ECONOMY DESPITE ALAN GREENSPAN

What Connects the Dots?

January 21, 2006

Both the U.S. economy, and also the world's economy, are now in the grip of the very advanced stage of what is, physically, not a mere economic depression, but a general physical breakdown-crisis of global society. Under any attempted continuation of the current, self-destructive trends in economic and related policies under U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr., the situation of the U.S.A. would become worse than merely precarious, that within a very short time to come.

In this light, there is no competent conduct of political business currently before the institutions of Federal, state, and local government which does not approach every leading issue of national and global policy from the standpoint of the immediate need to face the reality of a currently onrushing global economic breakdown-crisis of the existing world monetary-financial system as a whole. Failure to adopt an appropriate new global economic and monetary-financial system akin to President Franklin Roosevelt's intention for the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, would represent reckless disregard for the continued existence of civilization.

In fact, there is no presently leading issue facing any and every part of the world, such as the spread of the continuing asymmetric warfare in Southwest Asia, and no other issue of U.S. national security or internal general welfare, whose solution does not depend on actions which must be premised on adopting a general, FDR-style, global economic and monetary reform as the entire platform on which solutions to any leading issue of policy must be addressed.

The pivotal issue on which all those strategic and related matters of policy-reform hang, is the battle of the giants, the titanic struggle, begun in 1763-1776, between the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system and the legacy of the American System of political-economy. The issue now takes the form of a global struggle whose outcome will determine whether or not this planet will be organized on behalf of a cooperative search for promotion of the general welfare among the members of a system of perfectly sovereign nation-state republics, as Franklin Roosevelt had intended at the time of his death. Or, a new, global form of a Roman world-empire, in which that latter global system is maintained, as the Roman Empire of the Caesars was, by a system of permanent warfare, akin to that which the Bush-Cheney Administration has directed its adopted mission since no later than the time current Vice-President Cheney was U.S. Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush I, the policy announced by a would-be imperial President George W. Bush II in his January 2002 "State of the Union" address.

The forces currently associated with President George W. Bush, Jr. and Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, could not actually win the kind of war which they are presently engaged in extending into Iran; but, their efforts to do that, unless prevented, would end civilization as we have known it, globally, in a new dark age whose effects would be extended for generations to come.

In this presently actual global strategic situation, the most crucial among the reforms needed, to avert a now looming threat of a collapse of not only the U.S. economy, but also the world's as a whole, is a type of reform in the international monetary system which could not be competently launched by any nation other than a U.S.A. which were operating under not only a return to pre-1971 monetary-financial policies, but under physical-economic, social, and regulatory policies which would be fiercely contrary to the tastes of the current U.S. Bush Administration. Without radical reversal of trends which have been in progress for about forty years, especially the most recent thirty-five years, the world as a whole, led by our presently collapsing U.S. economy, would be plunged, for reason of precisely that 1968-2005 policy-trend, into what has been defined as of the type of a "new dark age" experienced as the mid-Fourteenth-Century European New Dark Age. This time, this would be, surely, on a global scale.

If you prefer continuation of the trend of policies under President G.W. Bush, Jr.'s Administration, you are choosing the worst disaster our republic has experienced since its founding.

This threat of a new dark age could be averted, and a genuine physical-economy recovery set into motion. The new economic policy announced in the recent Harvard University address by U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, points in that general direction. The recent revival of a more or less global return to a nuclear-power policy, points sharply in that direction. Without these and other, kindred changes, there would be no hope for civilization globally during the decades ahead.

However, those improvements are only a beginning, a good beginning; but, a much deeper and more general form of changes in policies of governments and public opinion, is urgently needed, if we are to actually reverse the present lurches toward the looming nearby precipice of global despair.

For these and related purposes, we require a radical change in the way policy-shapers and public opinion think about shaping economic policies of nations. Improvement would not be sufficient; what would appear to most economists, and others, as very radical, more sophisticated ways of defining and measuring economic performance, must be learned, and adopted now.

The Available Alternative to Disaster

Well-defined alternatives are available. As U.S. Representative Pelosi's recent Harvard University address indicates, some, if only some among these better alternatives, are widely understood among traditional industrial management, and among some others. Unfortunately, some essential parts of this happier perspective are not yet understood.

The most important of those concepts which have yet to be understood, is the role of technology in generating real physical improvement in both physical output and general conditions of life. Today, there is much use of the term "technology," but, largely as a result of a famous cultural paradigm-shift which struck during the late 1960s, there is little actual understanding among today's social strata of top management and the professions, of what the mere term "technology" should mean. That latter, crucial problem, the true practical-economic meaning of "the function of technology,"is the focus of my attention in this present report.

For example: Recently, there has been important progress toward the new goals which I have assigned for the role of computer-assisted animations, goals which I had pointed out earlier. I had intended this as a step toward competence in study of the lessons urgently to be adduced, for today, lessons to be taken from physical-historical evidence accumulated during recent decades. However, so far, the unfortunate tendency is to rely too emphatically on only connect-the-dots approaches; the prevalent habits of reliance upon mechanistic approaches to historical-statistical views of anecdotal evidence, die hard.

The catastrophic failure of the increasing, post-World War II reliance on so-called "linear programming" in taught economics, is an example of the problem. The intrinsic incompetence of Professor Norbert Wiener's radically reductionist notion of so-called "information theory," and the fantasies of his accomplice John von Neumann's miserably failed, related, pseudo-scientific schemes in "mathematical economics" and "artificial intelligence," are typical of this set of related, contemporary intellectual calamities of academic and related professional life.

Animations generated by connecting the dots of physical evidence, as my associates have done lately, in studying county-by-county changes in physical characteristics of the national economy, have been a significant improvement in the quality of policy-discussions occurring, where such reports have been circulated. Unfortunately, the pleasant sensation of this success in what we have done, tends to become a consoling distraction from the fact of what is not yet done.

The problem is, that simply transforming a series of data, or even a combination of series of data, into an animated simulation of lapsed-time photography, has the fault of being of the general form of the pre-school child's method of connecting dots to generate an image. Flowery rhetoric used to attempt to lend color to mere description of such a construction, tends to shut down the thinking process at exactly the point of discussion of such economic animations at which actually creative thinking must begin. The efficient cause of the apparent movement from one dot to the next, is thereby reduced, implicitly, to a series of straight-line connections; no amount of flowery rhetoric could make such a display a representation of an actually creative process. A simplistic view of the process of dot-connection conceals something of crucial importance: the decisive factor of scientific creativity in the Platonic tradition, which is the key to all scientifically competent economics.

Simple animations have the specific virtue of exposing patterns of negative developments, and therefore also indicate which wrong-headed habits of policy-shaping have contributed to the dismal and rapidly worsening conditions experienced today. However, to project the effects of beneficial, alternative policies, requires a more sophisticated quality of modelling.

Therefore, the failure to recognize what a simplistic, so-called "conventional" classroom view conceals, would cause the attempted presentation to appear to argue in favor of something which never actually happens in a living process, such as a physical-economic process.

For example: As in the use of lapsed-time photography for study of behavior of growing plants, there is a tendency to be so much amused by the effect of a weed's apparent expression of "his" or "her" intention, that the actual subject of the non-linear action, from within, generating the effect seen from without, is neglected.

For example: A weed's growth is generated by the fact that it is a living process, rather than simply a chemical process. No mathematics of mere chemistry could actually account for the cause of the phenomena which the behavior of the living weed betrays. The non-living phase of the chemistry of the weed does define the boundaries within which the animated photographic images steer the dynamical form of the weed's behavior; but, without taking into account the principle of life which subsumes the chemical behavior, explanations of the phenomena are deplorable sophistries. Only life produces life; only cognition generates cognitive (i.e., human, creative mental) processes. It is only the creative powers uniquely specific to the potentials of the human individual mind, which define the difference between human societies and the habits of either rhesus monkeys, or of Solly Zuckerman's baboons, or of Wolfgang Koehler's great apes.

Progress is uniquely a product of the work of the creative powers of the individual human mind. No inanimate device, no mere animal life, could willfully create the changes in mass behavior on which economic progress depends absolutely.

The same type of issue of scientific method, arises, in a negative way, in the determination of the exact point of death of persons. At what point is the individual resuscitatable? At what point is the principle of life, and also the principle of cognition unique to human individuals among all species, reconnectible to the biology of the living person at the moment of apparent death? This determination is affected by available, relevant technologies and medical skills; but the fact of the distinction between life and death of that human individual, exists, however the expression of that distinction may be presented in different ways under different technological settings.

To this effect, the important challenge presented by computer animations of economic data, is to isolate the kind of non-linear (e.g., dynamic) action which is generating the change of state associated with the motion. The observed motion is the shadow of the reality, not the reality whose mere shadow is projected by its passing.

For all cases, the prerequisite for competent use of statistical animations, is learning to think as Johannes Kepler did, in his use of statistics for his uniquely original discovery of the universal principles of gravitation, and of Fermat's experimental discovery of that principle of "quickest" time which, together with the central discoveries by Kepler, underlie all competent modern thought about physical processes, including national economies.

These issues of scientific method are crucial for the competent practice of modern economic studies. As I refer to this subject in the following body of this report, new global conditions, as implied in the growth of the ratio of consumption of raw materials to production for a growing world population, should compel nations to submit to profound scientific issues of physical-economy which are on the frontiers of current practice, and are largely beyond what is taught and practiced among relevant professionals today. The matter of the needed approach to the use of animations in economic policy-crafting and analysis, is typical of the challenges to be faced on this account.

Like life and cognition, gravity is a universal physical principle, a principle which can not be adduced statistically from a mechanistic type of mathematical-probabilistic construction in Cartesian space. The relevant, appropriate method, is the same method of dynamics associated with the application of that form of Classical Greek physical geometry known as Sphaerics: the method which is associated with the elementary discoveries of principle by the Pythagoreans, Plato, et al., as by Kepler, Fermat, and Leibniz, in modern times. It is this principle, acting as Kepler shows the discovered principle of universal gravitation to act, which is the cause of the transformation bridging the interval between any two successive points in an actually animated, real-life form of process-image. The simple animation, however useful it may be, is merely the image of the action; it is not the representation of the causal element of the adumbrated form of the action which has been presented to the senses.

