What Reforms Should Take Priority for Reformers
An Exchange of Views Compiled by Edward J. Dodson
[From a series of emails posted during May 2015]
The following exchanges were stimulated by an initial email posted by
Robert Keall of New Zealand. His position is that proposals for
monetary reform divert attention from the core challenge of reforming
the means by which government raises revenue. He wrote:
The Georgist movement in the U.K., U.S., and Australia
should not undermine our unique clean PROFILE by patronising wacky
ferals with their self-opinionated, half-baked insidious, subversive
heretical nostrums, putting themselves above the "Prophet of
San Francisco" and Einstein. They are not friends but the enemy
within.
Early in February I submitted our case to the Local Govt. Reform
Commission defending Land Value Rating against the Capital Value
Rating it plans to impose. This was widely circulated.
In March, Deirdre Kent rang to applaud the Submission and sought to
visit. On the evidence, she and her husband were warmly welcomed.
She avoided any discussion about currency issues, but her husband
later volunteered their ascription to the Douglas Social Credit
Theorem, explicitly. I overlooked that in light of Deirdre's applaud
for my Submission.
I later rang requesting a copy of their Submission and was told "It's
in the mail". (In fact it hadn't been written). A further
request in May elicited a copy dated 28th April of their Submission
to the Christchurch City Council supporting Land Value Rating but
including such as -
- "(We are) a group of people who believe in the public
creation of money without interest ......."
- "(We advocate) a Christchurch currency with a
circulation incentive, spent into existence ......"
- "......... a sustainable complementary currency in
Christchurch ........... used to pay rates and Council fees
........."
- " Christchurch would effectively have two currencies
......."
This proposal for an illegal counterfeit currency will be rejected.
Anything good will be thrown out with it. That rejection will
operate against our defence of our unique global record and our
plans to promote it. I've had some very encouraging, but isolated,
support for my previous protest of 16th March."
This post generated a number of responses, including one from Michael
Hudson, to which I responded privately but with copies to a select
group of persons I thought would find the exchange of interest. My
responses come from my own experience working in the financial
services sector of the United States economy.
Ed Dodson: Michael, The issues you raised are more
appropriate the subject for a roundtable exchange than an email in
which many people are copied without any expression of interest. Bob
Keall in New Zealand is obviously quite frustrated because the world
system is coming unglued and no one is listening to his calls for
activism. Clearly, he fully embraces Henry George's analysis and
sees no reason for continuous debate or pragmatic compromises.
What is unfair of you, I submit, is your tendency to lump everyone
who has been in some way involved with the Georgist community
(whatever "movement" there was did not survive very long
after the First World War) as of one mind. You state: "From the
outset, George's followers have been bedeviled by bad theorizing
about money and credit." As you know, Henry George argued
(Social Problems, 1883): "it is the business of government to
issue money." (p.178) He explains his reasoning:
"To leave it to every one who chose to do so to
issue money would be to entail general inconvenience and loss, to
offer many temptations to roguery, and to put the poorer classes
of society at a great disadvantage."
He observed first-hand the problems of bank-issued currencies. Yet,
in none of his writings can I find that he read and absorbed Adam
Smith's description of the operation of the Bank of Amsterdam during
that period when it functioned as a deposit bank issuing receipt
money. Henry George's basic position on the money questions is
revealed in an 1894 article he wrote in response to the call for the
coinage of silver by Westerners:
"The Greenbackers of the West (or, to call them by
a name that they would now more generally recognize, the "money
reformers") overestimate the importance of the money
question, as indeed do the orthodox writers. Money has served, and
does yet serve, most important functions in exchange. But there
were men before money, and the further progress of our
civilization is steadily to lessen the use and minimize the
importance of money. Money is really a mere medium of exchange: a
mere counter of value, and its kind or quality is as little
essential as the kind or quality of a poker chip is to the game."
As you note: "For many decades, Oscar Johansson and Robert
Andelson (supported by Lowell Harriss) imposed von-Misian "hard
money" approaches on the American Georgist institutions. Today,
there is still a dominant tendency of Georgism to follow "Austrian"
theory." This brief quote from an article Johansson wrote I
1969 puts his views in their appropriate context:
"But governments will interfere. Even if they
stopped inflating their currencies when the free market was
established, such a halt would only be temporary, because any
nation, particularly if it is a great power, will suffer economic
and social disturbances sooner or later if it treats land as
though it were private property. Poverty, unemployment and busts
will be the order of the day. The one palliative which is
invariably adopted to alleviate such conditions is inflation of
the money supply, for it usually does work temporarily. But this
causes the exchange rate of such a nation's currency to drop.
