Of the Seven Deadly Sins, the least well understood is Greed. The love of money is the least of it—that is simply the form it takes among less successful people. Among oligarchs it is the desire to possess and control everything and everyone. And by the nature of things this desire requires a static world—a world of no change. Again and again, oligarchs and empires have attempted (as they are attempting today) to stop or even reverse the clock, to crush progress, innovation, discovery, and independent thought.

This is the real division in the world. It is not between left and right, or between liberalism and conservatism, or even between democracy and authoritarianism. Since the vast majority of people are not oligarchs, the oligarchy spends lots of time working on ways to confuse us and to get us to fight each other instead of the oligarchy. That is the origin of all of the “isms.”

Lyndon LaRouche spent his life developing pedagogies to clear up the confusion for people and to outline what exactly people should be fighting for. In his most poetic representation, he asserted that we must be constantly increasing the physical power of each individual person. The first approximation of a measure of this power is the rate of growth in the kilowatt hours of electricity produced per year per capita—both here and in the world at large. In order to accelerate the growth in our power, we must be constantly increasing the power density of our power sources (i.e., moving up the ladder of energy flux density of power sources, as by going from wood, to charcoal, to coal, to oil, to fission, to fusion, and maybe on to matter/antimatter), and replacing older technologies with better technologies. The process of superseding older technologies with better new technologies is known as technological attrition.

So, the American approach is to be constantly focused on bringing the potentials of the next breakthrough to fruition even as we spread and perfect the currently available technologies.

The Imperial approach is to squash the development and spread of both the emerging and current technologies with an array of techniques, including the following:

• lies and propaganda targeting individual technologies,
• overregulation,
• mandates,
• misuse of patent law to prevent the introduction of new technologies,
• litigation,
• use of a security classification system to prevent researchers from speaking with each other,
• imposition of demands for instant return on investment at the expense of reinvestment—sometimes called “shareholder value,”
• preventing credit from being made available for long-term capital investment,
• “rationalization,”
• political sabotage,
• hostile takeovers and buyouts.

With that as background, let us look some aspects of our current situation.

The widely despised and discredited FBI is now attempting to garner some support for its continued existence by crowing about its success in tripping up some Chinese industrial espionage operations. And it is true that China has a very good industrial espionage system as do many other nations.  So defensive measures are necessary to prevent trade secrets and hard-won industrial know-how from just being handed out for free to competitors. However, law enforcement measures, treaty agreements, even patent protections afforded inventors, researchers, and companies constitute a very poor defensive industrial strategy. For example, already by the late 19^th century enough scientifically minded people existed to make defending a patent extremely difficult. By the early 20^th century Thomas Edison had noted that, “My electric light inventions have brought me no profits, only forty years of litigation,” and after many grueling patent fights, “I have lost all faith in patents, judges & everything else relating to patents. Don’t care if the whole system was squelched.” He adopted the only really successful strategy: continuous improvement to keep ahead of his competition.

Thomas Edison with some early Edison Effect experimental devices.

The best defense is pursuit of technological attrition as we also see implemented by companies such as SpaceX, Sierra Space, and Tesla Motors. Don’t get mired down into spending undue time and resources on defensive litigation, leapfrog to the next level. Today’s cutting-edge technology will be outclassed in a few winks. So even though the Madison Avenue folks may tout their “Ultimate Solution,” or “Ultimate Weapon” for this or that, there is no ultimate solution in any area of the economy. The fact is that with a population of more than 7 billion people, we now have many, many, times more scientifically-and-technically skilled people in the world than we ever had before, and that means that simply fighting for your legal rights (though sometimes unavoidable) is not a winning strategy. There are simply too many people and companies out there looking for a way to get around your defense. And once a pathway around your defense is discovered, that discovery will be transmitted across the world at the speed of the internet.

These difficulties for inventors, entrepreneurs, and companies are made catastrophic by the influence of the long arm of the British Empire and Wall Street. The Imperial control of finance has been used to impose feudal Physiocratic doctrines upon American enterprises. Take J. P. Morgan. He sought to take over cutting edge industries and “rationalize” them. To him “rationalization” meant merging them into monopolies and oligopolies in order to impose the old feudal system upon industry and stifle creativity. Eliminate competition, cut costs (especially including new research, development, and capital improvements) and then just collect what François Quesnay and the Physiocrats called a divinely ordained natural “ground rent”—as if the companies (and workers) were just feudal lands and serfs to be looted for centuries. The Imperial outlook which Morgan reflected aims at restoring a fixed society and static economy of no change in which all elements of society assume a fixed relationship to each other and to the future.

All of the legal agents of this process of “rationalization” were then brought to bear in patent fights. The U.S. Constitution specifies the importance of patents “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” However, as Edison discovered in the late 19^th century and many others would also later realize, the speed at which discovery and innovation was taking place would be constantly accelerating, and therefore in such an environment, patent litigation was becoming too slow to offer much protection.