Thus, to emphasize the crucial illustrative point: In living processes, such as physical-economic processes, the scientifically significant qualities of connections are never generated in a straight-line, mechanistic-Cartesian mode. These processes are always elementarily dynamic (in Leibniz's sense of the Classical Greek origin of his use of that term, dynamic), not statistically mechanistic ones; and, the movements within them are always caused by what is called a non-linear form of action, a process of transformation, which is, mathematically, expressed as a form of transcendental function.

In real economies, as opposed to the fantasies of ordinary statistical methods, significant action never follows anything akin to straight-line connections. Here lies the root-cause of the intrinsic incompetence of using accountants' efforts, which may be quite appropriate for financial accounting, but are utterly incompetent in efforts to explain a real-life economic process, as a process. This caution is to be observed not only in defining limits for the use of financial accounting practice, but in warning against the perils of scientific illiteracy expressed by the standpoint of the methods of economics practice commonly taught in universities and relevant other locations today.

For this reason, we should always reference the transformation of a series of physical states in an economic process, to follow, once again, the exemplary way in which Johannes Kepler, uniquely, discovered the universal physical principle of gravitation.

To that end, we must proceed as I indicated in presenting the lessons laid out in the EIR Christmas feature, "The Principle of 'Power' " (Dec. 23, 2005). As I shall indicate within the body of this report: think of Archytas' construction of the doubling of the cube, and the significance attributed to that construction by Eratosthenes. Add to this, the implications of Fermat's experimental discovery of the principle of quickest time.

Therefore, we must add the Leibniz-Bernoulli construction of the catenary-cued principle of universal physical least action, and its complement, Leibniz's original (pre-Euler) discovery of natural logarithmic functions.

Look ahead from those precedents, to add Riemann's emphasis on his use of what he defined as his Dirichlet's Principle, in his developing the notion of physical hypergeometries. Adduce the notion of a universal physical principle exemplified by these elementary cases, and apply that notion of a physical principle, so illustrated, to the domain of that physical economy which is the reality for which the financial economy is merely a shadow.

See that the elementary expression of the relevant class of non-linear forms of action, is Leibniz's catenary-cued universal physical principle of least action, as this explicitly dynamic notion of generalized mathematical-physical function was developed further through the work of Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and their associated circles in science. All competent representation of the physical characteristics of actual economic-social processes, are expressions of the Gauss-Riemann outgrowths of Leibniz's universal principle of physical least action.

To that, in today's global setting, we must, as I have said earlier, add the following qualification. Since the work of Russia's V.I. Vernadsky, in his rigorous definitions of the functional distinctions of Biosphere and Noösphere from the chemistry of non-living processes, we must include the principles of life per se and cognition per se, as universal, functional phase-space differentiations within the universe considered as a whole. In economic processes, which is to emphasize the action governed by the mind of living human individuals upon the physical form of the economic process, this three-phase functional distinction is crucial in attempting to adduce the factor of motivation ordering the observable "dots" of statistical analysis.

The relevant types of non-linear forms of causal action linking successive, "observable" points in an economic, or related process, are of the form expressed by such types of transcendental functions. Walking a student through the steps by which Kepler transcended the errors of Copernicus and Brahe, in the discovery of the principle of universal gravitation, introduces the habits of creative thinking which it is indispensable that we must develop further for grasping the practical meaning of the dynamic form of "non-linear" functions as a replacement for intrinsically defective mechanistic methods of the type commonly employed in statistical economic studies today.

In Review of the Challenge

In recent years, especially the recent twelve months, I have published much bearing on this subject of the required methods of economics practice for today. Since not every present reader has studied those relevant previous publications, a summary of the most crucial points for this present discussion is now in order here.

The needed application of the LaRouche-Riemann method, is merely illustrated by my emphasis on the "Triple Curve" pedagogy and the physical-economic implications of the Riemannian shock-wave function. For most among today's relevant professional and other observers, the implications of my relevant, original discoveries in this field, still hang, unharvested, on their intellectual vines. Correcting the crucial omission of that needed method, is something which must be done now, if we are to devise an effective U.S. policy for recovery from what is already a rapidly accelerating systemic breakdown-crisis of the U.S. and world economies. I emphasize the argument made in my January 27, 2006 EIR report, "How To Capitalize a Recovery."

Applying those reflections, as criticism, to recently popular professional fads in mathematical economics, there are no actually linear solutions for the general goals implicitly posed by the work of the late Professor Wassily Leontief. For that same reason, his rivals among what he, and I, respectively, rightly derided, during the 1950s, as "the ivory tower" faction of econometrics of Koopmans et al., were, like the latter's present-day successors, the present-day hedge-fund forecasters, even at their relatively least worst, have been usually worse than wrong, most of the time. The sometimes subtle, but often explicit influence of the axiomatic-like assumptions of ivory-tower fanatics such as the circles of Koopmans, Norbert Wiener, and John von Neumann, as integral features of both most contemporary academic instruction and practice in modern financial management by both governments and private enterprises, has been among the principal contributing, willful factors, of virtual "brain damage," in misleading the economies of Europe and the Americas into the ruinous condition of threatened imminent general collapse in which we find the world of today.

The roots of the sheer lunacy of today's rampant hedge-fund bubbles, are already found in the establishment of the still-lingering global hegemony of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal, empiricist system of financial accounting, a system whose imperial overreach was established during the course of the Eighteenth Century. The difference between then and now, is between the dangerously neurotic system of accounting belief and practice prevalent into the mid-1960s, and the frankly psychotic, and often criminal, "ivory tower" states of mind dominant in international financial and related practice since the 1971-1972 launching of the present, "post-industrial" form of floating-exchange-rate monetary system.

Thus, in the U.S.A. in particular, we have shifted, in a series of radical reforms made during and since 1971-1981, such that, whereas the U.S. economy, with all its troubles, was still operating at a net gain over the course of the ups-and-downs during 1945-1965 interval, in physical terms, per capita and per square kilometer, since 1971-1972 the physical economy of the U.S.A. has been collapsing at a generally accelerating rate, throughout the 1981-2005 interval to date. Under President George W. Bush, Jr.'s disastrous misleadership, the rate of collapse has been greatly accelerated in a way which corresponds to the second-phase, post-1999, version of my "Triple Curve" illustration.

To summarize the 1981-2005 pattern for the U.S.A. itself, consider the following. I repeat that which I have often said before, inasmuch as those references are needed for clarity in addressing the special issue of scientific method emphasized in this present report.

The Pattern of Decline to Date

The first significant, post-1971 effort to reawaken the already crippled U.S. economy, came in the form of President Ronald Reagan's March 23, 1983 attempt to secure Soviet agreement to what Reagan named "A Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)."

Had the Soviet government agreed to negotiate such a proposal, the net result would have been a return to the kind of science-driver program associated with the Kennedy manned Moon-landing mobilization. All of the leading forces of continental Western Europe were readied to cooperate in such an escape from the Bertrand Russell-Kissingerian trap of thermonuclear "revenge weapons," had the Soviet government been willing to explore this alternative.

It has turned out, subsequently, that the Soviet rejection of President Reagan's proffer doomed the Soviet system to what the former Soviet bloc nations of Europe have suffered up to the present time; the support which Andropov's rejection received from the wave of hatred unleashed against the SDI from within the U.S. influential ranks of both the "Bush babies" of the Reagan Administration and the Democratic Party, virtually eliminated any hope of escape from the downward turn of the post-1971/1981 U.S. and western European economies.

As I have reported many times since then, during the first half of 1983, I had warned that the Soviet refusal of President Reagan's offer ensured a collapse of the Soviet system "within about five years." The Soviet-led Comecon system collapsed, in fact, over the course of 1989. In the meantime, the other, more pedestrian, Reagan Administration economic policies of the 1980s, led into the 1929-like stock-market collapse of October 1987. The attempt to postpone the effects of that 1987 collapse, by incoming Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's policy of John-Law-style financial-derivatives "bubbles," postponed the entry into the actual financial collapse-phase until the Spring-Summer 2000 plunge of the "IT" bubble, with the entry into the presently onrushing collapse-phase of the hedge-fund-driven mortgage-based-securities "bubble." The two pedagogical models of "Triple Curves" provide a conceptual overview of the two successive phases of the long-wave 1971-2005 process to date.

Presently, the most deadly of the added features in the development of these financial-speculative bubbles, has been what is known, inside the U.S.A. itself, as the doctrine of "shareholder value," as that modern Sophist's doctrine is associated with the public utterances of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. From the standpoint of its implications for the science of physical economy, Scalia's argument is, functionally, clinically, as much as morally insane in and of itself, as cruelly immoral action against the people of the U.S.A. in its effects. It is not an original doctrine; in theology, Scalia's stated doctrine, including his virtually schizophrenic, Queenly Alice-in-Wonderland doctrine of "text," dates, philosophically, to the notorious irrationalisms of the medieval William of Ockham, and, more recently, a radically extreme form of the empiricist theology of Venice's Paolo Sarpi. In modern political contexts, those assumptions, as he describes them, are explicitly pro-fascist in their implications.

This crucial fact about the characteristics of post-1971 trends in international monetary and economic policies, brings us to the presently explosively crucial scientific issue posed now as the crisis brought about by the recent nearly thirty-five years under the floating-exchange-rate IMF system.

1. What Is 'The Rate of Profit'?

As I have emphasized in my "How To Capitalize a Recovery."[1] there are, in fact, two significant notions of a rate of profit. One translates into monetary policy today, as a rate of return on investment in money; the second, the rate of physical return on an investment of physical capital, as this latter is distinct from the circulation of money as such. In both cases, economic value is not defined mathematically by a fixed value, such as that of monetary gold, or a price of petroleum, as such; it is defined by what is often described as the variable rate of "return on investment." However, the effect of ignoring the qualitative discrepancy between the two notions of "return on investment," monetary versus physical, has repeatedly confronted the modern trans-Atlantic form of European economy and its global extension, in the form of crises.

Put the fact of this qualitative discrepancy in the form of the following question: What should be understood by "return on investment"? Should we signify "return" as measured in simple monetary terms; or, should we measure the physical-economic gains, per capita and per square kilometer, for the society's development of its physical-productive powers as a whole society? To solve that riddle, the origins of certain presently commonplace, wrong assumptions, shared between professional and public opinion, must be carefully examined, as we shall do now.