Politics being what it is, those in control wish to disguise that
fact and so intervene in one way or another; ergo, the free market
disappears. Therefore until the day arrives when men see the
obvious - that they are living on and from the land, and that
access to the land must always be freely available - monetary
crisis will follow monetary crisis no matter what are created to
prevent them."
The lesson of history seems to be that without solving the land
question, the money question will continue to plague societies
regardless of whether the currency is issued by government directly,
by the bank-controlled central bank, or by each bank individually.
When one compares how global commerce operated under different
monetary structures, the deposit bank seems to have far more virtues
than vices. This conclusion is supported by Quinn and Roberds
(2005):
"Our argument is that the Bank of Amsterdam,
called the Wisselbank in Dutch, was ultimately successful in its
goal [to prevent debasement of coinage]. As a consequence, the
Dutch Republic was able to maintain a stable system of coinage for
roughly 150 years, and Wisselbank money became the foundation of
European commerce and finance. As late as 1776, Adam Smith in The
Wealth of Nations praised the money of the Wisselbank for its
intrinsic superiority to currency."
Tighter regulation and independent auditing might have prevented
the Bank from departing from its charter and acting as a lending
institution. It was a simple step from there to the chartering of
the Bank of England under conditions that guaranteed monetary
expansion and inflation. The global monetary system went from
receipt money to ostensibly redeemable bank notes to today's
promises to pay nothing in particular.
It is the case that many in the Georgist community find reason to
embrace local currency systems, although I am not sure this comes
out a libertarian ideology. The reason is pragmatic, for much the
same reason as community land trusts are promoted. Both initiatives
are pragmatic ways to mitigate the economic hardships experienced by
those left behind by corporate and financial capitalism. If
anything, these strategies are best described as "counterculture."
There is a fundamental element of democratic socialism ingrained in
these strategies. But this is a socialism that is decentralized and
apart from the top-down dictates of the State, which is the
socialism Henry George found disagreeable to individual initiative.
You write: "This led George not to criticize the charging of
interest - because, as he explained in a letter to Michael
Flurscheim, he couldn't figure out how to tax interest in the same
way he taxed land." The issue we struggle with today is the use
of the term "interest" to describe both earned wealth and
fees paid and receipt for the temporary use of another party's
purchasing power. Is it your position that if I transfer my
purchasing power to someone else that I should do so without
expectation of receiving a fee that reflects (i.e., prices for) the
risks and compensates me for the time during which I am not able to
use these funds for consumption or investment?
You write: "The solution, of course, would have been public
banking. But this ran against George's individualistic, increasingly
anti-socialist politics." Given the events that occurred after
his death, I suspect that Henry George would have come to embrace
the concept of public banking. His major issue seems to have been
the power to issue currency as the responsibility of the national
government.
You write: "Georgism has blocked itself from the mainstream by
taking a land-tax out of the political context, and from the context
of how the overall economy works as a system." Henry George and
his key supporters made many strategic mistakes as they worked for
change in law. Their crusade should have been carried out as a moral
crusade against privilege in all its forms. When the front door
would not open, they tried the side doors (a progressive income
tax), then the back doors (local property taxes). What they ran into
in the United States and other countries where land markets thrived
was the entrenched instinct of people to speculate in land as the
path to personal wealth. As Jackson Turner Main wrote back in the
1960s, by the time of the mid-1700s most of the wealth held by
leading colonials was inherited. How to overcome such a
deeply-entrenched system of privilege that people accepted as a
birthright? Not even Thomas Paine could stir them from their
eagerness to play the game.
I believe you overstate the case when you say: "The key
perception should be that land rent has been turned into a flow of
interest paid to banks and bondholders. The same has occurred with
natural resource rent and monopoly rent." Banks both benefit by
and are exposed to risk by the distribution of wealth flowing to
rentiers. Rentiers take in far more income than they spend on
consumption; so, they "invest" this surplus income to
build portfolios that yield some interest and dividend income, but
also yield unrealized gains in resale value. Far more banks end up
closing their doors when their lending and investment portfolios
underperform than members of the rentier elite ever file for
bankruptcy.
