouldn’t the United States keep on until it becomes a country where a majority is living off a minority? The minority will not allow it, you say. But how can a minority prevail in a democracy? When it is a minority.

Chapter 8

Allegations in American politics no longer have to be proved to be believed. This was shown in the recent confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. The allegation of rape, though completely unproved, apparently was believed by about half the American public. It was the latest in a series of allegations like this. The Democratic party has been testing them. They have been getting more and more unbelievable. The level of popular belief seems to be remaining more or less the same. Such allegations have become a standard feature in the current presidential campaign. They seem to indicate a permanent lowering of the level of discussion in American politics. News in this country used to have some truthfulness control on it when it was dominated by newspapers. The more pretentious newspapers imposed standards on themselves to be prestigious. That was part of their appeal. It was not television that undermined this. Television remained subservient to newspapers. Television pretty much observed the same standards as newspapers. It was social media that undermined credulity. There is no editorial control on social media. Anybody can say anything he pleases. The American people have gotten used to this and accept it. When a seemingly responsible organization like the Democratic party makes a statement the public is very much inclined to believe it. The party has been testing how far it can go with this. It found it could evade the law by bringing forward a few women to accuse a man of sexual improprieties. It did not have to accuse him of a crime. With the Supreme Court judge it did not think it even had to make a plausible accusation. She could no details. The alleged act took place 35 or so years ago. There were no witnesses. There was no evidence.

Chapter 9

The U.S. Constitution always had the potential to be turned into a form of parliamentary government. The Democratic party seems to be bent on taking advantage of this. With the U.S. Constitution the House of Representatives can impeach the president. If the party controls two-thirds or more of the Senate that party can remove the president from office. This gives a party complete power over government, which is what a party has with the parliamentary system. The purpose of the changes in government in the 18th and 19th centuries was to limit the power of the chief executive (the monarch.) This purpose was so successful that by the end of the 19th century the monarch had no real power left. From then on parliament was ruling the country by itself. Which is what it is still doing. In the United States the new government removed the monarch entirely by successfully rebelling. That would have left the legislature ruling the country by itself. But the legislature wrote a new executive into the Constitution. He was the president. At the time the British king still had considerable power and the American rebels thought they had to have something like that. What the rebels did not realize that as the country developed the president would be able to increase his power. The Democratic party was not happy with this when it was out of power. It decided it was going to impeach the president if it won control of the House of Representatives. The Democratic party knew it would not get the two-thirds majority in the Senate it would need to oust the president. But it also knew that an impeachment

trial would disrupt the presidency and limit what it could accomplish. It also knew it could make future presidents realize that they had to deal with a much more powerful legislature.

Chapter 10

Better off people are better citizens because they favor property, not because they understand politics better. Better off people used to be the only ones who got an education. So it was logical for them to think they understood politics and everything else better. And it was true. But education has spread. People in modern, developed countries are literate and informed (to some degree). Still, better-off people get more education. So they should know more? Unfortunately, the knowledge about government in modern, developed countries is mostly of little use. It starts out as material meant to engender and prolong patriotism. All countries need patriotism. Much of this is false. It consists of heritage. All countries have heritages. They are suited to children. Large parts of them do not stand up to critical analysis. Later on, when children grow up and go to universities—as the children of the better-off do—what they get are theories that are as wrong as the heritages. So they never receive a proper education in politics or history. What they do have, being better-off, is the prospect of getting property, either through their own efforts or inheritance. This gives them an interest in using and preserving property. This is lacking among the less well-off. The welfare state is one which gives away money to whoever can persuade government to give it to him. This money is spent on things that have been produced. It is not spent on producing things. So it does not increase production.

Countries have to increase production to become more prosperous. They have to become more prosperous to become better-off. Property has to be preserved and used to increase production. It is not preserved if it is just consumed. Which is what happens if it is just given away. So having an interest in preserving property is a service for a country. Which is what the better off have. Which is what makes them better citizens.

Chapter 11

Newspapers were much more credible than today’s media. Today’s media are not credible because they are totally irresponsible. What they put out as information can be—and often is—false. What made newspapers responsible was libel. Newspapers were really afraid of libel. The awards for libel in the courts were high enough to be painful for them. And, besides the awards, there were the legal costs. Libel cases tended to drag out. The lawyers charged big money. Social media are not afraid of libel. The responsibility for their content does not lie with them. It lies with whoever puts the material into them. Suing an individual is not like suing a newspaper chain. A newspaper chain has lots of money. If it loses a libel suit it is going to pay the award. It is worth going after. Suing an individual for libel is usually a bad business proposition. Most individuals do not have enough money to pay a big award. The Supreme Court made the situation worse by ruling that when known figures are involved malice has to be proved. And known figures are the only ones worth suing. Because of libel newspapers got into the habit of making law the test for their stories. Because it was in the courts that libel suits were settled. The law makes many charges unprovable. Rape is the charge that has been very much in the news recently. Rape by its nature is very difficult to prove legally. Attempts to prove rape usually fail. But with the social medica it is different. They report that some woman has said

she was raped. That is enough. The man is guilty. In short, the accusation has become enough. The truth is irrelevant.

Chapter 12

The real problem of democracy cannot be discussed in public. And if that weren’t bad enough there’s another problem which is worse. The real problem of democracy is that the voters do not have the knowledge they would need to vote responsibly. This problem cannot be discussed because the voters would not like having it discussed. Whoever was trying to discuss it would get rejected by them. The other problem is that when voters do not have enough knowledge to vote responsibly they turn to their feelings. Feelings are a worse recourse than ignorance. If voters are so disqualified why have democracies lasted so long? Democracies have been around now for more than two centuries. If they are so bad why didn’t they disappear long ago? A big part of the explanation is that democracies are not democracies. They are republics. The people who actually make decisions in so-called democracies are a very small group. They know what they are voting on because that is the work they are living on. The catch is that nothing requires them to vote for what is in the best interests of the country. They will maintain they are doing that, but given the ignorance and dependence on feelings of the electorate they usually wind up with misrepresentation. Democracies were a better idea in the 19th century than they are today. In the 19th century the countries that had become democracies had laissez faire economies and no welfare. With laissez faire economies governments did not interfere in economics. Economies were allowed to run themselves. They were competitive. Competition brings about the most production at the lowest prices. With laissez faire economies governments did not engage in charity. People were

left to look after themselves. Governments, consequently, were very small. They did not have much to do. The United States government got most of its revenue from tariffs. They sufficed. National debts were not a problem except during times of war. Once the war was ended the debt could be paid off. What went wrong? The Great Depression. Banks brought about the Great Depression by loaning out money recklessly in the stock market. The whole thing collapsed, as anybody could have foreseen, and the Great Depression began. Depressions tend to drag on for a long time. When banks collapse because they have loaned out more money than they have, there is no longer as much purchasing power as there was before. Only less is bought. It is hard for banks—those that are still functioning—to start loaning out more because they have to find people who are capable of making those loans. Recovery comes slowly. The stock market debacle of 1929 was very large-scale. Many more people got into the stock market than ever before because it seemed such an easy way to make lots of money. So the losses that had to be made up before spending returned to normal were enormous. This caused many businesses to collapse and many people to be out of work. The government had to intervene or people were going to starve to death. They could not be left to private charity. It was overwhelmed. The government started giving money to people. Once governments in democracies start giving money to people the practice is very difficult to stop. They get used to receiving the money. They decide they are entitled to it. The practice spreads. If somebody else gets money why shouldn’t all of us get money? The welfare state has arrived. At the same time the government started intervening in business. Nobody seemed to know what caused the Great Depression, so the government tried one

scheme after another. Nothing worked, because what was tried did not deal with the real cause. Only when the prospect of World War II came did Europe provide enough demand to get the economy in the United States going again. Once the government started intervening in business and giving money to people the government was in an entirely different situation. It had become big government. Voters no longer were kept from having their weaknesses exploited. Those weaknesses had been relatively harmless. Now they were going to dominate American politics.

Chapter 13

What made men great made them stupid. That was intelligence. Intelligence made men able to think. It was with intelligence men got to where they are today. But it was with intelligence that men were able to imagine things that do not exist and believe they do exist. Including religion. Various forms of religion are still believed in. They are not still believed in only by backward people. They are still believed in by many educated people. This was excusable until the development of science. It no longer is. There is no longer a credible case for religion. Modern, developed societies will not it this because they do not want to offend the large numbers in their populations who still believe in religion. They are democracies and have to take into popular beliefs. The pretense is that a logical case can still be made for religion. It cannot. The appeal of religion is still very strong. The great appeal of religion is usually thought to be a happy immortality. But the logically indispensable function of religion is to provide a justification for morality. This is not generally recognized. Most atheists believe that morality justifies itself and can exist credibly without religion. They believe this because they are taught morality from infancy onwards and it seems unquestionable to them.

This is not true. So civilizations are left with a code of behavior they cannot justify. Luckily for them, they do not have to from a practical point of view. Most people believe in morality, justifiable or not. The only trouble comes when the attempt is made to prove the belief logically. That it cannot be done does not bother many people.