This division, which is best labelled the fundamental difference of principle, between the standpoint of Anglo-Dutch empiricism and the opposing standpoint of the American followers of Gottfried Leibniz, such as Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, is expressed in economics and law as the continuing opposition, in the principles of economic policy, of the U.S. constitutional tradition of Benjamin Franklin and his followers, to the opposing tradition of Anglo-Dutch Liberalism.

This division is between what became the only globally significant strategic factor in shaping the leading controversies respecting the principles of national and world economy from the 1763-1789 formation of what was to become the U.S.A. to the present day. All the crises inhering in the currently prevalent principal conflicts in so-called "economics" ideology, are rooted in the irreconcilable differences of moral and scientific principle which, categorically, separate the American System of political-economy of Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick List, Henry C. Carey, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, et al., from the caricature of what had been then the already wretched British doctrine which has been [promoted] lately the virtually economic-suicidal perversity of performance by the current U.S. Bush Administration.

For example:

The Anglo-Dutch Liberal dogma for economics, which, unfortunately, all presently conventional British, Marxist, and popular opinion has derived from the empiricist doctrine of Venice's Paolo Sarpi, insists that the principle of political-economy is premised on a systemically irrational doctrine: that the mass behavior of society must be controlled by what are, in fact, certain irrational motives of the isolable individual, as by a simple hedonistic principle, such as "individual greed." In that Liberal or kindred view, this factor, as expressed by such terms as "individual greed," represents a general, axiomatic principle of conflict which is alleged, by them, to be inherent in the relationships among persons. This is taught as being a conflict embedded in what is a universal principle, a principle governing both the behavior of the isolated individual toward nature, and what is assumed to be the inevitable, "jungle-like" conflict among all persons.

This typically Venetian (e.g., neo-Ockhamite) doctrine, of a society controlled by an irrational impulse for conflict of the individual with society, was introduced to an English-language tradition in modern Europe through a student, Thomas Hobbes, of Paolo Sarpi's personal lackey, Galileo Galilei. Slightly different versions of this same dogma were codified by Bernard Mandeville; John Locke; David Hume; the Physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot; by the plagiarist of Quesnay and Turgot, Lord Shelburne's lackey, Adam Smith; and, by Jeremy Bentham's founding of the doctrine of utilitarianism, as in his 1787 In Defense of Usury and his 1789 opus, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. This became the standard doctrine of the British East India Company's Haileybury school, and was the effect of the Haileybury school's influence on Lord Palmerston's Young Europe asset, Karl Marx.[2]

It is of crucial importance, on account of the grave practical issues under consideration in this present report, that this absolute opposition of the American to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, be understood in the fashion I argue those distinctions in this presently ongoing account of the issues. It is of special importance to recognize, that on the issues posed by the presently onrushing world crisis, the Marxist legacy in economics as an academic theory, must be understood, in retrospect, as, not outside the bounds of the British dogma, but as a rival branch of that same dogma. The issues of economic crisis which threaten the world today, reflect the common principles of folly which have been the onrushing cause of the present crisis of the Anglo-Dutch system and the preceding collapse of the Soviet economic system.

The historical-political significance of that opposition to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, of what U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and other U.S. patriots defined as the American System of political-economy, is the most crucial, practical political-philosophical issue confronting the world as a whole at the present moment of an onrushing global existential crisis of global civilization. In fact, it is, functionally, the only significant formal issue of the world at this moment of accelerating crisis.

As I have pointed out repeatedly over more than a half-century to date, on certain crucial issues of economy, the views expressed by Marx in his four-volume Capital have functional verisimilitude for many of the common topics of modern economy, although critics of Marx and of most Marxist doctrinaires, such as critic Rosa Luxemburg on the subject of imperialism, were relatively competent, even brilliantly so, where the prevalent views of leading Marxists were wrong. However, none of this would have been relevant had the world at large, including most of the leading avowed socialists, not been dupes of the doctrine of that British system of which Marx himself was an exponent. The American System of political-economy, the only significant system grounded in relevant principles of Leibnizian physical science, was little known to Twentieth Century life prior to President Franklin Roosevelt's Administration, but, since the Harry Truman Presidency, virtually unknown to academic, popular, and official opinion on economics.

The crucial scientific incompetence of Karl Marx's work as an economist per se, lies in the bounds of the issue of what he terms "theories of surplus value." He refuses to locate physical-economic growth per capita and per square kilometer in the application of individual discovery of universal physical and related principles to general practice. His adoption of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal version of Venetian dogma on this account, has the same ontological implications as a fallacy of composition, as the doctrine of "imaginary numbers" of d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al. For him the physical efficiency of the actual creative powers of the individual mind do not exist. Therefore, he fails, utterly, to account for the physical source of the marginal gain in productivity of labor from which physical economic growth per capita and per square kilometer is derived. Thus, he falls into the same utterly irrational superstitions which are characteristic of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system generally.

Now, the world has entered a phase in which the British system—the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of the recent three centuries—is due to become extinct, and its Marxist relics with it. What might be seen as the Alan Greenspan era of wild-eyed bubbling in financial derivatives has carried the previous Liberal system to the point of its virtual global extinction as a species, like the age of dinosaurs before it. A recovery of the real economy were possible, if the American System of political-economy of Leibniz, Franklin, Hamilton, Franklin Roosevelt, et al., were adopted for this purpose. However, now, largely to the credit of Alan Greenspan, the Liberal system, with its Marxian sub-species, has reached the threshold of its imminent, self-inflicted extinction as a form of organized human life. Atlas—the Atlas of Heinrich Heine's poem!—has, indeed, shrugged, or is about to do so.

To understand this problem and its remedies, we must shift to a fresh approach, an approach consistent with the anti-Liberal American System of political-economy, but with certain crucially important new features added.

For example:

In any serious consideration of the need to prevent a rather immediate general physical collapse of the U.S. economy, the most important concept which must be put across first, if we are to find agreement on means to save the U.S.A. itself from this crisis, is the notion of the fundamental difference between the British notion of "return on investment," as a matter of individual greed, and the American System's underlying constitutional principle of a beneficial, physical return on a physical investment for the present and future society as a whole. This difference, can not be competently understood, except from that vantage-point in viewing modern trans-Atlantic history. As I shall show in this report, that specific issue is the dividing line between the imminent fall of global civilization, in the presently onrushing global economic crisis of today, and the escape to safety from the imminent threat of a planetary new dark age.

The issue on which I place the greatest emphasis in this report, is not simply an axiomatic difference in the elementary definition of economics as such. It is also, inseparably, a fundamental difference respecting both the nature of mankind, and the most elementary principles of physical-scientific work.

I proceed accordingly.

Science and Culture

The philosophical principle underlying the American System of political-economy, is to be traced principally, and explicitly so, from its origins within the Classical Greek humanist culture of Solon of Athens and Plato. In this philosophy, the fundamental law of human nature is not that of irrational conflict and greed. Rather, our constitutional law is derived from the Classical Greek concept of agape, as presented through the mouth of Socrates in Plato's Republic, and as affirmed as the Christian principle of natural law, most notably, in the Greek spoken and written by the Apostles John and Paul. This became known in modern European civilization as the commonwealth principle of Louis XI's reform in France and Henry VII's reform in England; it is expressed as the anti-Locke principle of "the pursuit of happiness" uttered by Gottfried Leibniz. This was copied explicitly from Leibniz by the U.S. 1776 Declaration of Independence, and restated in the highest rank of importance for law in the "general welfare clause" of the Preamble of the U.S. Federal Constitution.

The study of the history of European civilization from this vantage-point, is pivotted on the role of the best produced from Classical Greece's development in laying the foundations for all leading efforts, since that time, to establish a form of society consistent with the spiritual, as much as the physical requirements of a civilized life. The defense of this commitment against the contrary role of the influence of the wicked Delphi cult of Apollo and its spread of Sophistry in bringing about the self-destruction of a corrupted Athens, is the crucial historical, conceptual benchmark from which the crafting of all competent studies of the history of European civilization, to the present day, have been premised, until now.

Such a study of the history of the process of evolution of European civilization begins with the choice of a benchmark of reference defined as approximately the Seventh Century B.C. onward, through, approximately, the deaths of the leading scientists Eratosthenes and Archimedes. This is a period which began during a time when Egypt, menaced by the evil of Babylon, and its allies, relied significantly on maritime allies such as the Ionians, for the eastern Mediterranean, and the Etruscan branch of what had been the Hittite culture, for the western Mediterranean.[3]

Taking that interval of ancient Greek history as a benchmark, we should study the greater span of history, by looking backward and forward from that point of general historical reference. The question of interpretation of evidence, actual or merely putative, from earlier periods of such a cultural series, must emphasize material evidence of a type which has crucial bearing on distinctively human behavior, such as the evidence that the leading edge of culture from earlier periods, expresses dependency upon the impact and related influence of ancient maritime cultures, including material evidence uniquely relevant for the study of transoceanic maritime cultures. The methods used rightly emphasize the model of Kepler's uniquely original discovery of the principle of universal gravitation.

With the self-destruction of Athens by Sophists such as the Democratic Party, which conducted the judicial murder of Socrates, the worst outcome was avoided through the influence of Plato and his Platonic Academy of Athens, up through the deaths of the great representative thinker Eratosthenes and the murder, by the Romans, of his correspondent Archimedes of Syracuse. The rise of the Roman Empire, the emergence of Byzantium as successor to Rome in the western Mediterranean, and the medieval abomination of the partnership of Venetian financier-oligarchs and crusading Norman chivalry, represent a long dark age in European history, relative to the Greece of the tradition of Thales, Solon of Athens, Socrates, and Plato.

Thus, the rise of modern European civilization was based, almost entirely, on resurrection of the legacy of the Platonic Academy and such among its predecessors as Solon and the Pythagoreans, a resurrection pivotted on the great ecumenical Council of Florence, and the intellectual influence of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa and his associates of that great Renaissance. Cusa's Concordantia Catholica, defined the principle of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, while his De Docta Ignorantia gave birth to all valid currents of modern European experimental physical science.

