Coming Around

Our tax-collectors increasingly take our money in order to pay international interests. As the debt of the United States grows, only part of the increase is owed internally. The rest of the increase is owed externally.

That is why tax collection in the single U.S. currency is in part a matter of U.S. foreign policy. It is not just about domestic policy. In fact, tosoc.org believes that our response to the Great Recession is better explained when we take the foreign policy aspect of the economic meltdown into account (for example, the treatment of AIG). We could not allow certain institutions to fail perhaps not so much because they would have another Lehman-like effect on our domestic economy, but because they might have that effect on other countries (especially in Europe). If we could prevent it, no matter how much it cost our own citizens, we would not allow our economic troubles to bring down the economies of our allies.

This has a bearing on the recent government scandals in the news. Two scandals are about surveillance on reporters and on the general population. The other is about bigoted, prejudicial behavior on the part of our tax collectors based on the perceived political orientation of applicants for tax-exempt status.

Tosoc.org thinks that it is a fairly straightforward and expected behavior that bureaucrats will try to please their superiors, including the President of the U.S. We think this is true even if the bureaucrats oppose their superiors' policies, up to a point. Most bureaucrats seem to favor the political left, but that does not mean that they will refuse to carry out the requests of a President on the political right.

Therefore we were happy to hear that President Obama was deeply upset by the discrimination of IRS employees against his political opponents. He is not entirely blameless, however. The President has not always kept his own and his administration's rhetoric about his opponents under control, so there may well be a similarity to the Thomas Becket story. ("Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?") The bureaucrats may have mistakenly put anti-Tea Party rhetoric into action, thinking that it would please their superiors. The President now has a chance to show that he will not tolerate the use of government power for anti-democratic purposes.

We can also imagine that some of the IRS employees with leftish tendencies thought it was funny to torment those they did not like. Perhaps they smiled and chuckled as they put their creative powers to work to find new ways to make the lives of their political opponents more difficult.

It is bad enough when the IRS is involved in this kind of thing, but could this also be happening elsewhere? We will probably never know whether other bureaucrats in the Justice department or the NSA used their information-gathering powers not just to spy on reporters and possible terrorists, but to gather information on groups with Tea Party or Patriot in their names as well.

There is no evidence of this so far as tosoc.org knows, but bad IRS behavior suggests that such a thing must now be considered.

Those of us who are more-or-less on the left should strenuously object to this behavior and never participate in it. We should go out of our way to treat our political opponents scrupulously. Why any of us should undermine our goals and the Obama administration in these ways is beyond tosoc.org. We need to control ourselves and not give in to "the end justifies the means" ways of thinking.

This is not so much a moral or ethical position. Instead it is powerfully practical because "what goes around comes around." Why would we build the tools and tactics that will allow the next right-wing administration to oppress us? Richard Nixon would have loved what our sympathizers have done because they justify his behavior. If we do the kinds of things that Nixon would do, then ultimately the right-wingers will also do them. And it will be difficult for us to complain about the anti-democratic activities that we created. It is hard to express how wrong-headed we think the IRS bureaucrats have been.

However, we believe that there is another aspect to this that goes beyond our domestic political struggles. The IRS is responsible for collecting enough money to pay our international creditors as well as to pay for domestic expenses. The discrimination against Tea Party and Patriot groups may have been motivated by the need to gather ever-more revenue for this purpose. Any domestic groups that make it more difficult to collect the increasing amounts to pay foreign interests could potentially disrupt foreign policy requirements. That is, up to a point and somewhat indirectly, the IRS works for international interests. The suppression of domestic interests in favor of foreign ones could be seen as a natural extension of their work.

It is not a pretty thought that our government takes from U.S. workers to enrich foreign interests, but it is something we have to consider. After all, it should not be hard to find examples where the U.S has done the same to other nations. Again, what goes around comes around.

One of the purposes of The Other Side of Capitalism is to find a different way, a way that is not exploitative and does not encourage anti-democratic behaviors. Multiple exclusive currencies and markets should help.

First, as we mentioned in "The Other Side of Defense," multiple exclusive currencies and markets should make it easier to track terrorists by following the money. That is because enforcing the relationships between markets requires auditing of all transactions. It may well be that patterns of transactions could be used to justify phone and email surveillance, meaning that the need for general surveillance of the entire population could be reduced.

Second, many of our domestic struggles are about money. As tosoc.org has said many times before, single-currency monetary policies that satisfy international interests will not likely satisfy domestic interests. Multiple exclusive currencies and markets will decouple international monetary interests from domestic monetary interests. That should greatly reduce many of our domestic differences and reduce the desire of bigoted bureaucrats to discriminate against citizens based on their politics.

Finally, the question has arisen whether the government that demands our loyalty is loyal to us. That question will remain so long as our international currency is the only currency we have. To the extent that foreign interests influence our currency they also influence our institutions and officials who use that currency. Put that together with the fact that our treaty obligations constitutionally have the power of law and we have a system in which our government's interests could become opposed to our people's interests. If that happens, then there will be pressure on the IRS, the Justice Department, and the NSA to use their powers against the threats that the people pose. That would be a sad and tragic situation.

With the multiple exclusive currencies and markets that tosoc.org has previously described, however, the government's interests will always be in line with the interests of the people. The external currency could be controlled to meet our external obligations and the internal currency (or currencies) could be controlled to meet our internal obligations.

The way capitalism should be.

Socialism for the socialists and capitalism for the capitalists.

TheOtherSideOfCapitalism (admin@tosoc.org)

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