Chapter 14

Men created a problem for themselves when they created year-round sex. The problem is that year-round sex and civilized life do not go together. So sex has to be somehow fitted into parts of civilized life where it causes the least possible trouble. People are so used to this—it is found in all civilized societies—that they do not think about it. The trouble started for the human race when women were given estrus at different times each month. To be able to impregnate them men had to be able to have sex at any time. No other species has an arrangement like this. What nature apparently did not foresee was that men would not be satisfied with this arrangement. If they wanted to have sex at any time, they would try to figure out how they could have sex at any time. They did figure it out. Women were supposed to have sex only during the brief period of estrus once a month. That was so they could conceive and have children. Which was what sex was all about. But men had developed intelligence. They could think. They realized that because they had hands and arms they could make women have sex with them whether the women wanted to or not. They did not have to wait for women to have estrus. So men began practicing rape. Rape led to the family because men started keeping women with them all the time. And—this was a sort of bonus—women came to have a great liking for sex at

any time. Sex no longer appealed to them only when they were experiencing estrus. Before rape women raised children without men, like other female mammals. The family turned out to be a great idea. Men could help feed and protect the young. The young could take longer to develop and could develop more. The trouble did not come until later. For a long period human beings lived in families. They could fit sex in. A man could have sex whenever he wanted it. But when these families started combining and civilized life began, this did not work. Other things had to be done. Things could not just be put aside whenever some man felt like having sex. So sex had to be relegated to times when it interfered the least with daily life. This turned out to be—naturally—during the time of sleep. We are so used to this we take it for granted. But, if you think about it, this is not a natural arrangement. It is not something all other mammals observe. For them sex takes place during daylight. Anywhere.

Chapter 15

Do we have to sacrifice the truth because of democracy? As we have been doing in the United States. We have been sacrificing the truth because we have been told that to say anything unfavorable about minorities is to show bias and we should not do it. We have even made it into a crime. It is actually prosecuted. We are all familiar with the kind of thinking involved here. And we all apply this kind of thinking in our daily lives. The thinking is that we don’t say anything negative about our friends. To say anything negative is an unfriendly act. Unfortunately, things can be said about all groups that are negative but true. And, unfortunately, dealing effectively with situations requires the truth. So what are democracies supposed to do? It has been the Democratic party that has espoused this line of thinking. It did that after deciding to become the champion of minorities. The Democratic party had not always been the champion of minorities. The opposite. Historically, it had been the champion of slavery. The slaves were the biggest minority in the United States. The former slave states were overwhelmingly Democratic. The ex-slaves were not allowed to vote. The Democratic party changed its alignment after World War II because it was losing the once solid labor vote as American workers turned against unions. It needed something to take their place. Minorities had been routinely attacked in the United States in the 19th century, when millions came in. There were no laws limiting them. The attacks speeded up Americanization. The children were more quickly Americanized because of the schools.

But it was different after World War II. World War I had made the United States anti-immigrant. Limits were placed on the number of foreigners who could enter the country. And the immigrants who had come did not Americanize themselves the way they once had. They could now keep UP with the old country. In the 19th century to go to the United States was a lifetime decision. There was no return. There was little or no . A few letters. And fewer of them because most immigrants were poor and illiterate. In the post World War I period there was more and more . And more temporary returns. Steamships. And then steamships and airplanes. Immigrants became hyphenated Americans. ChineseAmericans, Mexican-Americans, etc. National heritage became long-lasting. And it became more visible. Immigrants had come only from Europe. They had all been white. Racial differences became more of a problem. The problem that had solved itself no longer solved itself. Actually, it was the minorities already here, not the new minorities, who most needed the protection, because the most negative things could be said against them. But at the same time it was these minorities who would benefit most from truthful and therefore effective programs.

Chapter 16

Why does the United States try to impose its morality on the world? You would think any government would realize the stupidity of this. It is because the thinking in the United States is still religion dominated. Although the country is much less church-going than it once was. Religions have to think that their morality is not subject to adaptation. They have to believe that because it is God’s morality. God can have only one morality. God cannot be adapting his morality to changes in conditions. Which morality has to do. Religions in the United States were much more aggressive than in Europe because they were not run by the state. State-run religions adapt themselves to conditions. They have to. In the United States state-run religions were forbidden by the Constitution. The men who drew up the Constitution did not foresee the consequences of this. The result was that the United States had many religions. These religions were not part of the government. So they did not have to concern themselves with the practical consequences of their actions. The disastrous consequences of this were demonstrated by the Civil War. A small number of abolitionists advocated the emancipation of of the slaves by civil war. Other countries in the Americas had slavery and ended it peacefully. Nothing was learned from the experience. Fifty-five years later Protestant preachers advocated Prohibition. It was another disaster. The government soon put an end to it. Again, nothing was learned. An example is the U.S. government trying to get Islamic countries to give up Islamic practices. This does nothing but worsen

relations with those countries.

Chapter 17

Slavery disappeared because it was bad economically, not because it was bad morally. As children human beings learn to do what is right morally. So they like to pretend all their lives that they are doing right. But as adults they usually do what is right economically because that is what is in their interest to do. Slavery existed in all civilizations because it suited the conditions of agriculture. All the religions of civilization accepted slavery. Including Christianity. Jesus Christ, that great proponent of brotherly love, never uttered a word against slavery. The explanation for the disappearance of slavery in the 19th century is a simple one. Everyone knows you work harder if you want to work than if you are made to work. Getting slaves to work well was always difficult. But there was no alternative. What happened was an alternative developed because of the Industrial Revolution. Machines took over from land. Machines created conditions that made free labor possible. Because the factories with their machines had to have workers and those workers had to be attracted from where they were. The labor movement at the time was given to laying it on about the lowness of wages and the misery of the workers. But the workers went from the farms to the towns, not vice versa. And life got better. Machines increased production. Compare the average worker

today with the average worker 100 years ago. This ended slavery. Free workers were cheaper than slaves. They got paid more. But they produced more and more than made up for it. None of this interested the abolitionists. If it had the United States might have been spared the Civil War. They were preoccupied with the moral argument. Which made the slaveowners bad. You can’t deal with bad people. So you can’t compromise with them. That leaves you with only one alternative.

Chapter 18

Why isn’t the welfare cost of illegal immigrants made an election issue by the Republican party? Illegal immigrants get over 4 billion dollars a year in basic welfare alone. They are not entitled to this since they are not U.S. citizens and are living in the United States illegally. This is only a part of the cost of these immigrants. The other measures taken to deal with them, such as health care, run into billions more. You would think the Republican party would exploit this cost in elections. Everybody knows that the Democratic part is evading the law to get these immigrants into the United States in the expectation they will vote Democratic and make up for the party’s losses with other groups. So the Republican part would seem to have plenty of motivation to go on about this issue. It is crucial to the political future of the United States. Yet next to nothing is heard from Republican politicians. The explanation lies in the religious history of the United States. Historically, the United States is a Christian country. The Christian faiths all preach brotherly love in keeping with the life and words of Jesus Christ.

Chapter 19

Competition causes monopoly. Because it causes competition to be avoided. Competition reduces return to the lowest possible level. This is a great incentive to innovation. Innovations are given monopoly status by governments through patents. This is to encourage innovations—which are indispensable for progress. Patents mean innovations pay better than they otherwise would. The drawback for the public is that the products cost more than they otherwise would. All advanced countries have decided that the advantages of patents more than offset the disadvantages. Patents pay more than they seem to because their benefits don’t end when they run out. Whoever got the patent originally became so entrenched in whatever business he was in that he got a comparative advantage that was far from lost altogether. The irony is patents were having more and more to do with business when monopolies were becoming unpopular. This was the late 19th and early 20th century. Before the Industrial Revolution innovations were rare. Most lines of business went on as they had generation after generation. Competition, if there was any, was local because the high cost of transportation kept products from coming in from elsewhere. What competition there was was in price, not in product. Products were all alike. Wheat was wheat. A spoon was a spoon. It was these conditions that made for the old-fashioned monopolies Which were

the ones that became unpopular. The new monopolies, the ones that came from innovations, were generally accepted and became an integral part of contemporary life. Competition now is competition in product combined with competition in price, not just competition in price.

Chapter 20

A new race is developing in the United States. Thus race solves the problem that has dogged efforts to raise the position of blacks. The Americans themselves are not aware of the development. That is because of how history has gotten them to look at the racial problem. The history of slavery in the United States is unique. Not only is it unique compared to the history of slavery elsewhere in the Americas. It is unique compared to the history of slavery any where in the world at any time. The history of slavery in the area that became the United States started out like the history of slavery elsewhere in the Americas. A new area had been discovered that was suited to plantations and slavery. These parts began by bringing over poor workers from England to do the work. They signed contracts binding them to stay a certain period. This turned out to be an impractical arrangement. It was far too easy for these workers to run off. They were white-skinned like the other people in the 13 colonies. So they could melt into the general population. And there was plenty of better work elsewhere. So the South turned to importing blacks from Africa. The local Indians—being hunters—had shown they were not suited to the work. Slavery was already an established practice in the Americas. Slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil had gotten off to an early start. These areas were ideal for raising sugar, which was an extremely lucrative crop. Slavery had existed in Europe since the beginning of civilization. It was the usual fate of people who were defeated in war. It took on a different appearance after the fall of the Roman Empire. There were no more big countries to fight war and provide slaves. The little areas that remained had to provide their own slaves. Which they did by giving their slaves land to work and making the arrangement heredity. This was called serfdom, but it was just an adapted form of slavery.

