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Dr. Gordon Anderson speaks about his latest publication, Integral Society, Social Institutions and Individual Sovereignty
In this interview, Dr. Gordon Anderson discusses his newly published work, “Integral Society, Social Institutions and Individual Sovereignty”. Dr. Anderson explains the proper levels and spheres for social institutions such that they strengthen human sovereinty and freedom. Special empahsis is placed on economic freedom that has been blocked by corrupt relationships between centralized banks and exploitive governments.
About Dr. Gordon Anderson
Gordon L. Anderson has a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion from Claremont Graduate University. He organized a set of comprehensive academic conferences on world social systems with the late Morton A. Kaplan, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He worked with Alexander Shtromas of the Hoover Institution on the Soviet System, Ilpyong Kim at the University of Connecticut on the Chinese System, and Edward Shils at Cambridge University on Liberal Democratic societies.
His integral philosophy developed as the editor of a series of books by integral scholars at Paragon House, including Allan Combs, who introduced him to the work of Ken Wilber, whose integral framework was developed in this book. He developed his approach to integral society while an adjunct prosfessor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is indebted to the work of Steve McIntosh, the president of the Institute for Cultural Evolution whose Developmental Politics develops the field of cultural evolution in a parallel manner that economic evolution is tackled in this book.
He worked with the late Nicholas N. Kittrie, Edward Mooers Professor of Law Emeritus at American University on books related to constitutional and criminal law and peace studies. He collaborated with Professor Don Trubshaw in the Department of Business at Nottingham Trent University on the publication of Institutional Value Theory and the resiliency of social institutions. Dr. Norman G. Kurland, President Center for Economic and Social Justice, contributed to his knowledge of binary economics and the just distribution of capital.
He has practical experience with the nature of finance and governance by serving on and heading the finance committee of the board of trustees of the University of Bridgeport. As a member and president of the board of the Legislative Evaluation Assembly of Minnesota, he witnessed the gradual erosion of constitutional processes and the hijacking of the state government by political parties and the administrative state
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TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kaufmann: Dr. Anderson, welcome.
Dr. Anderson: My pleasure.
Dr. Kaufmann: This is great. We’ve done this once before on some of your prior work.
Dr. Anderson: We did one on this topic of social institutions earlier on.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yes.
Dr. Anderson: The book on it.
Dr. Kaufmann: Was that part of what evolved into this book that we’re going to discuss today?
Dr. Anderson: It’s part of it, yes.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. Alright, I’ve already introduced you, and I’ve already introduced the book. But let’s just real quick do that now, again, here in case somebody picks up in the middle of our interview here. So the book is entitled, Integral Society, Social Institutions, and Individual Sovereignty. Did it just come out just days ago, or?
Dr. Anderson: It just came out as an e-book about 2 weeks ago.
Dr. Kaufmann: Alright.
Dr. Anderson: And a print book will follow next spring.
Dr. Kaufmann: I see. Okay, so it’s only available now in e-book.
Dr. Anderson: Yes.
Dr. Kaufmann: And it’s purchasable by your own?
Dr. Anderson: Barnes and Noble.
Dr. Kaufmann: Barnes and Noble.
Dr. Anderson: Or amazon.com.
Dr. Kaufmann: Both places. Okay, wonderful. And just curious, I hadn’t planned this, but what would create a different time spacing for the release of an e-book and a print book because you said next spring? So, how would it be the case that an e-book appears much earlier than the print volume?
Dr. Anderson: In this case, I’m using the e-book to gather criticisms and corrections to try to improve it because it costs a lot more money to print the actual print book and I want to have it the best possible. The e-book, I can revise it and upload and somebody with a Kindle can get the latest version just by erasing their current version and downloading a new one without any extra cost.
Dr. Kaufmann: Congratulations. I didn’t pay attention close enough to see that it’s a Barnes and Noble. Is that the publisher or is it Paragon House Publishers?