You write: "The public at large recognizes that today's crisis
is largely financial, and has become a debt crisis. This debt crisis
centers on the real estate bubble, because 80% of bank loans are
mortgage loans. This bank credit has determined what real estate
prices are (namely, whatever a bank will lend), and hence land
prices." I certainly concur. As I have written elsewhere, the
decision by Fannie and Freddie annually to increase maximum loan
limits fueled the upward spiral of land prices. This was done to
maintain market share, but the side-effect was bank retaliation
against the incursion into what had been the "jumbo"
mortgage market. And this, sparked the banks to greatly increase
their role in securitizing subprime mortgage loans, which turned out
to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
You write: "Without framing the land-tax issue in this
financial setting, Georgists will not get a hearing, because they
miss the context and the system-wide approach." I concur here
as well. What Henry George provided was the basis for accurate
forecasting of the boom-to-bust cycle. The real shame is that none
of the professors of economics who grasped the significance of land
markets in this equation made an effort to build a think-tank
devoted to this task.
You write: "But they oppose such an approach because of the
political antagonism toward government, and especially to taxes.
This leads them (in the United States) to a kinship to the Tea
Party. There simply is no way that Tea Partiers ever will agree to
higher land taxation, so it is a blind alley. This is what has made
Georgism so sectarian, seeking to appeal only to the right, not to
the left, including the Marxists (who also have not spoken much
about finance, as socialist and labor parties throughout the world
have applauded austerity and balanced budgets)." More of the "Georgists"
I know personally have a kinship to the Greens than to the Tea Party
people. Yes, there are some very rigid libertarians within the
Georgist community, but there presence is hardly dominating (even if
they once were predominant among the New York contingent). I have
been arguing the case for a truly progressive individual income tax
to capture rents at the high end of incomes. So far, no one has
suggested I am a closet socialist or am betraying Henry George's
legacy.
You write: "So to succeed in promoting land taxation, it IS
necessary to talk about banking, finance and money. But neither from
the Austrian/Misian OR the local-currency "interest-free"
approach. The problem is not interest as such, but bad debts that
need to be annulled if property is not to become highly concentrated
in financial hands." Which raises the questions of which "bad
debts." Certainly, contracts for debt incurred that involved
coercion and/or fraud should be declared void. However, as you know
with real estate speculation, there have been many willing parties
to the fraud, buyers who fully expected to flip the property at a
huge gain and satisfy any mortgage debt within a short period of
time. The real crime is that our government has failed to
aggressively pursue, indict and prosecute those who perpetrated the
financial crimes.
Scott Baker posted comments essentially in agreement with those made
by Michael. I responded only to the one concerning the need for reform
of the banking function. Scott Baker writes:
Public Banking - We will NOT end the financialization of
the country, even the world, which Michael has written so eloquently
about, as well as Ellen Brown and others, without wresting at least
a good portion of banking back from private banking interests, who,
BTW, do not make many traditional loans; that's not their business,
actually and they make much more money in derivatives, wealth
management and implicit government bailouts. And as Michael has
written, we are moving towards a toll-road economy, with a price for
everything that used to be publicly provided, and cheaper too. It is
the public sector that is cheaper to run, not the private one. Yes,
really.
Ed Dodson responding:
The banking sector has changed materially since the days
when I managed the residential mortgage lending program for a
mid-size commercial bank. However, not all banks today have the same
business platforms. Not all banks are owned by a bank holding
company. Some are community banks with just a few branches. And,
then, there are the credit unions and what are called "CDFIs"
(Community Development Financial Institutions). These institutions
do make "traditional loans" and even hold loans on the
books to maturity. You might recall that after 2008 activists
encouraged people to pull their savings out of the big banks, join
credit unions or put their funds in community banks. I am not
arguing against the creation of public banks; they would serve a
very positive purpose by setting the bar higher for private bankers
to serve communities.
Michael Hudson writes:
"… financial analysis is excluded from the
georgist paradigm. And ever since Los Angeles' georgist meeting in
1992 or so, Cord et al. urged NO taxes on "capital" gains,
despite the fact that 80% of US capital gains are real estate
gains.)