So when slavery was introduced in the southern colonies it did not provoke much attention. It was an accepted part of life. But its days were numbered. The Industrial Revolution was taking over. It required free labor. With competition owners had to be able to hire and fire workers. It was more efficient. The land that became the United States was divided into some parts that were suited to slavery and some parts that were suited to the Industrial Revolution. They had different interests and different ways of life. They could have solved the problem of slavery peacefully, as the other parts of the Americans did. But they did not choose to. By the time of the American Revolutionary War slavery was starting to become a controversial issue. The northern part of the country had been settled by extreme religious groups. The belief common to them all was that they knew what was right and consequently they should prevail. Among them were abolitionists. They believed the slaves should be freed. This was supposedly a Christian belief. But there is no mention of it in the Christian Bible. This did not seem to bother the abolitionists. Because of the changing attitudes toward slavery a clause was put in the Constitution ending the importation of slavery in 1808. The thinking was that if slaves could not be imported slavery would die out. Elsewhere in the Americas slavery was dependent on the importation of slaves from Africa. They were worked hard and died young. It was cheaper to buy more slaves from Africa than to raise black children. The old practice of importation was continued. The countries themselves, being Catholic, were not anti-slavery. The end of the slave trade was imposed by the British government. There was abolitionist thinking in Great Britain as in the United States. The British were at the height of their power and used their fleet to try to stop the slave trade, but they were not really successful with countries that did not have the abolitionist attitude.

The ban on the slave trade did work in the United States, where there was popular . But the effect was not the predicted one. The importation of slaves from Africa was practically stopped. But the Americans did not give up slavery. Instead they raised their own slaves. It happened that the plantations in Virginia, which had been the biggest slave state, had been exhausted. So the slaves there were sent off to the Deep South and sold there. Slavery continued to flourish. It did not end as predicted. One of the inevitable side effects of slavery was the children of slave-owners and black women. Many of the white fathers were not about to have these children work in the fields like the other blacks. At the same time they were not going to keep them at home with other of the family. There was a tendency of the fathers to send these children off to the cities and help them there to enjoy a comfortable life. These mulattoes considered themselves superior to the field hands. They married among themselves. Lightness of color was considered a highly desirable characteristic. Given the preference, more and more blacks became lighter and lighter. After World War II a movement developed to end the inferior status of blacks. But there was a problem. Blacks were not as intelligent as whites and did not do as well in school, which had become the way to rise in the world. The activists maintained this was because they did not get the same level of schooling and once they did the problem would end. But that did not turn out to be so and the United States seemed to be stuck with a permanent racial problem. But there was a solution to the problem. It was that there were so many blacks who were only partly black, and the number was growing fast. This was the solution. This was the new race. This race was not created intentionally. Nobody anticipated the results of mixing blacks with whites. Which were that the new blacks were more intelligent— surprisingly more intelligent. When the new era of slavery began with the discovery of the Americas intelligence was not the prized characteristic it has become. Which was the

doing of the Industrial Revolution. It was the Industrial Revolution that made intelligence important. It took time. It was not until the 19th century that the Industrial Revolution took over. It was not until then that intelligence and schooling started to achieve their dominance. So the effects of mixing blacks and whites did not show up immediately. That happened when blacks were freed and could start competing. But this took time. The historical status of blacks had to be overcome. That took generations, and is still far from complete. In the United States the recognition of what was happening was very much hampered by the pro-black movement itself. They had fastened on a regrettable statement of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” So the last thing they wanted to do was it that the inferiority problem existed and was being corrected by the mixture of the races. Since the pro-black movement dominated the universities this development was not itted or given academic attention. So it was not generally realized to be taking place. Only those who did some thinking on their own would see the evidence—which was abundant.

Chapter 21

Reconstruction left blacks without legal protection. In a way they were worse off than they had been as slaves. The North never figured out how they were going to deal with a defeated South. If they had, they would have realized they were in an impossible position. The North had to occupy the South after the Civil War. Any changes they made with the South’s way of life would be resented. They would be removed as soon as the occupation ended. Anybody could have foreseen that the North would not stay in the South indefinitely. The abolitionist movement represented only a very small part of the North. It was imposed on the South only because the Civil War had induced a state of feeling in the North that would not last. When the occupation ended the South took back control of its own territory. By then the North was more than willing to let this happen. The South had a problem with the ex-slaves. It was not going to leave them in the position they were given by the occupation. That meant the South had to ignore the parts of federal law—which was U.S. law—that were added because of the Civil War. It could not do this with written laws. The North would not accept that. So the South had to do it without itting openly that it was doing it. This meant that the South had to have a code of law that was not a written code of law. The South made it up as it saw fit. That meant the ex-slaves had no recourse to the law. Southerners could treat them however they wanted to and get away with it. This included lynchings. The system of unwritten law lasted about 100 years.

As stated earlier, in a way the ex-slaves were worse off than they had been as slaves. As slaves their owners had an interest in protecting them and seeing to them. They were their property. They were not likely to damage their own property. When the slaves became ex-slaves this relationship no longer existed. Some whites, being normally human, might object to unusual acts of cruelty. But they would seldom interfere because they knew how the system worked.

Chapter 22

Learning throughout most of history was wrong. People who were talking learning, and who were respected for their learning, were talking nonsense. This was because learning was religion. Religion threw off people from the beginning. This was inevitable. Once people developed intelligence they were going to try to understand the world. Put yourself in their place. They are sitting there looking at the world around them and asking themselves what’s going on. They do not know anything except what they have learned in their daily lives. What do they have got to go on but themselves? So they imagined the world must be like them. That meant creatures like them must be doing things. But they could not see those creatures. You would have thought that must have posed a difficult problem for them. But it didn’t. Throughout the world they all came to variations of the same conclusion. The conclusion was that the creatures making things happen in the world must be invisible. Impossible, you think.

No, not really. The part of them that ran them was invisible to them. Men could not see their own souls. And it was their soul they thought was them. Their soul was what we would call their consciousness. Because they could see what was in their consciousness but could not see that consciousness itself they thought whoever was making things happen in the world did not have to be visible. So this did not bother them very much. From that time onward they imagined what we would call gods and they imagined these gods were running the world. So they imagined that since these gods were running the world they should try to do what would make those gods well disposed toward them. Then they would get what they wanted. That was what became the highest form of learning. That was the knowledge the most intelligent people had. But, you say, they didn’t always get what they wanted by using this form of learning. So that must have disillusioned them. No, it did not. It did not anywhere. They all continued to believe. How could this be? The answer is simple. They sometimes got what they wanted—often enough to stay alive. There were countless explanations for the failures. They must have done something wrong. So they would try again. And if they still stayed alive what they were doing was working often enough to keep them alive.

This kept them going through life. They wasted a lot of time on useless—and often harmful—religious practices. But they were all doing it so it had no competitive disadvantages. It continued. It is still very much around.

Chapter 23

You’d have thought everybody would have understood the Industrial Revolution. Nobody seems to have understood the Industrial Revolution. What the Industrial Revolution was doing was putting machinery in production. The world had been doing that only on a very small scale. Production had depended almost entirely on land. There were a few tools, only they did not count for much. So you would think that everybody would realize that you would have to provide machinery, which costs money. What’s the difference between machinery and land? Machinery has to be paid for. Land does not. Land is there to be used. So how are you going to pay for the machinery? The money has to come from somewhere. So how are going to provide the money? The most famous book about the Industrial Revolution is Das Kapital. That would seem to be a good beginning. Kapital is the German word for capital. Capital is money put into production. But what do you find in Das Kapital? You find that capital is stolen money. It is stolen from workers, because only workers produce capital. But the workers get very little of the money that is made from capital. It is the capitalists who get most of it. They steal it. So what’s to be done? The capitalists have to have the capital taken from them. The workers have to own everything. This can be done by making the state own everything. The state will act for the workers.

Now this theory was nonsense. Everybody can see that the workers aren’t alone in producing things once the Industrial Revolution started. Machinery is also involved—and in a very big way. The defenders of the book said that might be true, but at the beginning only the workers were involved, and therefore everything produced belonged to them from then on. Not everybody accepted that reasoning. The workers believed that theory because they thought it was going to make them much better off than they were. A big part of the world went over to the kind of state Das Kapital advocated. Many people thought this was great. But the results did not turn out to be the results that were expected. Eventually the system was pretty much abandoned. So money for production still has to come from somewhere. And if that money is used for some other purpose, there is less production over-all. That is the dilemma.

Chapter 24

Communism as a system is hostile to innovation. That made it unable to compete with capitalism. The founders of communism never gave this much thought. They were used to a world that changed very little. So in their thinking you built a factory and kept it running until it wore out. Then you built another factory like it. But the Industrial Revolution turned into a world that changed a lot. Because it kept changing it kept getting better than the communist world. Change in the communist world seems to be wasteful. You take something that is working and throw it away. The money you lose in doing this could be used instead to build more factories or dams or doing anything else you wanted to do. So the innovation seemed a bad idea. Not only did you not put innovations into use. There was no part of your system that was meant to discover them. So if you wanted to use an innovation you had to steal it from the capitalist countries. This meant you were always behind. There was one exception for the Soviet Union. That was the military. The Soviet Union was in a hostile relation with the United States. They were trying to divide the world between them. So the Soviet Union gave a lot of thought and money to its military. And, considering its disadvantages, it did a good job. The Soviet Union could get away with its system because it did not have to pay a lot of attention to its people. It fed and housed them—not very well—and that was enough.