Dr. Anderson: Paragon House Publishers, yeah.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. Okay. And so in the tagline you describe or in the promotional literature, you describe that it challenges our people of our present time to think about fundamental institutional changes needed to defend the sovereignty of individuals. That’s the core thrust of the book.
Dr. Anderson: I would say that’s a good description. That’s John Ross’ description from his…
Dr. Kaufmann: Praise.
Dr. Anderson: to the board.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yeah, very good. In the same promotional literature, I don’t know now if I’m quoting again from another scholar praising your work, but it describes that the institutions are meant to serve sovereign individuals not be exploited by them. And in the same paragraph, you say that while institutions have a valuable place in integral society, they must be kept to their mission sphere and level of society. Could you explain in a few words, these spheres? This would be helpful.
Dr. Anderson: Yes. This is actually in the appendix of the book and a built on Ken Wilber theory. Ken Wilber published the best-selling book A Theory of Everything, in which he gives a big picture of the historical evolution of human development and consciousness. I have added the concept of spheres; he already has levels in his view. So, levels of society would be like individual family, society, nation, world, cosmos, and those different levels. Spheres of society are governance, culture, and economy. And these spheres, I explain, come out of something very related to human nature. It’s developed by Frederick Hyack and his idea of spontaneous social orders. But the idea is, communication is the basis of culture and the idea to produce an exchange is the basis of the economy. And the third is the almost automatic creation of laws; that people, when they get together, they make rules about how they’re going to behave. And Hyack argues that all these 3 things occur. I mean, it’s like breathing, or eating. Those are social aspects of our life are fundamental to the social existence as breathing and eating are to our biological existence. These are the basis of the 3 spheres; communication, you know, economy, for the desire to exchange, and rulemaking for governance. So, these are the 3 core spheres of society. And then you have the levels. So, institutions fit in one of those spheres, and at one of those levels. And the family does not exist at the global level; it’s at the family level. And often institutions try to operate at the wrong level. For example, in communism, you have the central government trying to plan people’s daily economic lives. And that interferes with this natural desire to produce an exchange that is part of the human nature. So, anytime a social institution suppresses one of these natural impulses; to communicate, to have fair laws, or to have free exchange of goods and services, then human beings are frustrated by the social institutions. And we see today we’re in a world where social institutions all over the place are trampling on individual sovereignty. And you’ll see it when World Economic Forum is trying to you know control what people eat, and what kind of food they have, and what kind of money they use. You see it all over; the hijacking of universities, and other institutions in all 3 spheres. So, the idea is that institutions must remain in their proper sphere and at their proper level. When they do that and they serve according to their mission, then they’re serving human beings rather than exploiting or oppressing them. But the nature of institutions, you know, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is a slogan related to governance. But the same is true of other institutions. The institutions are human collectives that have more power, usually more wealth than an individual would. So, they can use that to their advantage to either serve or oppress people. And, I’m arguing in this book that, especially in the economic sphere, we’re still living in feudalistic times where certain people control the money, and the new money, and through government and banking cabals, they are really preventing people from having a blessed life.
Dr. Kaufmann: A lot of questions came up in my mind as you were just describing the overall infrastructure or kind of skeleton on which your writing happens here. One of them is the sphere. You say the spheres were Wilber’s concept and the levels you’ve added in or?
Dr. Anderson: No. The levels are Wilber’s concept, and they’re kind of common. You see that in lots of teachings, and you’ll see that in traditional International Relations courses, you have what’s called the Levels of Analysis Problem. The spheres are my own development.
Dr. Kaufmann: I see.
Dr. Anderson: Because each of them relies on different principles. And when an institution in one sphere tries to do something in another sphere, it’s not properly equipped. For example, government might try to control language. We’ve recently had problems with censorship in social media. And we can see that it suppresses that spontaneous nature of people’s desire to communicate and seek truth. So, it’s the wrong sphere. Government is not the sphere of language, it’s culture. And that should be free. Government would serve as a referee, not as a player in the case of language.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay. So, the spheres are what you’ve added into the equation in analysis for envisioning a healthy and wholesome…
Dr. Anderson: Right.