The “June Bug” flying in 1908 and sporting the Bell-Curtis ailerons (little movable triangular surfaces at the tips of the wings).

The Wright brothers successfully developed and patented a system of controlled flight which used wing warping to control and shift the lift characteristics of aircraft wings, but in no time Glenn Curtiss and Alexander Graham Bell made a big improvement by building aircraft using ailerons as a better method of control. Years of patent fights ensued which were only ended by government intervention under wartime emergency conditions. The Wright patents were sustained, but that did not stop the flood of innovation which quickly overtook their leadership in aviation.

As I discussed in the case of Lee de Forest and his discovery of the Audion tube, patents can stimulate new discoveries, as was the case with Curtiss and Bell, but they are a poor defense of industrial secrets. Law and lawyers cannot stop the spread of ideas or attempts at variations on a theme. And though you may find a piano lid to be a passable raft in a shipwreck, that does not mean that the piano lid is the best of all possible flotation devices ever to be discovered.

“Father of the American Factory System” Samuel Slater, aka “Slater the Traitor.”

Things get even more complicated when dealing with the differing motivations and legal systems in other countries. Take the case of “Father of the American Factory System” Samuel Slater, who illegally brought British textile mill technology to the United States in the early 1800s and created our first real industrial system. But back in England he was known as “Slater the Traitor.”

Edison once said, “Everybody steals in commerce and industry. I’ve stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal.” By that he meant that he would take someone’s idea and go beyond what they had previously done, with a better conception, a new chemical composition, or construction. And as the scale of complexity of networks expanded from telegraph, to telephone, to power grids, to networked computers, products, patents, and systems became even more interconnected. In fact, early software developers working under military and other contracts found themselves severely hampered by copyrights and excessive secrecy. An alternative concept, sometimes called “copyleft,” was developed along with various license types which allowed software to be released to the public with varying degrees of freedom of the public to use, alter, and develop the software. The internet was built out of the building blocks of many types of software distributed under such licenses.

So, given all of these complexities, how do we prosper in today’s world? How do we make the “quantum leap in the standard of living” of which President Trump speaks?

Of course there are many initiatives in President Trump’s Agenda 47 which point the way out of our current collapse—such as pursuing Project Artemis to colonize the Moon and Mars, building 10 completely new cities in the West, deploying nuclear power plants (and a bit later fusion power plants), tariffs and mutually beneficial reciprocal trade agreements, removal of environmental and other litigious regulations choking farming and industry, etc.

Beyond such initiatives, we need to create the environment in which people with great ideas and a strong work ethic can get the backing of a new National Bank via their local bank to bring those ideas to realization. We also need to organize a New Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system for international trade as long specified by Lyndon LaRouche. This is necessary in order to prevent the types of currency exchange rate manipulations which have been used by the British Empire to wipe out (or take over) industries and bankrupt nations. This is a very important defense against the globalist “cheap labor” assault upon American industries and workers.

Along with kicking speculation out of commercial banking, we need to restore a graduated capital gains tax which heavily taxes short-term gains on property titles. We want to dry out speculation and encourage long-term investments which promote the general prosperity. And we must use means such as President Kennedy’s investment tax credit to encourage the plowing of profit back into research, development, and improvement of product and production systems.

However, we also need to reexamine the way we think about the world, the nation, and the role of the individual. We not only have to develop the rules, institutions, relationships, and projects necessary to facilitate technological and production breakthroughs and innovations, but we must foster the development of the future workforce of independent thinkers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and skilled workers who will build the future we seek.

In other words, we have to deliberately, intentionally create the conditions which will allow a scientist, engineer, or just plain hard worker to minimally be able to own a home and raise a family on one paycheck. Were we not to do this, our society would be doomed in the long run.

So, don’t count on Christopher Wray and the FBI to preserve the leading role which some of our industries still maintain in the world. His interest is not in defending American industrial leadership but in advancing the dead-Queen-loving Biden collective’s drive to heat up tensions between China and the United States at the time when cooperation between the United States, China, Russia, and India would be required to lead the creation of a New Bretton Woods agreement as mentioned above.

As President Trump has said again and again, our economic and social problems are not primarily due to what China has done and is doing, but due to what we have allowed to be done to ourselves by people who claim to be Americans—or at least claim to be “friendly” towards us. For decades we have allowed the City of London and Wall Street Imperial interests to use their entire toolbox to cripple and constrain productive American enterprise and innovation. We can no longer afford their sabotage. We cannot afford to take the posture of simply “standing by our rights,” or “maintaining our corporate culture,” or “looking out for investors,” or any such backward-looking approach to the future. Our best defense against any threat, as a society, company, or individual, is to always be working on bringing the next big breakthrough to realization. We have to “THINK BIG.” Now is the time to bring everyone you know into this dialogue about how to solve our economic crisis and build the future we and our posterity require. Discussing these ideas with strangers and friends is the key to building a massive MAGA movement and MAGA voting wave in 2024.