In contrast, the capitalist countries favored innovation. Money—lots of money— could be made from it.

Chapter 25

The latest radical solution to “where’s the money going to come from” is partial expropriation instead of total expropriation. Radicalism is having a resurgence. The basic message is the same. Redistribute money by taking from the rich to give to the poor. Radicalism was set back by the collapse of communism. The radicals realized communism had lost its appeal. So they had to come up with something new. There are many new rich around. They are richer than the rich ever were before, thanks to the new technology. So they are tempting targets. Why should the poor be poor when the rich have billions? This is very powerful reasoning in democracies. There are lots of billionaires. So it’s easy to get a majority to vote against the rich. The catch is that radicals never consider effects on production. They just assume that production has a life of its own and will go on being there no matter what the country does. The history of production is a strange one. You would have thought that when the Industrial Revolution came along everybody would have realized that something fundamental had changed. But the agricultural world had been the only world for 10,000 years. People were used to thinking in a way suitable to the agricultural world. The Industrial Revolution did not cause them to change, though it certainly should have. The fundamental difference between the agricultural world and the industrial world is that land is what is essential for the agricultural world and money is what is essential for the industrial world. Nature provided land. Production required money. That stumped the radicals. Karl Marx decided that the capitalists stole it. According to him, only workers

created value. So capitalists were stealing money. That sounded good for about 100 years. But then communism collapsed after not doing so well and radicals had to come up with something new. What they came up with was just take some of the money away from the rich but leave them running things. This is the thinking behind the new radicalism. From the beginning there were some people who saw the danger of trying to combine democracy and capitalism. They said that if the majority rules sooner or later the majority will try to take money from the minority. But since political parties all depend upon majorities to win elections they did not listen. All went well for a while. Capitalism made countries better off. There were critics but they did not prevail because of the prosperity. The change came with the Great Depression. Capitalism pretty much committed suicide. Capitalism worked very badly. People turned against it. World War II saved capitalism in the United States. Things got better. But there were grievances. Once again people were taken by radicalism—the new radicalism. The new radicalism was possible because of an amendment to the U. S. Constitution ed in 1913. Because of the fears about the majority the rich men who drew up the Constitution ruled out income taxes. But there was a lot of anti-capitalist sentiment in the United States before the first World War, so the government started taxing the rich on their income. The income tax was just meant as a sop, being small, so it was not seen as a great potential menace. But no limit was put on the amount of the tax, so there was in fact a real menace. Radicalism, as usual, paid no attention to the possible effects on production. Unfortunately, there are effects on production. If you take money that could have been spent on production and spend it on the welfare state, production will not grow as much as it might have—if at all.

There is no mystery about this. Look at Western Europe.

Chapter 26

Einstein no sooner stunned the world with the theory of relativity then quantum physics came along. Einstein’s discoveries were the most consequential ever made by one man. His fame was completely deserved. Quantum physics discoveries were in the same category. They received much less attention. Few people know of them. The difference was that Einstein’s discoveries could be explained. The discoveries of quantum physics could not be. They could be proved in the laboratory. They could be used in the practical world. But they could not be explained. What quantum physics said was that two separate objects could act the same even though they did not seem to be connected in any way. It was easy to argue that the theory was wrong, as Einstein among many others, did argue. But the theory could be proved to be true. The objects involved are two small to be seen except with special equipment, which is why this problem never existed until recently. Physics was stumped at first. It thought that if more experiments were carried out somebody would come up with an explanation. That has happened many times before in physics. So it seemed to be reasonable to think it would happen again. But it has not. Quantum physics has been around for a hundred years now and it remains unexplained. Whoever discovers an explanation for what happens in quantum physics will be a great man in the same category as Einstein. There seems to be a completely unknown world out there.

Chapter 27

Government debt is good for business. Government debt is usually proclaimed to be a bad thing. Both parties go on about the burden we’re putting on our grandchildren. (This does not mean that both parties do not also go on increasing national debt.) Government debt is good for business because it is inflationary. Inflation increases the return that can be made from investment. And this increases investment, and so production. Much of the thinking about economics goes back to the 19th century, when economics was developed. Countries were on the gold standard. Currencies had to be related to gold somehow. The thinking was that gold had intrinsic value, whereas paper money did not. So it had to be possible to exchange paper money for gold. Otherwise it had no value. Money had been something with intrinsic value since its origin in the 6th century B.C. The substitution of paper for gold, if it took place, was supposed to be temporary. Governments often did not have enough real money to pay for their wars. They promised to pay back their debts once the wars ended. Often they did not. This gave paper money a bad reputation. It did not get permanently established until the Great Depression. Governments had to use it because they didn’t have enough gold to pay for what they were doing. And they had to spend so much because of the Great Depression. The Great Depression made governments realize that their power over people enabled them to make them accept paper money. They did not have to link it to gold. This was a great discovery. From then on they used only paper money. They did not go back to gold. That meant governments could do anything with money. They could print as much of it as they wanted. That is the world we are now living in. The catch is that how much money will buy depends upon how much money there is. If governments put out too much money it will became worthless. So governments try to limit the amount of debt they run up. The government of the United States knows some debt is good for business and openly its it

wants some inflation (currently 2 per cent). You would think people would get upset about this and would try to stop it. They worry about the burden on their grandchildren, but not much. They are used to some degree of inflation and accept it as normal. Actually it cheats people who keep money. But it’s good for business, and that wins out.

Chapter 28

The question is not why did no dinosaurs survive but why did other forms of life survive. A big asteroid hit the earth 70 million years ago and killed all the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs had been really numerous. They were the dominant form of life. There is a line running through the earth that can be used to date things. Remains of dinosaurs are found below this line. No remains of dinosaurs are found above it. That is why scientists feel confident they were all destroyed. But 25 per cent of all other creatures survived. That is why we are here today. Now what was it about those creatures that enabled them to survive? Nobody seems to know. It would be a less intriguing question if there were something about dinosaurs that made them especially vulnerable. There wasn’t, so far as we know. A lot of work has been done on dinosaurs since they became a matter of popular interest in the 19th century. Many remains have been found. A lot of money has been spent on examining these remains. So it is not if we can’t answer questions about them. The questions do not have only academic interest. Another big asteroid might hit the earth at any time. Large numbers of asteroids are flying around out there. So our lives are precarious. Obviously, we would like to know what saved certain creature 70 million years ago. The first thought that comes to anybody is that the big asteroid only hit part of the earth, not the whole earth, so there must have been some of us in the part that was not hit. But dinosaurs were spread all over, so if being in a certain part of the world saved us why didn’t it save them? And it wasn’t only being hit by the asteroid that caused the deaths. It obviously affected conditions on the earth enough to kill human beings. So what, if anything can we do?

There’s talk of destroying the asteroid before it gets to the earth. We can see asteroids coming and destroy them before they hit. But nothing much has been done on this. Maybe we should get started. Or are we going to trust to luck?

Chapter 29

The law favors rapists. This is not the law’s fault. It is its nature. The women’s movement has been very unhappy about this. It has been seeking ways around it—and finding them. The law favors rapists because it demands proof for accusations. It is the nature of rape that it can very seldom be proved. When rape cases go to court the man is usually found innocent because there is no proof. Rape was not much of an issue before the modern world. Middle and upper class women were kept from being put in situations where they could be raped. Lower class women often could not be protected like this. But these people lived mostly in villages. They had parents and other relations. The men could take the law into their own hands. Rape became an issue in the modern world, paradoxically, when it was no longer the serious crime it had been. The old moral code had deteriorated. Chastity was outdated. Women were leading promiscuous lives. What the women’s movement objected to was women using sex to advance their positions in life. This was a practice that had been going on for thousands of years. Everybody knew the practice existed and was an integral part of life. The explanation for the new attitude was that lesbians had become a very influential part of the women’s movement. (Extremists tend to take over every movement because they are the most interested in the cause.) Lesbians did not benefit by the practice, being lesbians, and resented it. When the women’s movement failed in the courts with rape charges it tried a new tactic. It got together a handful of women who were prepared to testify they had been sexually assaulted by certain men. The men were prominent and could be hurt by this. So it worked. The drawback was that the men had to public figures. Otherwise nothing much could be done to them.

So the women’s movement turned to another tactic. This was to get businesses to act against employees who were using their position to get women to oblige them sexually. The great thing about this was the accusations did not have to be proved, as in a court of law. Throughout, the women’s movement has ignored another issue which is both relevant and difficult. That is whether women consented to the sexual activity. Everybody knows that women like sex. So the possibility exists in each case that the women were not unwilling victims.