Dr. Kaufmann: society.
Dr. Anderson: Wilber’s Theory of Everything had a real big picture with 4 quadrants and all these different levels of development. The 4 quadrants are individual internal and external, social internal and external. So, you can place everything related to individuals in those upper 2 quadrants; mind and body unity, etc. And in the lower 2 quadrants, you have social consciousness or culture, and then the institutions that develop and that relates to the interpersonal or transpersonal level of socializing.
Dr. Kaufmann: It sounds like you’ve added some refinement to the levels. I’m hearing basically 2 different levels in what you’ve just described as Wilber’s 4 quadrants. And earlier on, you mentioned several levels like the individual, the family, the tribe, and so forth.
Dr. Anderson: Yes. Wilber discusses that. He takes the 4 quadrants, and he goes from the getting like 12,000 years ago, little hunter gatherer societies, and draws a line to the present day, we’re reaching what he calls an integral comments. That is where we have a consciousness. Te talks about Stage 1 and Stage 2, or Tier 1 and Tier 2 consciousness. Tier-1 consciousness is self-focused. And we know that when a baby’s born, it just thinks about mother’s nipple and the poop on its butt or whatever, and is totally self-focused. And then as we grow and mature, our consciousness develops to where we’re able to think about others, how others might feel, come to a view what some Christians would call a God’s point of view where you would see everyone as God’s child. And so the second tier consciousness gets to that level where you’re totally transcending your own ego in a higher view of consciousness. Wilber argues in his political side, that the US founding fathers were nearing this type of integral consciousness. So, he has this view of both the levels and the quadrants.
Dr. Kaufmann: I see.
Dr. Anderson: And I have the spheres.
Dr. Kaufmann: So, with the Spheres, would it be the case that every level would have all 3 spheres in it?
Dr. Anderson: Yes. So, in the family; the economy, the culture, and the rules are given by the parents to the children. They manage them on their level, and they should have a certain natural amount of responsibility on all 3 spheres.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yes.
Dr. Anderson: And, you know, you shouldn’t ask a government to do for a family what a family can do for itself, which is the principle of subsidiarity, which, in relation to levels, this is a Catholic doctrine, but I use it in the book in relation to levels; you give the greatest responsibility to the lowest possible level, because that leads to the highest amount of fulfillment and the least amount of oppression.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. A few more questions naturally arising from your explanation so far, one of them very quickly is that you created the sphere of culture that arises out of?
Dr. Anderson: Yes. Well, culture relates to knowledge, education, but it comes out of this natural desire. When you talk about social interaction between human beings, there’s a natural desire to communicate.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay.
Dr. Anderson: I’m out in the woods, and I run into somebody, I want to communicate with them.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yes.
Dr. Anderson: So, language develops from that.
Dr. Kaufmann: Language develops from that, and culture develops from languages.
Dr. Anderson: Yes. And knowledge develops in pursuit of truth. Each one of these spheres has an appropriate commandment, as a cultural sphere would be; Thou shalt not lie. Because if you lie, then communication doesn’t properly take place. And thou shalt not steal in the economic sphere, because everybody has a desire to produce an exchange. And if somebody takes their stuff, they’ve robbed them of that capacity. Thou shalt not kill is obvious; the right to life. You can’t even live and pursue happiness if you have no life.
Dr. Kaufmann: And you would place the killing as related to the governance sphere?
Dr. Anderson: Yes.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay. Yeah, what I wanted to ask about is that each of these spheres will have a content dimension, as well as a process dimension. So, it would seem to me that communication is only just addressing the process dimension, whereas the content dimension in the cultural sphere is information is actually a commodity. And lying relates more to the verity of the content, I guess it does use some process; you can become a skilled liar. That means you have communication powers, but the main thing you’re doing is misrepresenting the facts of the matter. They’re not quite static, but for argument’s sake, it’s a static entity. It’s like the coin of that realm.
