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June 8, 2017 - Radio Free Nortwest - H.A. Covington
57:02
20170608_rfn
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Oh, then tell me, Sean O 'Farrell, tell me why you hurry so.
Hush a woogle, hush and listen, and his cheeks were all aglow.
I bear orders from the captain, get you ready quick and soon, for the pikes must be together by the rising of the moon.
By the rising of the moon, by the rising of the moon.
For the pikes must be together by the rising of the moon.
Oh, then tell me, Sean O 'Farrell, where the gathering is to be?
In the old spot by the river, a rifle known to you and me.
One word more for signal, token whistle, out the marching tune.
For your bike upon your shoulder By the rising of the moon By the rising of the moon By the rising of the moon With your bike upon your shoulder By the rising of the moon Out from many a mud-walled cabin eyes Were watching through the night Many a man's chest was throbbing For the blessed warming light The forest passed along the valleys Like the man's she's lonely crew And a thousand
blades were flashing At the rising of the moon At the rising of the moon At the rising of the moon And a thousand blades were flashing At the rising of the moon Greetings from the Northwest Homeland, comrades.
It's June the 8th, 2017.
I'm Harold Covington, and this is Radio Free Northwest.
The following is a call-in panel discussion on the subject of the economy in the Northwest American Republic, recorded on June the 2nd, 2017.
There are five participants at the panel, myself and Comrade Don, Andy Donner, Comrade Claudia, and Comrade Chris from London.
I'm afraid that our usual round of technical problems pervaded this show, and two other comrades, Ida Bro and Richard from Florida, were not able to get onto the show, for which I would like to apologize to them.
At this time, I honestly don't know what the hell happened, guys.
I was able to get the other three callers into the conversation by simply dragging them and dropping them in Skype like I usually do.
But when you guys called, this weird setup we have here just decided to say, screw you, Harold, I ain't gonna work anymore tonight.
And when I tried to drag and drop you into the conversation, I kept cutting you off.
Basically, this kind of thing happens all the time because we do not have a proper internet setup here.
We're working with a bunch of 8- to 10-year-old machines that are held together by the cyber equivalent of spit and bailing wire.
My own computer skills are adequate for the moment, but very narrow and increasingly obsolete.
And while I will not describe our actual computer situation here for obvious reasons, take my word for it.
It's, shall we say, eccentric.
I am extremely tempted to go off on yet another tirade about party professionalization, but I won't.
Eventually, even I can see that there's no point in further beating a dead horse.
Until you people change the party's situation.
Will not.
I don't know what else to tell you.
You know what?
I think for our purposes, that's serviceable.
Okay.
Okay, we now have three people allegedly in the conversation.
Andy, Chris from England, and Claudia.
Can you all hear me?
Okay.
We are now on Radio Free Northwest.
It's an attempt at a call-in panel discussion, but unfortunately, as always, we are having some technical problems, and so the result is I'm not going to be talking much, which I'm sure is going to be a relief to everybody, and we're just going to let some of our callers talk about their ideas on economics.
Let's start with Chris.
Chris, as you know, I answered some of your questions on a show recently, but would you have any comments or rebuttals or arguments as to why we absolutely must have a stock exchange or whatever?
Go ahead and lay it on me now.
Well, the idea behind the stock exchange was that how are people going to make money from shares if they don't have a stock exchange to trade them through?
Another thing that you said, that we could use alcohol and ethanol in order to run an economy.
I'm not so sure that's a good idea because you would need the land for crops.
It's very expensive to produce alcohol and ethanol for fuel consumption.
It may just be cheaper just to import a slag or...
In World War II, Germans had an industry based on synthetic oil that they got from coal and other waste products.
From my limited understanding, because I'm not an expert, obviously, I'm not an agronomist, I'm not an industrialist, I don't really have the figures to hand, but from my own research, I think alcohol and ethanol are quite expensive to produce, and they do consume a lot of land, which could be used for agriculture, that would be needed during a war, and I assume if the Northwest American Republic were to be conceived of, in the future it could well be conceived in some kind of conflict.
Claudia, do you have any economic points you want to make?
If you can understand me, go ahead.
Just speak into the microphone.
Yes.
I can hear you well right now.
Oh, okay.
I just want to comment on Chris's comments.
I like the idea of a society where there is at least the opportunity For people to acquire wealth.
And I'm not talking disgusting, billionaire amounts of wealth, but I'm talking enough to care for yourself into your old age and leave something to your children, that kind of thing.
Enough to own a nice, spacious house.
I don't think we should all be living in hovels or anything, but the idea that you can acquire wealth to me is very attractive.
Otherwise, what the heck.
I live in a gulag somewhere.
But the three points I wanted to make.
One, alternative energy, by the way, I just want to say two, is extremely exciting and opens humongous possibilities.
And you covered that in your novel.
Number two, cryptocurrency and what they're doing in some states.
Nevada, I believe, is minting its own silver currency.
And then I believe some part of Massachusetts, I heard they were creating their own currency.
So new currencies, cryptocurrency, also very exciting, lots of big possibilities there.
And my personal favorite, oh, I just want to say one other thing, that I feel that we have dropped the ball.
And probably if you could point to one of the major reasons why you don't have, you know, a legion of people out there helping you, is because we don't help each other financially.
Some ethnicities, Jews in particular, help each other to the exclusion of other people with great focus.
And that's the tradition.
They've always done that.
In Dearborn, Michigan, I'm sure they have their own economy there, all the Muslims, their own businesses.
The networking amongst our darker races is unbelievable.
They help each other.
I mean, even if they hated each other's guts, they still help each other.
And that's something white people lack.