Chapter 30

Christianity brought back equality. Human beings had known equality for thousands of years. It had been their natural state. It had been their natural state because they lived together in small groups. In small groups majorities prevail. They lived together in small groups because they had no means to do otherwise. They finally acquired the means about ten thousand years ago at the end of the ice age. These means were agriculture. Agriculture enabled larger numbers of human beings to live together. It enabled minorities to exploit majorities. With agriculture minorities could appropriate a large part of production for themselves and so introduce inequality. Human beings did not like inequality being imposed on them but there was nothing they could do about it. Jesus Christ came along and offered them equality for eternity. He could do this because his equality was imaginary. He had no proof for it but he didn’t have to. People wanted it so much that they were capable of accepting it without proof. The real world remained unequal. But human beings are capable of believing in a world that does not exist. That is within the power of imagination. The power to bring back equality won over millions of human beings. It has caused Christianity to endure for more than 2,000 years.

Chapter 31

The Industrial Revolution and democracy occurred more or less simultaneously. With democracy workers had the larger numbers. This had been true during the 10,000 years that preceded the Industrial Revolution, but then the larger numbers did not determine the behavior or governments. All governments were run by minorities of property owners. They, naturally, acted in their own interest. With the Industrial Revolution the workers were faced with a dilemma. They bargained with their employers over how much they got paid. They, naturally, wanted to get paid more. The employers, naturally wanted to pay them less. There was a complication in this situation. The employers had to provide the investment that made the employment possible. The more the workers got paid, the less exployment the employers could provide. So the workers had to choose between more pay now and less pay later. This was a disagreeable choice. The workers preferred not to make it. So they denied they had to make it. They claimed that the employers were not benefitting them. A German self-appointed expert on economics even came up with a theory that the employers contributed nothing to production and so were entitled to get nothing out of it. This theory though obviously ridiculous, was widely believed, and nearly took over the world. It is impossible to believe that anybody seriously accepted the labor theory of value. There is a limit as to how ridiculous a theory any normally intelligent person can believe. So the only possible explanation is that the workers and their ers only pretended to believe in the labor theory. Effects of this “belief” still exist. A majority of Americans actually believe that capitalists are exploiting workers, when clearly the opposite is true.

Chapter 32

The whole anti-colonial movement was based on a fallacy. The fallacy was that you should be ruled by your own people instead of by foreigners. Africa today is an example of the bad consequences of this. Africa is corrupt and backward. It would have been much better off if the foreigners had stayed. The fallacy was not a fallacy before the Industrial Revolution. Then you would have possibly been treated better by you own than by foreigners. If your own people were ruling you might have been one of the ruling class yourself and so better off. All the societies were made up of a small privileged minority and a large oppressed majority. As a member of the society you could have been one of the lucky ones. But that’s as far as it went. Once the Industrial Revolution started the situation changed. Countries needed capital if they were going to become prosperous. Black Africans had no capital. The only capital in their part of the world was capital provided by foreigners. The foreigners not only had capital. They knew how to use it. If black Africa wanted to keep up with the rest of the world it had to keep the foreigners. Instead it threw them out and treated that as a great triumph. The black Africans cannot be blamed too much for this. They did not have enough knowledge to warn them of their mistake. But the non-Africans can be blamed. The ones who considered themselves enlightened had no excuse. Their own history should have taught them enough to make them see what black Africa had to do to get ahead. Instead they thought the end of colonialism was going to be the making of Africa. Look at what actually happened.

Chapter 33

We found the best system but we threw it away. The best system is capitalism. Capitalism achieves the greatest production at the lowest prices. It makes people do what is in the best interest of others. We threw capitalism away because of an unnecessary feature that attached itself to banking. Instead we should have removed that feature. The feature was leveraging: banks pretending they have more money than they do have. And then lending out more money than they do have. When it is tried to turn too many of these loans into cash they cannot do it and go bankrupt, unless saved by the government. Bank loans make UP a large part of demand during a boom. If this demand is suddenly reduced by a crash the economy collapses. It takes a considerable time to restore it because to do that many new loans have to be made, and the situation does not favor this. The 1929 depression was not the first depression. There had been many depressions before it. The banks knew leverage caused depressions. But they did not do anything about it because while the prosperity lasted things were great. And nobody knew when the prosperity would end, so so long as it went on they did not want to end it. The public did nothing about it because the public did not know what was going on. When the depression came they were helpless. Instead of stopping leverage the public introduced the welfare state. This was a big mistake because the welfare state reduces production by diverting money from production to welfare. It means less production and less prosperity and it goes on indefinitely.

Chapter 34

The one of many advantages of non-democratic governments is that they can adapt to changes in conditions. Democratic governments have difficulty in adapting to changes in conditions because they profess to believe in morality. Beliefs in morality cannot change because, according to morality, there is only one morality and it cannot change. An extreme example is the belief in the evil of slavery in the United States. Slavery existed since the discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago. It was the basis of civilization. It was accepted by all the major religions, including Christianity. Slavery was replaced in Europe by an adaptation after the fall of the Roman Empire. This was serfdom. The difference was that with serfdom the slaves stayed in the same place generation after generation. They were not bought and sold. When the New World was discovered the old form of slavery was reintroduced in some parts of it because suitable native populations did not exist. Slaves had to be imported from Africa, where slavery was an accepted institution. This was true in some parts of what became the United States. The Northern part of the United States resembled England and underwent the Industrial Revolution. A religious minority opposed slavery in the south and brought on the Civil War. A moderated form of slavery was left in its place. Finally, after about 100 years, the Industrial Revolution penetrated the South and slavery was pretty much ended. Then the disadvantages of democracy began to appear. The blacks and their ers started condemning prominent Americans of earlier times for owning slaves. This was patently ridiculous. But, according to them, if slavery was wrong in the 21st century it was wrong throughout all time. Non-democratic governments do not have to get involved in such nonsense.

Chapter 35

The women’s movement wants women to get back to their original condition of independence. Originally, women lived by themselves. They were not dependent on men. Like other female mammals they had to do with men only when they were experiencing estrus. The purpose was strictly sex and conception. Women, unlike most female mammals, experience estrus at different times. This forces men to be capable of sex at any time. Because of this men made women their captives. They wanted them to be available. Men could do this because they were stronger. And they had discovered that women could provide sex when they were not experiencing estrus. Men and women living together enabled the human species to develop more than any other species because their young could be looked after and protected much longer. When the discovery of agriculture at the end of the Ice Age came men’s strength continued to enable them to dominate women. This age lasted for 10,000 years. But then the Industrial Revolution arrived. It substituted the strength of machines for the strength of men and animals. Women could operate machines. So women could hold jobs and themselves outside the home and independently of men. Men were still able to dominate women physically, but they did not see the danger and let themselves be incapacitated. The use of violence in the home was made a crime. Democracy was made the prevalent form of government. At first men kept the privilege of voting to themselves. Women argued that this wronged them and men gave women the vote. Men thought women would remain what they always had been. They were mistaken.

If men were worried about what was going to happen, they would have reasoned that they were as numerous as women and so could hold their own in a democracy. Once again, they were mistaken. When it came to women’s issues women united. They voted as a bloc. Men, naturally, tended to vote for men’s issues. But their unity on this did not compare with women’s unity. Women favored the welfare state more than men. Once it was established women made it women without husbands when they had children. Women had been handicapped in their campaign for equality because without men to help them they had to their families all by themselves. So they substituted the government for husbands, ending their dependence on men.

Chapter 36

Robots are going to take the jobs away from human beings. There will be an economic catastrophe. They have been saying this since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Only then it was about machines used in production, not about robots, which are just another form of machines. So you think the robots are bad. So why is the world so much better off than it was before the Industrial Revolution? There seems to be something about economics that befuddles people. The world is better off. We all know that. So why is it better off? Well, it is better off because machinery increases production. That is why machinery has been invented. That is why it has taken the place of human beings and animals. It is easy to understand why the workers who get displaced are unhappy. The process does not automatically provide them with new jobs. They have even been reduced to destroying the new machinery. And much of the public has sympathized with them. Why is it so hard to understand that what increases production makes the world more prosperous? The answer is that it is easier to see that machines take jobs away from people than it is to see that increased production causes more jobs. And it is not that the evidence scarce or ambiguous. It is overwhelming. It has been piling up for a along time. Just because many people do not see how it works does not mean it does not work. It means those people have to think more if they want to understand it.

Chapter 37

Serfs were saved from acting like traditional slaves. So when serfdom ended they could adapt successfully to their new life in the modern world. This was not so with ex-American slaves. Serfdom resulted from the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was built on traditional slavery. The slaves were not separate races, as in the United States. Slaves commonly became slaves because they had belonged to armies that had been defeated. Once they had become slaves, they and their descendants usually remained slaves generation after generation. Their behavior was determined by their life. Slavery was taken for granted in the Ancient World. The fall of the Roman Empire ended traditional slavery because it ended the condition as under which that slavery existed in Europe. The European world became a collection of small political units that were largely self-sufficient. The small political units could no longer get their slaves from big wars. They had to provide their own. They found it worked better if the slaves stayed with them generation after generation and lived separately. The owners were no longer responsible for looking after them in their daily lives. They looked after themselves. They got a share of what they produced. So they had an incentive to work well. That (partly) solved the problem that had always dogged slavery and eventually led to its downfall. The problem was getting slaves to work well. The solution was punishing them when they did not. But there were many ways of getting

around that, and slave labor remained poor throughout its history. Another benefit of serfdom compared to slavery was that it held the family together. The human family has shown itself to be the most successful for the human species. Under slavery the owner is responsible for all the slaves. Since women are being ed independently, men tend to drift around among them, making the family unstable. Serfdom was replaced by free labor in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. This was because of capitalism and improvements in transportation. Capitalism provided the many jobs. The changes in transportation enabled the workers to get to them, whereas the earlier system and the villages had provided neither. Thanks to serfdom, the European workers could fit into the new world. The American blacks started adapting to the new conditions after the Civil War. But, unfortunately, the Great Depression brought on the welfare state, with the government taking the place of the, and caused many of the blacks to retrogress.

