Introduction

Introduction


A half century ago, the Anglo-American Establishment reversed the policies which had made America rich, powerful and humane. Our former, successful way of thinking was then systematically erased from public memory. 


What was taken from us was the original objective of our Founders, the distinctively American national mission: gaining scientific control over nature to uplift mankind. The transatlantic oligarchs imposed their own contrary strategic aim and theme, the control over many people by a powerful few. This cruel British imperial legacy was falsely inserted into history as if we had always been as now, so that no remedy from our real heritage seemed available.   


In this disastrous collapse of principles, the USA has been stripped of its industry and steered into economic austerity and poverty. We have descended into permanent global war (terror/anti-terror), regime-change intrigues (posed as pro-democracy struggles), trade war with China, and potential nuclear war with Russia.

In our former way of life, now vanished, Americans were proud of leading the world towards the high living standards and high wages that characterize truly modern times. The U.S. government promoted manufacturing, sponsored infrastructure and provided credit. 


The London-New York power axis ended this American policy in the late 1960s. The triple murder of President John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the senseless Vietnam War, and a flood of drugs so demoralized the country, that no serious protest, blame or punishment came to the imperial faction when they reversed the strategy which had built the USA and had brought modern conditions into the world.


Their new system, Globalism, was based on Free Trade, meaning universal cheap labor. They condemned the former policy with perverse historical lies.

The national government had directed resources into productive industrial channels. The Establishment denounced this as dangerous Nationalism, and deceptively declared that Nationalism is what Adolf Hitler espoused. Yet the very most humane American statesmen of the past, such as Abraham Lincoln, were themselves passionate nationalists, in opposition to the imperial system that enforced slavery and backwardness. 


The transatlantic financiers attacked government intervention as Protectionism leading necessarily to trade wars. Yet the very wisest American statesmen of the past had successfully used tariffs in carefully planned strategies that developed our economy and never caused trade war. 


The London-New York Establishment sponsored radical environmentalism. They condemned the promise of American-style industrial progress for poor non-white countries: they called it a dangerous attempt to exalt Man over Nature.


This is an age-old old war, to decide if the destiny of man is to be ignorance and suffering, or peace and genius. 


The city-builders and nation-founders knew that only a literate, skilled citizenry would have the spiritual strength to sustain a free society against the domination of imperial rulers. The greatest philosophers have spurred the victories of science, discovery and invention with this ideal of the self-governing republic in mind. 


The concept of improvement, progress as essential to our human nature, came to succeeding generations as a gift from Plato’s Greece and, after long darkness, from the Golden Renaissance nearly 2,000 years later. Strong national governments in France and England implemented this idea: France under King Louis XI from 1461 to 1483, and again under the policy of finance minister Jean-Baptist Colbert precisely two centuries later, 1661 to 1683; and England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I from 1558 to 1603. They began to organize productive economics so as to make their own countries powerful and wealthy. But the political sway of imperial interests stopped Europe’s industrial progress short of transforming the world.


In the mid-1700s, there were still no "industrial nations'' on this planet. England had less industry than terribly poor countries do today. The U.S.A. did not yet exist. France was stagnant, though still relatively rich from the old canals and crafts developed by Colbert. But nowhere in the world were there any factories in the modern sense, no machines powered by artificial means, no industries run on scientific lines.


Then came a spectacular rise of revolutionary industrial technology.


The Western powers did not gradually become industrialized. Rather, there were suddenly very distinct bursts of invention, and sharply defined periods of growth, that radically changed the life and work of society. 


In Britain, this rapid change from backwardness to industrial power, known as the Industrial Revolution, began in the 1760s. Britain subsequently acted to prevent other countries from advancing. 


In America, the great transformation took place from 1815 for about a quarter century, then again to a higher level from the 1860s to the 1880s. As the U.S. rose, it spread industrial progress to other countries. During the 1930s and 1940s, America established the principle that high living standards and modern conditions were the birthright of all humanity – including the colonial sector to which life-giving industrial technology had been forcibly denied. 

Certain fundamentally new technologies were subsequently introduced to give Man a powerful future. But in the late 1960s and 1970s, the underlying principle was disavowed and America’s global role as the engine of progress was terminated. 


There is an obviously urgent question for those who seek, today, to resume mankind’s aborted progress: How did the historic industrial transformation occur? Under whose leadership and with what policies?


It is not a simple matter of looking up the answer.


Virtually all current teaching about the rise of modern industry on is based on British imperial economics, Free Trade doctrine typified by Adam Smith, together with Karl Marx’s communist theory. 


Let us begin with Marx, who gave to the capitalist class (“bourgeoisie”) all the credit for industrial progress, and all the blame for the poverty and bad conditions of working people.


Says Marx, in his Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.... [It] has put an end to all feudal ... relations.... [it] has created … more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. The subjection of nature's forces to man and machinery; the application of chemistry to industry and agriculture; steam-navigation, railways and electric telegraphs; the clearing of whole continents for cultivation….”