Ed Dodson responding:
If we were to survey the 50 or so key "Georgists,"
I wonder whether the response would concur with your sense of the
situation. My sense is that most of the group understand there is no
such thing as a "capital gain" as this applies to capital
goods. Thus, gains on the sale of assets deserved to be taxed as
ordinary income. And, because a good proportion of high incomes come
from gains on the sale of such assets brought me to propose to the
Bush Administration's commission on federal tax reform a plan to
combine tax simplification with the progressive taxation of higher
incomes - beginning with the exemption of individual incomes up to
the national median, eliminating all deductions, then imposing
increasing rates of taxation on higher ranges of incomes. This
structure would capture a significant portion of rent-derived
income. Although not a perfect substitute for direct taxation of
rents, it at least leaves wages unburdened by federal taxation for
the bottom half of the working population.
Scott Baker writes:
Just to add a little flesh to what Michael said:
- North Dakota has the highest per capita community bank ratio
in the country - 81% (FDIC)
- North Dakota has the lowest foreclosure rate and, even with
the recent oil/gas price collapse, the second lowest
unemployment rate in the country.
- North Dakota was the only state to run a surplus during the
crisis (Montana came close, but went into deficit in 2009)
- The Bank of North Dakota (founded 1919) has never had a
scandal, paid $300m in dividends (not interest) to the state,
and pays is President about $300k/year (a bit less than Jamie
Dimon's $20m/year, and HIS bank - JP Morgan, had $20B in fines
in 2013, even in our under-regulated banking environment!)
- The states with the most community banks have the fewest
foreclosures and lowest unemployment.
Ed Dodson responding:
Publicly-owned banks, well-regulated and audited,
represent a significant improvement in our financial system.
I believe the case for the most corruption-resistant and
debasement-resistant approach to issuance of currency is subject
to further debate.
Gary Flomenhoft wrote:
Banks do not lend savers money to borrowers as
classical dogma asserts. According to the Bank of England banks
create 97% of the money supply with interest from thin air by
making deposits in borrowers accounts.
Ed Dodson responding:
There are the large money center banks. And there are
community banks and credit unions. The credit unions do take in
deposits and make loans to members. They issue longer-term
certificates of deposit and do their best to match maturities to
minimize duration and interest rate risk. Community banks do much
the same thing after raising initial financial capital from
subscribers, and, for some, subsequent issuance of stock. Despite
the consolidation of the financial sector, these institutions have
managed to survive.
Gary wrote:
Henry George ... would be an advocate of Positive Money
proposals today, and 100% reserve requirements, returning money
creation to the government as stated in the US Constitution.
Ed responding:
This idea of 100% reserve requirements gets thrown into
the discussions over monetary reform without sufficient discussion
of what it means. What is being held in reserve? A lending
institution cannot hold currency and lend currency at the same
time. The only way I can see a 100% reserve is if the reserve is
of something tangible and the currency is, by definition, receipt
money.
Gary wrote:
Public banks are a good start, and I wrote the public
bank analysis for Vermont (attached), but they don't go far
enough. Money should be a public utility, not a monopoly privilege
of banks.
Ed responding:
OK, fine. The U.S. Constitution says the government
shall have the sole authority to mint coinage and establish its
value, by which I believe the intent was its metallic content.
Gary wrote:
Land must be removed from the market entirely in my
opinion. Land taxes are a weak approach, easily reversible, but
better than nothing. So I'm putting my attention on Community Land
Trusts (CLTs). Lest I be accused of another heresy, Ralph Borsodi
an avowed Georgist created the concept of CLTs 50 years ago.
Municipal ownership and leasing like Singapore and Hong Kong also
works.
Ed responding:
If land is removed from the market, how would the full
potential rental value of any tract or parcel of land be
determined? The ideal would be for the community to hold land in
trust, with parcels offered for lease under competitive bidding.
CLTs are needed now because there is so much land held by a small
class of rentiers. However, the problem with CLTs is that so much
of the rent is left uncollected in order to keep ground rent
charges affordable. Thus, the community is denied funds for use in
establishing higher quality public goods and services.
When I was working with ICE to facilitate mortgage financing for
people purchasing homes in CLTs, the ICE folks tried to get us to
agree to allow homebuyers to borrow against the value attached to
the leasehold interest in the land. This value was created by
capitalization of the net imputed ground rent enjoyed by the
lessee.
Michael Hudson wrote in response to Bryan Kavanagh:
You got it, Bryan! Your chart shows that in order to
gain home ownership, buyers must take on a lifetime of debt. How
is this different from feudal serfdom? The serfs were frozen in
the land. Here in the US, after house prices decline and leave
owners with negative equity, they can't move (if their job
requires it), because they can't afford to pay what they still owe
the bank over what the house will sell for. It's worse in Ireland
and Latvia.
