Karl

I'm not sure if you are disagreeing with me or not :-) The state created paper money by 'fiat' and effectively banned competing currencies. No bank could have done that on its own. It effectively allowed banks to control the currency with no virtually limits on monetary expansion through the fractional reserve system that allowed banks to print money regardless of their being any asset to back it. The state allowed that to happen, it made lawful a counterfeiting operation. Then in an act of wilful criminality and destruction, Nixon got rid of the nominal gold standard and pegged the paper notes, not to an asset, but to itself. The state created taxpayer backed loans, it guaranteed banks and customers a bail out and took all the risk away from the banking sector. As you said in your reply the state has allowed the monetisation of bank risk and bad debts. It's monetisation corporate debt. The Government will always do this as long as the can. It allows the Government to lend huge amounts of money for its vote grabbing scams and revolving door government cronyism. Until this link is broken there is no chance of ever preventing this happening.

Who has allowed those corporations and Wall Street to act in this way ? Who has protected the creditors from risk and who set up the policy of home ownership for ever less reliable lenders. Fanny and Freddy are state backed lenders, even the ratings agencies are state run institutions with a modicum of supposed independence, the regulators are Government regulators, the Fed is a quasi private institution but really part of the Government. Who allowed state backed lending to students and who created the abomination of Obamacare which is creating health black holes as insurance companies terminate their involvement. None of this could have happened without Government creating policies and passing laws. As long as the corporations and banks can monopolise the political system, they will monopolise the political system. The best way to stop crime is not to regulate the criminals, but to prevent the criminals performing the crimes. Seperate state from market and there cannot be any more collusion.

Ignorant of......not per se any attempt at insulting you. If I wanted to insult you I certainly wouldn't have done so in that way. No doubt that's why you put a rider on your reply. I understand you having an agenda, but what if you are wrong. I'm assuming you want greater wealth, freedom and opportunity for the ordinary guy ? Maybe you don't ?

So who and what has caused the deterioration in the available jobs, the stagnation of wages, falling living standards, falling productivity and the rise in Government/corporate debt ? I keep hoping, like some enthusiastic puppy, that you are actually serious about these issues, but all you do is blame corporations for going abroad. The country doesn't own the corporations, no one has any right to the wealth created by those corporations. If they hadn't moved, if they had somehow been forced to stay then they would have shut down, much as has happened in the rust belt. I know lots about your country. I happen to think it's still the last beacon of real freedom, but it is dying very quickly. I have a lot of time for the USA, my father was head of an American company in the UK and visited the country many times. As youngsters we were awe struck by the USA, its products, it's buildings, the technology, music, space program and the sheer wealth of its people compared to our own, heck, even the stamps I collected were impressive. We are united by culture, much philosophy and the English language. I had always hoped for more, but it's been going backwards since the 60s and looks far more like it is moving towards that grim kind of socialism that dogged the UK since the war.

Putting aside the assessment on class, you correctly identify the effect but are ignorant of the cause, or you deny the cause because it doesn't suit your political agenda for socialism. The old Marxian 'class' argument has floundered and collapsed due to the success of the industrial revolution. We already have all these massive government welfare schemes and wealth distribution, we have unions, minimum wage laws and any company can set itself up as a workers cooperative if it wishes. Yet, yet, still the middle class has been hollowed out and as the welfare schemes, government growth and taxation has increased, the destruction of the middle classes has accelerated. The damage to ethnic and low skilled is to relegate them to lives of broken families, drug use and no opportunity for employment except the criminal kind- is it any wonder the morgues and prisons are full of young black men ?