Dr. Anderson: No, I think you’re absolutely right. There is a process and a content dimension. The content is the knowledge, or the understanding. And if you create false knowledge or fake news, you’re kind of committing fraud. Now, fraud is a crime, not something the government should regulate, because government should not control the content or generate the words, but it should be a referee in enabling the free exchange of information.
Dr. Kaufmann: And the means by which the determination of or misrepresentation of the facts of the matter that would fall to what means or authority or where government should just referee that communication, freely transpires?
Dr. Anderson: So, government would come in if somebody claims they’ve been harmed by fraud, and then they would go to court. And if it’s proven that somebody was injured by fraud, then the government would step in. But the government would not create any of the language to start out with, that’s on the back end, not the front end of the exchange.
Dr. Kaufmann: It’s on the back end.
Dr. Anderson: Right.
Dr. Kaufmann: So that the government has no say in what anyone chooses to represent?
Dr. Anderson: No, the government is not the appropriate instrument for truth, because government is based on power and law. And that tries to create truth that supports power. Yeah. And that’s always been a problem. The government has always tried to propagandize and that has to be prevented. That’s why they need to be kept to the limited role of referee.
Dr. Kaufmann: On the back end.
Dr. Anderson: On the back end. If somebody is harmed, the government should prevent that harm. I mean, it can have a kind of a front end effect by having the law that tells somebody if you commit fraud; you’re going to go to jail. And that’s a deterrent aspect. But it has nothing to do with the content of the communication.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yeah. It’s somewhat of an idealistic formula, but it’s fraught with very great difficulties, correct? Say, if someone says a drug would be helpful in the prevention or cure of a disease and it proves to be not the case, is that person harmed to the extent that the government is punishing fraud or? These are the types of things we’re facing in our day to day lives now.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yeah. I think, you know, you have to come in. And that’s why you have the judge side of the government. You have 3 parts of government. You have the legislation, law creation, you know, the administration, and you have the judges to settle disputes. And often why you have a jury of peers is because the jury has some amount of compassion and some general representation of the whole effect on society and has to make a judgement. The idea that any of these things can be clear, I think, is a fiction that a lot of people have. That you can have some absolute law that applies in every case. I think that’s a fiction that a lot of people who do not have an integral consciousness, kind of hold. It’s a pre-integral disposition.
Dr. Kaufmann: Correct. So, integral adds in the kind of supple, fluid, or flexible elements of everything that has to come under consideration for a healthy society.
Dr. Anderson: Right.
Dr. Kaufmann: Whereas sorry, people would imagine that there’s something technically known as misinformation or disinformation, somewhat of a mechanistic sense of what is the nature of what’s true or what’s…
Dr. Anderson: Yeah, mechanistic or reductionistic. So, for example, you have the question of climate change. Well, if everything you do is based around some dogmatic notion of climate change, then it doesn’t matter if people die because you’re so concerned with your climate change policy. You know, maybe genocide becomes then…
Dr. Kaufmann: appraised.
Dr. Anderson: appropriate action in your reductionistic mindset. Whereas someone with an Integral view would consider that every human life, it has intrinsic value according to Kant’s categorical imperative to treat everybody as an end in themselves, not as a means to some other end.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. The other thing, so in the other spheres, in the sphere of governance and in the sphere of commerce, there are these paired elements. There is the content. So even in governance, the content is the mechanism of enforcement. And then there’s the process, which should govern or guide that particular content of that sphere.
