The posts on "How to fix the economy" -- my adaptation of an essay by Stephen Leacock -- elicited a lengthy response from Ron McPherson, an accountant and present-day resident of Leacock's hometown, Orillia, Ontario.
Ron agrees that the world's economy is broken, but doesn't think laissez-faire capitalism is the answer. He puts the blame on governments, banks, and the whole concept of debt and the charging of interest. The fix, according to his book Freedom's Dawning, is a new economic system which he calls Facilitism.
Here's what Ron has to say about Leacock's idea...
I’ve never appreciated Stephen Leacock's writings anywhere near the extent to which they're promoted. We do, however, have a few things in common: living in Orillia, awareness of excessive government and taxes, idle industry and workers, and recognition that people seem to believe their government should look after them.
The latter belief, in my opinion, is impossible to achieve. However, no-one should be without the basics for living. Our planet has far more than enough for all of us to have great lives without the stress imposed by our present enslaving structures.
Capitalism has proven over and over again throughout the last 300 years or so that it doesn’t work, except for the benefit of a few. Even Leacock admits this when he suggests that although we need these few profiteers to get things turned around that when the profiteer has finished his work; “We can always put him back into the penitentiary if we like”.
Communism, of course, also functions with an elite class ruling over their oppressed masses.
The farce of democracy, with its supposed representatives of the people voting in Parliament as demanded by party leaders, who in turn impose the dictums they themselves receive from the controllers of the money supply, progressively advance the enslavement of the people while expanding the confiscation of the peoples’ earnings through taxes and fees to pay for wars and interest charges on government borrowings. Absolutely disgusting! And the people have accepted these shenanigans. Ugh! But they are waking up.
The world needs a better system, one that can eliminate taxes and poverty, one that allows those who desire more than the basics to earn more, one that provides incentives for all people to contribute. One that also provides free heath care and education. Such a system exists. It is called Facilitism. Its time has come.
Our politicians here in Canada, or any other country that has sufficient resources to function independently until other countries come on stream, if they had the gumption and daring, could quickly implement Facilitism’s funding methodology and eliminate taxes by modifying the country’s computerized tax and benefit data base of their residents.
Click on the link to Ron's book to have a look at the Facilitism website. You can contact Ron at ron@facilitism.com.
Showing posts with label Stephen Leacock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stephen Leacock. Show all posts
Monday, November 8, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
How to fix the economy - Part I
This is the beginning of my three-part adaptation of Stephen Leacock's thoughts on what ails the economy and how to put it right. Parts II and III will be found below.
On recent travels through this country, I could not help being struck by the situation of business. Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.
Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed. When I learned that the theatres were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression.
This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I refer to, almost two million men and a like number of women were out of work. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of taxes, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.
The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that the world suffers now does not spring from what is happening in Europe or India or China. The danger of industrial collapse comes rather from what is happening in our country itself.
For generations, industry in America and Britain has flourished on individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially, that was the recognized way of getting on.
The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word "profiteer" had not yet been coined. It was not politically incorrect to be a "capitalist". There was no income tax to turn a man's pockets inside out and take away his savings. The world was to the strong.
Under the stimulus of this, the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry.
As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small. In spite of the splendor of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that we knew.
Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The way to acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candle and read a book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin read or Abraham Lincoln. And when the soul was stimulated to it, the aspiring youth must save money, put himself through college, live on nothing, think much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced today.
For today the candle is free and the college is subsidized by the state. The student has "union" like the capitalist's club, with a swimming pool and a drama league and a society coed at his elbow for which he buys American Beauty roses at twenty dollars a dozen.
Adapted from from My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
On recent travels through this country, I could not help being struck by the situation of business. Passing through the factory towns and noticing that no smoke came from the tall chimneys and that the doors of the factories were shut, I was led to the conclusion that they were closed.
Observing that the streets of the industrial centres were everywhere filled with idle men, I gathered that they were unemployed. When I learned that the theatres were full to the doors every day and that the concert halls, beer gardens, grand opera and religious concerts were crowded to suffocation, I inferred that the country was suffering from an unparalleled depression.