In response to the Venetian financier oligarchy's role in abandoning Constantinople to the Ottoman conquest, Cusa organized his associates around the project of great navigational explorations, traversing oceans to the west and east. It was through the direct influence of Cusa's writings of this plan, that Christopher Columbus was recruited to the project of trans-Atlantic exploration, as essential features of this were provided to Columbus, as Cusa's writings were supplemented through Columbus's correspondence with Cusa's collaborator in this project, Toscanelli.

However, the succession of the Fall of Constantinople and the launching of the Spanish Inquisition by the monstrous Torquemada, unleashed waves of religious warfare within Europe which persisted until Cardinal Mazarin's intervention to bring about the 1648 Peace of Westphalia on which civilized forms of political life have depended since.

In this process, from 1453 through 1648, much of the progress gained by the Renaissance was lost. Although the city of Venice lost its formal imperial power over the course of the Seventeenth Century, a powerful offshoot of the Venetian financier-oligarchy rose around the Dutch and later British India Companies. It was during this period, which began with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that the way across the Atlantic was open to colonization by the Dutch, English, and French maritime cultures. The closely related establishment of the Massachusetts Plymouth and Commonwealth settlements, and the later settlement by William Penn, established actual governments, which, in their internal affairs, were only loosely tied to the English monarch, but not the Parliament, until that February 1763 Treaty of Paris which established the British East India Company as an empire-in-fact.

Nonetheless, the concept of the commonwealth, which was spread into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, was a concept, traced in the U.S.A.'s English tradition, to the present day, through Sir Thomas More, to England's Henry VII, and, thus, from France's Louis XI. France under Louis XI, and England liberated from Richard III by Richmond, were expressions of the revival of the Christian expression of the Classical Greek tradition of Solon, Socrates, and Plato. It was on these premises that our War of Independence was fought on behalf of the commonwealth principle affirmed in the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, against the British East India Company's imperial tyranny. That process, coming into focus in the same 1789 during which Lord Shelburne's London launched the French Revolution with the latter's subsequent Jacobin Terror and Napoleonic tyranny, defines the presently extended historical roots of the systemic difference between the American System of political-economy, and the characteristic systemic weaknesses among the parliamentary systems of Europe still today.

The commonwealth principle, on which the politics and economic practice of the young U.S.A. were premised, is to be recognized as the echo of the role of the figure of Socrates within Plato's Republic. It has been the principles of science and culture generally, which the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance adduced from the warnings given by the example of the ruinous Peloponnesian War, which defines the U.S. republic as in the footsteps of Socrates and Plato, whereas the British system established under leaders such as Lord Shelburne's crew, represents the contrary image, the image of a most notorious figure of Plato's reflections on the Peloponnesian War, the Thrasymachus on which the Nazi Crown Jurist, Carl Schmidt, and his sometime protégé Professor Leo Strauss, premised what became the tyrannical world-outlook of the so-called Federalist Society.

The great principle upon which all that is the best in our American System and its tradition is premised, is the same principle of agape which has been presented afresh as the theme of the first Encyclical proclaimed by a new Pope, Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est ("God Is Love"). This is the principle, set forth by Plato as the Socratic foundation of his Republic. It is the principle emphasized, as agape, by the Christian Apostles John and Paul, as in I Corinthians 13, and in, implicitly, the whole constitutional law of the U.S. Federal Republic, as affirmed as reigning over all feature s of that Constitution, from its position in the Preamble as the supreme principle of natural law of our republic.

That principle can be competently understood only when we situate it, relative to the legacy of the Classical Greece of Solon, Socrates, and Plato, as the great Christian Apostles John and Paul recognized the import of Plato's Timaeus. The latter work, when read in the context of the historical perspective, since ancient Greece, which I have outlined, has a special relevance for our attention here.

Usually, in classrooms and under kindred auspices, the most celebrated feature of the Timaeus, is the included emphasis on the subject of the fundamental ontological implications of the five regular solids. The point to be emphasized for our purposes here, is the customary mystification of Plato's work on that specific topic, by those who attempt to interpret the significance of the solids from the vantage-point of Aristotle and Euclid. The point which I make here, in this specific location, is that the commonplace blunder among scholars on this matter of the Platonic Solids, is of absolutely crucial importance for understanding the implications of my own discoveries within the body of a science of physical economy. [See Figures 3 and 4.]

Once we read Plato's argument there from the standpoint of the Pythagorean view of a physical geometry based solely upon the application of the Egyptian astrophysical principle of Sphaerics, instead of contorting geometry, as Euclid does, by adopting the Babylonian cult of flat-Earth geometry as the starting point for his reification of the preceding Classical Greek geometry of Sphaerics (by the arbitrary, and falsifying introduction of definitions, axioms, and postulates), there is room for none of the usual nonsense one meets in supposedly learned discussions of Plato's treatment of the so-called Platonic Solids.

Implicitly, what I have just underscored, was the actual approach which can be traced with confidence from Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, and the work of such explicit followers of Cusa as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Kepler, and, hence Fermat, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, with notable emphasis on the way in which Riemann features what he terms "Dirichlet's Principle" in respect to the subject of physical hypergeometries.

Although the typical reader of this writing may not be inclined to take up the latter feature of Riemann's work, the implications of what I have just said, must be taken into account, as being of presently crucial practical importance for organizing a now desperately needed resurrection of an almost deceased U.S. economy.

Culture and Morals

The principle of the general welfare, also known as agape, was also known in American English as Cotton Mather's and Benjamin Franklin's natural-law principle of statecraft generally, and of economy in particular, as the commitment of the moral individual "to do good." During the early decades of the Eighteenth Century, this pivotal principle of the U.S. system of constitutional law was counterposed in an exemplary way as a conflict between Cotton Mather's commitment "to do good," and the British system of John Locke. This policy of Mather, Franklin, and Leibniz, was opposed to not only the dogma of John Locke, but also the dogma of Mandeville. Mandeville argued explicitly that the public good was, as the Mont Pelerin Society Sophist Milton Friedman was to avow the defense of illegal drug trafficking, in a famous April 1980 broadcast interview with Phil Donahue. Locke and Mandeville typify the natural product of license allowed for the pursuit of private vices, as Adam Smith had argued in his 1759 Theory of the Moral Sentiments.

Thus, the general premise of the social theory of Paolo Sarpi's new Venetian school of philosophy, on which Anglo-Dutch Liberal belief and practice is based, is that individual man is essentially a vicious and predatory beast to other individuals and society alike. However, these followers of the empiricism of Sarpi and his lackey Galileo, argue, as Adam Smith copied Mandeville in 1759 and later; they argued for the purely ideological rationalization, that the universe is constructed to such effect that what they define as the inherently immoral beast, the human individual, is acting in a way intended to give us the best possible ultimate result for society, through certain mysterious agencies, operating as if from under the floorboards of the universe, agencies of which, they insist, the acting human individual could have no rational comprehension.

Thus, in the argument of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal tradition, we have two diametrically opposed conceptions of the fundamental principles of statecraft in general, and the economy in particular. Both of these derived conceptions are rooted in a pathological notion of the nature of man. I now quote here, once again, the relevant piece of shameless sophistry from Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments which I have cited on relevant other occasions, as follows:

"...The administration of the great system of the universe ... the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his familyhe Fr, his friends, his country.... But though we are ... endowed with a very strong desire of those ends, it has been intrusted to the slow and uncertain determinations of our reason to find out the proper means of bringing them about. Hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain, prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them."[4]

In those lines from Smith's 1759 publication, we have two inconsistent, directly contrary kinds of alleged principles combined, as if this were a single functional principle! On the one hand, we have a purely hedonistic, irrational set of impulses which allegedly govern human behavior; but, the result of that behavior is, according to Smith, totally unrelated to what he asserts to be the intended result of his witless hedonistic groping.

Adam Smith wrote those lines as a follower and imitator of the so-called "moral philosophy" of David Hume, who was admittedly no paragon of clinical sanity, but Smith carried these same notions forward in time to the period, beginning 1763, he had become a personal lackey of one of the most evil men of that century, the Lord Shelburne who had emerged as the leading political force within the British East India Company's international political operations, to become the actual architect of the French Revolution of July 14, 1789, of the terrorist reign of the British Foreign Office's "secret committees" agents Danton and Marat, of the Jacobin Terror. Bentham became the head of the Foreign Office's "secret committee" for these operations, and the coordinator of the work of the Haileybury school which laid down the foundations of British imperial doctrines of political-economy which are continued in the form of modern adaptations to the present day. In this way, Shelburne was a key figure behind the launching of that Martinist Freemasonic cult, in France, which orchestrated the French Revolution, the career of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, subsequently, the banker-controlled Synarchist movement which gave the world the Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and kindred fascist regimes of the 1922-1945 interval.

According to his family records, Smith was assigned by Shelburne personally, from 1763, to design the disruption of the progressive economies of Britain's North American colonies. Smith's 1776 The Wealth of Nations was principally a diatribe against the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The content of that book reflected extensive apparent plagiarism of the work which Smith had studied during his extensive spying in France during the 1763-1776 interval, the work of the Physiocrats Dr. François Quesnay and A.R.J. Turgot, most notably Turgot's Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth.[5]

Look closely at the implications of the emphasized excerpt from Smith's 1759 publication, which I have just quoted above: "...prompt us to apply those means for their own sakes, and without any consideration of their tendency to those beneficent ends which the great Director of nature intended to produce by them."

In that 1759 piece, as in his later The Wealth of Nations, sophist Smith demands unquestioning faith in the authority of a rule, such as "free trade," for which he not only fails to supply any scientific evidence; he insists that it is impossible for any of the believers in his dogma to know whether that rule is scientific or not. It is a matter of blind faith, as he insists in the 1759 location; it is the same in his explicit discussion of political-economy, in 1776 and later. More notably, all of the arguments of the empiricist writers on political-economy which I have identified above, including Locke's presentation of his notion of "property," are premised on the same kind of dubious assertion which Smith makes in that passage from his 1759 text.

Quesnay's kindred argument is of special contemporary importance on this account, because of Karl Marx's implied adoption of the same hollow assertion, in his praise of Physiocrat Quesnay's Tableau Économique. In all of the cases of the empiricists to whose work I have made reference here, the same mode of argument made by Smith's 1759 work, serves as the formal-logical sophistry on which the entire edifice of each of those author's system depends.

