Sage Advice - What are the True Principles for Making the U.S. National Budget? (4/6)

In our previous dispatches, we emphasized how to think about national capital budgeting for a technologically progressive, productive and self-sustaining economy versus the fatal checkbook balancing fallacy employed by Congress today.  Here we share Lyndon LaRouche’s view about one of the central issues in the budget debate:  What is the role of the Federal government? 

Here is LaRouche: 

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S ROLE 

The function of the central government's role in the direction of the economy, should be the maintenance of a set of reliable and stable monetary and financial systems, through the aid of the functions of "Hamiltonian" national banking, and tariff and taxation policies; and, through the role of the Federal and state governments, chiefly, in the promotion of that development and maintenance of the public infrastructure which should represent, under present conditions, the economy as a whole. 

These new directions in policies must be made now in three principal ways: 1.) Emergency action to stabilize and maintain otherwise, already implicitly bankrupt present monetary-financial institutions and systems of the U.S.A. and other nations. 2.) Mobilization of large masses of public credit at low borrowing costs, to shift the labor force's role away from low-value services employment and outright unemployment, into increasing emphasis on both physical production of goods at modern progressive technological standards, with the related remedying of the vast dearth of essential basic economic infrastructure which has been created over the recent thirty-five years. 3.) The negotiation of a system of international treaty-agreements, covering a forward period of up to a half century, and employing low borrowing costs within a fixed-exchange-rate monetary system, with emphasis on the leading role of great infrastructural and related projects for building up the potential level of productivity, per capita and per square kilometer of the planet as a whole. 

This is the true American way, which we have inherited from the founding and earlier development of our republic. This is the historic mission of our U.S. republic in service to the welfare of future mankind. This is the mission, under the natural law, expressed by the Preamble of our Federal Constitution, which our constitutional republic was created to serve in the interest of all mankind. 

What is Infrastructure?  The Key Program

In discussing infrastructure in his lengthy paper, the Lost Art of the Capital Budget, LaRouche first elaborates the roots of his thinking and ontological assumptions.   He looks at the planet Earth as a dynamic system in development, employing the very useful taxonomy created by the revolutionary Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky.   The Earth’s physical economy is composed of interacting phase spaces, the abiotic, the Biosphere, and the Noo Sphere (the latter space characterized by the creative and transformational activities of the human mind and human societies).  Our policies, LaRouche says, must raise the levels of anti-entropy of the combined system as a whole.  The development of the Noosphere drives the development of the Biosphere and the combined development of the Noosphere and the Biosphere drives the abiotic development of the Solar System and our planet.  

With that discussion in tow, here is his description of infrastructure in the capital budgeting process:  

Power Sources and Other Critical Drivers of Development 

The function of primary sources of power in the universe so defined as a dynamic process, is typified by what we may term, as if by crude rule of thumb, as the relative "energy­ flux density" of the power-source (e.g., per square centimeter cross-section). The greater the "energy-flux density" of the mode, the higher the quality of effectiveness of the power source. Thus, fission power is superior to chemical power, and thermonuclear fusion is orders of magnitude higher than nuclear fission.  

These two categories of technologies are crucial now, for reason of the increase of needs for "synthetic" generation of sources of potable water, through both depletion of fossil­ water sources, and increase of both population and of current human consumption requirements per capita. There are nu­merous other needs. The domain of thermonuclear-fusion technologies, enables us to manage other resources, and create new qualities of such resources, and also opens the gates to qualitatively higher productivities. 

The increasing of plant growth, especially tree growth, is also a general good which must be promoted because of rising human needs, and also the need for continuing qualitative progress in the physical productive powers of labor per capita and per square kilometer of the Earth's surface. 

We must also consider the need to remedy functional dis­orders which have risen within the organization of society as in the U.S.A. in particular, during the period since the close of World War II. 

The Ruins Resulting From Predatory Finance 

Speculative financier interests have ruined the organization of our cities, towns, states, and countryside generally. We no longer have an efficient network of convenient mass-transport of passengers and freight, and have passed over from what was a relatively superior and more efficient use and development of land-area, and of management of essential resources such as freshwater aquifers. We create counterproductive congestion in sprawling Mega metropolises, while imposing economic ruin, and even virtual desertification on formerly prosperous regions.  

The shift into outsourcing, and replacing the closely held smaller productive enterprise with great combines, has ruined the U.S. economy, and the lower eighty percentile of our family household income-brackets, most notably, since about 1977, and has contributed in various ways to the collapse of the physical economy of the U.S.A., while increasing the financial cost of living, relative to household incomes for those same categories, and also, now, even relatively higher-income categories.

By every physical measurement of the standard of living, as distinct from clearly questionable financial measures, the U.S. economy has been ruined by the trends in policy changes made since the latter years of the 1960s, and, emphatically, since 1971-1972. These problems were neither natural, nor historically predetermined, but, predominantly, the result of defective trends in the making of national and global policies. It is imperative that we return to a technologically mod­ernized restoration of the proven superior policies of practice of the pre-1966, and, in many categories, earlier dates.

The better use and development of land-areas of our national territory, through increased emphasis on decentralization through promotion of technologically progressive forms of closely held enterprises in physical production, and a balanced diver­sity of such enterprises in each area, must accompany a deemphasis on transnational mega-corporations which lack a mo­tive of community interest in local enterprise. 

Contrary to doses of mythology combined with foolish propaganda, the promotion of the highest technologies is fre­quently based in relatively smaller, closely held enterprises, on which clumsier, larger corporate giants depend for essen­tial technologies. It is also a matter of service to several aspects  of national security, that our nation command scientific and technological capability in depth, embedded within the pores of our society and its territory, rather than concentrated in large corporate super-enterprises which have been subject to looting by the fanged and wild-eyed, hyena-like predators of rabid financial appetites with no regard for the intrinsic self-interests of nations and their peoples, including our own. 

The Development of People 

We must create meaningful opportunities for employ­ment. The immediate pressures to this effect are seen in the wasting and demoralization of increasing rations of our general population, especially among the poor, but also more widely. Supplying jobs as a source of income for living, is necessary, but does not address the deeper systemic problem. A nation is not a labor market. 

A sovereign nation-state, which the Preamble and associated features of our Federal Constitution prescribe, provides for the development of people as peo­ple, a people which participates in the maintenance and devel­opment of the conditions of life and progress for its people and territory as a whole. What is most important for the citizen as a citizen, is a meaningful role in life, a life which has merit for the benefit of coming generations. 

The most essential quality of a nation is the determination of its people to respond to challenges by mustering themselves to ensure that the nation and, especially, its posterity survive, and hopefully, progress to honorable and memorable achieve­ments in present and future generations. Of late, that quality of our people has waned, and, among a large ration of them, what Emile Durkheim termed anomie is rampant. 

So, on this account, of late, we have tended, seemingly intentionally, to foster a no-future outlook among the so­-called Baby Boomer generation, and others. We have largely destroyed the role of the actual generation of scientific and related progress as an expression of the vital self-interest of our people in being human. Typical: we are exhausting the few remaining numbers of our professionally qualified histo­rians. We are losing the connection we in the U.S.A., as in Europe, too, once had, to the existence of the preceding generations. We have become almost soulless creatures, obsessed with present pains and pleasures, and a vanishing connection to past and future alike. The extremes, the upper twenty-percentile bracket of the Baby Boomers, and the lower income brackets of our poor, are the most typical of the human cost which this decadence of our nation's culture has brought about.