Learning from Bretton Woods

http://TheMonfortPlan.com

Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort is the multidisciplinary European and author of The Monfort Plan

The ongoing G20 meetings that started in November 2008 in Washington and continued with the G20 meetings of London (April 2009) and Pittsburgh (September 2010) have emphasized the necessity of moving ahead with the financial reform. In the reform agenda, there are other areas that were not incorporated, areas that are directly related with the origination and perpetuation of poverty.

In Australia the federal government is trying to implement an Emissions Trading Scheme to combat global warming. Opponents of this scheme argue that it will cost jobs.

Surely the whole point of trying to slow and stop global warming is that if such warming continues unchecked, it will cost millions of jobs, and lives, worldwide, because of the destructive effects of changing climates and rising sea levels.

It is clear that opponents of any plan to stop global warming have not understood the point. They think it is just a vote-catching scheme to attract the votes of a minority of ‘chattering classes’ in ‘leafy suburbs’ in the cities. They believe that the world can just grind along its present course with no change and no ill effects.

Recently in Western Australia there has been some discussion about the problems of youth - falling education standards, lack of respect for authority and for the law, bad behaviour with motor vehicles and in other ways.

As usual when these matters are discussed, several people have written to the newspaper advocating the re-introduction of corporal punishment in schools. It was abolished in Western Australian schools some years ago. One man described how he and his cousin had misbehaved at school one day. He got the cane, his cousin got the birch, and they never did it again.

Many people have asked me if the huge stimulus packages being tried by governments around the world will ‘work’. The packages aim to restore economic activity, that is throughput, to the levels of a year or two ago. They are intended to restore so-called ‘economic growth’, that is throughput-increase (see the post Concepts and Terms, early in the book) to those levels.

The stimulus is being applied by governments taking on more debt in order to fling vast sums of money at consumers to get them to buy more goods and services.

The Christian religion contains a paradox. It claims to be about love and life, while containing, in all its denominations and off-shoots, strong manifestations of death-orientation or necrophilia.

The term necrophilia is used in its broadest sense, defined thus: the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid; the passion to transform something alive into something unalive, and to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical or inanimate; the passion to tear apart living structures; the hatred of life, of its growth and development and its sources.