Dr. E Michael Jones joins us at IridaTV to discuss his pivotal work on economics, Barren Metal. What is the most fundamental and important aspect of an economy? Who should benefit from and what is the value of labor? How do you extract value from others' labor without doing any work? Dr. Jones answers within!

———
E. Michael Jones Books: https://www.fidelitypress.org/
Subscribe to Culture Wars Magazine: https://www.culturewars.com
Donate: https://culturewars.com/donate
Follow E. Michael Jones: https://culturewars.com/links

Obviously we can't go over the whole book, because it's like 900 pages long.

This isn't the first conversation you obviously had about the book.

Is there any topic that you've hoped that somebody asked that they haven't yet?

I'd just like to begin with a statement that I saw recently from Jeffrey Sachs.

He was the man that basically orchestrated the looting of Russia as an agent of Wall Street.

But I mentioned this because, no, is the loony of Russia in that book?

But he stood at Yeltsin's hand when they basically privatized the entire country.

And he said recently that everything he did was wrong, and it was based on an economics that made no sense.

And he got a PhD in economics, and it was totally worthless.

And he's going back to the sources, and the source he mentioned was Aristotle.

Good luck trying to reinvent the wheel here because someone more capable than you has already done it and that's Heinrich Pesce and he's the basis of that book that I wrote.

And 1 of the main reasons I wrote Barron Metal was to make his thought accessible to the English speaking world.

And in fact, I think normally I do an intro before we start it, but I think that's a good place to start.

I'll do the intro ex post facto here, which is essentially this is Dylan Moore with IRETA TV.

We are here to talk about his book Barron Metal.

Let me get that, let me get the subtitle here right.

A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury.

Jones is the editor over at Culture Wars magazine and author of very big books like this.

How many hours a day do you spend writing?

I take a week, no, I work especially hard on Saturday because St.

John Capistrano said we should show the Jews that we don't really follow their holidays anymore.

So I work especially hard on Saturday, sometimes more than I know.

I lead a very normal regulated life and do not work after generally 05:00 in the afternoon ever.

I mean, there are exceptions, but generally I don't.

at 09:00 in the morning and I work till 05:00 in the afternoon.

So normal 40, maybe 48 hour work week since I work on Saturday.

And I guess I'm already started getting off track here, but now I'm interested.

How do you, what's your secret to staying focused mentally?

I mean, obviously this is a huge mental thing, a huge mental exercise.

How do you stay focused 8 hours a day mentally on something like writing on, and It's not like you're writing fiction here.

You're not Stephen King just barfing whatever comes out of your head, right?

I think that the biggest thing that helped me was getting fired from a job I had as a professor.

I started off as an academic and then I started a magazine.

And with the magazine, I was basically writing articles every month.

And at a certain point, I realized that those articles could become chapters in a book.

And so it allowed me to break it down into manageable segments.

The first example was Degenerate Moderns, which was basically a series of articles that appeared in, it was called Fidelity then, and then it became culture wars.

But the idea that the life, the moral life is important to the intellectual life was the idea that guided me throughout that.

And it began when I started reading biographies of the people that I studied when I was an undergraduate in college, like Jean-Paul Sartre.

I read a biography of him and that allowed, I never wrote a chapter on him, but it allowed me to understand what I had been doing in a way that was not possible before, in a way that was simply led to confusion.

I was in the university at the tail end of existentialism.

So everybody was reading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

It was still, it was kind of like a 50s phenomenon in France but when I was in the university in the 60s in Philadelphia, and people still studied them.

But you did it in a kind of ahistorical fashion, because philosophy was not history.

And also, I was taught to begin my career as a literary critic under the new criticism, which said you just have to focus on the work.

Because I began to see the biography is very relevant, especially if what you're doing is projecting your own values onto the subject, you know.

So you can either conform your desires to the truth or the truth to your desires.

If you conform the truth to your desires, your desires are the most important thing that I need to know.

And I get to know that by reading a decent biography.

Yeah, The biography of Karl Marx is what's coming to my mind on that, where he talks about all this exploitation of the worker and such things.

And from my understanding, he never set foot in a factory during the Industrial Revolution, and he never really had a job.

And he got his housekeeper pregnant and kicked her out on the street.

I think it's even more obvious with Engles.

His father owned a factory and he had this fascination with girls who were working in the factory and was a great sexual exploiter of those girls.

Irish girl that he met in England and wrote this manifesto about women's liberation based on his own disordered lust and exploits.

So if women are liberated, I get laid more, is basically

He was 1 of the first guys who understood the way that worked.