Neofeudalism - isn't that what the original classical economists
sought to get rid of with their land tax, from Quesnay through JS
Mill etc.? But who are the "lords" today? The
credit-creating banks, or the new landlords (who buy on credit,
saying "Rent is for paying interest.")
Ed Dodson responding:
In the United States today, roughly one in four
households owns a primary residential property free and clear of
mortgage debt. Millions of property owners during the late 1980s
and well into the 2000s were able to refinance several times at
lower and lower rates of interest. Some portion of these
households chose to make regular curtailments against principal,
paying off their mortgage debt years before the amortization
schedule. Others refinanced out of a 30-year term into a 15-year
term. Of course, this occurred during a period of very volatile
mortgage interest rates.
The people who bought near the height of the property (note my
use of "property" rather than "house") market
inflation were either convinced by persuasive realtors or
convinced themselves that property prices would continue to climb.
In almost every metropolitan market there are reasonably priced
options. Too many people chose to leverage themselves in order to
acquire a newly-constructed property. At Fannie Mae, we required
all first-time homebuyers to complete a homebuyer education
program and offered only 30-year, fixed rate mortgage financing to
them. Until the national recession was in full swing this book of
business performed well. However, when entire communities are
destroyed by predatory lending and fraud, the property market
implodes and properties do not resell except to bottom dweller
speculators.
The societal issue is to what extent the individual should be
protected from making bad decisions. Prudent underwriting by
mortgage lenders partially succeeds at this. In the conventional
market private mortgage insurers provide a second level of risk
assessment and underwriting (for a fee).
It is also worth nothing that until the MBS (mortgage-backed
securities) market crashed, holders of these securities included
every sort of investor, including pension funds.
Deirdre Kent wrote regarding her vision of a just system of money:
I presented an earlier version of this at the CGO
conference last year and we have subsequently have moved towards
Community Land Trusts issuing this currency. But they would have
to be a formal elected public body. I confess I am not familiar
with the finances of land trusts, and I guess they all differ. It
would be easy to get rich if they charged a full land rental.
Ed Dodson responding:
Will owners of land accept the currency issued by a CLT
in payment for land? One way to raise funds is getting legal
status to issue tax exempt bonds. In the U.S. most affordable
housing units get constructed because the government issues tax
credits.
David Spain writes:
It is debt & land monopoly that is creating the
crushing economic burden. One solution is to call a Jubilee, but
there is no-one with authority or even the certain knowledge to do
that … possibly one will be forced on us.
Ed Dodson responding:
Very few people who call themselves god-fearing - even
those who take the scriptures literally -- extend their religious
convictions to a commitment of sharing the planet. Try sending
James Dawsey's recent paper in the AJES to your rabbi for comment.
Michael Hudson wrote in response to comments by Mason Gaffney:
Scott's point is simple to make, Mason. The FHA now
insures government mortgages that absorb up to 43% of homeowner
incomes. Just imagine what this means for export competitiveness,
and hence de-industrialization. Suppose workers were given all
their food, clothing and entertainment for FREE. Given 43% for
financialized housing costs, 25% taxes, 15% FICA wage withholding,
how on earth can their industrial employers compete?
Ed Dodson responding:
Under our economic system in the U.S. owning a
residential property is, generally speaking, the difference
between some net worth and none. Most households that live in a
rented apartment have very little savings. So, advocates for these
folks embrace gaining homeownership as a means of wealth building.
For many households, becoming a property owner results in
moderately lower total housing related expenses. If they have
managed to pay a high apartment rent for some years with no credit
issues, the logic is that they can carry an equal monthly PITI
(principal+interest+escrows for property taxes, homeowners
insurance and mortgage insurance premium). The remarkable thing is
that millions of people faced with this financial challenge
managed to keep current on their debt - unless they were
victimized by predatory lending or fraud.
I sat in on focus groups with lower-income people (mostly
minority). The reason they ended up with high cost mortgage loans
is because they were too intimidated by the application process to
go to a bank. Remember the advertisement by Champion Mortgage: "When
you bank says no, Champion says yes."