The significance of Quesnay's Tableau, is that whereas it provides an instructive map of the schematic organization of the physical economy of that time, as Marx recognized that fact, it accompanies that description of the matter by a wildly lunatic explanation, a piece of which is, practically, and otherwise, utterly immoral lunacy, a lunacy on which the entire "free trade" dogma of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system is premised to the present day.

In the case of Quesnay, he insists, as does Mandeville, that the entire physical edifice of a national economy depends upon a fairy-tale quality of childish belief in magic. He insists that what modern usage would identify as the profit of the estate, is the result of the magical power of the title awarded to the relevant aristocrat, as the proprietor of the estate. According to Quesnay, the farmers and other artisans employed on the estate are no more than human cattle, entitled to no more share of the wealth produced there than a milk-cow, who must be given just enough of the product to continue to function as a milk-cow. Yet, at the same time, no matter how much the landlord of the case is merely an indolent parasite, it is to him that Quesnay awards the title of the creator of the net product of the estate. Whence this profit? As for John Locke, the generation of the profit is attributed to nothing more than an act of sympathetic magic, the mere existence of a virtual mere piece of paper, a title to ownership of the estate, or ownership of the hereditary slave, nothing more than mere title to property!

This argument for laissez-faire, by Quesnay, and also Turgot, becomes plagiarist Adam Smith's "free trade." Owners of garbage cans take note; Adam Smith is a plagiarist who steals trash.

Engels As an Enemy of Science

The same genre of argument pops up again, this time out of the mouth of Britain's Frederick Engels. Engels insists that the source of mankind's gain in physical wealth, relative to the higher apes, is the evolution of the "opposable thumb." Engels complements that piece of his nonsense by locating the profit of production in the "horny hand of labor," perhaps hinting at Engels' own reputation, like that of the G.W.F. Hegel whom Engels admired, for a "horny hand" with the ladies. The same argument appears as a feature of the socialist movement's social doctrine, especially among those proud, avowed "proletarians" who evaded the fact, that it is the participation of farmer and industrial labor in harvesting the fruits of a fundamental scientific progress in the Pythagorean tradition, which is the efficient source of those scientific revolutions on which the increase of the human population to more than six billions has been made possible.

The essential, and impassioned hatred of actual science, as expressed so by Britain's Frederick Engels, is the same expressed by the Olympian Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and by the typical, "brainwashed," anti-science Luddite of the Americas' and Europe's contemporary, so-called "68er" generation. Zeus' objection is to the existence of the distinction between man and ape. The topic is the torture of Prometheus, this time not at Guantanamo, on the account of the charge that Prometheus had given people the knowledge of the use of fire, to say nothing of the nuclear power radiated from the Sun. From most ancient known times, through the Emperor Diocletian, and the suppression of the quality of the education proffered to the children of freed slaves in the post-Lincoln U.S.A., the essential principle of imperial and related tyrannies by the few, is the assignment of the subjugated many to a cow-like condition of life, by the denial of the ordinary individual's knowledgeable access to the experience of reenacting the discovery of universal physical principles.

The putative great socialist, Engels, admires the working men and women of Karl Marx's tale, but actually only, like objects in a museum-collection, as mere cattle, or house pets. Thus, like the Olympian Zeus, or the Emperor Diocletian later, or MIT's Professors Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, Engels denies the ordinary folk any actually uniquely human quality which might distinguish them from apes![6]

Contrary to Engels, the issue of all economics practice as science, is the principled difference between man and ape. That difference is typified by the human act of discovery of a universal physical, or comparable artistic principle, by means of which, humanity's physical power in and over the universe, is increased in a qualitative way.

So, mankind, in whom ape-like qualities would not permit a planetary human population of more than some relatively few millions of living individuals, now represents over six billions.

This power which sets the human individual apart from, and above the apes, is, literally, power as the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato define it, by the Greek term dynamis, which Leibniz revived for modern scientific use as the term dynamic, a term which he presented as a means for conceptual insight into the intrinsic scientific incompetence of the mechanistic methods of Descartes and Newton. This is the significance of the central point of the contributions by me, and my young adult associates, to the Christmas 2005 edition of the political intelligence weekly Executive Intelligence Review.

As I shall emphasize in the course of this present chapter of this report, and in comparable locations, the nature of a universal physical principle, such as the principle of the use of fire, or Kepler's discovery of universal gravitation, or the mastery of nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion, has the apparent ontological form of an infinitesimal. I mean this as I stress the common incompetence of the empiricists Descartes, Newton, and that among such of their mechanistically inclined followers as d'Alembert, de Moivre, Euler, and Lagrange, who denied hysterically the existence of Leibniz's infinitesimals. Whereas, the greatest achievements in modern science since Kepler and Fermat, have been those associated with a view opposite to their own, the view by Leibniz, and the circles of collaborators of Carl F. Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and, later, such as Albert Einstein.

If we look back to the pre-Aristotelean, pre-Euclidean Greek science which was associated with the roster of the contributions by such as Thales, the Pythagoreans, and of that circle of Plato's associates which excluded Demosthenes and his student Aristotle, virtually all of the valid principles and related materials contained within the famous set of Euclid's Elements, had been developed prior to any significant work by Aristotle or others. All of the most relevant content of Euclid's Elements had been developed by a better method, by the circles of the Pythagoreans and Plato, before either Aristotle or the Euclideans came visibly on to the scene. As is shown most plainly by the ironies of the concluding sections reporting some of the outcome of Sphaerics, in Euclid's Elements, the special significance of the relevant content of the Elements, is what has been done to reify this material from the vantage point of what is fairly best-described as blind faith in a "flat Earth" universe, as the famous mathematician and teacher of young Carl F. Gauss, Abraham Kästner had pointed out in Kästner's own definition of the anti-Euclidean geometry on which much of the development of mathematics by Gauss himself was based.

The crucial issue of scientific principle here, is the implication of the Egyptian method of Sphaerics, as opposed to the Babylonian cult of what Euclid's set of definitions and axioms define, systemically, as representing the geometry of an axiomatically flat-Earth universe.

That is to emphasize, as Kästner did, that where Egyptian astrophysics and related science starts from the spherical character of the observation of the physical universe in which we live, the Babylonian legacy starts from the working, aprioristic assumption that the universe is primarily an outgrowth of the flat area implicit in the set of definitions and subsumed axioms of Euclidean elementary plane geometry. The idea of a solid Euclidean geometry is essentially an extension of the axiomatics of a Euclidean plane geometry. Notably, these "flat Earth" definitions of the universe, do not provide for the existence of an efficiently physical universe, but treat the real world as merely a kind of abstract real-estate-development scheme.

Take the case of Kepler's discovery of gravitation. At no part of the orbit does the functional equivalent of a straight line exist. Unlike the circle, the elliptical orbit of the planets never experiences "straightness," even in the most infinitesimal of infinitesimal intervals. The same point was emphasized by the Nicholas of Cusa, who had emphasized the Earth's orbit of the Sun before the Sixteenth Century; Cusa emphasized, first in one of his sermons, that Archimedes' attempt to approximate pi was brilliant, but, nonetheless, ontologically incompetent. The argument by Cusa became a crucial feature, in his De Docta Ignorantia and beyond, of his founding of the entire sweep of modern experimental physical science.

As the later leading figure of the Platonic Academy, Eratosthenes emphasized, the most crucial case to be referenced on this account, is the proof, by construction, originally by Plato's friend and collaborator, the Pythagorean Archytas, of the exact doubling of the cube, without use of arithmetic, by methods of construction based upon the principles of Sphaerics. The replication of that discovery of Archytas, by modern students, is the most convenient pedagogical approach, still today, for grounding students in the essential methods and principles of a constructive physical geometry, and in the rudiments of science in general, the science of physical economy in particular.

The Historical Setting of Gauss's 1799 Paper

The modern significance of Archytas' original accomplishment, is made clearer by relevant study of the implications of Carl F. Gauss's 1799 publication of his doctoral dissertation exposing the frauds of d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al. on the matter of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.[7]

The most crucial discoveries of late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century physical science, were set into motion by a leading mathematician of the Eighteenth Century, Abraham Kästner, who pointed out the crucial fallacy of all taught derivatives of Euclidean geometry. Kästner is the founder of a modern anti-Euclidean physical geometry. He recognized the fraudulent feature at the center of both what is called Euclidean geometry, and also so-called "non-Euclidean geometries," the fraudulent nature, from the outset, of a Euclidean notion of definitions, axioms, and postulates.

The influence of Kästner, one of the two principal teachers of young Carl F. Gauss, was of crucial importance for Gauss's own contributions to the development of an anti-Euclidean, physical geometry. Behind what might seem to some to be the paradoxical quality of Gauss's discussions of the subject of the non-Euclidean geometries of Lobatschevsky and Janos Bolyai with both Janos and his father, Farkas Bolyai, was Gauss's own understanding of not a non-Euclidean, but an anti-Euclidean physical geometry, a fact which was reflected in a crucial way in the argument which Gauss made against the Berlin Newtonians associated with Euler, in Gauss's own 1799 doctoral dissertation.

During the period beginning with Napoleon's occupations in Germany, Gauss was singled out for an especially vicious attack from Napoleonic and related quarters. The attack on Lagrange in Gauss's 1799 dissertation, and Napoleon's sponsorship of Lagrange, must be considered relevant, as the intervention on Gauss's behalf, by the circles of Lazare Carnot and Carnot's École Polytechnique associate Alexander von Humboldt, is relevant in the rescue of Gauss from a very nasty predicament at that time.

Without changing the views which he had implicitly set forth in his 1799 doctoral dissertation,[8] Gauss adhered to the same commitment to an anti-Euclidean geometry throughout his mature development; but, nonetheless, he carefully minimized the risk of making himself once again the personal target of the circles of his reductionist adversaries of 1797-1799. So, the deeper significance of this successive work of Kästner and Gauss was not to be made fully clear to modern science until work done by Bernhard Riemann, beginning with Riemann's 1854 habilitation dissertation, and continued through Riemann's work on Abelian functions and physical hypergeometries.[9]

Looking back to Gauss's 1799 dissertation from the vantage-point of the later work of Riemann, we encounter the crucial importance of that 1799 paper for the science of physical economy.

I restate here certain aspects of the same issues which I have addressed in earlier various published locations, most notably in my "Vernadsky and Dirichlet's Principle," and, in collaboration with some associates, "The Principle of 'Power.' "[10] In this instance, I underscore the references to that material which have crucial implications for the understanding of those principles of the science of physical economy which have crucial importance for dealing with the global economic crisis now at hand.