So it really helped to understand somebody like Engels.

It helps to understand just about anybody.

It's important because the good, the true, and the beautiful are all transcendentals and they're all related.

Well, I think that's a good place to start because obviously in your book, Barron and Metal here, there's a lot of biographically relevant information.

And I think that's a good mindset to jump into this from.

And before we really dive into it, I think it'd be a good idea, because in, I mean, let me read this title again.

Yeah, Barron and Mettle, a history of capitalism as a conflict between labor and usury.

Please define, just so we're all on the same page, capitalism, labor, and usury.

Yeah, Capitalism is state-sponsored usury.

How's that for bringing the thing together?

That's the definition that I got from Pesce.

The other thing is capitalism is the systematic appropriation of all surplus value.

Surplus Value means if you have a bushel of wheat that has a certain value, if you turn that into a bag of flour, you've increased the value because it's closer.

And then you turn that flour into a loaf of bread, you've increased the power, the value even more.

That step of increased value along the way is called surplus value.

That's all you're adding to that material.

And that brings us to the next point, which is that labor is the source of all value.

These are fundamental principles that you have to understand if you want to do serious economics.

Well, and then I want to split a hair here because the word capitalism, I mean, is so emotionally loaded.

Like, I feel like we have to address it just to just to get past people shields because I mean if we take the say the communist version of it we could say okay it's the exploitation of the worker If you take the libertarian version of it, it's, hey, free, you know, being able to trade without coercion, right?

Or I mean, we can even take the Carol Quigley definition of it, which is just, hey, pursuit of profit within a price structure, right?

I want it to be clear when we're having this conversation that when we're saying capitalism, we're using your definition, which as you just pointed out is state sponsored usury.

State sponsored usury, I think it's the best definition.

Everything else is ideological, either ideologies of the left, which demonize it, or ideologies of the right, which valorize it.

But you have to break out of that dialectic, because otherwise you're not going to understand it.

And the way you break out of that is by being understanding that it's economics is a branch of moral philosophy and that means it's philosophy.

You have to have some type of philosophical understanding of principles, specifically the practical reason, which is how you achieve the good.

That is the matrix out of which you can have a fruitful understanding of what economics is.

And that's not what Jeffrey Sachs learned when he went to get a PhD in economics.

Usury in general means the fundamental reality of economic life is 2 people coming together, 1 with money and the other with the good.

And they're trying to work out some type of agreement where they can exchange money for some other good.

In this situation, the stronger will always be tempted to take advantage of the weaker.

And you have to bring economics is coming to an understanding of the balance that has to be achieved between those 2 parties.

So the classic example of the stronger taking advantage of the weaker would be the employer taking advantage of the employee, because the employer holds the cards and there are lots of employees out there and you can just kick them out.

That was the battle that for basically I'd say 100 years, beginning with, what do you want to begin it with, the Communist Manifesto in 1848, where the factory system had come into existence and there was ruthless exploitation of the worker.

As comes about with new technologies, There's always going to be an exploitation whenever there's a new technology.

We're going through it right now with the internet and all of that type of stuff, where it is the powerful, seized control of the internet, and they use it as a way to enrich themselves and impoverish everyone else.

And that's why at that point, you needed to bring this moral understanding to the table.

The first man who did it in a serious fashion in...

Look, you know the book, It goes all the way back to the Italian Middle Ages.

No, you started in Rome, if I remember correctly.

I'm saying for this particular system, and obviously there's a whole bunch of chapters on the Medici, and they were the beginning of the factory system.

The production of cloth in Florence was the beginning of the factory system.

But by the 19th century, it had become so widespread and so pressing that the church finally got involved when Bishop von Kettler of Mainz wrote a book called Christentum und die Arbeiterfrage, Christianity and the Worker Question, where he tried to situate this in a Christian context.

That book came out the same year that Das Kapital came out.

And so you had this battle now, in a sense for the German mind, because this was a German, it was basically Germany and England at this 0.2 countries battling it out to see who's going to rule the world and who's going to have the most powerful economic system and so on and so forth.

And Bishop von Kettler was crucial, a crucial figure in steering Bismarck away from his anti-Catholic crusade known as the Kulturkampf, and trying to explain to him that, look, the worker has certain needs, we're your friend, Catholics are your friend, the communists are your enemy.

And I think he succeeded, The Bismarck then implemented 2 of his suggestions, which were basically social security for the aged and health benefits, health insurance for the worker.

And because of that, they stopped the hemorrhage of German labor to America.

And once they stopped that hemorrhage, they could concentrate labor, which is the source of all value.

