Fifty years of research and publication, plus the personal experience of having lived through Mussolini’s Italy and the devastation of World War II, do not make me more clairvoyant than anyone else.
Short term, clearly, we are at a fork in the road. One path leads to ruin; the other leads to a brilliant future—a brilliant future for everyone.
If we are in danger of losing it all today, it is because we have set the haves against the have-nots, gender against gender, race against race, money against nature. This is a world that leads to ruin for everyone. How long will those canned foods in fully armored bunkers last? And what will the survivors, the remnant find when they come out of the bunkers?
Let us focus on the long term; it might mightily help us solve problems in the short term. A brilliant world will come—ideally without spasmodic short-term hiccups; a brilliant world will come. It is unavoidable. It will gradually come, and we might even avoid the precipice on whose brink we are so irresponsibly teetering today, as soon as we enter the three new intellectual worlds that I have uncovered during fifty years of discoveries, always fortunate enough to be assisted by some of the best minds of the age.
The new world has three components:
Concordian economics,
Somism, and
Relationalism.
Concordian Economics
Concordian economics offers an integration of economic theory, policy, and practice.
Fig. 1 - Economic Theory – The Economic Process
Fig. 2 - Economic Policy – Economic Justice
Concordian economic theory presents the integration of Production of real goods and services; Consumption or expenditure of financial assets to acquire real goods and services; and the Distribution of ownership rights over real as well as monetary wealth. Even in the purchase of a car, for instance, you have an exchange of three items: 1. the car; 2. the money; and 3. the title of ownership. One cycle of the process is completed when goods pass from producers to consumers and money passes from consumers to producers; for the exchange to occur—in a civilized way—both producers and consumers must have ownership of what they exchange.
Concordian economic policy presents an integration of the three essential planks of economic justice: the right to participate in the economic process (participative justice), in order to obtain the right to a fair share of what one produces (distributive justice), and the right to receive an equivalent value of what one gives (commutative justice).
The advantage of presenting these two diagrams back to back is to reveal the inner relationship between them: Economic justice is the mirror image of the economic process. You can just as soon separate one from the other as you can separate people from their shadows. The two can be separated only at great risk and peril.
Concordian economic practice presents an integrated set of
rights and
responsibilities
in relation to the four essential factors of production: the right of access to land and natural resources and the responsibility to pay taxes on that portion of land and natural resources that fall under our exclusive control; the right of access to national credit and the responsibility to repay loans acquired through national credit; the right to the fruits of one’s labor and the responsibility to contribute to the process of creation of wealth; the right to the enjoyment of one’s wealth and the responsibility to respect the wealth of others.
The very process of implementation of Concordian economics will bring economic harmony to us. The world of economics, once truly understood, reveals that we do not live in a web of exclusionary interests, me against everyone else, but in a world of interdependence. I will benefit in the proportion that you benefit. It is the false ideal of equality that brings us envy and ruin. I cannot produce, if I starve the consumer. Money in my pocket is a worthless piece of paper; money acquires its power when I exchange it for the wealth you have produced. Once these organic interrelationships are recognized, as we will briefly see below, it will be relatively easy to translate them into legislative reality. The exercise of our economic responsibilities will automatically grant us all the economic rights that we need.
And economic harmony is indistinguishable from ecological harmony. Can anyone image what will we be able to produce when we exhaust our natural resources? Without distortions brought into the economic process by misguided economic theories and shortsighted practices, left to its own internal wisdom the economic process has found its natural balance over millions of years. It is when we want to impose our will on nature that cracks in the system appear.
To produce wealth to pay debts, as it is vastly done today, namely to needlessly destroy natural resources to pay debts is the most misguided of all human operations. Solutions cannot be found in constraints over human reproduction practices; there, too, one must trust natural balances. Solutions to the eventual exhaustion of natural resources are possible only through human control over the production and distribution of money, the utilization of money to create real wealth, not paper wealth, with obvious emphasis on the production of renewable resources, and the systematic destruction of the zeros that constitute our debts.
