Charlie Rose

JohnGelles  09/08/2011 04:47 AM Report

Thank God the first post was accepted.

The title of their new book I could not recall. My Google task window found it: "That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back."

If they had an ounce of wit these two might have mentioned that the information revolution, globalization and hyper-speed communication and multi-tasking, all of which they have figured out is what ails us, has not wrecked our potential to copy and update all we did to win WW II -- especially the way the Treasury and the Federal Reserve arranged financing victory with an anti-inflation array of tools and money enough to win created to match what we had to pay to contractors in cash.

In short all the answers to what these two moaned about are contained in Lincoln's Greenbacks, Bernanke's Quantitative Easing, Franklins pre-revolutionary printed currency, etc.

These two have no idea of what debt and money are all about. If they would read Keynes Without Debt by Morrison, Buffet's article on import certificates in Fortune years ago, enough on functional finance (Abba Lerner) and functional law (Felix Cohen), they would know how to implement FDR's Second Bill of Rights. Once they digested these fundamentals, they could relax as Hollywood took education for hyper-fast critical thought, for multitasking, as a job for animated films.

Their book stumbles and fails completely because it wants to stay with profit and loss accounting when only cost accounting can remedy our disease -- which ignorance of money and its purpose. The purpose of money is to provide jobs enough for all of us -- if we want to find light at the end of tunnel. Beyond that, America and its allies will develop all the arts civilization has made possible.

Yes, in WW II we began to understand how to cooperate and compete without ruining either social interaction. Yes that used to be us. And we can be that again. But not if we measure a deficit between revenue and expenses: the real deficits are between what we need and what we produce and use.

JohnGelles  09/08/2011 04:13 AM Report

Tonight is midnight September 7-8, 2011, and C. Rose has just finished with Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum on their new book intended to bring America back to its glory of old.

I am handicapped by having no transcript. I do have a Google task window that opens and closes without disturbing my text. It will help.

But I must proceed here, in hope of gaining some readers -- after which I can return with better text on the proper CR archive page. I must because Friedman and Mandelbaum are so frustrating and off course on entitlements and deficits as to be worse than useless to their own objectives.

Their objective with the book is to help us improve systems, such as our schools (from pre-school to Singularity University and higher), our monetary system of production (from Adan Smith's pins and needles to Boeing's dream-liners and yet to be finalized Mars Manned Lander), our energy provider (from sun and wind to the hydrogen economy), and our spiritual foundation (from our founding documents to the "second coming of Christ to Earth").

But, in spite of these lofty aspirations, they deliver their concern that we lower our mass entitlements and spend both money enough to exploit the moon and no-money at all (to be sure hyper-inflation will be impossible). This last internal contradiction within their objectives is particularly annoying.

[to be continued because this may not post and I do not want to irritate myself to death]