And within around the time of the unification, following the unification, there was this incredible concentration of German labor, not without conflict, without the struggles I've already talked about.

And by 1910, they had surpassed England as the most powerful economic manufacturing entity in the world.

If you don't mind going back, something that you mentioned right at the beginning of that was something to the effect of when you've got an economic situation, there's going to be 1 side that's got an advantage over the other.

The example that you gave was the employee and the employer.

Typically the employer has the advantage over the employee.

1 of the, on the show we talk about economics a lot and 1 of the people that we bumped into, have you heard of Professor Richard Werner?

So he was, He's advised quite a few central bankers.

He was intimately involved with the Japanese meltdown, like in the early 90s or the late 80s.

And essentially, his story is, none of these central bankers listen to me.

They all nod and say that they agree and then when it turns around to actually what they what they need to do they do the opposite of what I said and 1 of the things he does is he destroys the the economic narrative and the I mean what is the core of the economic narrative it's the supply-demand curve right there's That there's this equilibrium between the supply and demand curve, and he points out that, I mean, it's completely ludicrous, the assumptions that you have to make in order for that to be true, and there's no evidence that suggests it's true, and in reality, just Like you said, if you've got a buy and a sell, 1 side's gonna have an advantage.

And whoever is the short side has that advantage.

If you want a successful economic system, you're gonna have to portray that as a moral decision on both people's part.

That is the crux, that is the crux of what Heinrich Pesch had to say and how he basically relocated economics back in his proper matrix, which is as moral philosophy.

What happened over this period of time is Adam Smith was hired as a professor of moral philosophy, so at that point it was still there, but what he did was canonize, economize Newton's philosophy, which is a pagan ideology based on love and strife, and that turned it over the course of the next 2 centuries into pseudophysics, which I discuss in detail in the book.

And I don't know if you remember, I had you on the show before to discuss pseudophysics.

This is when I only read about that much of the book.

I really want to get into what you just said about the basically that The fact that there's a short side really turns us into a moral question, but before we do that, can we go into the history of labor a little bit?

Because, you know, you said you basically start with the Bedices, but you kind of start with Rome in the book, where Christianity is basically the first thing on the face of the planet that takes a look at labor differently from everyone else, right?

Can you give a little bit of an idea of how labor was valued before Christianity and how Christianity gave that a facelift.

Okay, the short answer is it was not valued at all.

If you look at the great Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, you had a country basically that had people who exploited labor so that they could be philosophers.

Someone once said that if you wanted, you couldn't be a citizen of Athens if you had to have a job, because it was a full-time job just to go all to have all those discussions and all those meetings to determine policy.

So you had a kind of platonic dualism that was based on the realm of forms and the realm of matter.

And if you wanted to be a philosopher and deal with the realm of forms, you couldn't work.

And if you wanted to, and so if you're not gonna work, you have to have slaves.

So this is a culture, no matter how great, 1 of the greatest outbursts of logos in human history, but it was based on contempt for human labor.

That was something that was done by slaves.

Now this could not survive the advent of Christianity because now the human person has a much higher value and there's no great dichotomy here between free man and slave.

Aristotle debated whether you are a slave by nature, fousse, are some people condemned to be slaves by their very nature?

That we went through this in the American South where Black folk were supposed to be created by God to tote that bale and lift that barge, you know, but this is not compatible with Christianity.

And so you have the advent of Christianity in Rome, the Roman Empire, at a time when you could, you again, had contempt for labor.

And the sign you have contempt for later is the slave society.

And the slave society comes about through usury.

You cannot talk about labor and usury without 2 sides of the same coin.

And so what you had in the Roman Republic were gentleman farmers.

This is what Virginia was supposed to breed, you know, gentleman farmers, the people that put, you know, like George Washington put down the plow and picked up a gun and drove the English out.

Those people in the Roman Republic had to buy their own weapons and they fought wars at their own expense.

And when the wars got to expand to the Roman Empire, they lost everything because they couldn't afford to do this.

And when you lose everything, you got to work for someone else.

And at that time, that meant being a slave on 1 of the latifundia, which were the factory farms of the Roman Empire.

And so what you created, because of usury, because you didn't have a Christian understanding of the nature of value, was a slave society at the bottom and a usury society at the top.

You cannot have usury because you can never pay off the debt.

And so what the Roman Empire did was, well, we'll plunder other countries and we'll kick the debt down the road.

The bill comes due and when 476, when Romulus is, can't pay the troops and you know damn well the first thing that happens when you don't pay the troops is that they loot your country and that's exactly what happened with the the Germanic invasion.