The needed understanding demands looking at modern economy back from its origin in the founding of both the modern nation-state and modern experimental physical science, which occurred as a set of developments centered in Golden Renaissance Italy, to the methods which that Renaissance adopted as resurrections of scientific work of Pythagoreans such as Archytas and of Archytas' friend and collaborator Plato.[11]

Modern physical science, which is, in fact, a characteristic outgrowth of the birth of the modern nation-state, was born, chiefly in Fifteenth-Century Renaissance Italy, with outstanding contributions by Filippo Brunelleschi, such as his application of the catenary principle to the construction of the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence, but in a more comprehensive way, by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia, and later work by himself and such publicly avowed followers as Luca Pacioli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Kepler; but, also, in practice, by John Napier[12] and William Gilbert.

These and related developments represented a comprehensive revival, under emerging modern political conditions, of the ancient Greek science established by such pre-Aristotelean, pre-Euclidean figures as Thales, the Pythagoreans, Plato, and their respective followers and collaborators. If we trace the developments associated with the approximately two generations of Gauss's contributions to science to their origins, we must locate the combined development during the unfolding of about a hundred years of combined Classical artistic and physical scientific development since the impact of the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the Abraham Kästner of Leipzig whose promotion of the legacy of both Leibniz and Bach was not only a central feature of the German Classical revival of the late Eighteenth Century, and of the support for the cause of the independence of the U.S.A., but a crucial figure in the preparation of European science of that time for (as Napiers') the role of Kästner's young pupil Carl F. Gauss.

To grasp the significance of that approximate century of Classical artistic composition and physical science, from the aftermath of 1763 through the death of Riemann, we must view these developments against a certain specific historical backdrop. To comprehend the history of European science and Classical artistic composition as a whole, the influence of Aristotle, Euclid, et al., had already, back then, represented the onset of a turn, backwards, to the same standpoint of philosophical reductionism from which modern empiricism, Kantianism, and the radical positivist outcrops of their influence are derived.

The ebbs and flows within about seven centuries of modern European civilization as a whole, must be measured against developments in modern physical science from Cusa through the work of Bernhard Riemann; they represent, especially, since the rebirth of ancient scientific knowledge as a kind of awakening from a decades-long little dark age in science since the death of Leibniz. It was not until the work of Riemann, that modern science recaptured fully the essential principles of the method of scientific thought associated with those followers of the Egyptian astrophysical science of Sphaerics typified by Thales, the Pythagoreans, and Plato. During the entire sweep of those modern centuries, the ebbs and flows in science and in Classical artistic activity have been closely correlated phenomena. An adequate understanding of the principle of a science of physical-economy brings these functional connections into the required quality of focus.

With respect to that Eighteenth-Century little dark age, the progress of modern science since Cusa, Pacioli, and Leonardo is associated, most notably, with two periods since that time: the Seventeenth-Century publications of Kepler, Fermat, Huyghens, Leibniz, and Jean Bernoulli, and the work of the Monge-Carnot phase of France's École Polytechnique, and that of the circles of Germany's Alexander von Humboldt, typified by Gauss, Dirichlet, and Riemann. In between the death of Leibniz and the middle to late Eighteenth-Century Classical renaissance associated with the names of Kästner, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and the period of the early École Polytechnique: the "Voltairean" Eighteenth-Century empiricist "Enlightenment," was, thus, as I have just said, relatively, a "little dark age" of mystification of science by the empiricist reductionists.

The Crucial Issue Posed by That Paper

Now, that said, look backwards toward the close of the Eighteenth-Century, to Carl Gauss's 1799 publication of his doctoral dissertation. In this setting, the figure of Alexander von Humboldt, as being representative of both the Monge-Carnot École Polytechnique of which he, von Humboldt, was an active member and close personal associate of Carnot, bridges a following interval of slightly more than a half-century of the greatest period of epistemological florescence in modern physical science since the late Seventeenth Century. It was also the closest approximation of a recapturing of the vitality of outlook we should associate with the period of the collaboration among the Pythagoreans, the circles of Socrates, and Plato.[13]

The crucial significance of Gauss's doctoral dissertation for the science of physical economy today, is to be considered in that light. The point of most immediate relevance at this point in this report, is the implicit connection of Gauss to the work of Archytas and his friend Plato, as centered on the related challenges of the construction of the doubling of the cube by Archytas, and Plato's treatment, especially in his Timaeus dialogue, of what have become known in modern usage as "The Platonic Solids."

The indicated connection between the work of the ancient Pythagoreans, Plato, et al., and Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation, is found in the famous "Great Theorem" of Pierre de Fermat, that it is impossible to determine so-called "rational roots" for equations of greater than the second degree, a statement which is traced from the attempted treatment of cubic roots by modern mathematicians, such as the Sixteenth-Century Giralamo Cardano et al. Hence, the significance of the famous treatments of the subjects of cubic and biquadratic functions by Carl Gauss.

The significance of Fermat's marginal note, known as his "Great Theorem," is essentially ontological, rather than, as some ivory-tower mathematicians have presumed, merely formal. It is implicitly crucial in respects which have absolutely crucial significance for the practical comprehension of modern physical science, especially, for our subject in this report, the application of that science to the crucial issues of policy-shaping for modern economy. On this account, that so-called "Great Theorem" must be seen as cohering pervasively with the way Fermat's mind functioned in his definition of the "quickest pathway" of refraction-reflection, a definition which led into the development of the discovery of the epistemologically crucial, Leibniz-Bernoulli, catenary-cued principle of universal physical least action.

This matter became the subject of a famous collaboration, on the subject of cubic roots, between the empiricist ideologues d'Alembert and de Moivre, during which de Moivre exclaimed his opinion that some of the estimated roots of the algebraic representation of a cube must be "imaginary." This view was adopted by the circles of the Leibniz-hating Voltaire of that time, as the pivot of a comprehensive libel directed against Leibniz by the Leonhard Euler then based in Berlin. D'Alembert, Euler, and Euler's protégé Lagrange became the leading advocates of the view that some among the cubic roots, and implicitly also roots of biquadratic functions, were purely imaginary, which is to say, with only formal, but not ontological significance.

Since Plato's contemporary, and collaborator, the Pythagorean Archytas, had shown, by construction, what the nature of all of the roots of the generation of a cube must be, this conclusion by de Moivre, d'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange, et al., must have been absurd in fact. The clarification of that fact was the subject of Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation.

The argument which Gauss presents in his 31-page 1799 dissertation, is conclusive, and thoroughly so. The argument, and its authority, has been addressed in sufficient detail by various authorities over time, as by some among my immediate associates. Since that material is readily available, from such assorted relevant sources, I limit my treatment of that argument to a most crucial, but rarely acknowledged point, as now follows.

This limitation goes with the nature of the subject-matter of this report on economy. Indeed, it goes to the core of any competent conception of a science of physical economy, as the able reader will now soon begin to recognize.

What is a universal physical principle always expressed experimentally, and therefore mathematically, as an infinitesimal, in the sense of Leibniz's catenary-cued universal principle of physical least action? What is this that is bounded only by formal mathematical zero, and is nonetheless a physically efficient experimental presence? Why is the argument made by d'Alembert, de Moivre, Euler, Lagrange, et al., that the infinitesimal is "imaginary," not merely wrong, but intrinsically silly? The best answer to that question is to be found by asking a relevant question: Where does Leibniz's conception of the infinitesimal originate, and why is that essential ontological conception absent from Newton's counterfeit claim to have produced a "calculus" comparable to the original discovery made previously by Leibniz?

The calculus which was developed originally by Leibniz, and no one else, was a by-product of Johannes Kepler's uniquely original discovery of universal gravitation. At the center of Kepler's conceptually vast approach to the experimental methods he developed for his purpose, there was one central mathematical problem with two aspects. One was the notion of the infinitesimal, as the Leibniz calculus defines it in a more refined way by his universal principle of physical least action; the other was the notion of a deeper meaning underlying the notion of experimentally defined physical functions of an elliptical form.

In both aspects of the problem posed to future mathematicians by Kepler, the elliptical function which described the relationship of the orbiting of Mars and Earth with respect both to one another and to the Sun, showed that these elliptical functions could not be explained in terms of a simple elliptical cut of a cone. The often cited, "looping" of the image of a Mars viewed from Earth, is a convenient pedagogical event for the purpose of conveying a sense of the issue to the novice. Since, in the first instance, the interval of action within the planetary orbit was both efficient, and yet infinitesimal, Kepler proposed that future mathematicians develop a calculus for representation of the inner dynamic of the generation of the elliptical orbit. The second instance, the elliptical form of the functions implied by the planetary system, the attempt to explain an elliptical orbit formally as a section cut through a cone, must be put aside.

In the meantime, Fermat's resolution of the apparent discrepancy between reflection and refraction, through the discovery of an ontological, rather than merely formal resolution, produced Fermat's principle of pathway of quickest action. Fermat's solution prompted the Paris collaboration of Christiaan Huyghens and Leibniz on, among other subjects, this matter of the pathway of quickest time. This approach evoked the discovery of the calculus by Leibniz, and the subsequent Leibniz-Bernoulli development of the catenary-cued natural-logarithmic principle of universal physical least action.

The history of European science, especially along the track into Greece from Egyptian astronomy (as opposed to Babylonian), presented the human mind with the formal evidence of lawfulness of trajectories in the apparently spheroidal depths of the observed universe as a whole. This approach, known to ancient Greek civilization as the science of Sphaerics, presents us with objects which are universal, rather than objects confined by sensible boundaries to some part of observed space-time. These objects are efficient in every infinitesimal interval of the space in which they appear, and yet can not be contained within any of that subsumed physical space-time. Therefore, the universe defined by universal physical principles, is, as Einstein put the point, finite but not bounded.

Since the life's work of Bernhard Riemann, we are far better equipped to conceptualize the implications of what I have just, once again, stated, on this subject. This added convenience bears the name, given by Riemann, of "Dirichlet's Principle." The foundations of this statement of principle, whose significance is located primarily within the domain of Riemannian physical hypergeometries, are nonetheless already implicit in the life's work of Gauss.

