President Bush's 1950's Era Economic Philosophy

The straw man arguments president G.W. Bush defends his failed economic policy with that builds a vast federal debt, outsources modernization of manufacturing and floods the nation with illegal aliens might have had a solid rationale in the 1950’s amidst a minority of economists. The President’s policy belief is that isolation and globalism are the only choices available; as if it were actually possible for America to be isolated in the 3rd millennium with present transport and communications technology, or as if the Federal Government had an authority to restrict global business to its own liking…the President has signed away through trade agreements that sort of somewhat obsolete opportunity and should know better.

The federal government should serve the people of the United States within the global community first and maybe help out global corporations too. Federalists began government policy with Hamilton choosing to create corporate welfare in order to pump prime manufacturing, and the premise that the federal government had a right to promote the general welfare of the people in road building, schools and all manner of previously non-governmental areas was off and running.

Today the federal government should promote national business inventions that liberate the nation from reliance on foreign trade-deficits or ecological destruction. Simply pointing to a potemkin unemployment rate that finds many Americans not reporting, underemployment and cheap labor work for foreign corporations is as harmful as claiming the no child left behind school policy that has 1/3/rd of students failing to graduate from high school and 50% of blacks failing to walk down the aisle to jive with the teach-tech is a successful policy (Newsweek or Time article recently).

The Tongass Forest policies of the President are equally obsolete slaughtering valuable stands of old growth and cedar for quick cheap profits for his timber felling supporting corporate types in Alaska. Once gone the old growth never returns…sycophants at Department of the Interior lamely claim it does no harm to wildlife (they didn’t add that the wildlife are vacationing on the moon).President Bush has raised the federal debt to an all-time global high along with oil prices for his oil compadres.

A recent magazine article describes how electric cars can be made at home or for hire from 8000 to 20,000 dollars that get maybe 150 miles per charge up. With solar panels one can charge an electric car in a parking lot and drive around Texas or wherever without paying a dime for fuel…why not accentuate then positive a little? One converts a chassis from an old car with a new electric motor, and some tech changes could make them much more efficient…save that second ‘car’-the SUV or truck for gas guzzling heavy payloads not mall-hopping.

Thomas Jefferson wrote presciently about President G.W. Bush’s federal deficit planning…that deficits are made by federal officials so ‘it never (can) be paid, but always (is) to be a thing with which to corrupt and manage the legislature”. My interpolations for clarity, in parenthesis.

Plato's Realm of Forms

Neo-Platonists such as Plotinus who wrote seven hundred years after Plato understood Plato's thinking about as well as possible I would guess. I am not being too technical here with a reply; philosophy has so many books and topics, and life has so many diversions that it isn't possible to be continually immersed in one particular philosophical subject.

Plotinus read Plato and studied at Alexandria Egypt amongst other places, and wrote a group of tractates called 'The Enneads' or groups of essays in six books of nine each. A free version of the enneads by McKenna and Page is available on the internet.

Plato's realm of forms is an abstract aspect of the Universe or beyond the Universe. One might consider Plotinus' explanation and development of the realm of forms like Dante’s trilogy about the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradisio in that it is a sort of cosmogony or cosmological map of how things are.

Interestingly Plotinus' ideas fit in rather well for modal logic deliberations on Christianity and Quantum Cosmology...I wrote a little book of essays that just tried to survey some of the Genesis/Cosmology/Physics issues in 'Creation and Cosmos; The Literal Values of Genesis'.

Plotinus had a belief that God or 'The One' is absolutely perfect and contains everything that could ever be sort of non-spatially, non-developed if one might imagine a Shannon entropy totality like a black hole of all knowledge compacted to a singularity yet without dimension at all. The One is absolutely perfect and can't be described very well.

The One in some way (here is the tough part for physicists) emanates 'ideas' effortlessly outward, perhaps one can imagine 'radiation' of knowledge and reality into a new extension of God called 'The Intellect'. The Intellect is the realm of forms. It has everything that could every be throughout all time, and everything that ever was sort of as an abstract and non-material idea. Plotinus' 'The Intellect' or Plato's realm of forms has virtue, goodness and every sort of quality too. Maybe one could think of it as the realm of perfect blueprints.

'The Soul' is the next or third stage of 'The One'. The Soul is equivalent to the Universe, perhaps that created by a big bang or the Spirit in Genesis with the 'let there be light' command.

Plato's allegory of the cave is about mankind living in the material world of The Soul and unable to see the true light higher up beyond the cave (the cave is the Universe). Plato probably developed the theory of the realm of forms to explain and relate particulars and universals, time and change, and of course built upon the pre-Socratic philosophical ideas. Plato's realm of forms was a concept of pure genius that hasn't been surpassed or made obsolete today.

If one reads the April 2006 Scientific American book review on page 100 of 'Beyond the Standard Model', or reads Green's 'the Fabric of the Cosmos' multi-dimensional universe theory as a consequence of M-Theory can be considered briefly with books like Adam's 'The Five Ages of the Universe'?. Plotinus would have the material world as the farthest from 'The One', and of course Satan and other created or even agnostic or atheist beings in the imperfect and broken material world/universe that chose to not return to The One would quite naturally have a long cruel time on their own in a way as far from order and reason as possible. Jesus Christ is the expressway to The One through his atoning sacrifice (I just had to write that...it will be helpful eventually for believers anyway).

The material universe may have a big bang or a big crunch, but for immortal souls being in the wrong protocol will be quite difficult.

Souls too are of The One, it’s simply a matter of being in the right theo-space-time coordinate relationship that the difficulties and progress arise. Trying to understand the realm of forms with referring to it within a theistic and spiritual context is de trop...It’s all about spirit.