How Can We Bring a Concordian World to Life?
Two petitions that are circulating on the Internet will bring a Concordian world to life. The first calls for the Federal Reserve System (the Fed) to implement three rules: 1. Issue loans only to create real wealth; 2. Issue loans at cost; 3. Issue loans to individual entrepreneurs, cooperatives, corporations with ESOPs and/or CSOPs, and to public agencies with taxing powers so that loans can be repaid. If the repayment of loans for public works occurs by levying taxes on land, the implementation of this petition will call for a gradual exercise of all four economic rights and responsibilities listed above.
The implementation of the second petition responds to the brilliant construct of the seven-year Mosaic jubilee (and a two thousand year old tradition in Mesopotamia, as I have recently learned through research done by Michael Hudson): When loans crush the borrower so that no further wealth is created and there is nothing but hot air behind the zeros accumulating in national and international accounts, we have to tear all those zeros down in a systematic way that respects relative positions and creates long term benefits for borrowers and lenders alike.
The most amazing development of the last few years is that the Fed seems to be ready to implement these rules, provided they are acceptable to the Congress. Hence the world of politics is an integral part of the human discourse.
Most importantly, once the rules called for by the implementation of organic economic rights and responsibilities are set into motion, both “politics” and “money” will be taken out of the economic process. A free economy, the old ideal of classical economists, is created not by the absence of rules—a status that is exploited by the quick and the sharpies—but the mutual respect of rights and responsibilities belonging to human beings operating within the economic sphere.
Somism
A Concordian world will be seriously built as soon as barriers to clear thinking that exist in our political science theory—and consequently in our political and legislative discourse—are dismantled. We rarely realize that the Individual alone is an abstraction, and a greater abstraction is Society. On the basis of these two abstractions, wars are waged; such flaming words as Capitalism and Communism, with all subtle variations on these two basic themes, are thrown at each other. Barriers, tall barriers are built among people.
The reality is composed of Men and Women in the Social Context. Somism in a word, a word that I had to coin during the early 60s to preserve my sanity.
It is men and women who are fully integrated in their own personality and social context who will respect each other to the point of creating social structures that truly benefit the interests of all parties. The fostering of the common good is the ancient ideal that will become a reality during the very implementation of Concordian economics.
Relationalism
With a tiny bit of humility on the part of all of us, we will look at the common good as something that benefits You and Me. The first level of awareness humility will bring us is the realization that we are all related to each other in an incredibly long chain of relationships that unite haves to have-nots, gender to gender, race to race, even money and business to nature. The chain of Relationalism is long, but—once unearthed—it will be found greatly rewarding.
We have already briefly seen how haves are integrally related to have-nots. It is the multitude of have-nots who consume the plentitude of production. One withers without the other. And are not race relations mostly poisoned by economic mismanagement of society? Solve the problem of economic accumulation to the detriment of the weakest members of society and you will have solved most maladjustments between the races.
Of gender we shall deal in its proper context.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carmine Gorga is president of The Somist Institute. He is a former Fulbright scholar and the recipient of a Council of Europe Scholarship for his dissertation on "The Political Thought of Louis D. Brandeis." Using age-old principles of logic and epistemology, as well as mathematics employed by modern engineers and scientists, in a book and a series of papers Dr. Gorga has transformed the linear world of economic theory into a relational discipline in which everything is related to everything else - internally as well as externally. He was assisted in this endeavor by many minds, notably for twenty-seven years by Professor Franco Modigliani, a Nobel laureate in economics at MIT. The resulting work, The Economic Process: An Instantaneous Non-Newtonian Picture, was published by the University Press of America was published in 2002 and was reissued in a third edition in 2016. For reviews, click here. He is also the author of To My Polis, With Love. During the last few years, Dr. Gorga has concentrated his attention on the requirements for the unification of economic theory, policy, and practice calling this unity Concordian economics. He is also integrating this work into political science, which he calls Somism, and culture in general, which he calls Relationalism. The basic principles of Concordian economics are as follows:
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