Dr. Anderson: Yeah. You can view the processes like the operating system. You have a Constitution, a set of laws. In a computer, you have an operating system that tells all the components how they’re going to communicate with all the other components to facilitate the job of word processing, or whatever you want to do. And the same thing, the government law, and the legislative process are dictated by the Constitution. But the actual content of the law is determined as it arises in the course of human events.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yes, very good. And finally, the same with commerce or what was that sphere called?
Dr. Anderson: The economic sphere.
Dr. Kaufmann: Economic sphere.
Dr. Anderson: Economic sphere is actually the most serious sphere that I address in the book. Because in the evolution of the cultural sphere, we had come to a level of individual autonomy with the teaching of Martin Luther and other reformation principles that took control of knowledge away from the institution of the church or other social institutions, or took it out of the realm of both the government and cultural institutions. So, people gained individual cultural autonomy, which was a foundation for democracy in the political sphere. In the political sphere, you can’t really have democracy without self-sufficient, self-reliant individuals.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay.
Dr. Anderson: But in the economic sphere, we still suffer from feudalism. And this stems back to banking practices that begun in 1696 in England, where the fractional reserve banking creates what’s called new money. I don’t know if you understand that process. But say, if you have $100,000 and you put it in a savings account, fractional reserve banking allows the bank to lend out a million dollars and hold your $100,000 as a reserve. Because, enough people have savings that only so many are, you know, going to the bank and asking for their money at one time. So, this mechanism of fractional reserve banking has led to great economic growth. But the payments on that loan, which are backed by your $100,000 are taken by the bank. You should get the $1 million when the loan is paid, and the bank should be charged a service fee. And that’s the way it was before.
Dr. Kaufmann: When did that change?
Dr. Anderson: 1696. And here’s what happened. It was illegal to do it because the banks were really stealing the depositors’ money, or the banks were using the depositors’ money to take the profit rather than giving the profit to the depositor and charging a service fee. But in 1696, the government says, ‘Hey, we’re going to ignore that if you give us part of the reward. So, as the depositors are paying $100,000, we’re not going to let you take a million dollars, and steal it from the depositors, but we’ll let it slide if you give us a certain amount’. So, there’s been these government and bank cabals where this new money is divided up between the bankers and the governments. And it’s often used to fund military industrial complex, or in the case of England, King William used it to fight wars when the system went into effect. And so, the real question about fractional reserve banking is who gets the money? And if the depositors got it, the capital would be distributed throughout the whole society. And you would have everybody owning the capital, which funds the industrial production and growth that we have, instead of the 1% or 3%. So, we have a system now in which the governments and the bank take the 1%. And you had Marx arguing against that, but he wanted the party to take the 1% whereas I am arguing that the true economic democracy is this money is given equal opportunity among all citizens. And that would be the evolution of a sovereignty or economic autonomy in the third sphere. So, we have autonomy in the cultural sphere and the government sphere we used to at least have glimpses of it. In the US Founding, we have a particular good glimpse at it. Because at the US Founding, I want to introduce one more principle related to the economics and that is what’s called binary economics. Everybody has labor. We have our labor value, right? We can work so much, we put in 8 hours a day, and we get paid for it. It might be the banker shuffling papers, or it might be a ditch digger, digging ditches, but you’re getting paid for your labor. And when the United States was founded, almost everybody was paid for their labor because almost everybody had their own business or their own farm. And there’s very little developed by capital. I explained that about 95% of production came from labor at the time the US was founded. So, you had economic democracy. But the development of capital and machines and now today, artificial intelligence and robots, you have production generated from capital rather than human labor. So, we have this problem where today, instead of 95% of production coming from our labor, we have 95% of our production coming from capital.
Dr. Kaufmann: Really?
Dr. Anderson: Only 1% of the population receives this, or 3% receives most of this because of the way this money is distributed, this new fractional reserve banking mind. Almost 97% of the new money ends up in the hands of just a few people. Whereas if it was illegal for the banks to take the depositors’ money, but the banks had to pay the depositors the payments on this, then everybody in the country could be a depositor, and everybody could be in ownership of the means of production because they would receive the payments on the capital investments that the banks receive today. And the banks are receiving those payments on your money. That’s not even legitimate enterprise, but it’s been going on so long that even bankers just assume that that’s the normal practice, even though it’s highly unethical and unjust.
