Lakoff False

Money Frames

Had a reason to review Lakoff and language framing. It was interesting (and ironic gioven his politicla preferences) how Lakoff is so ignorant of state monetary operations that he regularly false frames taxation and welfare issues.

Here is the lecture for reference .

It’s a brilliant little lecture, but I had to post a long comment.

Lakoff himself is guilty of false framing. Regarding “big government” and taxation, etc., he fails to realize all US dollars come from the government or via credit from the chartered agents of the State (licenced private banks — they are part of government) the US﹩ does not come from anywhere else (it’d be counterfeit). So tax return is a “return back to the issuer”, from the French, revenir. It is not a funding operation for the government, it is a redemption (the US﹩ is an I.O.U,. of the State: “I owe you redemption for one unit of imposed tax liability.”).
      So “my tax dollars” are not funding anything. They came from government from inception. The government issued that currency by spending (or a bank issued credit in circulation, but that is not net US﹩ creation, since there is a debt on the other side of the ledger). All the dollars spent by the government not yet used to pay taxes are the non-government sector’s net financial wealth in US﹩. The false frame is to call that “our debt”. It is in fact our ﹩ wealth. The debt on the other side of the ledger is that the USGov promises to accept back Its currency when you pay taxes. If it refuses to redeem your tax liabilities it is in default and has not honoured Its debt. The US Gov is at least acting “morally” because it never seems to refuse to redeem, it always accepts your tax payment.
      The moral obligation is more serious though: by imposing taxes in currency no one initial has, the government creates unemployment (people seeking to earn the tax credit). The government must then spend sufficient to permit the “economy” to pay all the imposed tax, plus meet savings desires, otherwise it made a terrible policy blunder and caused residual employment, a simple policy mistake, not a market force.
      If there are net savers around (they need not be billionaires, anyone who nets saves is forcing someone else to net spend) then the government should be running a deficit (spending more than tax return) otherwise the government is by local accounting identity placing some people somewhere in needless debt to a private bank.
      Interestingly, some conservatives understood this. In a very twisted way. The folks working for Reagan and Bush knew government deficits were necessary, since by accounting identity the government deficit is the private sector surplus — while simultaneously “blaming” Democrats for the government deficits! Orwellian in the extreme! — they just wanted most of the surplus to go to the Top One Percent, not the poor via hiring all the unemployed the tax liabilities created.
      Reagan was right (though still racist) to not want “welfare Queens”, but he was disingenuous, he could have made them all go away by hiring them all for public service in decent meaningful jobs. There is no end to work needing done, we wake up every day to severe labour shortages, but the private sector will not hire the unemployed, they do not want them, they want people already working, so a demand stimulus will usually just cause a wage demand spiral, leaving people still unemployed and wasted. Only the monopoly currency issuer can hire all the unemployed without causing inflation, since the private sector bid for the unemployed labour is zero. (Not that moderate inflation is bad mind you, it is a good thing if the real wage is rising. A bit of inflation erodes the purchasing power of hoarded tax credits.)

Love Sets

From Metaphors We Live By there is this idea we use spatio-temporal adjectives and metaphors to describe distinctly non-spatio-temporal concepts.

• Mary is imprisoned in her marriage.
• Maya is in cahoots with Martin.

et cetera. All fine and good. But what Lakoff & Johnson too casually dismiss, to their detriment, is that “space” and “time”, while objective elements of reality imho, are nevertheless mental constructs we use to make sense of patterns presented to our mind.

For the former (the elements of reality) we could tell this if we supposed animals were non-conscious Zombies. (Maybe some are! Who the hell knows.)

Which is more important then, the idea of a space or the more abstract notion of membership (of a set or class)? I’d argue membership is perhaps the more primitive. Just a musing.

So “being in love” is membership of the set of people in the state of adoration of their beloved.

So what of spacetime and other proper spaces with measures? Well, is it not a prejudice to say those spaces have measures, and the set Love does not? Counting things in a set is a measure.

Alright then, so what is so proper and special about a manifold or a spacetime? What is so special is that we live in one of them! Objects embedded in spacetime share all the symmetries and laws thereby associated, which unites us as a One. (What?… too commie??)

We are not all fortunate enough to be in the set Love and we are all, for now, stuck in the set Spacetime. A huge aspect of the struggle of human civilization (and I presume the Trisolarians too) is to survive in this particular matrix and find peace and harmony while doing so, it is any civilizations calling.

Those who think life is all about conflict and competition have it all backwards. Those effects seen in natural evolution are the pathologies that are the norm, precisely because the spiritual is too often ignored. (Lakoff & Johnson guilty here.)

The better way to think about language is that all the physical/material concepts are the metaphors, and they spring from the spiritual, not the other way around. (This is why no respectable neoliberal politicians want to be near my thought cloud proximity.)