Chapter 38

Social justice finds nowhere for billionaires because it ignores production. There was no social justice throughout most of history. People had what they had because they or their ancestors took it by force. What they had—when they had something—was mostly land. So people had to do some new thinking to understand the Industrial Revolution. The central idea was using machines instead of human beings and animals. But machines had to be made. Money had to be used for this. Where was the money to come from? The only money that could be used for this was money that was not spent elsewhere. There were two elements involved. The money to pay for the production and somebody to organize and oversee the production. Social justice was not able to deal with this. Karl Marx decided to proclaim that labor created all value and so dispose of the problem. Unfortunately for him, that was incorrect. It took both labor and money to produce anything. Marx was not much troubled by the problem because under his system— communism—the government would both build and own all productive facilities and so would not need any that had to be privately built. What he would have found out—if he had lived long enough—is communist government facilities don’t match up to capitalist facilities because they don’t have to compete. This was demonstrated wherever communism took over. All of this does not faze the exponents of social justice. They ignore production. What they concentrate on is the supposed unfairness of the present system.

Chapter 39

The welfare state depends on paper money. Which is money without anything valuable behind it. Before the great Depression all money had something valuable behind it or people would not have accepted it. That was proved false by the Great Depression. People in all countries accepted paper money as valuable. They did not accept it because it had something valuable behind it but because their governments told them they had to. This happened more or less accidentally. It was not planned in advance. It was done out of desperation. The Depression governments could not get enough through taxes to maintain the welware state. This was much more than they had ever needed before. (Except in time of war.) By this time governments were big enough and strong enough that they could force their people to accept paper money. Earlier they had not thought they were. Once they got used to paper money governments were not going to give it up. It enabled them to spend more without taxing more—a combination their citizens very much liked. The deficits kept increasing. Everybody talked as if this was was a terrible thing. But that didn’t mean they had any intention of stopping it. There was a danger they could overdo it. Then there would be super-inflation, and super-inflation would ruin a country. So the the governments usually showed some restraint. But they did not have to be too careful. Governments could deal with inflation with more inflation. This would reduce the real amount of their debt. Governments were in the enviable position of being able to to decide the amount of their debt.

It could all end with collapse. But that was not the end of the world wars in some countries did end with collapse. They just started over again. They are still there.

Chapter 40

The Christian religion did not try to reform the institutions of this world. That can seem strange if you think about it. The Christian religion instead tried to get individuals to reform themselves. There is little doubt that if Jesus had lived on he would have tried to reform the institutions of this world. He was an out-and-out egalitarian. But he died and his successors showed absolutely no interest in institutional reform. They took the world as it was and lived with it. This was simply a matter of practicality. Christians would have been destroyed if they had challenged the world as they knew it. All the civilized world in the time of Jesus was ruled by small, rich minorities. Their position was secure because of hierarchy. They did not tolerate revolutionaries. They had the means and the will to deal with them ruthlessly. What the Church did was to transplant the world that Jesus wanted to the afterlife. You could have equality there. This was an arrangement that worked until the United States and introduced mass democracy. At first nobody thought democracy would change institutions. They did not realize what they were getting into. But they found out. Democracies started using their numbers to revolutionize themselves. They did this through the method they had been using all along with children. Teaching by right and wrong. The great advantage of this method is that you can’t argue with it. Parents and teachers do not argue. What they say to children has to be accepted. Partisans of any cause like this. They are convinced they are right. Therefore, nobody should question what they say. Their belief is the opposite of what is required in a democracy. Which is that people differ and must reconcile these

differences. Luckily for the reformists in the United States, they had a situation that suited them. Most of the teachers in the United States public schools were reformists. Reformists politics suited their way of looking at things. So by the time the children reached adulthood they had been indoctrinated. They knew what was right and wrong. Anybody who disagreed with them was wrong and was not entitled to be heard.

Chapter 41

The United States is better for the world than Europe. Europe thinks it has made the better choice with the welfare state. It has prosperity and security. The United States has more prosperity but less security. Many people in the United States—particularly among the more educated— agree with the Europeans. They favor the United States following the European example. But that definitely would be worse for the rest of the world. Whether the rest of the world is going to become better off depends upon production increasing. The more it increases the more the world can become better off. Production increases less in welfare states than it does in the United States. It has a tendency to nearly stop increasing altogether. A country cannot be giving away in welfare so much of its wealth and still have very much left over for increasing production. It’s one or the other. This is a truism you would have thought the world would have learned long ago. But it did not because for the 10,000 years of civilization the world was living off of agriculture. With agriculture, in contrast with industry, land is what determines production. Nature provides land. People do not have to. So people got used to thinking in agricultural . You would have thought that the Industrial Revolution would have changed conditions. But they got used to thinking one way, and seemed to find it impossible to change. Americans have shown a better understanding of the situation. Obviously, their unique circumstances have something to do with that. Unlike the Europeans, they were not born into the position they were going to stay in all their lives. They could make new lives for themselves, and most of them, had to. This gave them an understanding for the need of money in creating new businesses. And new money had to come from somewhere. If it went to one thing, like welfare, it was not going to go to another.

The countries that are going to create new wealth are the ones that have already developed advance economies. So if you sacrifice most of them to the welfare state, there’s not much left but the United States (luckily the biggest). Americans may not be much happier with their additional prosperity, but the rest of the world is, whether it knows who it should be grateful to or not.

Chapter 42

Mexico and the rest of Central America think they have figured out a way to get the United States to solve their no. 1 problem. That is by sending the poorest part of their population to the United States. Thanks to the Democratic party, the United States has pretty much invited them to do that. It has rigged up a procedure that enables the Latinos to stay in the United States even though their entry was illegal. Most importantly, it provides them with welfare, although that is likewise illegal. U.S. welfare is a higher level of living than in their home countries. It not only includes regular food for the whole family but medical care, neither of which the Latinos get if they stay at home. The Democratic party has done this to try to make up for lost votes. During the Great Depression Franklin Roosevelt promoted the Labor movement with unionization. But after World War II the workers became disenchanted. They found the union executives were favoring themselves instead of the workers and they decided the workers would be better off without them. The workers not only turned against the unions but against the Democratic party, which had been working close with them. To try to recoup this loss the party turned to the blacks, where they succeeded despite the party’s history, and then to the Mexicans. With the Mexicans the idea was to get as many into the country as possible— which the party proceeded to do by breaking the immigration laws. The success was so great that the people of the Central American countries decided to imitate the Mexicans and immigrated to the United States en masse. This could have seemed like a great idea at the outset. But it cannot remain a great idea. The more Central Americans head for the United States the more resistance there will develop to them and the Mexicans.

The Americans have been pretty much oblivious to how much the illegal immigrants have been costing them. But if it keeps it will reach an amount they are going to become increasingly conscious of. Immigration had been of great economic benefit to the United States, which left the country with a favorable attitude toward it. But present-day immigration from Mexico and Central America has the opposite effect, and the more of it there is the more the American public is going to realize that.

Chapter 43

One World? Evolution uses violence to cause evolution. Species are supposed to use violence among themselves and with other species so they have to evolve to survive. They have to become better at whatever they do or do something different. The human species is now in a position to escape from this fate. Its could all live together without fighting. The evolutionary formula worked because species gave birth to too many young to live from their food supply. The human species can now get around this formula by limiting their numbers and by increasing their food supply. Birth control and abortion are both available. Increasing the food supply is in a different category. The human species has never known what it is capable of. The Industrial Revolution is a good example. When the Industrial Revolution started it was assumed that it would consist of a few inventions. Otherwise life would go on as it always had. But there have been more and more inventions. It turned out tha the more inventions there had been the more there would be. There is no limit. This will work with the food supply. It can be increased far beyond present levels. So human beings no longer have to be bound by the laws of evolution. They could all live together in peace. Unfortunately, they have also discovered how to destroy themselves in a single day. There is a tendency to think this is so horrific that no human being would

deliberately make it happen. But that is an illusion. Human beings are capable of all kinds of behavior. So far the human species has been lucky. But it will always be possible that the wrong person will get into a position where he can cause that single day.