Dr. Kaufmann: So, I have hundreds of questions. I am planning or I hope you will have time going forward that we can take up little sections of your book further. But very quickly, the fact that capital rather than labor is producing, would you call it wealth or..?
Dr. Anderson: It’s the basis of wealth. Yeah, right. It’s the basis of all the wealth produced from machines and…
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay.
Dr. Anderson: or artificial intelligence, robots, all the things that instead of individual labor, things are being produced in other ways.
Dr. Kaufmann: And you would say that capital is generating that value, that wealth, economic growth?
Dr. Kaufmann: You’ve mentioned 2 elements in banking that define, have a strong influence, or maybe even define the current economic reality we face today. One was fractional reserve banking. It was developed where please?
Dr. Anderson: Well, it was developed in Sweden, but bankers have always been trying to use other people’s money to profit on them. And if they could dip into reserves, they would try to get away with it. But it became legal in Sweden to hold a 10% reserve. Then, banks could lend out the rest because not everybody would be running on the bank for money at the same time. And that allows the economy to expand very rapidly compared to waiting for somebody to mine gold. All the rest of the economy can only grow as fast as gold is mined or something.
Dr. Kaufmann: Understood. Okay. And then the other thing you mentioned was called binary. Was it binary economics or binary banking, what was that?
Dr. Anderson: Binary economics. It’s when you get an income from both labor and capital. Now, everybody pretty much gets an income from their labor and their salary or their paycheck. But income from capital would be extra money that comes from lending to corporations who are building and then receiving payments back on that. I think in 2019, the US developed $4 trillion in new capital out into the economy. So, just a few people got that. Whereas if that were spread out among the entire population, it’d be $10,000 per person.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay. I always thought that capital’s capacity to produce value or wealth came from the money itself. But we were discussing earlier, possibly before this interview, that you even include the money produced by AI, by robots, by machines. That’s capital producing value?
Dr. Anderson: Yes. It takes capital to buy the machines. You couldn’t set up a Tesla factory without capital. You just wouldn’t have a bunch of people getting together with manual labor. And the industrial sector has evolved over time. So, you would buy big machines from other companies, and then you would typically borrow money from a bank. And the bank would, as I mentioned before, be using your $100,000 getting a million dollars back on a 5-year loan at 8%. And they get like 0.1% on that today, but you should be getting about a 200% return on that.
Dr. Kaufmann: Interesting. Okay. So there are 2 things producing genuine increase in wealth and value. But the problem is not that capital produces value, that’s not the problem. Or even that fractional reserve banking is a way to heat up the economy or create growth. That’s not a problem either. The problem is the way things are structured in a corrupt fashion that only a tiny few people sees all of the value that’s produced. Is that what you’re…?
Dr. Anderson: That’s right. It’s like just a few percent of the population own 90 some percent of the capital and receive 90%. You know, you get income just from production and selling things. You can have a profit, but that goes to the stockholders or in our corrupt system; a lot of it goes to the government. So, you have income from lending and you have income from stock ownership. You know, the concern about Marx is the workers didn’t own the means of production. Well, I’m arguing that his observation is correct, that everybody should own the means of production. Everybody should have the opportunity to invest in all the companies and receive both the proceeds from the loans that those companies take as well as income on stock dividends. You would have everybody in the country, largely being a middle class, just like when the US was founded everybody had an economic democracy because everybody’s income was from labor. What I’m proposing is a system in which everybody’s income is from labor and capital. And you don’t have a situation like where Warren Buffett pays 10% on his income, and the Secretary pays 40% on hers, because hers is a labor and his is capital, you should be charging the same taxes on capital income as labor income.
