Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Should We Pay Back the Debts?

Governments are telling the public that they must do with less so that the government can pay back its debts.

The debt payments go to the billionaire class and to working class investors and pension funds, who make loans to the government (i.e. buy government bonds) with the guarantee of being repaid what they loaned plus interest.

Governments could just tax the billionaires. Why don’t they? Because the billionaires control the government and run it in their interest. Our fake democracy is mere window-dressing for billionaires’ rule.

The wealth of billionaires does not rightfully belong to them.  Working people have produced all the wealth of society. Yet billionaires claim to own the land, buildings, machines and raw materials that people need in order to do productive labor. They claim, therefore, to own all the wealth that people produce with their labor on that land or with those machines and raw materials. Yes, the billionaires pay their workers wages and salaries, but the wages and salaries suffice only to buy back a fraction of the wealth the workers produce. This explains how profits are made and where all billion dollar fortunes come from.

A billionaire may or may not personally contribute some useful managerial labor, but that is not the way he or she ends up owning billions of dollars. Nobody can work enough hours to earn billions of dollars as fair pay for their labor. Nor is anybody’s intellectual contribution a reason for them to own billions of dollars; great ideas are only possible because of the countless ideas of others before them. Billion dollar fortunes don’t come from honest labor or brainy ideas; they come from legalized theft.

Working people should rightfully own all the wealth because they produced all of it. They have already “paid” for all of it with their labor. To be able to live decently, working class people (including retirees and those who cannot work) ought to enjoy their reasonable share of the wealth that working people produce, taken from the stolen billion-dollar fortunes to start with. The billionaires, however, deny this wealth to workers and force them to buy stocks and bonds to be able to retire, and then tell us we have to pay back the bond debts "for the sake of retired people"--making the billionaires richer.

The working class should not have to pay (in the form of bus or subway fares or taxes or anything else) “debt” payments to the billionaire class (or its governments or its banks) for what working people themselves already produced. The billionaire class should be made to live like everybody else and work like everybody else, and be told they are not going to be handed “debt” payments to live in luxury at the expense of working people any more.

The wealthiest people in the world deliberately created the recent banking crisis, knowing that the governments they control would bail out the “too big to fail” banks with money borrowed from the privately owned U.S. Federal Reserve Banks and other countries’ central banks. They knew the governments would pay the central banks (i.e. billionaires) back, plus interest, with money taken from the public as taxes and austerity budget cuts, all in the name of “we have to repay our debts.” The FED has given banks $16 trillion already. It's a “make the rich richer and the working class poorer” scam.

If anybody owes anyone money to pay back a loan, it is the billionaires who owe working people all of the wealth they have “borrowed” (actually stolen) from workers over the centuries—trillions of dollars!

9 comments:

  1. It was my pleasure talking to you and your sone yesterday at Davis. Your ideas are very interesting but still you have to pay attention to many shortcomings the idea possesses - in order to make it better.

    We can continue here our disscusion.

    Best, Blazo

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  2. Hi Blazo,

    I agree that we should pay attention of the shortcomings of our ideas. Would you care to suggest which shortcoming we should start with? I mean this sincerely.

    --John Spritzler

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    1. I think first that you should more use Scandinavian countries as an empirical background for your ideas, rather than an example form a civil war period in Spain. Indeed, egalitarianism reached its maximum not in communist countries such as Cuba or North Korea, but in Sweden and Norway. What happaned in Spain was just an attempt motivated not by a normal life circumstance - it happened during the war.

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    2. I think also that the idea would be less vulnerable if had not been that based on blaming capitalists for inequality. I think that you should approach more friendly to ideas of ineqaulity and capitalism, with aim of modifing these ideas (evolution), rather than abolishing and destroying them (revolution). You have to seek to make change within the system and not from outside the system.

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  3. Hi Blazo,

    I assume we agree that things should be more equal. Is that correct?

    Who do you think is truly to blame for inequality?

    --John

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    1. inequality in wealth is not a problem if there are appropriate institutions encouraging distribution of wealth.
      Ineqality in wealth is not dangerous. What is important is that people are not hungry, that are not cold, etc. everything other comes and goes

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  4. Hi Blazo,

    Many people in the United States, however, are hungry. In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent of households (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States [ http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/us_hunger_facts.htm ] Hunger is worse in other nations, due to the IMF having forced governments to pay back the debts of corrupt dictators by taking food and health care away from the masses. At the same time the combined wealth of the world's billionaires is $4.6 trillion [ http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/].

    Whose fault is this hunger?

    --John

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    1. That's very bad if that's true. But it is hard to say who is to blame for that. Billioners feed millions of people with their money as much as the government does. We feed eachother true mutual exchange. You will not solve the problem if you confiscate the wealth of billionaires.

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  5. Hi Blazo,

    Let's think about what is to blame for this hunger. Those hungry people would not be hungry if the world were like what we advocate in Thinking about Revolution (www.newdemocracyworld.org/thinking.pdf). If the world were like that, then those hungry people would be able to go to the grocery stores and take freely the food they need. They would only have to make a reasonable (as judged by their local democratic community assembly, of which they are a member equal to the others) contribution to the economy (which might be child-raising for some individuals. They would not be involuntarily unemployed because they would be welcomed to help out at any workplace where they could do something useful; the only thing the workplace would have to "pay" them is a certificate that they are doing useful work.) There would be sufficient food in the grocery stores because things are produced according to need and we have the ability to produce all the food that is needed.

    So, the people who are to blame for the hunger are the people who prevent things from being as described above. And who are those people? Not ordinary people, but the very wealthy who don't want an egalitarian world based on "from each according to ability, to each according to need" because then they would no longer be the privileged and powerful people that they want to be.

    You say the billionaires feed people. But obviously they don't feed the hungry ones, do they?

    --John

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