I had replied to John Horvath II about The One %

1) HGL's F.B. writings : Mark Shea Asking For the Commenter he Blocked, 2) Correspondence of Hans-Georg Lundahl : I had replied to John Horvath II about The One %, 3) John Ritchie Sent Me Mail

Hans-Georg Lundahl to John Horvath II (via TFP)

Carecopies

To a girl I used to love and who is concerned with what he wrote, to a former Father Confessor, to a Sedevacantist Catholic Magazine of Sweden and to Robert Sungenis

date : 29/03/14 à 13h45

objet : On the 1%

"My one percent represents those who earn the federal hourly minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. ... My entry level job helped me go to college and avoid student debt. My experience taught me the value of work and the need to save. Since I earned so few of them, I learned early in life to value each dollar—which was certainly worth a lot more back then. ... Like it or not, forcing the minimum wage upward necessarily drives the number of jobs downward."*

Two points:

1) If only one percent are on exact federal minimum wage, how would raising it erase jobs?

I mean, if 50 percent were on minimum wage (hardly likely to happen in any society), doubling it might make people who resort to them get their heads together and think of how to save expenses. It might land 25% of the wage earners, 50% of the 50%, in the situation of seeing their work replaced by machines. Even so the paymasters would be loosing, since doing so they would have to pay higher taxes to take care of the new out of work.

But if the minimum wage is 1% [of the population or active adult such]?

I wonder how many are on the ledge between that one percent and the limit on which one is earning twice the minimum wage.

For raising the minimum wage means that some wages previously above it are then equal to it, some below it and needing to be raised, and some still above it, but less far than previously.

2) I also wonder if Mr Horvath's experience was really morally all that useful. Avoiding study debt was a very good thing - socially. But ...

"My experience taught me the value of work and the need to save."

What does the Psalm Nisi Dominus and the repeated words of the Word made Flesh say about this?

Is the value strictly Catholic, or is at an attitude fitting for Calvinists?

"Since I earned so few of them, I learned early in life to value each dollar—which was certainly worth a lot more back then."

Knowing how much a dollar or a pound is worth is a knowledge which precisely for that reason goes out of date.

A government that decides on minimum wages might also be needing to decide on maximum prices.

Actually the minimum wage was realised in the Middle Ages indirectly as a by-product of the Maximum Wage which was part of other Maximum Prices which were part of the better measures of a sham god-king called Diocletian. One that his successor Constantine kept in force even while renouncing the sham godhood. As over Babylon one could find steles of Hammurapi's law, as over India one might still find steles of Ashoka's decree, so in Greece one may still find steles with Decretum Maximum.

Directly it came by through a reasoning that the minimum wage for every work cannot be too far from the Maximum Wage. I think half the maximum wage or half the maximum price may still be just, but just a third or a quarter would be unjust.

"Indeed, as everyone knows, most of these wage earners work in food preparation and similar services, requiring minimal skills—and less compensation."

A good point, and a reason why there are categories that are on minimum wage. But for one thing it is not the same thing to say "most" and to be precise "90%" (of the 1%) or "55%" (of the 1%).

For another thing saying someone needs to have a minimum wage due to his small contribution to society does not say the wage needs to be such that living off it becomes more and more difficult.

A third, 3) "They can conceive no charity beyond that handed out by big government."

A dole or a food stamp is a charity handed out by big government.

A minimum wage is a justice handed out by the employer to the employee.

To the employer, a minimum wage raising is a wage raised. It goes to his employee insofar as the employees income is not eaten by income tax.

A dole is a wage paid to government bureaucrats as well as an expense to a person poorer than himself.

If minimum wages are raised and taxes remain or are raised too, employers will try to get around this - perhaps by reducing unskilled labour altogether. And, as bad or worse, small employers may go out of business.

But if minimum wages are raised and taxes lowered, especially to small employers or self employed, and if doles are lowered, or replaced by punctual alms from government given also as an example to others to do alms as well, not leaving the government a "monopoly" on almsgiving (as Rome had from Caesar to well past Constantine), I think that as total expenses for employers stay equal or even lower, employers will have less need to fire unskilled labour, and small businessmen will have less threats of going bankrupt.

So, guess why this fan of minimum wages is also so NOT a fan of Inheritance Duty. My first deception with Bush Jr was not the Declaration of War against the Talibans of Afghanistan (without asking Austrian successor states for forgiveness for Woodrow Wilson blaming the war on a very similar ultimatum), no, my first deception with him was when he listened to a club called Responsible Rich (including obviously men called Gates and some similar types), and doing so broke his promise to abolish inheritance duty. As I noted back then, the guys who pontificated on how bad it is to be born with a silver spoon in the mouth would be able to die and their children would even after paying it be born with the silver spoon in the mouth, BUT a small businessman, a grocer with one shop or a farmer, would very likely know when he died that in order to pay inheritance duty their children would have to sell the business or borrow from a bank.

For my part, getting a study debt has taught me the value of staying out of debt.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Library in Paris
St Cyril, Deacon and Martyr 29-III-2014

* Why I Side with the One Percent
Posted on February 11, 2014 by John Horvat II
http://www.returntoorder.org/2014/02/side-one-percent-2/

Correction

"A dole is a wage paid to government bureaucrats as well as an expense to a person poorer than himself." Should be: "A dole implies a wage paid to government bureaucrats as well as being itself an expense to a person poorer than himself." And "himself" is ambiguous, can equally stand for tax payers and bureaucrats.