Dr. Kaufmann: Real quickly, of course, Marx’s experiment resulted in the darkest period of human affairs; mass genocide, the worst ever. What do you envision in terms of the equalization that you’re advocating that would travel a different path than what happened to Marx?
Dr. Anderson: What Marx wanted was to totally centralize ownership of capital, and even make it less than the owners, just the leaders of the party that controlled it. And the government’s spheres are not even in the right sphere, it’s not part of the economic sphere. So, the principles aren’t even right for making an economy work. What I’m proposing is distribution of ownership of capital. So…
Dr. Kaufmann: Wasn’t he saying, right, that everyone owns the means of production, wasn’t that his slogan?
Dr. Anderson: I would think that he would be happy with that outcome, but that never happened. And it’s not clear from the Communist Manifesto, that he really wanted all the workers to own the means of production, but that the party would intervene on the workers’ behalf because they weren’t smart enough to manage it themselves. And that’s the way Lenin went. And that’s the way the World Economic Forum is going to do.
Dr. Kaufmann: But the World Economic Forum makes no pretense of wanting mass distribution of the means of production.
Dr. Anderson: No. And neither did Marx. Because, at least the Marxist, the communist party today defines private property as distinct as from what you own; your house or your car, or your bed, but private property as a special means. It’s the capital ownership for the means of production. So, in his rhetoric, he made people believe that the worker should own the means of production, but then he turns around and says, ‘Give it to the party who will act on the workers’ behalf’. And that’s the mistake. So really, the worker should own the means of production. Not only the workers, but anyone who’s involved. Because, the labor theory of value, he didn’t have binary economics, he didn’t have a capital theory of value.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. Who would guarantee that the distribution would meet this idealistic concept that you’re putting forward? Because what we would have to do would be to avoid something like the party, which became a totalitarian tyranny.
Dr. Anderson: Yes. So there are 2 proposals I have in my book, and one of them is just natural; you have nobody overseeing it. You just have people investing in savings accounts. And the actual capital produced from those savings is given back to the depositors. So, if you have $100,000 in your bank, you might have a million dollars after 5 years.
Dr. Kaufmann: It’s just structuring…
Dr. Anderson: That’s the amount the banker would have. The banker would get a million dollars on your money on a 5-year loan at 8% to a corporation, but that is not their money. They’re guaranteeing it with your deposit. Everybody can have a savings account. And if everybody’s making 200, there would be 30% on a 30-year mortgage on a house, and 200% on an 8%, 5-year industrial loan, it depends on the type of loan. But you know, people would all be highly motivated to save and prosper greatly from their savings rather than just a few percent taking it all and using it for all sorts of unworthy purposes like military wars.
Dr. Kaufmann: Would there need to be any renaissance of human nature involved? Or, you imagine that this could be just managed?
Dr. Anderson: In this system, it would just happen spontaneously because of the spontaneous nature of the desire of human beings to exchange as long as you keep it in the economic sphere. Now, there are proposals, and some of them are pretty good, where this new money would get divided into capital homestead accounts. So, everybody at birth would get a capital homestead account. And then the banks would need some entity like the Federal Reserve, to deposit those monies equally in everybody’s capital homestead account. Though, it’d be really giving everybody exactly the same. But that would eliminate the motives for savings because everybody would automatically get it. So, you could argue that it would be more just, but I don’t think it would be as economically efficient as the normal market.
Dr. Kaufmann: Another part of our prior conversations had to do with your sense of timing or historical timing. Because in a certain way, perhaps, well, I speak for myself, I was going to say the hearer or the listener of our show, but there seems an idealism in what you’re recommending. It’s hard for me to envision the mere manipulation of systems that could utterly ignore the dysfunctional dark side of human behavior; greed, lust.