Chapter 44

Why the news media repeat what they know are lies. This is easily understandable when the lies favor the causes of the particular media. It is not so easily understandable when they favor causes the particular media oppose. We have had a classic demonstration of this that has run on for over two years. That is the alleged collusion between the Trump forces and the Russian government. The Democratic party has repeated the story over and over again and so have the news media that favor Trump. These media have said there is no evidence to the story but they continue with it. That seems to be contradictory behavior. But it isn’t. The hostile media has been repeating the story because people are interested in it. The media do it for the audience because they make money from the audience. They put their commercial interest above ideological interest. If they said this story is a lie and refused to cover it they would hurt their business. This is not an isolated instance. Instances like this happen all the time. This one is cited because it is a classic. It is a classic because the lie is so obvious and indisputable. Often the lies are somewhat questionable. And it is a classic example because the organization behind it is in a perfect position to do this sort of thing. The media can’t ignore the Democratic party. The Democratic party, of course, would say the lie is not a lie. But it is. Examine the situation. Russia is supposed to be able to significantly affect the outcome of an American presidential election. Why? With what? For what? There is no motivation. There is no practicality. Russia is not the Soviet Union. The argument is accepted because the public re the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union might have wanted to swing an election and might have been able to influence it to some degree. If you asked all the people who accepted the argument why they did they would not have been able to explain. They just did. And there really was no argument. You were supposes to believe there was because the assertion was coming from

the Democratic party and the Democratic party supposedly would not lie that blatantly. If you thought the public would not accept anything, no matter how unbelievable, now you know better. And if you thought the media would seem to accept anything, no matter what its own beliefs, now you know better.

Chapter 45

You would think the declining birth rate in the developed world would be a very big issue. Populations are shrinking drastically. Soon the world will not have the manpower it needs to keep up production. The countries involved do not seem to be very disturbed. The threat of too few people instead to too many has developed very quickly. Evolution meant species to produce too many and that was what they have done. Now conditions are different. It was the Industrial Revolution that caused this turnaround. It favored innovation. One of the innovations turned out to be birth control. For the first time the human species could control its numbers. At the same time the human species could increase its production. But to increase its production the human species had to make itself capable of doing things it had never done before. These things took time to learn. That meant they took money to learn. So families turned from producing many children to producing few children. The one child or two children family became the ideal. It cost a lot to raise and educate these children. There was no longer any motivation to producing many children. Besides which, producing many children was not practical. The mothers were working outside the home. They did not have the time or inclination to produce many children. Having children and home-keeping had been their only occupation. Given a choice, it turned out it was not necessarily their favorite occupation. The people benefiting from the changes think things are pretty good now. So the new crisis does not concern them very much. It’s something for the future. So let the future worry about it. That is the contemporary attitude. There is not a general awareness of how quickly people in underdeveloped countries can change their way of life. And there is not a general awareness of how difficult it will be to reverse the process if that turns out to be necessary.

Propaganda about population had had a great success. All those larger families in underdeveloped countries. The public in the developed world uncritically accepted predictions of billions more people in a short time. But it did not take geniuses for couples to see that one child with an education was going to do better than 10 children without an education. And then to figure out what they would have to do to have one child instead of 10. (In China, where tradition was most embedded, the government did the thinking for them.) The question is what will the advanced world do about under-population instead of over-population. The Europeans and other people who have benefited most from the Industrial Revolution show no indication of adapting family size to deal with this new situation. So the white populations (and the Japanise) will probably go extinct, or nearly so. They will give the world over to the colored populations, who in this matter have been more adaptive.

Chapter 46

One of the long-standing mysteries of human development is why human males can have sex so frequently. This has been indispensable for the human achievement that have put them above all other species. Human beings did not start out living together in large numbers. That is necessary to explain their success because large numbers are essential for progress. It is the combining of the knowledge of many that causes progress. Human beings were not aware of their unique advantage because they did not know it was unique. They thought many other animals shared it. The unique advantage is imagination. With imagination human beings have an alternative to their senses. They can see in their consciousness what they are not actually seeing. They can hear what they are not actually hearing. And so on. Nobody knows how they developed this amazing capacity. Nobody knows when they developed it. As already said, they thought other animals shared it with them. So it never occurred to them that it could explain things about themselves that were unique. Like thinking. Other animals are dependent on their instincts for their sex urges. They get these urges last for limited periods. Without these urges they cannot have sex. That is why they cannot have sex as frequently as human beings. They go through a brief sex period, and then they have a non-sex period that lasts for the remainder of their time. It is different with human males because they can imagine situations which excite them sexually and so perform sex. They do not have to wait for instinct. The only limitation on how often they can perform sex is physical. Because of this unique capacity, human males wanted to have human females available. Originally, the sexes lived separately. Man changed that by introducing rape. This is what they had to do because human females had a special condition (estrus) that made them crave sex and they had to wait for that.

But they could experience sex whether they wanted it or not. Men took advantage of that characteristic and forced them to live with them. After a while women came to enjoy sex at any time and the human family was created. That was the beginning of the unique history.

Chapter 47

Whites feeling guilty is ridiculous. Slaves were held throughout civilization. Slavery was not condemned by Christianity or any other religion. It was an accepted practice at the time the U. S. Constitution was drawn up. The abolitionists were a small, non-representative minority. Fighting the Civil War was a terrible mistake. There were over 600,000 deaths. The South was devastated. Other countries in the Americas ended slavery peaceably. The United States could have done the same. It would have been to the advantage of the whole country. The slaveowners should have been paid for their slaves. Instead the South was devastated for a hundred years. The whole country was set back. The current American attitude toward slavery is a disgrace. Morality has changed in the western world. The pretense that morality remains unchanged is childish. Nobody can be that stupid. The American blacks are the best-off blacks in the world. They were illiterate and ignorant when they were brought over here. Most of them had been slaves in Africa. It was going to take generations to bring them up to a civilized level. The most important thing was that the blacks got schooling after the Civil War. They did not get schooling in Africa. The schooling they got was not as good as the whites got but it was better than none. They have progressed. There is no comparison between the blacks of today and the blacks at the beginning of the Civil War.

Falsifying their situation does not help the blacks. It hurts them. It makes them imagine they’re entitled to special treatment because they were wronged when in fact they were not. They were much better being brought here than they would have been if they had been left in Africa. And they know that. They’re not going back.

Chapter 48

Anybody who receives welfare should lose his or her vote. The U. S. Constitution would have provided this if there had been welfare at the end of the 18th century. You can’t have people voting money to themselves. They will overdo it. Their country will stop getting more prosperous. This This has already happened in Europe. Needless to say, the political parties that depend on welfare will oppose this with their usual fallacious arguments. When the U. S. Constitution was drawn up the government was practising laissez-faire economics. It did not give welfare. The problem did not exist in the United States until the Great Depression. Welfare takes money that could go into investment and increase production. It is as simple as that. The more welfare, the less investment. Economics has shied away from accepting this. Instead it adopted a theory during the Great Depression that put the blame for lack of demand on the failure of the economy to recover. The idea was to give money to the unemployed. That would supposedly have the desired effects. The only trouble was that it did not. The Depression recovered very slowly. Things are not going to get better in a country unless production increases. With stagnant production the problems that exist are going to continue to exist. The opportunities now are greater than ever. The more knowledge that is accumulated, the more opportunities there are for increasing production. It is a sin not to take advantage of this.

Chapter 49

Suicide has to be reconsidered. Suicide has to be reconsidered because of Alzheimer’s—and old age in general. The present attitude toward old age is half natural and half artificial. Living creatures want to keep living. That is what living is all about. So to reconsider suicide does not seem to make any sense. But there are new circumstances. Human beings have taken life where nature never intended life to go. Thanks to medicine, we are living much longer. Our bodies are not up to it. Our brains are not up to it. Science has made this possible. But so far science has not made possible improving aging enough so that human beings can keep functioning normally. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But so long as it doesn’t the human species has a big problem. Science can keep the human body functioning better than it can keep the brain functioning. This is a big problem because the human being is in the brain. The human species is in danger of having many more bodies than brains. That’s why suicide has to be reconsidered. Are these bodies to be kept alive as long as possible? Given the consequences that would have for other people. The simple solution would be to get old people to die somehow. But that is not so easy to do. The artificial resistance is there because human societies were ruled by aristocracies until recently. Aristocracies exploited agricultural populations so they, the aristocracies, could live idly and well. They had their populations work for them and fight for them. The lives that resulted for those populations were not that happy. Some of them were bound to think of suicide. The aristocracies, naturally, did not want them to commit suicide. So the established religion forbade suicide. That situation has changed. Suicide is no longer as disadvantageous as it used to be. Production depends on machines, not human beings. Now it would be

advantageous for countries to get rid of oldsters. The are a needless expense. But how to do this. The only way is to get the oldsters to kill themselves. The strongest argument for that is Alzheimers. The human brain cannot be kept functioning as long as the human body. So the choice is between a human body that is no longer a human being and anticipating that and doing something about it. Once that is made part of popular thinking suicide should increase significantly. Perhaps enough so that other measures would not have to be resorted to.

Chapter 50

How can a minority change behavior in a democracy? This is what has been happening in the United States. Where you would think it would be impossible. What has happened has been the decline of religion and the rise of television and other new media. Religion used to control behavior because human beings were exposed to it and practically nothing else and they were expected to abide by its pronouncements. Some organization has to determine behavior. Proper behavior has to be determined. It does not just exist. And that organization has to have access to the public. Religion lost its hold over the public during and after World War II. Television and other media took its place. The material on television and other media was being provided by young liberals. Being liberal was part of the personality of those in the media jobs. Young liberals are attracted to the thinking that is considered advanced. A good example was approval of homosexuality. Homosexuality, historically, had been condemned. They used the AIDs epidemic. It was getting a lot of attention. The young liberals exploited the pity it inspired. The speed with which this happened was unprecedented. Not only with homosexuality but with other sexual practices that been condemned. The new church—the media—swept away the old church in a matter of a few years. The much greater success of the media was the explanation. It could create a new civilization in a generation. It took only a small group of people to turn itself—a minority—into a majority.