This diagnosis turned out to be absolutely correct. It has been freely estimated that at the time I refer to, almost two million men and a like number of women were out of work. What with the lowering of dividends and the raising of taxes, the closing of factories, feeding the unemployed and trying to employ the unfed, things are in a bad way.
The underlying cause is plain enough. The economic distress that the world suffers now does not spring from what is happening in Europe or India or China. The danger of industrial collapse comes rather from what is happening in our country itself.
For generations, industry in America and Britain has flourished on individual effort called out by the prospect of individual gain. Every man acquired from his boyhood the idea that he must look after himself. Morally, physically and financially, that was the recognized way of getting on.
The desire to make a fortune was regarded as a laudable ambition, a proper stimulus to effort. The ugly word "profiteer" had not yet been coined. It was not politically incorrect to be a "capitalist". There was no income tax to turn a man's pockets inside out and take away his savings. The world was to the strong.
Under the stimulus of this, the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry.
As a system it was far from perfect. It contained in itself all kinds of gross injustices, demands that were too great, wages that were too small. In spite of the splendor of the foreground, poverty and destitution hovered behind the scenes. But such as it was, the system worked: and it was the only one that we knew.
Or turn to another aspect of this same principle of self-help. The way to acquire knowledge in the early days was to buy a tallow candle and read a book after one's day's work, as Benjamin Franklin read or Abraham Lincoln. And when the soul was stimulated to it, the aspiring youth must save money, put himself through college, live on nothing, think much, and in the course of this starvation and effort become a learned man, with somehow a peculiar moral fibre in him not easily reproduced today.
For today the candle is free and the college is subsidized by the state. The student has "union" like the capitalist's club, with a swimming pool and a drama league and a society coed at his elbow for which he buys American Beauty roses at twenty dollars a dozen.
Adapted from from My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
How to fix the economy - Part II
This is the second instalment of my three-part adaptation of Stephen Leacock's thoughts on what ails the economy and how to put it right. Part I will be found above, and the conclusion appears below.
Or turn if you will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by a state-appointed board of censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the spirit. Let the board of censors do it. They together with three or four kinds of commissions are supposed to keep sinful actions, even sinful thoughts at arm's length, and to supply a first-class legislative guarantee of righteousness.
As a shortcut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort, our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it guards against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in some states of the Union even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.
The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is apparently more full of thugs, muggers, bandits, buggers, pornographers, spies and crooked policemen than it ever was. It almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is made good.
This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us.
Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit. It builds ships and loses money on them. It operates the ships and loses more money. It piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of industry.
The only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when he has got it, to keep it. The raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. There are vast empty spaces still. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Buffalo or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Mississippi, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it.
The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital is frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in a bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with no productive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bullfrog hidden behind water lilies, refusing to budge.
Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions and to pile up debts, but to start running again the machinery of bold productive effort.
Adapted from from My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
Or turn if you will to the moral side. The older way of being good was by much prayer and much effort of one's own soul. Now it is done by a state-appointed board of censors. There is no need to fight sin by the power of the spirit. Let the board of censors do it. They together with three or four kinds of commissions are supposed to keep sinful actions, even sinful thoughts at arm's length, and to supply a first-class legislative guarantee of righteousness.
As a shortcut to morality and as a way of saving individual effort, our legislatures are turning out morality legislation by the bucketful. The legislature regulates our drink, it guards against the deadly cigarette, it regulates here and there the length of our skirts, it safeguards our amusements and in some states of the Union even proposes to save us from the teaching of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution.
The ancient prayer "Lead us not into temptation" is passing out of date. The way to temptation is declared closed by Act of Parliament and by amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Yet oddly enough the moral tone of the world fails to respond. The world is apparently more full of thugs, muggers, bandits, buggers, pornographers, spies and crooked policemen than it ever was. It almost seems that the slow, old-fashioned method of an effort of the individual soul may be needed still before the world is made good.
This vast new system, the system of leaning on the government, is spreading like a blight over America, and everywhere we suffer from it. Government, that in theory represents a union of effort and a saving of force, sprawls like an octopus over the land. It has become like a dead weight upon us.