And that's where we've fallen completely down, and that's why we're in the pickle we're in.
And the third thing, which is my own pet project that I've been toying with for years, another reason why you don't have legions of people out there is because, well, the young people should just go.
But older persons like myself are probably clinging to their wage slave job because they've got a 401k, and a couple of people might still be getting a pension.
Not many.
But they're hanging on by their fingernails to what they've worked for for their entire life, and they don't want to lose it.
And what my pet project is, is the idea of a fraternal organization such that my grandfather and everybody's grandparents and great-grandparents were very familiar with, things like the Woodmen of the World, the Lutheran Brothers, who you still hear of a Lutheran Brothers.
Brotherhood Hospital, you know, other fraternal organizations based on either religion or ethnicity, Knights of Columbus, that kind of thing.
They were in their heyday after World War II, and then it dropped off sharply in the 60s and 70s.
Suddenly there wasn't everybody joining Demolay and all that.
Not that I would ever recommend anyone join anything to do with Freemasonry.
But I think if we could have some kind of fraternal organizations, trade guilds is related to that as well, that would give people the sense of a safety net.
There would have to be some kind of investing going on, pension funds, sunshine funds for if your kid breaks his leg, help with medical and other financial crises, just some perks of some kind to serve as a safety net that people can stop clinging to their little 401ks, something we can offer them instead.
Cakes and ale.
And I don't say that in any derogatory way.
Yep.
That's what white people want.
Yeah, go ahead.
A lot of the problem white people have is that they are individualists.
If you look at other races, they have a lot of enforced consensus that goes on in their communities.
Jews in particular have a very tight-knit, almost a cult-like group.
That stifles free thought and kind of a diversity of ingenuity.
So they're all conformed.
So why the white race has achieved an industrial revolution, whereas no other race has, is because there's been a diversity there of ideas and a lot of conflict between different white factions, which has led to competition and generated industrialization.
Yeah, one of the...
Main memories I have from my time in your country, Chris, is going in and out of London along the various rail lines and seeing those big, huge, socialist flat blocks, just skyscrapers reaching up to the sky with tiny little two- and maybe three-bedroom apartments in them where all the poor people were housed.
These were poor white people at the time, and that was sort of like the great monument of socialism that stuck in my mind.
Making white people live like ants in an ant hill.
And I hope you guys can hear this and this records all right.
Anyway, Andy, you got anything to put in?
Well, the thoughts I came prepared with were along the lines of the economic stuff.
And by the by, everything you just said came in loud and clear for some reason.
Okay, all right.
Very good.
Yeah, you're coming clear to me as well.
Okay.
Excellent.
Maybe I can say something too.
Okay.
In fact, I want to say something right now.
There is a famous quote, it ought to be famous anyway, by a former president of the American Psychological Association.
He's a Jew.
He said, economics is a very poor theory of human behavior, very carefully applied.
So I think that from a white nationalist point of view, Chris made interesting comments about our individualism.
And I think that an economy and that whole idea of economics ought to be viewed from our white psychology, our white sociology, and what would work for us is not necessarily what would work best for somebody else.
And that we ought to think about what kind of structure exactly we want, issues other than just a stock market.
I think no one's mentioned usury or loans at interest yet, but I think that's obviously something to discuss.
And that the National Socialist view fits in very well here in that we need to understand our nature and what economic structure works best for us.
Another good quote is, I took a course in economics once many years ago, and the first thing the professor said on the first class was, Economics is life.
So when we think about economics, we shouldn't think about it from too narrow a point of view.
It includes a whole lot, including small farms versus mega farms, the whole idea of private ownership, and what people receive from society independent of the idea of private ownership.
That's just some things I wanted to throw out there for your consideration.
Okay.
Andy, you were...
Believe it or not, and I agree with everything Don said, but believe it or not, we actually have in the general principles, which we have used, I'm using the term we loosely here, but things like the draft constitution and the prohibition on attorneys, paid attorneys, and things like that, we actually have the principles necessary to decide the issue of whether or not we have a stock market, and we have them already in everything the party's done.
I will note that we've had an awful lot of complaints, particularly from teenagers and other incredibly, and I say this with due definition of their position, but some incredibly naive younger people will get on the party's case about, you have to have attorneys because some attorneys specialize in business, and how else are business owners going to protect themselves from unscrupulous behavior on behalf of others?
And I understand their perspective, but without paid attorneys, contracts will end up being very clear and very well managed.
That is, individuals are perfectly capable of examining their own condition and examining what they need from other people.
This is a very simple transaction.
You want so much money will be exchanged for, say, so many head of cattle.
Mm-hmm.
The exchange will take place at a particular day, at a particular place, and receipts will be exchanged as well so that neither party can claim the other has cheated them.
Any other provision someone wants to write under that contract, go right ahead, right?
It's their contract.
Both parties can negotiate that.
If somebody doesn't like something, they walk away from it before the contract is signed.
And on the day of the exchange, at the place of the exchange, the goods are exchanged for money, and receipts go along with that, and there's not really a whole lot that can go wrong, you know, provided the goods were in acceptable condition and all that, which, again, add that into the contract.
Party B can walk away from the deal if party A supplies inferior product.
And define what inferior product is.
And the reality is, someone doesn't need to engage in any of these behaviors, in any of these activities, if they're not prepared to look after their own interests.
Because we have been shown time and time again that nobody can look after your interests like you can.
So it's impossible for a bureaucracy to care more about your well-being than you do.
And because that's the case, we should actually, as Claudia has asked, and I'm sure this is at the root of Chris's concerns, There's nothing wrong with somebody making money.
There's nothing wrong with somebody engaging in free market, which is not the same as capitalism.
