In a recent Wall Street Journal article (5/10/2023) titled “Why We Swear To Tell The Truth”, Fay Vincent quotes the witness’s oath.

“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you  God?”  The oath taker replies, “I do.”

There are truths (veritas) of testimony and cumulative verifications (veritas) of economic laws. Verification  rests in the isomorphism of the pattern of the mathematical expression with the pattern of correlations in the data.

In the current negotiations in Congress regarding a debt limit, the swindle called “inflation” is a significant issue.

… the prime cause of inflation is ignorance.  The principles and laws of the normative macroeconomic dynamics of surplus and basic expansion, and surplus and basic incomes are not understood by academe, not formulated in establishment textbooks, not taught by academe to influential persons….. [CWL 15, 82]

Politicians must place the whole truth above personal glory; they must not make a Faustian bargain with their leaders and voters. Consider the following:

Money is a dummy invented by humans to enable divided exchange. Money is a promise of trust between people. But, simple as money’s functional purposes may seem, the determinations of how much money to create through the credit function is not well understood. There are natural limits to the supply of money, though the menace of so-called Modern Monetary Theory’s unconstrained printing of money would violate these limits and swindle the relatively vulnerable populace.

… money is an instrument invented to fulfill a definite task; it is not the ultimate master of the situation.  One has to place first human society which is served by the economic process, and second the economic process which is to be served by money.  Accordingly money has to conform to the objective exigencies of the economic process, and not vice versa. (CWL 21, 101)

Once the possibility of an unbalanced budget is established, the precedent can be invoked to persuade politicians to carry on other wars: wars on illiteracy, on poverty, on ill health, on unemployment, on insecurity.  Where the profit motive does not prove efficacious, the state must intervene. … the increasing volume of transactions requires a larger money supply, and the central bank can be persuaded to meet the demand. … it appears to be less evident that a vicious circle of ever more demands for a larger money supply with no increase in real income is inflationary … In any case there has emerged in fact if not in name the welfare state. … Its mechanism is rather strikingly similar to that of the favorable balance of foreign trade. The debt once owed by colonies to richer countries now is replaced by the national debt. … now the long overdue basic expansion is doled out to one’s fellow countrymen under the haughty name of welfare. [CWL 15, 85-86]. Continue reading