We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nations to the changed conditions. - James Madison
The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless... From the conclusion of this war we shall be going downhill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to affect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. - Thomas Jefferson
The time that our revolutionary founders predicted has arrived. International parasitic financiers, the people who make the bulk of their money from capital rather than work, who make up the top 0.1% of the US income range, are destroying our society in their pursuit of compound interest. The notion that a system of compound interest can keep going forever is absurd. The power of compound interest is enormous. At a 5% compounding interest rate, money doubles in 15 years. In 150 years, a penny will become 1,000 pennies, and every 150 years after that the total will multiply by 1,000 again – a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion. If someone had invested a single penny in an account earning 5% compound interest at the birth of Christ, that account would now have a value equal to 73,383,000 balls of solid gold the size of the earth (that number is obsolete as it is written, as it would earn a new earth-size ball of gold every couple of seconds), or 9 billion trillion trillion dollars. We are now close to the limit. At current course and speed, within the lifetime of today’s high school students the top 0.1% of the population will have more assets than all the rest of us put together. Before that, capitalism will collapse. This isn’t a tomorrow issue. It is a today issue.
We are already seeing its death throes in our politics, our foreign policy, our media. As the financiers seek new ways to be able to keep their compound interest growing they devote gigantic resources to promoting unsustainable consumption, debasing our lives and destroying our souls. They run up insane deficits so that they can acquire the work of your children and grandchildren as a financial asset, forcing them to devote a substantial part of their working lives to pay taxes going directly to interest on financier debt, or else go to prison. They create new “assets” like cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens out of air. They establish the Big Brother state of relentless surveillance and propaganda and censorship because they know that working people are getting restless, that we can sense that things can’t go on this way.
We have been raised to believe a giant lie, that we must choose one of two economic systems. In capitalism, the profit from your labor goes to capital, namely people with money. That system is collapsing. In socialism, the profit from your labor goes to society, specifically the government where it is controlled by the scoundrels in power. The Europeans, Soviets, Chinese, Vietnamese, etc. have proven that the financiers will always undermine that system, and that in any event the vain nitwits in power poison it. But in reality there is a third choice. The profit from your labor could go to you. If it is capitalism when the profit from labor goes to capital and socialism when the profit from labor goes to society, then the system where the profit from labor goes to labor is laborism.
The fact that we have all learned not to see that the profit from what we produce should go to the people who produce it is a triumph of propaganda. Who produced that propaganda? Who owns and controls the media and publishing houses? Who funds the academics who write papers on economics? Who controls the politicians who control the conversation? They are the rich, parasitic financiers and speculators who benefit from our capitalist system. They don’t want you to open your eyes. They will fight tooth and nail to convince you that the idea that the profit from your labor should belong to you is ridiculous, that it is unfair, that it could never work and that you are foolish and ignorant if you believe that it could. They are lying to you. Don’t listen to them.
Moving from capitalism to laborism does not require taking any property away from anyone. All that it requires is treating capital the way we have traditionally treated labor, as only being entitled to a limited return. That return would be risk-based, not based upon a fictional “time value of money.” Money does not have an inherent time value, no matter what the financiers’ pet economists say. Recent events have proven that. Between 2008 and 2022 Americans had a negative real return on their savings, but they still saved. As recently as 2021 German government bond yields were actually negative, meaning that even before considering inflation people paid the government to hold their money for them, but Germans still saved. We would transition by allowing working Americans to earn a better interest rate on their savings than they have had since 2007, up to $1MM in regular savings and $1MM in an IRA. Beyond that, “time value” would be eliminated and stock would be modified to be in the format of an instrument I helped create for an Austrian company, just giving a reasonable risk return. All other profit would go to the workers.
Briefly, that involves doing the following:
1) changing stock so that it just provides a limited risk-based return on actual dollars invested in the enterprise, leaving residual profit for the employees whose labor produces it;
2) eliminating so-called “time value of money” charges on both stock and debt, aside from bank deposits of normal savers;
3) ending speculative activity through the measures above and more specific controls on other assets;
4) making certain tax and currency adjustments;
5) limiting the wage multiple in corporations so that the top-paid employee can only make as much in 2 weeks as the bottom-paid employee makes in a year;
6) stopping 19th-century-style practices that undercut the power of American workers;
7) making it easier for employees to organize;
8) increasing market competition and transparency;
9) restoring family farms and rural vibrancy; and
10) making certain other adjustments to the way corporations are run so that they operate as the beneficial state-chartered entities that they are supposed to be.
It also involves investing in our children to a level where every child born in America really can achieve his or her potential, and bringing our foreign policy back to what our revolutionary founders intended to protect our freedom and prosperity. Our founders were a lot smarter than the recent dimwits. Their very clear advice is still correct today.
All of that is described in detail in my book Laborism: A Bloodless Revolution. You can get a free Apple e-book version here or download a free pdf here or free e-pub version here. Don’t be scared by the Github format - just click the ellipse … and select download. If you prefer, it is available on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Laborism-Bloodless-Revolution-Matthew-Lykken-ebook/dp/B0FBZSHDD4/. I have serialized that book in this substack. In future I will add additional information and hopefully guest posts from people who are more expert in parts of the program than I am. I also explain how we can achieve this within our current system. Our founders already fought the revolution and they gave us the tools we need. All we need to do is to get off our couches to talk to each other and organize. It has been done before. For example, in North Dakota a century ago a laborist movement called the Nonpartisan League organized, hijacked the existing political parties, and took power, doing great things for the state economy. Their movement later failed only because it was local, and financiers poured in resources from all over American with the full fury of their self-interest to create dissension and destroy it. We will rise across America, wise to the financiers’ tricks, and not let them do that. The billionaires can’t stop us. We have the power. We just need to stop being fooled by the ploys they use to divide us and distract us.
Who am I to write this? I am the grandson of the person who designed what was perhaps the signature achievement of the Nonpartisan League. I am a working person who has been a ranch hand, an academic worker, a government law enforcement worker, a corporate worker and executive, and a self-employed consultant. I have worked for companies producing petroleum and chemicals and fabrics, medical products, pharmaceuticals and biotech, consumer and producer manufacturing, and consumer and business services. I have researched and taught criminal justice, American government, Soviet and Chinese politics and theory, the politics of energy, antitrust law and constitutional law. I have experienced, studied, and written on tax and economic policy. I have consulted with the World Bank and the Polish Finance Ministry on designing a revenue regime for newly post-communist Poland. I was asked by a senior auditor of what was then Her Majesty’s Revenue in the UK to submit my Shared Economic Growth proposal to her bosses. I was asked by the Chinese State Administration of Taxation to lecture their international auditors on how and why corporations structure their international operations. My Shared Economic Growth proposal got as far as having the Senate Finance Committee put a placeholder for it in the 2017 tax bill, before it got overwhelmed by the politics of the first Trump administration. I have lived in various countries and worked with lots of others, observing what works well and what doesn’t. In short, I have spent a lifetime seriously thinking about these things and acquiring real-life experience about how the world works. I have had a lot of looks behind the curtain at what really goes on and why, I have had many opportunities to compare what the media says to what I know for a fact to be true, and I have learned how to find real information when the financier media and the financier academics are lying to us. I don’t know everything, but I know a lot of things. I know enough to know that we need laborism, and we need it now, or things are going to get very, very bad. I am willing to do this work to allow my children to inherent a decent America, the America that our founders intended. Are you willing to make the time and effort to join me?
To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe as a supporter (it’s free) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.
Matt Lykken