Capitalism is people with money make the rules and the money.
Provided someone is engaged in genuine free market activity and they're doing so honestly, I actually don't have a problem with someone becoming filthy rich by that.
Okay?
Provided it was honestly gained, where's the issue?
Now, applying these very basic principles of you should know what you're doing before you go and do it.
I generally don't believe a stock exchange is necessary or even a good idea.
Now, we have a slightly older audience from what I gather.
Not everybody knows some of these terms, and I don't claim to be an economist.
Not as much as you might think.
I've seen signs recently that we have a much younger listenership than we did, largely, frankly, due to alt-right exposure on Twitter and so on.
Anyway, go ahead.
Alright, well, even better.
So, we need a few terms to find.
And again, I'm not an economist, I'm not a banker, I don't have any in detail, specific nitpick understanding of this issue.
But, in general, okay, companies, the idea of a company is to make money.
There's no reason to have a company if it's not making money.
And I say that as a matter of, that's just by definition, because the money could be better used somewhere else if the company is losing it.
So, the idea is a company makes a profit.
Owners in the company will own a certain portion.
of the company and that will entitle them to whatever profits the company doesn't spend elsewhere.
So they get a share by definition.
They have whatever percentage they own of the company is whatever percentage of the profit becomes their property after everything is said and done.
Now the purpose in owning a share in a company is whatever percentage of the shares of the company you own, you own that much of the profit.
Now part of the trouble is that initially this was for investment.
And strictly speaking, it still is for investment.
And by the by, I don't view investment, let's say someone's nothing but a professional investor and they're using their own money or money they have honestly acquired from people who wish them to invest it.
If they're willing to take the risk to be an investor, I don't have a problem with them raking it in from investing either.
Because if someone makes a good decision with their money and invests in the right companies and those companies do magnificently well.
The person who enabled this should be rewarded as well.
So that may sound to, again, I hate to use the term naive so frequently, but to a naive, that may sound as though I'm engaging in some sort of laissez-faire swashbuckling capitalism, but no, I'm not.
It's a simple matter of someone made a good decision and supported the right productive activity, and they should be rewarded in turn for that.
And again, back to Claudia's point, there's no problem with this.
Now, and this is where this becomes critically important.
One of the concerns Chris brought up, and all of his questions were fantastic, even if I don't agree with the point he's thrusting for, one of the concerns he brought up is that the purpose of the stock exchange is to protect people.
You know, you have all of these things like, Chris, I don't know how old you were right after 9-11, but right after 9-11, we over here had the Enron catastrophe.
That's kind of a case in point, because there are all sorts of things...
Hang on, Andy, I've got another body trying to get on here.
Let's see.
What Andy said was, we were talking about stock exchange.
I'm not opposed in principle to abolishing the stock exchange.
It is a source of great evil.
I'm not denying that, but I'm concerned that without a stock exchange, you wouldn't have the medium for which you would need in order to gain the skills and expertise and the knowledge to be able to trade in shares successfully.
Stock exchanges are not just places where people throw away money.
They're places where...
It's like a nexus.
I work in the city of London, and everywhere you go in this program, there are people who meet in pubs and talk and exchange information.
It's like a nexus, like a hub of communication and information that flows around.
And without those vital sources of information, how are you going to successfully coordinate your share trading activities?
All right.
That's the question I intend to answer, and it's a perfectly fine question.
Now, do we need that for the purpose of exchanging company ownership?
And the honest answer is no.
And this is the sort of thing that it's very attractive, especially in a genuinely free market society, to enable the individual to invest their money wherever they wish.
And I see no reason to tell someone they can't do that.
In fact, telling someone they can't use their money a certain way is tantamount to prohibiting all activity related to that because all activity requires money, right?
So you're never going to hear someone in the party say, you may not invest your money in that activity that is otherwise lawful.
The issue is, why do we need to make ownership of companies?
Because bear in mind, this is something Harold mentioned in the RFN show where this was dealt with, but the actual purpose in owning shares is collecting profit.
And the value of the business, by definition, is some multiple of its profit year over year.
The value of a share should be the same fraction of that, by definition.
Now, those terms being what they're for, the stock market itself obfuscates what stocks are really for because of the way people will inevitably just start using the stock market to play.
Now, that in and of itself isn't wrong, but for people that are serious investors, a serious investor isn't going to play around with the public stock market.
Reality is, investing is for people who are investors.
And I don't think we need a separate investor class, but neither do we need to make brokering ownership of companies something that when you own a company, granted this is in the American system, owning shares means you have some say in who's on the board of directors and the board of directors hire and fire executive management.
There isn't any reason that the man on the street needs to have access to hiring and firing businesses, hiring and firing executive management, that is, of businesses that, quite frankly, they know nothing about.
That should be up to the people who own the company and the people investing in the company.
And again, that doesn't have to be just investment class only because I don't think we need a separate investor class, but the stock market serves to democratize a whole bunch of things that really don't need to be democratized.
It needs to be the people who seriously create, own, and sell companies engaged in that activity.
And someone who is going to seriously engage in that activity on a regular basis would look out for their own interests in such a way that we don't need a stock market to protect anything because such a person would be able to correctly negotiate the value of shares that they're about to purchase.
Claudia, do you have anything to put in here?
I'm trying to keep the time allocated more or less equal between the four of you here.
Claudia, you got something you want to add there?
Well, I think all the points are valid, and I don't think stock exchanges are inherently evil.
It's the people who are involved.
I don't really have much to add on that.
In a society where there's no interest, people would have to trade in shares in order to make profits.
And you're going to seriously inhibit that activity by not having a stock exchange.
But I want to ask why.
Why is it the case that people who seriously want...