As a matter of pedagogy, the implications of what I have just argued are as follows.

There are objects in the domain of the shadows cast upon sense-perception, which are presented in the form of finite objects of sense-perception. There are also infinite objects, notably of the class of experimentally validatable universal physical principles, which are experienced by sense-perception, but which do not appear in the form of finite objects. We can observe the presence of the latter only in terms of apparently anomalous behavior of the former. The latter appear to the mind as experimentally validatable as efficiently universal physical principles. Yet, they are objects, although not presented to us as discrete experiences within the bounds of sense-perception.

In other words, you experience the infinite object, the universal physical principle, as something which you are inside. The action of that which you are inside, then becomes quasi-visible to your cognitive machinery of sense-perception, as an infinitesimal. That infinitesimal is manifest as an effect which may appear in the very, very small; but, nonetheless, you can not catch it as an object held in hand, there; it eludes your attempt to grasp it as a discrete object. Yet, as an effect, it is there in a very efficient way, an experimentally demonstrable way.

However, it never conforms consistently in a way which suggests objects in "empty" space. There is no division of matter, space, and time of the sort that the ignorant believer in sense-certainty demands. There is only physical space-time. It is the interaction of universal principles which define the apparent signs of existence of the universal. This brings us to dynamics.

We have thus identified two classes of objects met in the individual human mind. One are discrete objects, which represent the sense-perceptual form of finite objects in the real universe. The second are universal physical principles, which are not discrete objects, but are distinct objects nonetheless. Formally, in mathematics, we must present both types on a common ground, as objects of the mind. On condition that we recognize the distinctions between the two types, we may correlate the relations among these distinct types by aid of a common mathematical or other language. The simplest way of bringing such matters into discussion is found in the mathematical paradoxes of geometry which confront us in the matter of cubic and biquadratic functions, as these were explored by Gauss. As Riemann has shown, the continuation of that line of investigation leads us into the kind of common language of thought which Riemann associates with the term "Dirichlet's Principle."

At this point, it may be said, that this is what figures such as Riemann and Albert Einstein were talking about, and Kepler and Leibniz before them. Therefore, we have dynamics. That much said, so far, shift the focus to some relevant historical examples of the political implications of the dynamics.

2. The Dynamics of the Present Crisis

Rather than the notion of discrete objects bumping in the empty space of the customary empiricist mind, a notion which was denounced by Leibniz in his attack on the incompetent physics doctrines of Descartes, Leibniz defined a real universe whose ontological existence is manifoldly interactive. In that exposure of Descartes' fatal methodological incompetence in matters of physical science, Leibniz demonstrated that the correct view of the physical universe is that associated with the use of the Greek term dynamis, as by the Pythagoreans and Plato. This exposure by Leibniz, of the systemic incompetence of the mechanistic method common to virtually all modern reductionists, is as relevant now, as then. Since then, a systemically competent physical science has been associated with Leibniz's translation of Classical Greek as a view of physical processes as dynamic, as opposed to follies of a mechanistic method of Descartes and those, related modern statistical methods which are commonplace still today.

The point is, that virtually all popularized economic dogma taught on university campuses, and in kindred places today, is one or another, more or less crude variety of radically reductionist, mechanistic-statistical method of Cartesian empiricism. All generally accepted financial-accounting method is an expression of a crude form of that mechanistic-statistical method. The present international monetary and related regulatory agencies, base the formal expression of their policy-shaping processes within the bounds of those intrinsically incompetent terms of reference.

Today, the standpoint of the development of the notions of the Biosphere and Noösphere by Vernadsky, provides us the appropriate conceptual framework in which to think about, and discuss the dynamic quality which sets the human species, and also its individual member, apart from all other forms of living and other existence in our universe. The needed, dynamical conceptions of physical economy required for mastering the present world existential crisis, are to be found, conveniently placed, in the overview of economic policy-shaping which I present in this chapter of the report.

To present that case, I begin with a selection of a few benchmark developments, which help us to make some telling points about relevant points in past and current history.

To understand the specific urgency of the subject of that controversy for the perilous current political situation of our U.S.A., we must situate the discussion within the bounds of today's political significance of the controversy of dynamic versus mechanistic methods in science. We must employ that approach to the apparent theory underlying each and all of the sundry brand-labels of empiricist economic dogma. To that end, we must take into account, in review, of at least the summary features of the centuries-long conflict between the American and British systems of political-economy, as follows.

The significance of British Lord Shelburne's use of his blunt instruments such as Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, is that the French Revolution, the Bonapartist wars, and the 1814-1815 Congress of Vienna, had the cumulative effect of virtually isolating, and undermining the newly founded U.S. republic over a long time. This relative isolation continued until the reversal of that containment through the victory, led by President Abraham Lincoln, against the combined forces of Lord Palmerston's puppets, such as the Confederacy, France's Napoleon III, and the temporary Habsburg reign by the tyrant Maximilian in Mexico.

After the U.S. victory against Lord Palmerston's plots, the power and international influence of the U.S. model grew rapidly, to such effect that the world's leading economist of that time, the U.S.A.'s Henry C. Carey, exerted great influence in Japan, for a time, in Bismarck's Germany; in Russia of Czars Alexander II and Alexander III, as reflected in the work of D. I. Mendeleyev and Count Sergei Witte; and, otherwise, in sundry places where the American System of political-economy was often copied to great economic advantage.

This spread of the influence of the American "model" throughout the Americas, and in leading parts of continental Eurasia and Japan, prompted the British Empire to orchestrate what become known as World War I, chiefly in the effort to crush the spread of the influence, throughout the continent of Eurasia, of the hated rival of the British system, the American System of political-economy. This World War I actually began through the alliance of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, with the Emperor of Japan, in the 1894-1895 launching of the first Sino-Japanese war, Japan's occupation of Korea, and Japan's British-directed 1905 naval attack on Russia.

The 1933-1945 U.S. Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt temporarily consolidated the U.S. economy and the American System as the leading force in the world, until the U.S.A. itself began to be thrown into ruins by the succession of the 1962 missiles-crisis, the wave of fascist-international-directed assassination-attacks against France's President Charles de Gaulle, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. Indo-China War, the 1968er phenomena, and the subsequent, willfully destructive economic and social policies launched by such pro-Synarchist elements of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financial establishment as Pinochet-linked Felix Rohatyn, under the Nixon Administration. The overt "cultural paradigm-shift" of the 1968-1981 interval, transformed the U.S.A. into an increasingly decadent appendage of an international financier power which is presently in control of the floating-exchange-rate system formally established at the 1972 Azores conference.

Nonetheless, despite the long periods of relative misfortune suffered by the U.S. economy in its centuries-long history of rivalry with the London-centered monetary-financier power, the American System of political-economy has always been a vastly superior economic system, relative to all rival designs, most notably to the Anglo-Dutch Liberal design. It has been only to the extent that the U.S.A. has been subjected to the imperial control which the Anglo-Dutch Liberal monetary-financial system has exerted in the field of international loans and trade, that the U.S.A. has been self-corrupted by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal penetration of the U.S. financial system, such that that modern Venetian model of the world monetary-financial system launched by Venice's Paolo Sarpi has been able to regain and maintain intellectual hegemony in the economic ideology of not only Europe but, all too often, inside the U.S.A. itself.

As a result of these and related circumstances, the hegemonic notions, still today, of financial accounting, of monetary and financial systems, and of taught "economic" belief, are adaptations to the radically reductionist dogmas of the Anglo-Dutch Liberalism launched by Paolo Sarpi's New Venetian Party. Locke, Mandeville, Quesnay, Turgot, Adam Smith, and Bentham, can not be competently discussed except when their dogmas are recognized as differing brand-labels of a common Anglo-Dutch Liberal—i.e., neo-Venetian—ideology, an ideology which must be recognized as being essentially a certain type of pagan religion, and, decidedly not an actually Christian one.

We have come, lately, in the wake of the most recent Davos Conference, to the long-overdue retirement of a public figure whom the future will probably regard as one of the most notorious charlatans of our recent history, currently retiring Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan. We are confronted simultaneously by the spectacle of a European Central Bank which is, arguably, functionally, the probably worst, and most explicitly malicious piece of economic lunacy of modern economy's history of statecraft: a product of the hateful lust for destruction of the German economy on which all Europe depends, as this hate was expressed by the fanaticism expressed by Britain's Thatcher and France's echo of Napoleon III, François Mitterrand.

The present situation is, therefore, that which is portrayed by my pedagogical image of "The Triple Curve." The current rate of nominal monetary emission, is presently determined by the monetary cancer of "financial derivatives." That pedagogical tool, the Triple Curve, was first crafted by me as fulfillment of a commitment which I volunteered in the course of my participation in a 1995 Vatican conference on health and related matters; it was supplied and intended to clarify the relevant issues for the numerous participants there who were, largely, not professionals in such economics matters. The point was to make clear the functional relationship between, on the one side, the trends toward collapse in performance of society's physical capacity, and growing willingness to address the issues of health care and human life policies generally; and, on the other side, current world monetary-financial and economic policy since the radically morbid, and still worsening changes in intention and performance of the world monetary system, the latter changes launched on the initiative of the Administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon during 1971-1972.

The propagation, and continued use of the "Triple Curve" pedagogical tool by me, was prompted by the need to counter the presumption that levels of nominal obligations to pay, have been rising, whereas, at the same time, in fact, the actual physical output as measured per capita and per square kilometer, has been not only falling, but the discrepancy between rising prices and falling physical output, per capita and per square kilometer, has been accelerating over the course of, most clearly, the interval since the U.S.-led collapse of the original Bretton Woods System, and since the relevant 1971-1975 events in monetary reorganization.

Up to the time of the referenced, late 1995 Vatican conference, there had been three sets of developments of most notable, qualitative significance within this process of degeneration of the world's economy as a whole. The first were the effects of the August 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar by the Republican Nixon Administration, and the subsequent role of Nixon's George Shultz at the Azores monetary conference, where the original IMF system was replaced by the lunacy of a floating-exchange-rate system. The second crucial development was the wrecking of the internal economy of the U.S.A. by the 1977-1981 U.S. Democratic Carter Administration, under the direction of Zbigniew Brzezinski's lunatic rampages as U.S. National Security Advisor. The third, and most ruinous development, has been the post-October 1987 role of Alan Greenspan in his assuming the function of U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman. At each of these three points, there was an acceleration of the previously prevailing functional rate of general monetary inflation, to rates now far beyond the threshold-levels already determined by the combined effects of the 1964-1972 U.S. War in Indo-China and the willful actions of the United Kingdom's disastrous first Harold Wilson government in collapsing that nation's physical economy, and unleashing factors of monetary chaos into the existing Bretton Woods System.

