Counter-Currents
Counter-Currents has republished four of Ezra Pound’s works on economics. These texts were already available online.
- Social Credit: An Impact (1935)
- What is Money For? (1939)
- America, Roosevelt, and the Causes of the Present War (1944)
- Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States (1944)
We are looking for electronic versions of the following works which are not yet online (as well as clear photocopies, so we can check them):
- ABC of Economics (1933)
- Alfred Venison’s Poems: Social Credit Themes by the Poet of Titchfield Street (1935)
- A Visiting Card (1942)
- Gold and Work (1944)
Please email me at [email protected] if you have copies.
Greg Johnson
Editor-in-Chief
From the Editor Ezra Pound’s Writings on Economics
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10 comments
Lost interest when he attacked paper money.
Gold has value because people believe it has value. It has no intrinsic worth except that it is an excellent blocker of most types of radiation.
If your currency is backed by gold, the future sale of land or the promise of future tax revenue as long as the market believes the stated value matches the market value…there is value.
Pound may have been a good polemist, but he was not a good economist.
Does he attack paper money?
Pound is an advocate of pure fiat currency “backed” by whatever people will give you in exchange for it. He is certainly no “gold bug.”
In modern technological society it does have inherent value. I found this list:
Resistance to corrosion
Electrical conductivity
Ductility and malleability
Infrared (heat) reflectivity
Thermal conductivity
It depends on how you want to define “inherent value”, I guess. However, I’m not a fan of gold as currency. The idea actually repels me. Some people collecting and hoarding gold by way of coins, jewellry, etc. reminds me of bower birds. And while I don’t know what the bower birds are thinking, I know what the gold collectors are thinking – that if they have enough of this shiny stuff it can protect them from the disasters and pain of this life. Right. After a major disaster/collapse they can sit in a damp cave, stroking their gold, with glinty eyes and drooling mouth: surely some sucker’s just around the corner, wanting a bit of this stuff in exchange for life’s comforts!
“I know what the gold collectors are thinking – that if they have enough of this shiny stuff it can protect them from the disasters and pain of this life. Right.”
Really? How do you know what they are thinking? Do you know many?
All gold “collectors” I know do not even see themselves as such, but rather as rational investors who have taken the red pill as regards the Jewish money system and are doing their best to protect their hard-earned savings from further debasement and to secure the welfare of their families during the ongoing and worsening economic and political tumult.
They see silver as a useful bartering vehicle and are preparing as best they can by forming cooperative networks, learning to garden, learning to home-school, and storing essential supplies like food, medicines, tools, fuel, generators, books, seeds, herbs. clothing, footwear, various means of self-defense, and countless other items. For those who can afford it, gold is seen as a means to purchase larger, more expensive assets such farm land, houses, or vehicles.
“After a major disaster/collapse they can sit in a damp cave, stroking their gold, with glinty eyes and drooling mouth: surely some sucker’s just around the corner, wanting a bit of this stuff in exchange for life’s comforts!”
I admit that this kind of ridicule does get under my skin after a while. It adds nothing to an otherwise useful discussion IMO.
Andrew II, I didn’t mean to insult you, it is not personal. I just happen to agree with Greg’s take on gold, currency, fiat money, etc. I am plowing my way through Mr. E. Pound but I’m a little too thick for some of it.
To answer your question, I do indeed know people who have a love affair with their collection of gold. Some very, very close relatives. They think that in the coming collapse, it will magically “save” them. Now, if they are smart, they will unload all that damn gold now, take the paper money, and buy something that will sustain them in hard times. “There’ll always be someone who wants my gold when I’m homeless and starving!” Sure there will – but why would they give you the necessities of life in return when they need these things for themselves.
“Gold has value because people believe it has value. It has no intrinsic worth…”
So what? This is true of anything that people use to facilitate trading. Value is always imputed rather than intrinsic. It is whatever a buyer and seller ascribe to any medium of exchange – sea shells, bank notes, hours of labor, ounces of silver, whatever – as they negotiate a mutually acceptable price.
Throughout recorded history, more than any other medium, gold and silver have always and nearly everywhere emerged naturally as the media of choice precisely because they function so well as an honest stable form of money. Gold is durable, fungible, divisible, inert, transportable, easily recognizable, and impossible to counterfeit. Because it is difficult and costly to mine, bankers and politicians cannot arbitrarily manipulate its supply to engineer extreme business cycles, relentless long-term price inflation, and debt-enslavement.
Because it is the only trade-able asset that is not simultaneously some-else’s liability, it serves as the common man’s best means of protecting his savings from stealth confiscation and of storing his savings for future consumption during lean times or for future investment in productive enterprise during prosperous times.
I really do have trouble understanding the antipathy I find on this forum for gold. I see it (and silver, for those of more modest means) as our most potent anti-dote to the debt-based, usurious, coercive money system foisted upon us by our Jewish overlords.
That said, I firmly believe that no currency should be imposed at gunpoint by government. White men do not need this kind of tyranny.
Gold is a lovely substance, and I have no objection to people buying it and selling it as they please. But gold is a terrible currency, precisely because generally the supply does not grow with the rest of the economy, and people tend to hoard it or use it for jewelry and other luxury goods, as well as manifold industrial applications. This means that barring some vast new gold strike (and why should the economy be held hostage to something like that?), gold is a deflationary currency, which is bad for borrowers, who have to work harder with each passing year to pay back loans in increasingly scarce and expensive gold.
The precious metal currency philosophy really is not a serious approach to economic problems. It smacks of “I got mine, buddy!” devil-take-the-hindmost individualism. It really does not grasp the nature of money or the deep problems with the present financial system. The problem is not “fiat” currency. The best kind of currency is fiat currency, i.e., a purely conventional medium of exchange that is not subject to hoarding or sudden overproduction. The real problem is that banks, which are merely looking out for their own interests, are allowed to create currency out of nothing, when in fact it is the government, which should look out for the common good, that should create currency — increasing the money supply as production increases — and distribute it interest free to consumers and producers.
The very idea that banks are allowed to create currency and that governments then borrow that currency from banks at interest is one of the most remarkable swindles in history, and it is an open, obvious swindle, not something complex, secret, and subtle.
Take a look at my essay “Money for Nothing” for more ideas along these lines: https://counter-currents.com/2012/01/money-for-nothing/
Helvena has republished the text of Pound’s ABC of Economics on his blog at:
http://helvena.wordpress.com/tag/abc-economics/
Unfortunately, I can’t find the table of contents, which makes the text hard to navigate
Thanks for the head’s up. Unfortunately, I would still need a photocopy in order to correct some clear scanning errors.
You might be able to locate a copy at a library within your reach by searching WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org). There appears to be a copy at a library within my reach, which I could visit in around a fortnight, but I can’t absolutely guarantee that they have it: on several occasions, I have requested items from their stacks, and they have been unable to find the items requested.
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