I mean, if someone's going to be financial class or investor class or whatever, they should be able to manage that on their own with contracts negotiating sales of shares and things like that.
Why is it?
Because again, go back to the analogies and lessons Harold put in the Northwest novels.
No, there weren't necessarily shares involved in productive activity.
Now, if someone wants to sell shares in their productive activity, that is perfectly okay.
But I'll also note that I've worked at companies that were considering going public, and they had a very interesting problem come up, and that's that issuing shares actually decreases the value of the share.
Because unless you do something that increases the value of the business, selling more shares only creates a net drain for the people that already own shares.
So it's not necessarily in a business's interest to even issue shares unless they desperately need capital.
And the reality is that the value is in what they produce and what they do for people, not necessarily whether or not they sold shares.
So I don't accept the premise that somebody has to trade in shares to make money, because they can just go do things for other people and get paid.
Maybe we should sell shares in the party.
I think you could try running an economy like that, but I think it could potentially work, but I think the growth would be very slow.
Well, again, if somebody needs capital to grow, they can certainly sell shares in their company.
The issue is that we don't have to have a centralized exchange for someone to do so.
I don't accept the premise that someone has to do so, because if someone wants to engage in a risky endeavor and they want to get partners to help soften the blow in case it fails, they can certainly do so.
Well, I hope you guys can understand me here.
The first shares were sold, as Chris has said, in London in coffee houses and the backs of pubs in the 17th century.
And, of course, if you want to sell shares in your company, there is no reason why it can't be done in that kind of informal or private setting.
I'm not quite sure why you need a central exchange where anybody, any Tom, Dick, and Harry can walk in and buy stocks.
Okay, now, were you guys able to understand that?
Not every word, but all of the important words.
I got the gist of it.
I see trade on the international stock exchange as a form of warfare.
Hang on, guys.
Got another guy trying to get in.
I'll be right back with you.
Okay.
All right, fair enough.
Well, there's nothing wrong with the question Chris is asking.
It's just the underlying premise that buying and selling of shares in companies has to happen on an exchange, because it doesn't.
And I would prefer that it doesn't happen on an exchange, even though the exchange itself is not inherently wrong.
It's that there should be a normal and natural barrier for someone getting involved in that activity, just like any other activity, where they should have to be reasonably confident that they're not being suckered.
And the exchange creates the premise, and the false premise, I might add, that you're getting something honest, a la M1.
Yeah, the question is, do you want to trade on the International Stock Exchange in the Northwest American Republic?
And if the answer is yes, you'd better have a stock exchange so you can compete with other stock exchanges.
I think it will be legal in the Republic to issue, buy, and sell shares, not necessarily on a central exchange.
Yeah, so I have a friend who's a property consultant.
He has actually seen in the UK we have our lawyers are called barristers and solicitors.
In America, I think you call them attorneys.
And he's actually seen that happen where solicitors, lawyers, have written laws in tenancy agreements which don't make any sense.
I mean, they take the old tenancy law and they put it right next to a new tenancy law without any kind of translation whatsoever.
They do that deliberately to confuse the law so that they have to be paid to sort it all out.
When I was at university, I was affiliated with a law society where they actually say to each other that the whole point of being a lawyer is that we're all in one group.
This is our group.
This is our in-group.
And never give a sucker an even break.
That was the ethos in this law society at my university.
In America, it's probably even worse.
Well, it's probably about the same overall, I would say, in terms of what lawyers do and what they are.
I know professionals who work in property who have seen property legislation being completely mauled deliberately by lawyers to deliberately confuse the law, so they have to be used to interpret it.
Well, and that's very true.
That's precisely, as you say, that's precisely how they act.
It's called a racket or racketeering, where you have to pay a lawyer to solve a problem that another lawyer created deliberately to put you in that position.
And what I want to emphasize is benefits of a stock exchange actually go away altogether, simply because individuals are going to be required to do their own legwork and make sure what they're getting involved in is one, what they think it is, and two, it has the value that they're being told it has.
The issue with the International Stock Exchange is that I don't know that we would ever want to allow mixing of international anything into the NAR.
Simply because that enables someone to buy up a whole bunch of assets that might be NAR related and then swallow a poison pill financially and ruin Northwest assets.
And because of that, I honestly don't see why we can't go back to a system where people who are actually investors and actually have interests in owning a company outright, or at least owning portions of companies for the purpose of genuine investing, as opposed to the sort of speculation that the stock market is used for now.
I don't see any reason we can't just go back to that.
As you say, it may inhibit some low-level purchases that really aren't supposed to happen in the first place, but bear in mind, the only reason anybody has any motivation to get involved in the stock market in this society is because it supposedly, and I consider this prospect very questionable, but it supposedly beats inflation.
If you're in a society that doesn't have runaway inflation to begin with, The prospect of being forced to or even being enticed to invest in the stock market is very questionable because, quite frankly, that should be for people who know what they're doing with owning things.
I believe India have a regime whereby if you want to invest in India, there needs to be an Indian citizen on your board of directors.
A lot of countries have that arrangement.
Sorry?
A lot of countries have that arrangement.
Yes.
So is that something you would seek to replicate?
I would probably say so.
I don't find that inherently unreasonable, and if we could get some sort of a situation where outside interests were being watched like a hawk, and there were somebody in the country who would administer anything related to what's going on in the NAR, so that we could go after them if we don't like something, or something untowards has happened, then yeah, that's not inherently problematic.
That arrangement does work, but it...
Countries where that arrangement doesn't happen, like China, for example, their economies are booming massively compared to India's.
Define booming and from whose viewpoint are they booming?
Are they booming in the form of very high prices on the stock exchange and billionaires buying mansions?