Not if your population can't afford to buy things because your government has made labour so expensive that business is forced to move its factories to other countries. It was inevitable that when a new labour and goods market for multiple millions opened up it would cause rapid change. Manufacturers must compete or die. They couldn't compete by remaining in the USA-which I suspect they would have much preferred. We're it not for cheap Chinese imports being sold on the imaginary strength of the US dollar the USA would be suffering massive cost inflation. Eventually, the dollar will fall in value and even Chinese goods will no longer be affordable. The inflation that was exported from the USA to China will roar back across the ocean with a vengeance. It's only the idiotic management of the Chinese economy that has prevented this occurring. So, not corporate greed, but corporate competition to maintain competitiveness which keeps goods flowing and prices low for US consumers. If the US wanted the manufacturers to return, they only need to change domestic policy, cut welfare, cut taxes, cut red tape, licensing, boondoggles, subsidies, Tarriffs, regulation, minimum wage laws, employment laws and all the fraud that goes on in the name of monetary policy. Return to laissez faire capitalism, seperate state from commerce and the ordinary guy can have a chance at a bit of self respect and share in a wealth boom.

Indeed it is the closest to heaven one can come whilst still being on Earth. Don't you just love socialism.

I don't think you are getting this. This isn't anything to do with judgement, wisdom, knowledge, vision, predictions. I'm simply saying that if you choose to be doing one thing then by deduction you cannot be doing another thing. Look up 'opportunity cost'. I'm happy to discuss judgement but that's another subject entirely. For the moment all I'm saying is that meditating means we can't also be out earning money, painting our toe nails or shaving the cat.

Is that the beautiful socialist utopia of Venezuela ?

We can only think our way straight. We can have crippled, stunted egos just like plants that are kept without light and derived of nutrients or water. Our egos can bloom into full flower if we attend to them carefully. A crippled ego is unhappy, limited, has no pride of feeling of self worth, often this results in bullying, violence, drugs, sex addictions in an attempt to bring some sense of control to life-small ego. There is no master and slave, there is the mind that is either functioning well, or it isn't. Anyone with a healthy brain, in a free environment is capable of improving their minds and hence their egos can blossom full and ripe.

That's what legs are for. The reason there are fewer jobs is that people are wedded to the idea of getting free stuff. The more free stuff they get, the less employment there is. Poor urban areas are today's plantations serving the interests of those in power who purport to be helping them.

I've never known Brian to destroy countries, I don't think he even kills flies and wasps.

Thats a vote winner. Who can resist the picture of a small boy in tears as the evil tides demolish his sandy hopes ?

....and I must admit to a certain misplaced pride in someone naming a thread a Karlism. I think Karlosophy and Karlonomics might be nice ;-)

Said the small boy shouting at the incoming tide. :-)

And of course there is no 'right' to healthcare, as there is no right to welfare cash, education, jobs, equal pay, equal opportunities or any other thing except life, property, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

It doesn't harm to evoke some thinking on the nature of the practice requirement, the Internet is chock full of monetarily free advice on practices. Does it really harm to provoke thought ? I do understand your point of view by the way, so I will curb it in that area.

Yes, that is correct. This isn't about which is the better decision is, only that there is always an opportunity cost of taking that decision as opposed to some other decision. For better or worse. Making relative value judgements is something entirely different. The OP asks a question like the man who walks into the doctor and asks for a pill to make him better, he doesn't care what the pill is, nor what it does, neither is he quite sure why he wants it, but, as long as it doesn't cost any money he will take it.

There isn't any disagreement. One might well choose meditation as the best option, but it isn't free, there is an opportunity cost. If you were facing an oncoming train I would suggest that meditation isn't going to help, you might well be calmer as a result and be less frightened than you would have been, but when there is an option to get off the tracks, then the opportunity cost is your life. That's pretty expensive.