Dr. Anderson: So, you need checks and balances to prevent that. So in the Constitution that I propose, no government could borrow money from a central bank in which it controls the currency. You can only borrow from some other entity, not from a cabal. And so, that would greatly limit the government’s ability to collude in this and back handedly sanction the banks stealing it. Because, they say, ‘Okay, well, you can steal it, but give me a kickback’. That’s basically the system we have today. So, the Constitution would forbid that.
Dr. Kaufmann: The way just simply a hard separation of the 2, making the 2 non-collaborative at the expense.
Dr. Anderson: It’s the same way today; an individual state can’t print money. So, an individual state can’t do this. An individual state isn’t part of the cabal, it’s only the federal government; the federal reserve in the case of the United States, or the European Central Bank, or the Bank of England, that are involved in these corrupt cabals; Bank of China, where the Communist Party does the same thing. So yeah, it’s mainly a separation of powers, they would be unable to do it. Government would be unable to do it and the banks would be forced, they’d be punished if they didn’t pay the payments that came from this new capital, if it didn’t go back to the depositors. Although they tried to keep it of course but if they receive stiff enough penalties for not distributing these funds. And you know, in my example of $100,000 deposit and million dollars coming back in payments, the interest at 8% on that would be about $194,000. Now, that’s no small amount. That’s plenty for a bank to push papers and have its own labor income. I mean, the banks wouldn’t suffer any more than the average person. They would be getting plenty for their labor income.
Dr. Kaufmann: Very good. Well, there’s a lot more I want to ask, I have a lot of questions. One of the beauties of your book is that you make things very clear. You outline; I’m going to speak about these things, the book is divided into these parts, you explain the parts, you have a constitution which you’ve proposed. And so, I have a lot of questions. We’ve concentrated mainly on the issue of banking and the kind of grand theft from the citizenry. But there’s much more to discuss. Just before you go, you mentioned to me that you have a sense that this is a time in history that something revolutionary, a great leap could happen. Can you mention a word on that?
Dr. Anderson: You do see all over the world. You see the tremendous inflation because the banks have like taken this cabal to the almost limit. They can hardly sustain it anymore. So you’re seeing possibilities of economic collapse, you’re seeing possibilities of rigged elections, you’re seeing all kinds of complaints about individuals complaining against social institutions. And that’s happening all over whether it be social media institutions, or whatever. But people are starting to realize that we don’t have the controls on social institutions that are needed. They’ve evolved since our constitutions were developed 300 years ago. We didn’t have any corporations in the United States. We outlawed the Hudson Bay Company and the East India Company, and started from scratch mainly with labor power and family businesses.
Dr. Kaufmann: So, you’re suggesting that the level of corruption or the level of dysfunction has reached almost an insufferable limit, that change is being forced. There’s no further to go into dysfunction of what has evolved institutionally.
Dr. Anderson: Well, you’re seeing people waking up. They’re talking about this time as even a second Great Awakening. And you had the Great Awakening in the 1730s before the original US revolution. But Donald Trump, the Nationalist Movements, the Brazilian election, all of these things, and protests against the World Economic Forum, and the vaccines and government mandates. People are just getting fed up with what institutions are doing to them.
Dr. Kaufmann: Okay. In our next conversation, I’d like to talk about these levels that you introduced in the beginning of our interview here. I’m going to wrap up now, but my question will be can a dysfunction or oppression or kind of a tyrannical control be from just one level up? Or do you leap across to federal control way down of the family? That’s the kind of thing I’d like to look at next time we’re together.
Dr. Anderson: Yeah, that’s an important point, and there are examples of skipping levels.
Dr. Kaufmann: Yeah. I think this will be an important thing to look at when we’re together next. It’s been a great chance to be together again, Dr. Anderson. I always enjoy listening to your understanding.
Dr. Anderson: Alright, thank you.
Dr. Kaufmann: Thank you very much.
Dr. Anderson: It’s been a pleasure.
Dr. Kaufmann: See you soon.
Dr. Anderson: Okay.