Or are the people themselves of those countries getting any kind of the overflow of all those goodies and all that money?
In terms of capital intake and the revenues that are drawn from it.
Well, see, this is, again, we're talking about here if I were king and if I were some kind of individual with dictatorial powers to make everybody just do what I wanted and so forth and so on, which isn't going to happen, but if that was the case, my concern...
And I believe the concern of the Northwest government has to be not for capital intake or share prices or the profits of corporations.
It has to be for the working white man and woman on the ground with the house and family and the job and the lives.
Now, no nation ever for, God, at least a century in Europe or here has ever really been concerned about that, has really given a damn about the ordinary white man.
To reinforce the point he's made and to go back to what Don said earlier, I happen to have been presented some material years ago on something called Elliott Wave Theory, and the basis of Elliott Wave Theory in terms of stock pricing is predicting it for the purposes of speculation.
But to emphasize what Don said earlier, human interactions are frequently driven by two things: fear, And greed.
And the reality is that, just like now, every week since Donald Trump has been elected, we've had a new high in stocks.
I mean, I don't think there's been a week where I've gone without seeing that news, that there hasn't been any significant economic change anywhere or change in legislation anywhere that would warrant that much exuberance in the stock market.
And the problem with any stock market is, once we make that the point you go to to engage in large economic activity, everybody's going to sit there and just watch numbers.
And a lot of these numbers, they're a factor of not just the actual value of what's being sold, if any, but the volume of trades, right?
Andy, I would like to interject and ask you a question.
And that is, and I'm amazed you haven't thought of this question, but if there's no legal stock market, stock exchange like we have now, wouldn't people's trading and both stocks and information just go to the internet?
And we'd have...
Well, it's quite possible that the activity in the NAR, especially around larger economic transactions, may exactly mirror what goes on in the stock market.
The issue is, I would prefer it not be central, and not because I have a bias towards decentralization.
So in short, what you're saying is very possible, Don.
In fact, it may even happen exactly like you're saying, and I don't think that would be a problem.
The issue is, I don't think we inherently need it to be that way, but also...
And this is the real reason I'm skeptical of the concept of a stock exchange, even if it's not inherently wrong, is that we end up taking economic temperature based on, and this is for no sane reason, people will end up using what's going on in the stock market, which will inherently start being used for just speculation.
So it's trade this, it went up a little bit, trade it again, it went down a little bit, it was a bad deal, trade it again.
And that's what stock markets end up being used for, but they should be used.
For long-term, okay, I'm staking a position here and I'm buying these shares because I want that profit in the long run.
That's not what ends up happening.
But also, the entire country would end up just watching it and they'd use it as a barometer for economic activity, even though, and granted, we wouldn't have a government doing things like quantitative easing because this is another reason we hate lawyers, right?
Because quantitative easing sounds complicated.
Well, if I make those words into something everyone understands, it's a government program called quantitative easing, and I could just call it a government program called numbers feel good.
But if I held a press conference saying, I'm the government and I'm going to do numbers feel good, you'd look at me like I'm an idiot.
But that's all quantitative easing did, is the government printed money and then used that to buy stocks to inflate the stock prices to make everyone think there's economic activity.
So the real issue with a stock market is it's a layer between people and actual economic activity.
I would rather people interface directly with economic activity, even if they end up doing so in the form of owning shares.
So that you don't have some convoluted thing that most people can't quite get their mind around because, again, everybody on this call is smarter than everybody else.
Okay, I hate to say that because it sounds like I'm a giant ass, but as has been revealed in recent RFN comments, I am the most unlikable man on the internet, so to speak.
And that's just how it is.
I have to point out that, as Harold has said, the average white person on the ground isn't going to be able to wrap their heads around the intricacies of what a stock market actually does.
Even I don't know all the low-level details.
I know what the objectives are and I know what the inputs are, so I can kind of guess what goes on in the middle.
But the reality is that the average person is going to start looking at the stock market as some sort of indicator of, are things going well or are things going badly?
And just because shares dip a bit in price doesn't mean something's going bad.
Inherent, right?
And that's the problem with this is that it creates an obfuscation layer that's very opaque to the vast majority of people, and they can't tell what's actually going on with their investments or with a particular company or in a particular sector.
And the one thing we need to do is make sure that the average person in the NAR has the ability to understand their own dealings and whether or not they actually want to proceed with a deal.
The stock market is essentially a hive of predatory speculation.
The question is, who's the predator and who's the prey?
That is the purpose of the stock market, is to engage in economic warfare.
But you're saying that we should not engage in any economic warfare.
Well, I haven't said that at all.
Competition is fantastic.
The only caveat I have on that is, especially in the NAR, someone should have the possibility to tell that they're getting involved in a bad deal, and the best way for someone to do that is for them to have to do their own legwork.
Because if somebody is not willing to do their own legwork on a deal involving the exchange of stock for money or whatever else, they're going to be prey no matter what.
Well, that's where all your Jews always come into economic things is as middlemen, as brokers, as wheeler dealers, as the guy who promises that you can get rich quick if you'll just trust all your money to him.
The stock market as it exists creates too many shades of gray where Jews can thrive.
That's another problem I have with it.
Well, I keep bringing up Enron for a reason.
And for those of you that don't know what went on with Enron, and this was shortly after 9-11.
So there are an awful lot of people listening to this that might have been five years old when this happened.
I was actually in the 11th grade, so I have some understanding of the news around that time.
Basically, Enron, the energy company, engaged in a whole bunch of shady and bad business, but they hid all of that in subsidiary corporations that held debt.
And you couldn't tell that.
The stock market wasn't going to tell someone that.