John Horvath II to Hans-Georg Lundahl (via other email)

date : 01/04/14 à 18h30

objet : Thank you

Return to Order From a Frenzied Economy to an Organic Christian Society- Where We've Been, How We Got Here, Where We Need to Go

April 01, 2014

[My emphasis]

Dear Mr. Lundahl,

As a "Thank You" for your friendship, I'm sending you a complimentary subscription to my weekly Return to Order e-newsletter.

Return to Order is for people who grieve over the current state of America. Who believe that honor, family and virtue practiced in the context of an organic Catholic society can fix our warped culture and restore the American soul.

It took me 20 years of prayer and study to realize this truth: only an organic Catholic society can solve the moral root cause of America's economic meltdown.

If you'd rather not get my gift weekly e-newsletter, I'll remove you from the list. No problem.

But I'm 100% sure that without an all-encompassing moral renewal that transforms every aspect of human activity, America's economic crash is inevitable.

In my weekly e-newsletter, I offer completely original commentary on current events from an organic Christian perspective.

In other words, I show how an organic Catholic society is the hope and solution to America's economic and moral collapse.

To unsubscribe, click here.

Or do nothing and I'll send my Return to Order e-newsletter to your email inbox every Wednesday at 12:30PM, at absolutely no cost. God bless!

Sincerely,

John W. Horvat II
Vice-President, The American TFP
www.ReturnToOrder.org

PS – Please see what eminent Americans are saying about my book Return to Order:

[Leaving out most, but letting one remain:]

"Horvat's book is a thorough analysis…and points to the way out. This is very valuable in times when people are provided with false analyses and false solutions."

— Tadeusz Radlinski
Founder of MRM (vessel design and construction), Gdansk, Poland

Own comment to last:

If Tadeusz Radlinski is an US American residing in US and founded a company in Poland, he is a Capitalist. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is that they and their workers are so much more numerous than small shop owners.

Tadeusz Radlinski may be an eminent American (meaning US such, obviously). He may be an eminent Polish patriot despite the fact of emigrating from Poland to escape Communism. He is not an eminent friend of Malmö (where I am from, if you pronounce it Malmowe you are near the real pronunciation and Malmhowe would be ethymologically the same as Malmö) in the sense that Kockums used to be doing vessel design and construction across that southern part of the Baltic. Unless he would say that Malmö is better off with smaller ships and no grand vessel construction factory. Perhaps he is. But then perhaps so is Gdansk, a k a Danzig. Perhaps I am doing him wrong. Perhaps his company MRM is a fairly small one. Perhaps it is constructing small vessels and only now and then, perhaps once a year, a tanker which might make the world economy more hectic - or other merchant vessels of similar size. Perhaps he is thereby leaving room for other contractors, both smaller vessels and occasional tankers and other merchant vessels of similar size.

But perhaps more to the point: he is right that thorough analyses pointing the way out are an asset when people are provided with false analyses.

My point with my letter was that John Horvath II is not likely to totally mend the trend of false analyses, since I caught him redhanded in one himself.

Own comment to other point:

But I'm 100% sure that without an all-encompassing moral renewal that transforms every aspect of human activity, America's economic crash is inevitable.

An all encompassing moral renewal? Sounds like the Reformation to me. That transforms every aspect of human activity? Sorry, now it starts to sound more like Communism. A bit in between you have something which has things in common with both: MRA, Moral Re-Armament, a k a Oxford Group Movement (not to be confused with the earlier Oxford Movement called Puseyism, which was what led a former Evangelical, i e Puritan, like John Henry Newman, from Reformation to the Catholic Church).

But it does not sound very much like Medieval analyses made by Medieval people living in the Middle Ages, as accessible by their still extant writings.

And to me that suggests this is not exactly how a Medieval caught in a Time Machine and transposed to Our Time - meaning real Medievals, not sham parodic ones as in Les Visiteurs, but real Medieval Scholars - would have analysed our time. Btw, did you notice one important item left out from the header? His book is - unlike Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity - NOT dealing with where we are and why that is wrong. That is Bulverism. Presume someone is wrong, explain extensively how he came to be wrong, with intricate and subtle analyses of the history of his mind, and carefully omit to prove THAT he is wrong. Sometimes XXth C. people do it to people who are right. Annoying enough, but at least one can understand them, since being wrong they lack real arguments. Problem is when Bulverism is such a settled social habit that it is no longer noticed as such. But Horvath has shown it can be done to someone or something which is wrong, like the XXth Century (or its leading trends and tendencies for at least much of its length, or if you prefer the Century past, from 1914 to 2014). In this case it is catastrophic, since it serves to camouflage the real case against the XXth C, both Capitalism and Communism.

Here is Chesterton:

G. K. CHESTERTON

THE OUTLINE OF SANITY

New York
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
1927
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/Sanity.txt

This is not to cancel the subscription!

I am, of course, subscribed to Acharya Sanning (despite the Swedish meaning of the latter taken name pretty far from truth) and that in order to refute her, which on occasions I have done:

somewhere else
lundi 18 avril 2011
No, true enough Acharya, Varro did not write about Jesus ...
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2011/04/no-true-enough-acharya-varro-did-not.html