Well it's fascinating you point that out 1 of the topics we've talked about on the show is specifically that the relationship between debt and slavery.

And I just to emphasize what you're talking about, like, I'm sure this goes back even further.

It's just that Sumeria is they wrote the best records and all the records they wrote were about taxes on stones.

But this was like a constant issue, even in ancient Sumeria, where due to usury, at some point, so much of the population would become in slaves that they regularly had to do these debt Jubilees.

Otherwise the society would crumble because the whole place turned into slaves.

Because they were inspired by God and God knew you can't have a floating loan forever, it's gonna wreck everything.

You can have a floating loan for 60 years and then it's gonna explode and no 1 can pay it off and that'll be the end of it.

So you have to have a jubilee year, you have to forgive debt, it's that simple.

And we don't, we're totally confused about that because we basically have a pagan concept called pacta sunt servanda.

In other words, if you sign the contract, you're on the hook and you're gonna pay.

That's what rules student loans right now.

Correct, yes, thanks for bringing that up, yep.

Donald Trump did it 3 times, okay, because he's too big to fail.

But the poor schmuck who took out a student loan, oh no, you're on the hook, buddy.

If I create an entity and know how to play the credit game, like I create an LLC, I sign up on the right websites, I get the right credit accounts, I get a thing where I can loan a hundred thousand dollars, I loan a hundred thousand dollars, I pay myself, don't pay it off, that thing goes bankrupt.

If I know how to play the stupid game, with the way that the rules are set up, I can totally take advantage of it.

But like you said, if I want to follow, you know, just be a good guy that does labor and learns, you know, I get screwed.

Donald Trump said exactly the same thing.

He said, you will get, he knew how to game the system and that's why he became too big to fail.

The whole point of this, what is economics?

Economics is not some magic formula that will allow Donald Trump to get rich.

If you're talking about an individual, you're really not talking about economics.

And once you look at debt over the, with the perspective of the big picture, you realize it's untenable.

And I think that this is exactly what Christianity understood at the beginning of that era.

Just as they understood that there is value to human labor, they understood that usury is a sin, and you can't allow it.

And it worked because the Roman Empire collapsed.

You have a situation where there's only local economies and there's really not a whole big role that money plays in a local economy like this after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The serf, this is a period of time when you're constantly being played by invasions.

It's the Vikings from the north, it's the Saracens from the south.

When the Vikings show up and you're just this little guy with a little plot of land, you have to run to the castle and you have to wait it out, hope that they just go away, and then you go back and hope they didn't wreck your crops.

And it became so chronic that they said, look, I can't do this anymore.

I have to become basically a servant to the Lord because he's got the castle.

And that was the beginning of the serf system.

You were saying you owed them labor and you didn't need money.

That was the good part of it because you didn't have to get money to pay taxes.

And over that period of time, we had the Christianity being the leaven in the loaf.

And so at a certain point, because the serf had rights as a Christian, we're all children of God, we're all on the same level, he began to have de facto property rights of the German sort, which meant you had the right to work this property, but you did not have the right to sell it.

So gradually that became institutionalized and you pretty much had the right, this is in England as well.

You had the right to use that property even though you didn't own it.

And there were people, a rich man would die and he'd create a purgatory society which is basically you could graze your sheep here if you pray for my soul.

And it was a 1 of these beautiful arrangements that William Cobbett talks about in his book on the Reformation in England, which he describes as a looting operation, which is absolutely true.

So, over this period of time, this evolved.

And now, what happened as civilization became more and more complex, and we're talking about the high Middle Ages now, And Italy as the absolute center of everything in the high Middle Ages, like art, but also economics and bookkeeping, double-entry bookkeeping was invented in Venice.

The Germans would come down to Venice to learn these techniques at this point, and it's becoming more and more complex, and at this point, you need money.

Like you're paying wages now to factory workers who are working in the cloth factories in Florence, places like that, and if you're paying wages, now these people have to pay taxes, and now you need money, and money is short because it's gold, and there's not a lot of gold around, and so where do you get gold, where do you get money?

Well, you go to the Jew, because the Jew was the man who lent you money at 43 and a third percent interest.

It just boggles my mind that that's even if-

If you're lucky, you'll get it at 43 and a third percent interest per annum.

And so immediately you've got a social problem because the people are falling into debt and they can't get out, and the Jew is getting richer, and he's becoming more and more arrogant the richer he gets.

See all Culture Wars Podcast transcripts on Applepodcasts

Economics Requires Morality with Dr. E Michael Jones