So now we have, I believe the law is Sarbanes-Oxley is what came out of this situation where companies are required to report this and that and the other and so on and so forth.
But the reality is someone that wants to engage in predatory activity is going to do so very easily, as Chris says, on the stock market.
And the stock market will actually obfuscate the fact that they're doing something they shouldn't be.
So it's better to have someone that knows how to manage that situation when they want to buy stock.
There will always be insider trading.
There will always be these situations.
Well, one problem is that there are people right now, in this country anyway, who want to put things like the Social Security Fund and people's private pensions and 401ks and everything all into the stock market.
All of these safety nets, they just want to pour it all into this big gambling casino, this giant roulette wheel.
And if they get their way, it is entirely conceivable that Social Security and Medicare and private pensions and 401ks and everything else could just go right down the tube when the market makes a so-called adjustment.
There's nothing wrong with buying and selling shares to maintain a company or a going concern that's actually manufacturing something or providing something, goods or services.
Shares in that is fine, but the use of a centralized stock market as a form of gambling?
You might as well just walk into a casino and stick all your money in a slot machine.
Not everyone gambles on the stock exchange because there are people, there are groups of people inside the stock market who know what's going on.
I have to interject here and disagree completely with both of you because everyone speculates.
Everybody who's in business, everybody who owns a farm.
Don, we can't hear you, but I'm going to make the point you're going to make.
I don't think he can hear you.
I will make your point for you, Don, because we can't hear you.
Don is making a point.
What is the definition of a speculator?
If you've ever gone to a market and bought green bananas, nobody eats green bananas.
If you buy green bananas, you're a speculator because you're banking on the fact, you're taking a gamble that you would rather spend that money on those bananas right now because you'll have bright bananas to eat in a few days.
Everybody's a speculator.
Every interaction that goes on in the stock market is a risk-taking action.
And back to my point, incorporating Don's point, since all of this is inherently risky behavior, the only people, and it was mentioned right when we started this call, that the stock market would provide the feeling of a safety net or some sort of perceived safety net.
There is no safety net in reality, so we should not, and this goes back to what I said about creating an obfuscating layer, we should not provide someone the expectation of a safety net when in fact there is none.
People who want to engage in lawful exchange of shares do not need a stock market to do so.
Chris, you're quite right.
There are people that don't gamble in the stock market.
There are people that are genuine, good-natured investors that actually want to participate in that way.
And in the NAR, someone who wants to do that will be able to do so, but legitimate activity that is above board does not require a stock market.
And it does not require a stock market because people who should be involved in trading shares understand that they're taking a huge risk every single time.
And they should do the legwork to make sure that risk is good.
And a stock market will keep people from doing that.
Now, is there any non-stock exchange economic issue or anything you guys want to talk about?
I'd like to ask one question.
What does everyone think about the gold standard and pegging currency to the gold standard?
Do not do it.
Do not do it.
And as much as there are gold bugs listening, and I say that with affection because I know an awful lot of these people, and for the record, I consider every single one of them incredibly intelligent, even though I don't agree with them on this.
The gold standard is a little bit iffy.
Not because it's inherently bad, but it has a particular flaw.
One, and this is the major flaw, if somebody suddenly finds gold, they're rich for having done nothing.
And again, that's not necessarily likely, but there's a bit of a flaw.
The reality is, and most people here will probably have heard of or outright remember the Follow the White Rabbit podcast done by, I can't remember now, anyway, he read a whole bunch of books by Dr. Joseph P. Farrell.
And those are some very interesting books, even though Farrell hates white nationalism, he himself is white.
And he actually does a whole bunch of very ancient history, and the most stable of currencies were actually fiat public central bank currencies.
And the reason for that was if somebody limited their currency to a particular type of thing, be it metal or something else, counterfeiting would eventually become a huge problem.
So it's better just to have a fiat currency public central bank like the Deutsche Bank or something like that.
That has proven over long periods of history to be the most stable.
Now, that said, there's nothing wrong with someone owning gold or other precious metals because they do store value.
They're not by any means a bad thing.
Hey, Claudia, you've been quiet for a while.
Well, I have to say something that some people might think is a little persnickety, but this is all well and fine.
Oh, and I just want to say, what about the commodities market?
But this is all well and fine, but let's get there first.
I mean, let's get our people who are suffering and limping along out there, and we can worry about the stock market after we've set up shop, so to speak.
But this is all blue-skying and not really practical.
There is a lot of that in our movement, Claudia.
You'll be amazed.
I'm amazed how much of my time people want me to spend crystal ball gazing and blue skying and describing the big rock candy mountain for people whom I can't even get a $20 donation off of.
I'm not really complaining.
That's just us.
That's the movement.
That's who we are.
It's who we've always been.
But, yeah, we've got a long road to go, folks, before any of this happens.
Right.
We do have some things we need to do first, and Claudia's right to bring that up.
People's motivation to ask these questions is, again, they're good, reasonable motivations, right?
They want to try and stack up where we stand against where they stand ideologically and things, but it's worth noting that a lot of the subtext to that is they want to know whether or not they need to get involved at all or if they think we're raving commie heretics or something and we're not.
We're not communists.
But the reality is...
There are a number of things, and for example, and I will never ever detail these unless the right situation comes about, but there are things in the draft constitution I personally don't agree with.
Again, I'm not going to tell you what they are because they're not relevant.
Like Claudia says, we need to get there first.
But I've looked at those things and said, you know what, I'm not going to spaz.
There are things the party has projected that will happen that I personally don't like.
And I knew all that before I even emailed Harold the first time back in 2010.
But that didn't stop.
So what I would say to people that are genuinely concerned about these things is, you know what, like Claudia says, we've got something to do first.