Chapter 51

Since you can’t believe anything that is taught, you don’t have to study. This is the attitude of young Americans. It explains why they are so ignorant. Cynicism is natural to young people. They want to show they are grown up and cannot be taken in. It does not apply to matters that have practical value to them. It does apply to matters that earlier used to studied only by the well-off. They were called the liberal arts. Now they are part of the general curriculum in American schools. Their problem is not only that they have no practical value. It is that their subject-matter is not scientific. What is taught cannot be proved. The situation used to be different. The western world had a common culture. That was ed by its Christian religion. This gave the beliefs credibility. That religion no longer has much of a real following. So the young people feel free to disregard it. Not only do they not believe in much of their school curriculum, they are more easily taken in by extreme, nonsensical views. They think that if they cannot believe in what is taught what could be true could be pretty bizarre. It attracts them just because it is that.

Chapter 52

The combination of democracy and capitalism has created an insoluble and possibly fatal problem. The problem is that capitalism has made it possible to earn too much money. Voters think so much money cannot be deserved. They want to appropriate it for themselves through taxation. That discourages those who have made the money from continuing to keep trying to make that much and keep the economy working as well as it has been.

Chapter 53

Capitalism had a means for preventing this situation but it no longer works. Innovation had rarely happened before the Industrial Revolution. What was produced and the means of production remained pretty much the same generation after generation. Then along came the Industrial Revolution. It consisted of innovation. That was what it was all about. Innovation increased production. Those who came up with innovation could make lots of money. So countries wanted as much innovation as they could get. Because of this they introduced patents. Patents gave the inventor of innovations the exclusive right to produce whatever the invention consisted of for a certain period. Patents worked. They caused lots of innovation. The innovations caused lots of increased wealth. But they had a negative effect. That is the insoluble problem.

Chapter 54

The essence of capitalism is competition. Competition causes capitalism to work for the general welfare. Everything gets made as cheaply as possible. Everything gets produced as abundantly as possible. When competition was evaded with patents the effects were thought to be temporary. Competition was expected to be resumed. But that frequently did not happen. The original company was too entrenched. Capitalist countries tended to turn into countries where competition was not between the same products—as in agriculture—but with different monopoly products competing with one another. Competition then would not work as it was supposed to. It did not bring down profits. It made profits go up. That is where the billionaires came from. That’s where the welfare state saw its opportunity.

Chapter 55

Socialism in the United States is just the welfare state under a different name. The purpose of this socialism is to take money from the better-off by taxation and to give it to the less better-off. The purpose of real socialism is for the government to run production. Today’s socialists don’t want to be identified with real socialism because of real socialism’s history. ers of socialism in the United States do not want to get involved in production. They realize that attempts to do that did not turn out well. Their idea is to leave production in private ownership. It is income they are interested in, not ownership. What bothers critics most about capitalism is the difference in income in capitalistic countries. For their first millions of years human beings had lived in small collectives. These collectives were a variation on the family. They divided up whatever they had the way a family does—more or less equally. This long experience gave them their ideas on how people should live together. Their lives changed fundamentally when the Ice Age ended 10 thousand years ago and they started to live on agriculture. Agriculture brought a very different life. Human beings could live together in much larger groups because they could accumulated food supplies. Large groups could move around together and spend their time doing something besides getting food. This made hierarchy possible, without which civilization would not have been possible. With hierarchy a small group of men could control a much larger group. Those small groups became the aristocrats who ruled the world for the next 10,000 years and made the others produce wealth for them. This system lasted until the Industrial Revolution brought the peoples of countries together, which caused nationalism. With the previous localism rulers could use troops from one part of the country to enforce their rule in another part. Without that localism the troops would not fire on one another. Royal rule

was ended. Democracy took its place. Democracy was very limited in what it could do so long as laissez faire economics prevailed, as they did until the Great Depression. When democracy could interfere the welfare state was inevitable. People were going to tax the better-off to benefit themselves.

Chapter 56

Does anybody doubt that women have a different heritage than men? Does anybody doubt that because of their different heritage women behave differently than men? The women’s movement has been claiming that women are equal to men. For women to be equal to men they would have to be identical to men, which they are not. The women’s movement makes these false claims so women will get more favorable treatment. They have prevailed to some extent because of the political situation in the United States. The Democratic party has become a struggling party and sees women as its best hope. So it s women’s claims. Women already favor the Democratic party and could well switch in large enough numbers to make it dominant. But it’s dangerous in democracies when policies are based on false claims. Governments will not be able to deal effectively with governing and the country will suffer. The truth has practical value. The heritage of women is based on the lives women have led since they evolved into women. Their behavior has been determined by feelings. Women would not be women if this were not so. To look after children women have to be acting on feelings. They cannot be acting on self-interest, like men. Not only do women have to be motivated themselves by feelings, they have to use feelings to motivate children. Children are too young to think. So feelings have been everything to women. They can think and compete with men, but it is not natural for them. A perfect example of this is sports. Performance in most sports depend largely upon size and strength. Here women are inferior and cannot compete with men. Men have been paid more for spectator sports because bigger crowds come out to watch men than women. There is no denying this. But women have used their political power to get equal pay in some sports and are hell-bent to make this a general rule—not only in sports but in all activities.

Chapter 57

Banks should be forbidden to loan out more money than they have. It is that practice that causes depressions. Bankers should be imprisoned if they do this. It is because banks have been doing this and bankers have not been imprisoned that we have had a successions of depressions. Because we have had a succession of depressions that we have created the welfare state. Banks loan out more money than they have because they make more money doing this. They have gotten away with it because at first nobody knew they were doing it. It is not something that discloses itself. In time some outsiders figured out what they were doing but not the general public. What banks do and why they get away with it is very simple to understand. It just hasn’t gotten any publicity. Banks loan out a substitute for money. They charge for this. The more they loan the more they make. But there is a catch to this. They can be asked to substitute real money for this money. Banks have real money because of their savings s and other operations. When a boom looks as if it might be starting to end people decide they would rather have real money than bank money. Banks reach a point where they can no longer exchange real money for their money. They go bankrupt. When this happens to too many banks there is a depression. Because much of the money making for the boom was bank money. Without that money demand falls off. Governments try to make up for this fall-off but the amount involved is too great and they do not succeed.

It is hard to get out of a depression because business conditions are bad and very few people want to borrow from banks. So depressions tend to drag on. Often it is only some external cause that brings back prosperity. As World War II did with the Great Depression.

Chapter 58

The aristocracy did the world a great service. But not intentionally. They have never been credited with it. The service was making the world of human beings unequal. The aristocracies did this when their class came into being at the beginning of the agricultural age. It was then that they used hierarchy to rule the larger areas that agriculture made possible. They forced the other human beings in those areas to work for them and provide them with wealth. Real wealth had been unknown before the agricultural age. Human beings lived in small collectives. The men were more or less equal and existence was handto-mouth. This new system lasted roughly 10,000 years. It was replaced by the Industrial Revolution. With wealth the new system could produce things. The wealth fed the workers involved in the production and provided whatever was needed for that production. Without this wealth—which came from inequality—that production would never have taken place. At first the aristocracies tended to squander their wealth. They had nothing else to do with it. But with time there was enough innovation so they could use the wealth for practical purposes. And they had to do it. The world was competitive. Land remained the primary source of wealth for thousands of years. So most wealth went into means of fighting to get more land. That changed with the Industrial Revolution. Then what mattered were things that could be used in peacetime to increase production. That is where we are now. But we would not be here if it had not been for the inequality started by the aristocracies.

Chapter 59

Morality is self-contradictory. But it is reluctant to it that it is. Morality maintains that it is unchangeable. But anybody with any sense knows that is not true. Morality gets itself in this predicament because it is taught in childhood. Children cannot think. They have to be told what is right and wrong. They cannot be told that morality depends upon conditions and if conditions change morality will change. Childhood is meant to be a period of learning. What is learned is meant to be applied throughout life. That is true for all mammals. It has caused problems for human beings because 10,000 years ago their lifes started to change once they grew up. Until the agricultural age human beings lived in small families throughout their lives. Families are collectives. The conditions human beings lived in as children were the same as the conditions they lived in as adults. So their morality suited them all their lives. Once the agricultural age started this was no longer true. The groups people lived in had to become bigger to defend themselves against one another. And their families had to become competitive with other families. This meant the morality they were taught as children could not always be practiced when they were adults. So a conflict developed between the two moralities. It was more of a problem for men than for women. Men had to live in the adult world and deal with the adult world. Women could pretty much remain in their homes and the children’s world. A crisis came with the Industrial Revolution. It brought democracy and the rise of women. They could work outside the homes because machines replaced strength. Women’s lives became much more like the lives of men.

But the differences in heritages made women favor childhood morality, while it made men favor adult morality. The two positions often could not be reconciled.