Blog 18 Crisis / Opportunity

In Blog 7, I introduced the four means of subverting the law of money within a nation.

1 Noblesse oblige (the charity of the rich);

2, Government redistribution; by taxing the richer and spending the tax receipts on the poorer.

3, Workers unions - with freedom to act collectively to level up the power balance between wage receivers and dividend receivers.

4 Finally, when 1 to 3 have failed to function sufficiently, revolution, which I symbolized with an image of a guillotine. That is a humane device for separating heads from bodies. It was used extensively on the French royalty in the 1790's,

I noted that 1. noblesse oblige, while laudable, is not a big contender for gold medals in wealth equalization.

And 2, government equalization gets strangled by the power of of the debt-based money system. The rent payment on the debt (national/state/municipal) don't leave much for public picnic baskets.

Ditto 3, collective bargaining, suppressed by debt-stressed governments on the insistence of their bankers and big-money supporters.

So,prepare for the guillotine.

The French Revolution was just one of many revolutions brought on by the operation of the law of money. A list of examples would include the Communist revolutions beginning in Russia in 1917, and, more recently, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the current ISIL and other 21st century Arab revolutions. They were and are brought on by a recurring crisis point in the distribution of wealth, when too much money has been accumulated by too few people, leaving too little for the majority.

And how much is too much,  and too little? Number-crunchers, despair. That balance may be quantifiable only after the revolution has decided it. But give it a try. And then notify the 1%. It could just save us from a nasty revolution.

It deserves to be said on that point that revolutions are almost never initiated by the poor, who are too occupied just keeping breath in their bodies. Revolutions are birthed in a deprived or de-privileged middle class, but once launched, the middle class seldom retains control.of the outcome.

So we seem to be due for one, it it hasn't started already. It is hard to predict the outcome because this revolution, unlike those previous national uprisings, is going to be global. That makes the stakes huge, and the predictions dubious.

But they all start with a small beginning somewhere.

That could be Iceland, and Greece, or ISIL.  ISIL? A theocracy? With human beings assuming the "voice of God/Allah" and telling everyone else what to do/think/be?  That could be worse than the cancer stage of capitalism!

Well,let's leave that thought to another blog. How a bout an upbeat quotation from Robert Frost, who, when asked what he thought about the fate of man, said, roughly quoted, "Men are like cockroaches, ineradicable."

Yeah, and by the way, I'm not inventing this stuff. I'm just quoting history.

Interesting verbal note:  the word "crisis" came from the old Greek word for "decide". 
And the English word "decide" came from Latin. In Latin it meant, "cut, with a downward stroke".