Let me say again, folks, that Constitution is a draft only.
The actual final form of government for the Northwest American Republic will be settled in a constitutional convention by the men and women who actually bring the country to birth.
It may look something like the present draft Constitution.
It may not.
It may be something completely different, but that's not our call.
Like I say, all of this stuff you're hearing here is pure if I were king type of stuff.
The real kings will make the kingdom that they fight and bleed for.
I'd like to ask another question, actually.
What does everyone think about tally sticks?
Isn't that a good method of storing value?
Those things were used almost up until the 19th century, I think.
They were a very primitive form of accounting.
I think they kept using tally sticks up until the early part of the 19th century, and they phased them out because they wanted to keep the men who made them employed until they retired.
I know that the tax records in England were kept in tally sticks.
You could tell by the grain of the wood that it came from the same sticks.
I can't say I've researched them.
I know what you're talking about, and I can't say I've researched them in any great detail, but I don't see anything inherently wrong.
That said, I know probably the least about that as anything.
I think a lot of the law and the business practice and the customs in the Northwest American Republic would revert to stuff that is based in...
Early Anglo-Saxon practice.
And can you guys understand what I'm saying at all here?
You're breaking up again, but I just don't understand.
Well, vaguely.
I know vaguely what you're talking about.
That may be phrased a little bit better for most of the audience.
What has to happen economically and business-wise in the NAR will central around proving value.
Because anyone that actually wants investors in their business is going to be ready-made with something provable that they can exercise off the cuff in a very convincing way.
And sure, they could lie, but what we'll have to do, and this will be we the society collectively, is we have to insist on a high standard of, if you say you have something valuable, you have to be ready to prove the value of the thing you're doing or selling or producing.
And if we can get to that point, I don't think a lot of the details will matter as much.
Alright, any other economics-related questions that anyone wants to talk about?
How would the Northwest economy function in an emergency?
I know the early 13 colonies, when they seceded from Great Britain, they had something called Continental Script or something like that.
Would there be a similar situation in the Northwest?
Would you print money, or would you store it electronically, or would you Bitcoin?
I wish you could understand me a little better.
I get into that in Freedom's Sons.
My guess would be, and I hope you can understand this, that we probably will not have enough gold or silver or platinum or other precious metals to coin money and have a completely species-related economy.
I don't anticipate there being an issue with how it's stored.
If you want to store it electronically, store it in a cryptocurrency that the state comes up with, or I realize that's somewhat contradictory cryptocurrency that the state comes up with, but how it's stored isn't so much important as how it's created and how its value is maintained.
And a lot of that comes back to People are going to have to do things that are productive for each other.
I'm a little bit leery about any kind of electronic currency because that would mean that some foreign enemy sitting thousands of miles away behind a computer keyboard could click a few function keys and mess up our economy.
Well, that does exist.
And I will note that, again, there are people...
I'm not so keen on cryptocurrencies myself for a few reasons.
One of them is the electronic issue.
I have tried asking questions of people that ye hang about with the NF about cryptocurrencies, but the actual meaning of my question seems to go over their head on a regular basis, and I continually try to assess whether or not that could be something we could use.
There are some concerns with cryptocurrencies, particularly that to manage them correctly, people have to really know what they're doing, that as individuals have to be pretty sharp to make sure they understand how this works.
And I don't know that that's something for the average person, so it may be unattainable.
For Joe Schmo on the street.
And don't forget, during the US Civil War, the Confederate currency was completely decimated.
It was worthless.
Even the mid-part of the war, the Confederate currency was completely valueless as a viable currency for any foreign nation to trade in.
I mean, the Confederacy tried to get Britain to buy its cotton.
Hello?
Chris, you kind of cut off there.
Anyway, yeah, well, and Chris is raising a valid historical point that, yeah, we need to do something.
This is back towards his question about how does the economy function in an emergency?
And we do need to do something about the issue of economic disaster at home as well as foreign attacks on the value of the currency.
But this kind of all comes down to, again, the same issue of are we going to allow people to even trade in our currency?
And if so, what would be the actual value of that to the NAR?
Why not, again, use a Third Reich-style trade credit scheme?
Because that seems like something the NAR would be able to keep much more control of.
And I'll note that because it's coming from the outside, there's a border crossing involved, so it's automatically the NAR's and government business anyway.
So you might as well let the NAR have a bank that does nothing but trade credits.
It was more of an observation that the states depended upon an intervention and would try and win the pot of water, but they had no chance.
It is going to be, if the NAR were involved in a war, it would be incredibly tough.
Apparently, they may turn out to be badges.
Yeah, so what Chris has said is he's making a historical observation that the South was depending on an external power during the war, and what happened is Britain just switched its cotton supply from going to the South to going to the North, and the Southern currency ended up valueless, and if the NAR was in a war, we'd have a very hard time, which that goes without saying, right?
I don't think the difficulty of surviving an attack or surviving oppression from outside forces is greatly...
Decreased or increased either way, depending on how we set up our foreign trade.
And because of that, I would tend to prefer the Reichsmark's trade credit solution, simply because I don't think all of this interaction with foreign entities is going to greatly help us as far as survival goes.
That's the sort of thing that you would genuinely need a Third Reich historian to address correctly, and I don't know that as much of a history nut as Harold is, I don't know that we actually have anyone around that's actually kept up with details on that level.
One has to realize that war isn't something any economy can put up with for very long.
The Germans did it solely by force of will.
It has been stated repeatedly, and this is something I agree with, and it's something that's been stated in at least one or two Northwest novels, and it's something that's been on RFN repeatedly.
