Jim Rickards [part of Xxxl's must-read "diatribe series"]:

“Complexity starts out as your friend and ends up as your enemy.  The Byzantine Empire solved the problem of complexity by simplifying.  You can think of it as a downsized version of the full-scale Roman Empire.  They ditched the west, they kept the east – the east had the most fertile land, great sea lanes, great strategic position and in effect, it lasted another thousand years.

They said: “We’re going to get rid of all these provinces we really can’t deal with and don’t produce very much, they cut the agrarian heartland.”  It was very much an agricultural, farm-based empire – because of the farming system, you could feed your people, you could raise troops.  If a farmer had four sons, two of them would go in the army and two of them would work the farm.

Because it was fertile and productive, you could tax people.  By the way, the Byzantine Empire had a 10% flat tax – it was a very moderate tax regime.  It wasn’t zero but it wasn’t 30,40, 50% as we see today and people didn’t mind paying 10-15% – that was affordable – so the tax system was in balance, the budget was in balance, they had a gold coin which was not debased for almost a thousand years …”

“That was very stabilizing to that empire to have that sound money, was it not?”

“It was one of the most critical things but to put it in modern terms – what did they have?  Low taxation, sound money, an agriculture based economy and a simplified system they actually managed reasonably well, a lot of patriotism, a lot of loyalty to the Emperor, also a a very strong religious foundation.  You have to understand that it was not a theocracy in the technical sense – freedom of religion is an important thing but that’s what they had and that’s the formula we need today.”

“This is not a religious site but we are looking at history.  These people were not stupid.  They knew what they were doing when they put those in so why are we going at it today, attacking and removing it and that almost parallels Rome.”

“It’s certainly the case that the United States has very strong Christian traditions and I would just look at the Eastern Roman Empire – when something works for a thousand years and religion was a very large part of that so to talk around religion just seems to be denying reality.  I’m not sure it is the particular religion but it was a unifying force and in the Eastern Roman Empire.

See, the point is – religion is one of the legs of the stool.  We don’t want a theocracy but a values-based society is part of that.  It’s not the establishment of religion but the attack on it which is very worrying today and that will have negative consequences on the United States.”

“I want to go back to Rome and as you said, it was a pay-as-you-go system, so they really didn’t have the debt and contrast that with the United States which has this massive, massive debt we created for ourselves.”

“They had all these vulnerabilities, in terms of these obligations, using more and more resources and requiring more and more taxes to pay for it but they never had a national debt the way we think of it today.  How far can you tax people?  Till they can’t pay or won’t pay or they quit working but there’s a gap there and we bridged the gap with borrowing.  Rome had to, in a given year, stop spending or cut taxes, demand fewer military campaigns, not adding people to the dole etc.   In the short run, you can expand your borrowing well beyond your taxing capabilities but in the long run, you become vulnerable to your creditors.”

He mentions such creditors as the Chinese and others around the world but does not mention the IMF, WB, Club of Paris, BIS and others who also own our nation and perhaps he doesn’t even understand their game plan – the establishment of a private, not nationally sovereign, ownership of the people of the world, using a one currency regime and thus we’re getting back to the Bretton-Woods argument again.

There have to be catalysts – one is the Eurocrisis and another is the sinking of the U.S.A., a position it should never, ever have been in.  As this blog has tirelessly pointed out from Day 1, it is certain people embedded in the finance who are leading this move and it is they who caused gold to be withdrawn through Roosevelt, they who set up the Fed and they who withdraw credit at whim, generations having been weaned on the debt/credit system.  It is they who funded madmen and ne’er-do-wells who caused the wars these people find so lucrative and which killed my father.

This flat out refusal of those involved in economics to recognize that this is not a natural wave phenomenon in the least but an induced situation for political purposes is one of the key stumbling blocks preventing rationalization and a return to sound economics.

The man in the City who cut his teeth on graphs and charts which insist on natural waves is never, ever going to accept collusion and predetermination, when it is standing out like a sore thumb that this has been behind all major vicissitudes.  Those raised on Keynesian economics are in the worst position of all because they can never see what is actually going on, despite the wealth of documentation in the internet era, outlining how and when and why it happened.

Let’s step back one year – i don’t like the U.S. razamatazz production values in the clip but you can glean the major points along the way [and it's short]:

People, this is what is going down, many people know it and just as many people, in key positions, are vehemently denying it and calling the other side all sorts of names.

What is happening is a known known.

Finally

This might be of interest.  I’m quite suspicious of it, in the way I’m suspicious of the Protocols of Zion and yet it exists.  All I can do is present it and see what you think.  H/T IPJ

Filed under: Politics & economics