But, this class has also "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … in the icy water of egotistical calculation.... It has ... concentrated property in a few hands.'' Its workers are "slaves'' whose property "the development of industry has ... destroyed.'' Marx says workers have abandoned belief in "law, morality [and] religion” [believing them to be merely] bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush ... bourgeois interests.'' The capitalist class, having ruined its own Western workers under industrialism, then "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.'' To right these wrongs, Marx proposes a revolution to abolish all private property under a dictatorship of the workers. 


An elementary logical error, or trick is involved here. What Marx lumps together as the history of a single group, "the capitalists,'' is actually the net result of a long, bitter conflict between people with two absolutely opposite points of view. 


On the one side are certain people who have in fact believed in "law, morality and religion,'' who created our immense powers of technology. Employing both government and private means, they dramatically expanded the property and status of the common man. Their belief that more productive labor would make man more truly human, stems from the idea of God as humanity's common parent, who desires us to perfect ourselves in His image. 


On the other side are those powerful men who have substituted "egotistical calculation'' for law and morality. They used the creative accomplishments of their opponents to make hellish factories based on mass misery. In giant banking and merchant firms, such as the East India Company, or later the International Monetary Fund, they succeeded in preventing the spread of Western industry into the undeveloped countries. 


Free Trade and Marxist historians both claim that when medieval restrictions were lifted, and the rich were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their money, they turned their investment portfolios toward the greatest profit, which just happened to be totally new industry. The freedom to be selfish thus supposedly caused the new industry to appear. 


Oxford lecturer Arnold Toynbee promoted the hoax: "The essence of the Industrial Revolution is the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth. On this account it is not only one of the most important facts [sic]of English history, but Europe owes to it the growth of two great systems of thought--economic science, and its antithesis, socialism.'' 


But how revolutionary new technology suddenly appeared, supposedly without forethought or strategic purpose, is a mystery for which Free Trade and Communist theorists supply the same silly solution. Adam Smith claimed that various bored, uneducated workers, made the most important inventions to lighten their work. In his book, Wealth of Nations, Smith tells us: "In the first fire-engines [i.e. steam engines] a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder.... One of these boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that, by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play-fellows. One of the greatest improvements that has been made upon this machine, since it was first invented, was in this manner the discovery of a boy who wanted to save his own labor.''   


Since such a "discovery'' is perfectly accidental to the purpose of the enterprise, the motive for the story is to reinforce an old lie told by Free Trade and Communist theorists alike: that national progress can never occur by the design of free men, but only as the chance result of selfishness, or through dictatorship. 


In all of today's anti-progress economics literature—the only kind on the market--there is no credible account of the origin of modern industry, only derogation of mankind's spirit of improvement. 


We now propose to tell a different story. The secret to modern history, is that all the great breakthroughs in technology and living standards were deliberate projects for the improvement of humanity, guided by the principles in the American Declaration of Independence. 


Let us, then, take a fresh look at the Industrial Revolution, from Benjamin Franklin to John Kennedy. If we are to have a future, we will need a past which is better than the dismal fiction our enemies have given us. 


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A Note on “Conspiracy theories”

Over the years I have developed a peculiar, melancholy feeling when browsing through papers (or books) which simply and directly state the great principles of economics, or of statecraft. For I know that some other paper or book can be and often has been written, in opposition to that one. Then the petty Pontius Pilate with his self-satisfied smirk can throw up his hands and sigh, “what after all is the truth?

Any hypothesis worth conveying must be based on your own original discoveries from the realm of the bitter and frightening human clash over a profound principle, or that hypothesis lacks some essential power of truth.

Karl Marx falsely attacks pro-American economist Friedrich List’s “conspiracy theory”:

“Since his own work (theory) conceals a secret aim, he suspects secret aims everywhere. Being a true German philistine, Herr List, instead of studying real history, looks for the secret, bad aims of individuals, and, owing to his cunning, he is very well able to discover them . . . . making [his enemy] personally an object of suspicion, so Herr List also casts aspersions on the English and French economists, and retails gossip about them. . . .”

But in my view the crucial duty of those who would rescue mankind from Zeus, is to accurately and forcefully tell the story of the warfare that the leaders of mankind on both sides – arrayed always in conspiracies, virtuous and evil -- have waged. to determine in which direction mankind’s culture, thinking and actions will move.

We have learned to accept with sorrow that Alexander Hamilton, and Nicholas Biddle, and Henry Carey, and Franklin Roosevelt, have apparently left behind no written behind-the-scenes account of the titanic strategic warfare in which they were bitterly engaged. We have to supply it.

I was personally criticized by a political associate for being “concerned with stories, or conspiracies, instead of ideas.” I reject the canard: no idea, not even scientific discovery or artistic creation, exists or can be fully conveyed unconnected to biography. In political economy, above all other subjects, the “secret history” of the head-to-head war over principles must be made the property of suffering mankind, for its redemption.

Footnotes for Introduction


1. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, London, 1884; p. 85. https://ia802707.us.archive.org/3/items/lecturesonindus01jowegoog/lecturesonindus01jowegoog.pdf
2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published 1776, Book 1, Chapter 1.  http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-01.html
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