Wherever it touches industry it cripples it. It runs railways and makes a heavy deficit. It builds ships and loses money on them. It operates the ships and loses more money. It piles up taxes to fill the vacuum and when it has killed employment, opens a bureau of unemployment and issues a report on the depression of industry.
The only way to restore prosperity is to give back again to the individual the opportunity to make money, to make lots of it, and when he has got it, to keep it. The raw assets of our globe are hardly touched. There are vast empty spaces still. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Buffalo or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Mississippi, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it.
The world is out of work for the simple reason that the world has killed the goose that laid the golden eggs of industry. By taxation, by legislation, by popular sentiment all over the world, there has been a disparagement of the capitalist. And all over the world capital is frightened. It goes and hides itself in the form of an investment in a bond, a thing that is only a particular name for a debt, with no productive effort behind it and indicating only a dead weight of taxes. There capital sits like a bullfrog hidden behind water lilies, refusing to budge.
Hence the way to restore prosperity is not to multiply government departments and government expenditures, nor to appoint commissions and to pile up debts, but to start running again the machinery of bold productive effort.
Adapted from from My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
How to fix the economy - Part III
This is the conclusion of my three-part adaptation of Stephen Leacock's thoughts on what ails the economy and how to put it right. Parts I and II will be found above.
Take off all the excess profits taxes and the surtaxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can be done by a wholesale dismissal of government employees and then give industry a mark to shoot at.
What is needed now is not the multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the formation of any kind of corporation that will call out private capital from its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start the wheels moving again.
The next thing to be done, then, is to fire the government officials and bring back the profiteer. As to which officials are to be fired first, it doesn't matter much. If the edge of the axe of dismissal seems too sharp, hit with the back of it.
As to the profiteer, bring him back. If the promoters of corporations presently earn huge fortunes for themselves, society is none the worse. In any case, humanity being what it is, they will hand back a vast part of what they have acquired in return for honorary degrees or bits of blue ribbon or whatever kind of glass bead fits the fancy of the retired millionaire.
Yes, bring back the profiteer -- the same person who not so long ago was called a Captain of Industry, an Empire Builder and a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed, not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but no greedier. And we have just the same social need of his greed as a motive power in industry than we ever had, indeed a worse need than before.
We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, or if not him personally, we need the eager, selfish but reliant spirit of the man who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a spoon-fed education and a government job alternating with a government dole, and a set of morals framed for him by a board of censors.
Show such a man a map of the world and ask him to pick out a few likely spots. The trained greed of the rascal will find them in a moment. Then write him out a concession for oil in central Asia or irrigation in the Australian Outback. The ink will hardly be dry on it before the capital will begin to flow in.
Wealth will come from all kinds of places whence the government could never coax it and where the tax-gatherer could never find it. Only promise that it is not going to be taxed out of existence and the stream of capital which is being dried up in the sands of government mismanagement will flow into the hands of private industry like a river of gold.
And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished his work, we can always put him back into the penitentiary if we like. But we need him just now.
Adapted from From My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
Take off all the excess profits taxes and the surtaxes on income and as much of the income tax itself as can be done by a wholesale dismissal of government employees and then give industry a mark to shoot at.
What is needed now is not the multiplication of government reports, but corporate industry, the formation of any kind of corporation that will call out private capital from its hiding places, offer employment to millions and start the wheels moving again.
The next thing to be done, then, is to fire the government officials and bring back the profiteer. As to which officials are to be fired first, it doesn't matter much. If the edge of the axe of dismissal seems too sharp, hit with the back of it.
As to the profiteer, bring him back. If the promoters of corporations presently earn huge fortunes for themselves, society is none the worse. In any case, humanity being what it is, they will hand back a vast part of what they have acquired in return for honorary degrees or bits of blue ribbon or whatever kind of glass bead fits the fancy of the retired millionaire.
Yes, bring back the profiteer -- the same person who not so long ago was called a Captain of Industry, an Empire Builder and a Nation Maker. It is the times that have changed, not the man. He is there still, just as greedy and rapacious as ever, but no greedier. And we have just the same social need of his greed as a motive power in industry than we ever had, indeed a worse need than before.