The NAR is going to have to come up with some military whiz-bang whatever that makes it impossible to effectively invade the NAR so that we can always keep external forces at bay and effectively do so.
That's just something that has to happen.
We will have to come up with a military deterrent.
I can't see that Chris is saying anything.
Our technology seems to be going from bad to worse.
Is there anything else that you would like to say, Claudia?
We might as well, I guess, begin winding this up.
No, I think it's great that you're addressing it.
I think everybody should invest in the white homeland in any way they can.
Okay, Don?
Well, it's unfortunate that we had these problems that prevented more interaction.
I had several things I wanted to say which we haven't had a chance to address.
You're recording here fine.
I wanted to address some other issues.
We've really just touched the surface here, and one of the things I wanted to say is from an engineer's point of view...
What is an economy?
An economy is when people and other resources interact to produce goods and services for people.
And the issue of currency, stock markets, and things like that all should be viewed from that point.
And the difference between capitalism and socialism is simply that the rules are different.
The rules that the government enforces are different.
The rules that the people who have a monopoly on force are different.
So what we think of as capitalism and what we think of as socialism aren't the only choices out there.
The National Socialists in Germany showed us another way, and people say, well, there's mixes of these two, but it's not just those two.
You have a lot of other choices.
You can arrange, create something different.
Going back to the first thing I said, economics being, would I quote, economics is a very poor theory of human behavior, very carefully applied.
Well, we can use our knowledge of human behavior, of human nature, to devise a system that works better than the one we're using right now, for example.
So, I wanted to open it up to a lot of other things than just some of these relatively specialized technical arguments.
All right, I can't quite tell if Don is still speaking, so I'm going to go ahead and interrupt.
I don't think he is.
Don has mentioned the issue of various types of economic model.
You know, there's capitalism, which pretends to be the free market, and there's a Marxist-type socialism, and national socialism genuinely is something different.
Now, I'm not...
I'm a total expert in that subject, but I do have a planned RFN talk coming up on whether or not the party is communist, because some of us happen to be sort of national socialists, and the answer is no, we're not, but I'm actually going to...
This is for the benefit of the standard red-blooded American type that is worried that the party is a left-wing organization, because there are some very excellent people that have hopped on board with the party that have told me they're worried about that as an issue, but they've still decided to do the right thing and hop on board.
So...
I'm actually going to do a definitive once and for all, no, we're not communists, we're not left-wing, and so that is something that we actually have to address at some point, and I'm going to do so very soon, I hope.
I don't really want to tease things, but that's kind of the underlying theme in all of this conversation is whether or not the party is a left-wing entity.
And it isn't.
But I'll need you to allow me a future date to convince everyone of that.
Okay.
Chris, anything else?
I can't think of anything else at the moment.
You're back.
Yeah, I agree in principle of abolishing stock exchange.
It is a source of great evil.
The point I'm trying to make is that if you are going to trade on the international stock market, you'd probably need a stock exchange in order to get the necessary information and expertise out.
The question is, do you want to trade on the international stock market?
Because if you want to, then you're going to need a stock.
Well, realistically that's not going to be my call.
Realistically, it's also not going to be my call, but I honestly will throw down my pronouncement now and say that's just not something we want to mess with simply due to the fact that somebody could buy Northwest assets and swallow a poison pill and wreck a Northwest industry.
That's true.
Hopefully, if the Northwest American Republic were to have trading assets on the stock market, the international stock market, it would have sufficient regulation to be able to do so.
But if it was that concerned over the potential dangers of doing so, Well, bear in mind, even things like, you know, again, Sarbanes-Oxley, which, if I remember correctly, is the name of the legislation that came out of the Enron catastrophe.
We can come up with all the regulation we want, but the reality is that most regulation has incredibly bad, unforeseen consequences and unintended effects.
And the reality is that we just don't want to go down that for our economy.
For example, how many directors of the Enron company were executed for what they did?
Well, and this is the problem, is I don't know that they did anything that was outright capital.
Exactly.
You know, capital crime-wise.
My vision of better regulation would be to bring those who are responsible for what is essentially economic treason to justice.
Well, you know, in communist China, they do execute major fraudsters, bankers who screw up, and industrialists who make massive errors.
They will take part of the local stadium and shoot them to the head.
I seem to remember that the CEO of Enron did die.
He was murdered, apparently.
What Enron did was essentially a type of fraud.
Well, fraud is already illegal, right?
So in reality, and this goes back to what sort of society do we want the NAR to be, we're not going to need a whole lot of those regulations because fraud is a type of theft by deception, and theft will just plain be illegal.
We don't want to create a situation where suddenly we have to fall back on these types of regs.
A lot of people say that 2007, 2008, the collapse then was due to people in the banking industry say it was deregulation.
Well, it was just one regulation being taken away, and the regulation that was put in place to counter the bad effects of that regulation was forcing something over now.
So it's not this idea that we want to have, to be fair to Chris's point, he's not talking about pages and pages and pages of regs that nobody can understand, but the instant that we come up with a section of NAR life that has a whole bunch of rules all of a sudden when other aspects of NAR life just didn't, we need to look at that from our base principles and say, maybe if that's what it takes to do this whole international stock exchange, maybe we don't want to do that because that's not who we are.
Just a thought.
Okay, anybody got anything else?
All right, guys, thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Indeed.
Thank everybody for showing up.
Okay, right.
Well, our time is up now for this week's edition of Radio Free Northwest.
This program is brought to you by the Northwest Front, Post Office Box 2188, Bremerton, Washington, 98310.
Or you can go to the party's website at www.northwestfront.org.
This is Harold Covington, and I'll see you next week.
Until then, Sasha Underban.
Freedom.
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