Kenneth D. Gartrell

4 Comments to “Contact”

1. on 30 Aug 2008 at 8:17 pm1John Gelles

   Dear Ken,

   We met on the Amazon politics forum. It is a terrible place. Yet the thread you were on and your comment of the perils centralization was more interesting than their usual fare.

   My blog entry related to yours is at http://www.ustaxreform.us/83008.htm

   Read it. Write to me on the links there. Or communicate on any sane way. The Amazon way does not have a habit of keeping discussion to a reasonable length.

2. on 30 Aug 2008 at 8:25 pm2John Gelles

   OBAMA OR NOT ?

   The choice has narrowed to McCAIN-PALIN, an unsophisticated team, willful, anxious to succeed– but attached to an anti-intellectual constituency, and OBAMA-BIDEN, talkers and thinkers, trying desperately to be elected, supported by anyone who can read and is not part of the power structure determined to stay rich (in fact or in their dream-life).

   And so I’m going with the O-B team. But I will listen to Sarah. She has just come to our attention. She may suggest some populist measures that will be attractive.

   One of our forum’s writers gave us an interesting analysis of centralization versus decentralization. I appreciate that his view is helpful. It led him, however, to be reject Obama for president.

   My own analysis begins with a line I heard from one of the pundits today: “Obama’s plans to fight deprivation, pollution, corruption, disunity, etc., are logical, and deal with reform that is necessary, but HOW WILL HE EVER PLAN TO PAY FOR THEM?”

   The aforesaid forum member appears to me to be more the political scientist, even the history buff, than the economist, or one who has really studied the history of money as the language of price and how its internal contradictions must be resolved along logistical (supply) lines, if we are to avoid depression and war on a greater scale than they are at the moment.

   Obama appears to be an effective listener. I’ve read that Lincoln was one. But Lincoln, in my mind, was a truly great thinker and problem solver, himself. He listened. But his decisions reflected his own mind more than others.

   This is the question in my mind: Is Obama gifted enough to take on our real problems related to (1) avoidance of WW-next, and, taming of money’s power to distort our production systems– instead of facilitating them, and (2) accomplishment of conversion to safe clean energy systems, and, reform of law and language to stop the race to Mandarinism and the total triumph of form over substance.

   Where are my economic reformers ready to turn price over to our recently acquired super-abundant computational powers and ready to focus production on the urgent needs of the human race?

3. on 01 Sep 2008 at 1:26 pm3John Gelles

   Obama-Biden versus McCain-Palin:Someone is going to win. Pray that is America.

   America-NATO versus Russia-China, with partners of convenience, to oppose unnecessary encirclement by the USA and our example that their best and their brightest will copy in part. Pray we improve the example and quit the attempted encirclement whose need is less than apparent to anyone I’ve read on the matter.

   We all trade in a global market– but fight in the political dark. Let us put some light where it will do the most good.

   President Nixon saw China as a potential friend. Kissinger saw it too– and he saw Russia the same way. There is nothing wrong with political peace from Japan east to China, Russia, India, Europe, North and South America. We would encircle the globe– not a potential authoritarian alliance with an equal arsenal of WMD’s and a trading potential it would be a shame to shun.

   If we drive the authoritarians into another arms race, no good will come of it. If they drive us into one, we will have to enter it and repeat the cold war– hoping for sanity in the end to change their doctrines and dogmas to more closely resemble our best– from our Constitution, through Lincoln’s legacy, TR’s good sense and can-do, FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, and our current revolutionary discoveries in science and the art of compromise (without accepting evil for good). There will be no profit in risking nuclear exchange or even something horrific but less.

   Global trade at the moment, still chases low cost producers. We must put an end to that. We have the economic muscle to raise business to level of the highest art– and manufacture here (or anywhere) not only the best product, but also the time and talent to appreciate that accounting is the servant, with law, and our best instincts must be the master.

4. on 01 Sep 2008 at 1:55 pm4John Gelles

   I’m thinking of a foreseeable improvement over words and sentences that model the human condition and its possible triumph over a very long period of time.

   It would be a Google-pedia, with diagramming and animations on call. Matrices, maps, Venn diagrams, stochastic networks, jargon-free shallow learning curve ideas in the plainest words, chronologies, dialog, every pictorial self-teaching tool. Google-pedia would be the product and resource of and for scholars supporting the voters and their elected leaders. It might cut years off political and business delay and might easily succeed enough to encourage very small governments and political parties– while normal people did what they do best and leave the driving to others who, by law, would be paid the least at all times, and fired first when their solutions did not work.

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