Mind is ego, there is no seperation. Our minds aren't some passive system that we interrogate by means of something else, our minds are active, dynamic and changing. We can and can only interrogate ourselves, in effect focusing awareness internally on our mental activity and questioning how we know it to be true in order that we can decide what we should do. There is no dictatorial programmer, there is poor filtering of philosophical inputs. For instance, the other day there were pictures on the TV of people on hospital beds in Syria. The patients had nebuliser masks and bandages, they were getting washed with hose pipes in order to wash off the chemicals that has been dropped upon them. Yet, people see these things and just assume it's true, but we don't know if it is true because these scenes were filmed within Syria by those not supportive of the Assad regime. We don't know if it's real, or even if it was, who dropped the gas, where they dropped it or why they did so. How many ask the questions ? We absorb so much from parents, friends, school, media, books and then we fail to check to see if it is real. We are told that it's all about feelings, that we should simply react to what we feel and the philosophies we imbibe are related to 'feelings'. Our schools preach childish 'expression' our art ignores any kind of aesthetic sensibilities, our economics praises rising prices over falling prices-in the new Orwellian world inflation is a natural good that we should engineer into our lives. We are told culture, particularly any form of tribal culture is good no matter if it actually is, that we should preserve folk art and language at any cost, despite it being rejected entirely by the mainstream. All we need to do is stop emoting and flapping about every little thing we are told to flap about; be it whales, newts, Mother Earth, drowned children, or unfairness/equality. We should stop with the 'expressing' and start with the introspection that leads us to align our internal thoughts with concrete reality. Instead of crashing through the forest with our arms waving, screaming like lunatics, we should think and plan our best passage.

That's nice.

Except meditation isn't 'free'. It has an opportunity cost. Instead of meditating we could be producing goods, earning more money to buy better food, mending the broken slate which is allowing water to destroy our dwelling. It is free of immediate monetary cost, but, as they say, time IS money. Even if we regard money simply as energy, then time spent doing one thing, must be weighed against the energy out put of another thing. In the end we must choose to survive and, whatever we choose to do impacts the success of our strategy. There is always a cost.

We are the content and activity of our minds, the mind is the ego. Spirit could be regarded as the soul, it is an axiomatic fact and indivisible. We are alive and conscious of existence that much is known, but we cannot know how, spirit is therefore the nature of man as a volitional creature with his mind as the only tool for his survival. To say the mind is separate from ego is the ego trying to seperate mind from ego. No such thing is possible. To introduce spirit as yet another mechanism of cognition is doubly confusing. We are our minds, our minds are our ego. There are no other minds/spirits looking at mind. There is mind looking a mind and only that - called introspection. We can change our minds, that is to say to alter the content by redefining our philosophies in light of new experiences, or in relation to our success/happiness in life. Often our minds just don't do much thinking, we just swallow preconceived, pre packaged philosophies in a piece meal sense and regurgitate them when making choices. Few think enough to examine if those philosophies will support making the best decision, it's more like an automatic action. Think of all those phrases we adopt "money is the root of all evil" contrasting with "a fair days pay for a fair days work" or "too many cooks spoil the broth" contrasting with "many hands make light work". We say "it's fine in theory, but not in practice" or "that maybe true for you but not for me", that "no one can help what they do". The list of appropriated philosophy is what determines our thoughts and actions, but few examine the philosophies at all, they have become integrated into a great mass of conflicting, contradictions and floating abstractions devoid of definitions related to concrete reality. It's no wonder it is described as 'being asleep'. It is no asleep, but a refusal to think that is the problem.

That's a bloody good attempt. There are a lot of holes in your premesis, such as life amounting to 'energy' which is abundant throughout the universe in innanimate matter. A perception of physical reality implies a consciousness capable of recognising it. Plants are alive, but they are not conscious, they are goal directed, but are without purpose-something only applicable to conscious entities. The best part for me is 'first there is existence' 'then life' then 'consciousness'. That there can be life that is not conscious of existence is rarely considered. However consciousness is an axiomatic corollary of the identification of existence. We cannot get further than 'existence exists' and consciousness grasps it. Many here take the opposite view, that consciousness generates the illusion of existence. That nothing really exists as a concrete reality. Some are materialist subjectivists that use 'modern' physics to illustrate that matter is just empty space. That we can't know reality at all in any sense.

Existence is an axiom. Existence is identity; consciousness is identification. It depends what is meant by 'life'. Living organism ? Human life ? The existence of innanimate matter is unconditional. The existence of life is not. It depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its form, but it cannot cease to exist. Only a living organism faces a constant alternative: life, or death. Life is a process of self sustaining and self generated action. If an organism fails in that action it dies ; its chemical element continue to exist , but it's life ceases to exist.