We need him not only in business but in the whole setting of life, or if not him personally, we need the eager, selfish but reliant spirit of the man who looks after himself and doesn't want to have a spoon-fed education and a government job alternating with a government dole, and a set of morals framed for him by a board of censors.
Show such a man a map of the world and ask him to pick out a few likely spots. The trained greed of the rascal will find them in a moment. Then write him out a concession for oil in central Asia or irrigation in the Australian Outback. The ink will hardly be dry on it before the capital will begin to flow in.
Wealth will come from all kinds of places whence the government could never coax it and where the tax-gatherer could never find it. Only promise that it is not going to be taxed out of existence and the stream of capital which is being dried up in the sands of government mismanagement will flow into the hands of private industry like a river of gold.
And incidentally, when the profiteer has finished his work, we can always put him back into the penitentiary if we like. But we need him just now.
Adapted from From My Discovery of England, by Stephen Leacock, 1922, Toronto, S.B. Gundy. Stephen Butler Leacock, FRSC (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist. He lived and wrote before the rise of the nanny state and political correctness.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The weather of London (England)
Let me clear. [For a change. ed.] The London mentioned here is the big one -- the capital of the United Kingdom. There is a smaller one in Ontario. And there is a New London in Connecticut. I have visited all three.
I have also visited Orillia, Ontario, where I called at the home of the famous Canadian humourist, Stephen Leacock. Unfortunately, he was not at home, having expired several years previously. I never went back.
However, his demise did not prevent me from reading and rereading some of Leacock's tremendously funny books and essays. I revisited one today, and find it has aged well. In other words, it's still funny, 88 years after it was first published.
The book in question is My Discovery of England. This work is not as well-known as, say, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, but has great appeal for lovers of travel writing, of which I am one. Here's an excerpt, an observation about London's weather.
No description of London would be complete without a reference, however brief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London climate. This is seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate of London and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of the Gulf Stream.
The way it works is thus: the Gulf Stream, as it nears the shores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises into the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times the soup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist; at other times it has the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are a little sensitive on the point and flatter their atmosphere by calling it a fog; but it is not; it is soup.
The notion that no sunlight ever gets through and that in the London winter people never see the sun is of course a ridiculous error, circulated no doubt by the jealousy of foreign nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible in London, without the aid of glasses, on a November day in broad daylight; and again one night about four o'clock in the afternoon I saw the sun distinctly appear through the clouds.
Those who think that funny travel stories about Britain were invented by Bill Bryson should check out My Discovery of England. I defy you to read it without at least snickering, and more likely laughing out loud.
Footnote: I do like and admire Bill Bryson. His new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, appeared in the bookstores this month.
I have also visited Orillia, Ontario, where I called at the home of the famous Canadian humourist, Stephen Leacock. Unfortunately, he was not at home, having expired several years previously. I never went back.
However, his demise did not prevent me from reading and rereading some of Leacock's tremendously funny books and essays. I revisited one today, and find it has aged well. In other words, it's still funny, 88 years after it was first published.
The book in question is My Discovery of England. This work is not as well-known as, say, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, but has great appeal for lovers of travel writing, of which I am one. Here's an excerpt, an observation about London's weather.
No description of London would be complete without a reference, however brief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London climate. This is seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate of London and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of the Gulf Stream.
The way it works is thus: the Gulf Stream, as it nears the shores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises into the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times the soup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist; at other times it has the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are a little sensitive on the point and flatter their atmosphere by calling it a fog; but it is not; it is soup.
The notion that no sunlight ever gets through and that in the London winter people never see the sun is of course a ridiculous error, circulated no doubt by the jealousy of foreign nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible in London, without the aid of glasses, on a November day in broad daylight; and again one night about four o'clock in the afternoon I saw the sun distinctly appear through the clouds.
Those who think that funny travel stories about Britain were invented by Bill Bryson should check out My Discovery of England. I defy you to read it without at least snickering, and more likely laughing out loud.
Footnote: I do like and admire Bill Bryson. His new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, appeared in the bookstores this month.
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