Patrick Holwell
Jul 29, 2017 · 3 min read

This is an excellent essay. I appreciate your thoughts. I just read two very thought provoking books by a fellow named Yuval Noah Harari. In the second, titled Homo Deus, he says that in this current trend toward less restrained capitalism, we have traded meaning for power. Quite a profound statement, when you think about it, really. I recommend both books. The first book is called Sapiens. They are very good.

As to your article, I’m quite in agreement with the concept of huge public works. Here’s how I think of it: I pay lots of taxes, and I get sick of my tax money, which SHOULD be used in programs that make my life better, like healthcare, get instead rerouted to become corporate profits. We’ve got some real structural corruption — the idea advanced by the radical libertarians is that we need to ‘chain’ the populace with voting restrictions and things like Citizens United, which in effect allows corporations to line up billions of dollars in opposition to groups like AARP and ACLU who represent the people. A great book about this movement is called Democracy in Chains. It is authored by Nancy McLean and is an outstanding expose of the stealth effort by Charles Koch and other billionaires to replace the republic with unrestrained capitalism.

The reason I’m commenting, though, is this: in your post you state that zero interest allows us to finance stuff basically for free, which is true on its face. However, if we think this through just a bit more deeply, we find the current fiscal situation in the United States begs a very big question. If the national debt is money we owe to ourselves, then why are we paying it back to bankers with interest? If you are interested in monetary and fiscal policy, as I am, then a good book to educate yourself on these matters is Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt. You can also look at local movements, like public banking, and concepts like Regenerative Capitalism, which isn’t really capitalism but empowers local people to have maximum say in local policies that affect them, which is what democracy is.

So in the face of your post, I pose this question: Why not repeal the Federal Reserve Act of 1912, get rid of the Fed and begin coining our own money like it says in Article I, Section 8, “The Congress shall have the Power To coin money…” Do this, and in spite of the screams of ‘inflation!’ from the banking crowd, and the covert efforts they are sure to engage in, such as flooding us with counterfeit money (like the British bankers did to us in the days of Lincoln — look up why the Secret Service was created in 1865 — it was not to protect the President). If we did this, and took a few other steps like getting rid of Citizens United, we could then have your Marshall Plan.

One last thought: While I’m all for reducing the gross big-government spending bloat for ‘defense’ and ‘national security,’ we must proceed gradually. A lot of jobs are dependent on these contracts and the transition to more peaceful and useful expenditures. So we can’t all of a sudden beat our swords into plowshares, or we will send ourselves into a deep recession. There has to be a transition plan, much like the one we desperately need to transition the nation from fossil fuels to renewables.

The new Marshall Plan has to address global warming for what it is, as well — a human-caused crisis that threatens to cause massive extinction of life, including our own species. This is a huge threat to the entire world and it is going to be far more extensive and painful than merely dealing with rising sea levels and the billions of dollars in losses and millions of refugees that will cause.

Thanks for your posts. Keep them up, will you?