Bryan Kavanagh writes:
I'm not sure I agree that owning a residential property
is the difference between having some net worth and none, Ed. The
'get your own home if you are at all able' is at least
questionable, and could be seen an apologia for the status quo
(the high land price phenomenon under which we've laboured and
most have have become accustomed), particularly in view of what
happens to land prices at regular intervals. It's quite arguable
our money might be doing better for us elsewhere rather than tied
up in real estate or land price-inflated mortgages. Phil Ruthven,
Australia's guru analyst and business-advisor has argued this way
for years. The Germans, who have the reverse of our proportions of
home ownership (70:30), don't seem to suffer for it. Maybe, short
of Georgism, renting is a valid alternative for many more than it
is currently in the US and Australia?
Ed responding:
I only have seen the data on the U.S., Bryan. And,
here, equity in a residential property is the difference between
having assets and not having assets. People who live in rented
apartments have the lowest level of median net worth (under
$10,000). Thus the reason why "homeownership" is put
forward as an important component of economic security. As to what
happens to land prices, unless an entire community implodes, land
prices start to climb again within a few years after a general
downturn.
The one advantage of a community with low rates of residential
property ownership is what is referred to as the mobility of
labor. It is easier to get out of a lease than to sell a property
in a down market. Thus, someone who is renting has more
opportunity to pick up and move to where the demand for labor is
higher. A number of economists have made this argument as one
reason why the New York City metropolitan area bounces back from
recessions faster that others. NYC has a comparatively low rate of
residential property ownership, and most of these properties
(coops and condominiums excluded) are multi-family income
producing properties of between 2 and 5 units.
New York also has a relatively high number of rental units where
the rents are capped by law. This means that even though the
household incomes of tenants does not increase, their housing cost
remains affordable even as surrounding property prices are
climbing. At least through the early 2000s rental units in
properties renovated with public subsidies were restricted to
households with incomes no greater than 80% (as I recall) of the
AMI (area median income).
Michael wrote:
My point was that with $15 million each, RSF or HGS
COULD have formed a think tank - and instead, just did …
well, you know. But my point was about Georgism and the role of
funding institutions. My analogy here is with the Democratic Party
today. From Rahm to his successors, only right-wingers (Blue Dogs)
have been backed, not reformers. The Blue Dogs almost all lost in
2012 - leaving desert behind, as voters are now finding. I haven't
seen such pressure in 50 years to form a 3rd party, giving up on
the Democrats as hopelessly Clintonomics/Rubinomics.
It's that way for the socialists too - once their leadership and
its institutions supported the Vietnam War (from abut 1962-3) and
supported the CIA as progressive (being anti-Stalinist), the YPSLs
(such as Bernie Sanders) and the rest of the party dissolved
pretty quickly. Funding means sponsorship, which becomes de facto
leadership. The fish rots from the head down, as the Mafia says.
Across the political spectrum.
Ed responding:
For me, the only party that stands on principles is the
Green Party. Ideally, political parties should be outlawed.
Individuals should be required to stand for election as
individuals. Better yet, I believe we would get much better
representative bodies (from city councils on up) if people were
selected by lottery. If you are willing to serve, you take what
amounts to a civil service examination to prove basic competency.
You name then goes into the lottery. If chosen, you serve one term
(four years seems the right length). When you are finished,
someone else is chosen to replace you. Your fellow citizens have a
right of recall. If some majority of eligible voters withdraws
support, you would be removed and replace. No elections. No
campaigns. No buying of votes by corporate or ideological
interests.
Mason Gaffney wrote:
Ed may have something here, but I'd prefer to see ALL
wage and salary income exempt from the personal income tax - as it
mostly was, believe it or not, before 1941. Then raise the rate on
everything else, but allow an investment tax credit - as JFK and
Walter Heller did during the "Soaring Sixties". And let
buildings and other capital be tax-depreciated only once, plugging
a gigantic loophole that Michael and Kris Feder have documented,
the world has ignored, and few Georgists have followed at all.
Ed responding:
In a world where great ideas seem to have less of a
chance of adoption than a snowball has a chance of surviving you
know where, I tried to come up with a structure that might find
political support (for different reasons) from those right of
center and left of center and center.
Mase responding:
I don't know why you think my proposals would lack
political support:
Ed responding:
My view on the subject is immaterial. Even when I was
very active politically I was never able to get anyone to come
around to my way of thinking. The challenge is how to get the
politicians to pay attention to anything that doesn't come with a
large campaign contribution.
|