Although today's prevalent, errant opinion, views the 1971-2005 decline of the physical economies of the Americas and Europe as offset by an ostensible surge in growth in India and China, the fact is, that about seventy percent of the populations of the latter nations are gripped by a cruel impoverishment. This poverty reflects the fact that the prices of the exports by those nations are far below the levels needed to pay for the full national cost of the production of those nation's exports. The notion that the leading nations of Asia, such as Japan, China, India, Iran, and so forth, now represent the leading global economic and financial powers of the future, is a delusion. Any significant collapse of the levels of physical consumption in the European and North American markets, would have the political-psychological effect of a suggested "thermonuclear implosion" on the internal economies of leading Asian nations.

From the standpoint of the practice of idiocy known as the methods of financial accounting being currently applied by the IMF and others to shaping international monetary, financial, and physical-economic policies, it might appear that China, first, and India, second, are the most successfully rising economic powers in the world today. In physical reality, the opposite view must also be taken into account: They are among the largest of the monstrously vulnerable targets to be hit by any sharp collapse in the trans-Atlantic sector's, and Japan's, financial and physical condition. Reliance on current standards of financial accounting, rather than the methods of Leibnizian physical-economy, is, in that respect, the greatest of all current, catalytic threats to the world as a whole today.

Searching for Alternatives

Cutting national budgets, production, or physically essential services, as a response to general financial bankruptcy of a nation's, or the world economy, would be, and currently is, a virtually psychotic form of action against both the sovereignty of nations and the lives of their populations. What is needed, for any such contingency, is to maintain full employment in essential production and services, by whatever means are most suitable, and, treat that freezing of the level of physical collapse as a platform, from which to launch net physical growth of the economy's useful employment of its labor force and output, per capita and per square kilometer.

This goal must emphasize a rapid shift in the composition of the U.S. labor-force, in particular, away from emphasis on unskilled services employment, toward more than comparable margins of increase of science-driven, relatively capital-intensive modes of employment, but also a progressive decrease of the ration of unskilled and semi-skilled employment of the U.S. labor-force as a whole. It must be recognized, at long last, that the increase of the ration of unskilled services employment, when combined with reduced physical capital-intensity, and low "energy-flux-density" modes in infrastructure and production, is, intrinsically, a highly inflationary impulse toward even ultimately hyperinflationary explosions.

It must be recognized that most of the growth in the services ration of employment is poorly disguised unemployment, disguised in the costume of implicitly inflationary, and of relatively useless forms of low-paid employment in make-work activity. In contrast to such current practice in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, we must recall the contrasting achievements under Harry Hopkins' leadership, in using public works programs to move a mass of more than four millions of unemployed which had been reduced almost to uselessness, into a crucially important component of the capital-intensive, science-intensive development of the powerful U.S. labor-force, which produced the world's greatest, most productive economy ever, under the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt.

That is, in fact, a challenge which both the U.S.A. and western and central Europe will face very soon. In large degree, that is already the situation throughout much of the trans-Atlantic community of nations.

In the case of the U.S.A. itself, such action is the implicitly mandatory Constitutional obligation of the Federal government. Failure of any Federal agency or official to take that course of remedial action to stop the bleeding, and launch new net growth, would demand the immediate action of impeachment for reason of violation of the general welfare provisions of the Preamble of the Federal Constitution. Were the U.S. Supreme Court to rule against such compelling remedy on the intrinsically incompetent, and immoral pretext of "shareholder interest," the Federal Executive and U.S. Congress would be obliged, under the general-welfare principle of natural law, to go as far, promptly, to defend the general welfare, as to take prompt impeachment action to change the composition of the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although that latter action might be required, on the matter of the relevant authority, the highest-ranking lawful authority in our republic, is not the Supreme Court, but the organic, dynamic, whole implication of that Federal Constitution of the U.S.A., composed of both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Federal Constitution. The leading expression of that authority, in natural law, is the Preamble of the Federal Constitution. The essence of the lawful existence of our republic, is the commonwealth principle, the principle of the general welfare, agape, established in practice among modern governments by France's Louis XI and England's Henry VII. All of the demographic accomplishments in characteristics of government and economy, are reflections of the influence of changes in European statecraft and economy set into motion by the great ecumenical Council of Florence, a Council which reflected the bitter experience of Europe during, especially, the centuries under Venice-led ultramontane rule culminating in the ugly spectacle which was encapsulated by Boccaccio's Decameron.

The lesson for today, especially for globally extended European civilization, is a "Let us not go there again" response to the outcome of the medieval Venetian, ultramontane system of "globalization." The great threat to civilized life on this planet today, is the struggle by nostalgic neo-Venetian admirers, the veritable Miniver Cheevys of today's international financier cabals, to take the world into a globalized system like that under the feudal, ultramontane tyrannies of Venetian financier oligarchy and Norman chivalry, a continuing Venetian tradition. It is that tradition which, today, has been the continuing threat to globally extended European civilization since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the monstrous Tomás de Torquemada. That was the Torquemada whom the Martinist Freemasonry's Count Joseph de Maistre chose as the model for the Count's personally tailored re-design of the imperial personality of his protégé Napoleon Bonaparte, the Napoleon who was the model, based on the murderously anti-Semitic Torquemada, for Adolf Hitler.

In this moment of onrushing threat of early general financial collapse, the obligation of government would be to ensure the continued operation of firms, to forbid those foreclosures or other liquidations which would tend to prevent defense of the general welfare, and to correct the causes of the bankrupt condition by lawful measures of government to launch a vigorous expansion, and technological progress of the physical economy. This expansion would be effected through the launching of an urgently needed, vast development of basic, modern economic infrastructure, chiefly by government, and an accompanying, and dynamically interlinked expansion of the private sector's predominantly capital-intensive investment in scientifically and technologically progressive institutions.

In the present circumstance, the prompt first actions to be taken by governments, must be to eliminate the existence of so-called "hedge funds" and related expressions of so-called "financial derivatives" from the national and international economy. The practice of bidding to gain temporary control of stockholdings, to use that control to loot the firm for the advantage of the vultures who have seized control thus, and to then take the extracted financial loot as part of the means for the financial "Mongrel Horde's" looting other firms and nations, is a moral crime, and must be treated as a crime against the implicit moral law, the law of the obligation to subordinate other considerations of special interest to the promotion of the general welfare. Confiscation of looters' gains under such a principle of law, is not only lawful, but even mandatory, under such circumstances. Theft, by whatever means that scheme was accomplished, was theft, for which the beneficiaries of the moral crime are fully accountable.

Under the natural moral law of the modern sovereign nation-state republic, the existence of a business entity, especially a corporate form of such entity, is a privilege properly arranged by government. Excepting matters of freedom of speech or related considerations of individual human freedom, the private enterprise must adhere to the useful efforts it makes as its intended contributions to the general welfare, and must enjoy reasonable protection, and aid, as by government, on that account. However, to use a business entity to attack the general welfare of the nation, as in the case of Enron, is a crime which demands restraints, going as far as forfeiture, to deter misuse of the corporate or related form for purposes which are contrary to the general-welfare interest. Intentional abuses of relevant categories are to be treated by sovereigns as offenses, even criminal offenses, against the general welfare of society, just as much as illicit traffic in dangerous drugs.

That Beastly John Locke!

For example: During and following the Fifteenth Century, governments of Portugal and Spain, among others, declared the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa to be animals, rather than human, and, under that pretext, hunted down those targetted peoples as they might have hunted down wild cattle. The "old bulls" were often killed as a precautionary measure, and the ranks of relatively older adult women debrided similarly. The living residue of this murderous practice was declared to be "property," and once a captured person had been so classed as "property," his or her descendants were also declared to be ordinary private property, in perpetuity.

Although the British East India Company and its New England accomplices, abandoned continued direct participation in the slave trade on their own account, during the 1790s, the British participation in the slave traffic was continued past the 1790s, indirectly, by the Nineteenth-Century Spanish monarchy, which practiced the slave trade under the protection of Spain's Anglo-Dutch Liberal creditors, the British monarchy.[14] This was defended internationally by London's defense of the alleged, Lockean right, of "property" (e.g., Justice Antonin Scalia's "shareholder value") of its Spanish monarchical assets to traffic in slaves; it was also defended by the pro-slavery faction inside the post-1820 U.S.A., who premised their argument for the perpetual right of the slaveholders on John Locke. Perhaps, what Charles II did to the deceased Oliver Cromwell, might be an action bestowed upon the literary remains of John Locke.

Elements of the spirit of that Brutish arrangement were continued even after the nullification of slavery by the U.S. government's defeat of Britain's Confederates. This was done under what might be properly identified as "The Law of the Olympian Zeus," the Zeus of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound. As Prometheus was tortured, on Zeus's order, for the alleged "crime" of providing human beings with knowledge of the use of fire, so even anti-slavery liberals who had opposed the brutishness of the Confederacy, pursued a Zeus-like, post-1865 policy of opposition to the Frederick Douglass policy. The result was the anti-Douglass policy of opposition to educating the children of former slaves to a level above that of their intended, inferior economic status in life. This suppression of the intellectual development of the descendants of freed slaves was often promoted under the cover of the sophistry of suggesting that resisting modern education was "protecting their African culture."

To this day, in the U.S.A., there are those who promote a regressive level of intellectual-cultural development for the majority of persons of ascertainable African descent. They insist on promoting qualities of general employment and career opportunities which are qualitatively below that intended for "middle-class whites." The argument is that the culture of poverty must be "defended" against the intentions of humanists in the Frederick Douglass tradition.

Hence the signal significance of Brown v. Board of Education. The reform was written into law, but the practice usually falls far below the level of the presumed intention for both education and for social status in life generally. More and more, since the election of President Richard Nixon, under current policies of actual practice, there has been a regression in the personal conditions of life in entire communities, and in the majority of those displaced from improving positions wi