Dr. Wolfram,

A copy of your letter on the OWS movement made its way to my email inbox - a technological convenience inaccessible, if not inconceivable, to Americans like Thomas Jefferson or even John F. Kennedy. But, that does not mean we are more free than those generations.

Since graduating from Hillsdale College after attending several of your classes, I have become very politically active. I have been the State Chair of the Libertarian Party of Nevada and was a top tier candidate for the Libertarian nomination for President this election cycle - until I withdrew from the contest when Ron Paul announced his intention to seek the office.

I have been following the OWS movement since it began in Zucotti Park, covering it on my radio show - The Jim Duensing Show - featuring Opinions So Good They Ought To Be Yours on Freedomizer Radio, which can be heard around the globe at www.FreedomizerRadio.com.

I also have become active in the Occupy Las Vegas solidarity effort. It is from this perspective that I read your letter. I will concede to you that many people in the national OWS effort are devout socialists - an opinion indicative of significant character flaws, intellectual laziness, and historical ignorance. I myself have had a run in with some communists in the local Occupy Las Vegas effort, not surprisingly their reaction to political disagreements is inciting state violence over attempting to find common ground through adult discussion. And, there has, no doubt, been a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment gatekeepers, like Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, and Cornell West, to make this occupy effort appear to be a left only movement. For their part, the Establishment Media only shows the most absurd examples of the extreme socialist left. They go out of their way not to show Ron Paul t-shirts and Guy Fawkes masks, though that element is very well represented amongst OWS protestors nationally. In my experience the Ron Paul / End the Fed / 911 Was an Inside Job contingent of the occupy movement is much larger than that of the socialist ideologues.

I think your article in praise of capitalism is theoretically sound - as far as it goes. However, your characterization of the motives of the OWS participants is perhaps colored by the television reports ability to take a small minority fringe element and make them seem larger than they are - and possibly the reading of too many Heritage Foundation think-tank pieces.

The Occupy Zucotti Park effort began because Big Banking has gained a virtual, if not complete, monopoly interest over the economic affairs of the nation and the world. Those originally gathering to protest were opposed to the undue influence that banks and hereditary banking families have in our present day society - and in causing the hyper inflationary collapse we are currently suffering under..

In short, they were not protesting capitalism, they were / are protesting the modern incarnation of crony capitalism - or Fascism - if you prefer the original German. The Establishment Media is quick to try and categorize this OWS effort as a response to the Tea Party effort, but as I attended several early Tea Party rallies across Nevada, I am aware that the people attending the rallies were opposed to BOTH parties and to the lack of control over their own lives that they were facing in modern day Amerika. Their concerns were not ideological. They were practical. “How are we going to start making things in America again?” type questions.

The Tea Partiers were / are opposed to the Federal Reserve, to the Military Industrial Complex's unConstitutional undeclared unsustainable wars of empire and occupation overseas, and to the growing police state complete with its Orwellian surveillance society here at home. The OWS folks, from Zucotti Park to Oakland, are not there for primarily ideological reasons. I can attest to this from my personal experiences with the Las Vegas effort. The majority are in the streets primarily because of a feeling they may or may not even be able to articulate. That feeling is that modern day America is a place run for and by big faceless banks and corporations, who own or are in bed with our so-called representatives in Washington, not for and by We the People. The people behind these institutions pay for the police state which is imposing unconstitutional measures on We the People.

It is true that we have technological gizmos that our Founding Fathers did not dream of - well maybe Jefferson did. But, economic well being is not measured by the speed at which photos and videos are downloaded to one's cellphone. Economic well-being is first and foremost measured as a feeling of security about tomorrow. In any age, economic well-being is considered good when the bottom level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is met and is expected to be met tomorrow. That is, when the average person can feed, clothe, and house himself and reasonably expects that he will continue to be able to do so with the same or less effort next week and next month - there is economic security. BTW, economic freedom and this security is the only necessary condition for the investment and forethought required to produce real economic abundance.

I remember you asking our class a similar question to the one you mentioned in your letter - about being born a king in 13th century Europe or being born in America today, and just as back then, I would gladly be born the poorest person in an economy based upon the idea that I own my person and 100% of my labors and where the human rights inherent in the Laws of Nature are respected in a real self-governing society. However, the society we live in is far from that ideal that I was promised in grade school. That is the genesis of OWS. We live in the open prison of a police state. We don't live in a free country anymore. The economic system is run by a small group of international financiers who enjoy monopoly privileges while We the People trade our labors for a hyper-inflated currency instead of enjoying the Opportunity Society and the American life of leisure and abundance that goes with it that our Founding Generation attempted to hand down to us.

The chief evil that Thomas Paine mentioned in his Revolutionary Pamphlet 'Common Sense' was that the real powers in colonial government owed an allegiance to and were controlled first and foremost by a single entity - in the person of the so-called king of England. That single central power burrowed its way into and then corrupted all of colonial American society. Our Founding Generation had a little Rebellion after a Tea Party and a Massacre in Boston to remedy their personal situation. Then, they attempted to hand down to us a Constitutional Republic if we could keep it.

It is clear today, that prior generations have failed to hand down that dream to the American people. Today, despite the form of words on some goddamned piece of paper, America has ceased to be a self-governing Republic with a free market economy. Our economy is now operating under a virtual mirror image of the Soviet system. The crony capitalism that was being developed in Russia as I was attending Hillsdale College in the late 90's where the former Soviet regulators became the new “private owners” of Russian industry and commerce, is virtually identical to the no bid contractor privatization of war, corporate monopolies on utilities, and the federal government's “partnership with business” of today. Look no further than the first post-invasion President of Afghanistan being a Unocal executive. Or look to the nationalization of Government Motors, not to mention Romneycare turned Obamacare, or the trillion dollar bailouts to big banking and big insurance without so much as an accounting of the corporate welfare to the nominal owners of the country, We the People.

You described in considerable detail to me and my fellow economics majors and minors exactly how big businesses come to control the regulatory process which effects their particular market. The big players in the market, the ones who collectively make up about 2/3rds of the market share, lobby to have their former executives run the federal agencies responsible for oversight of their former companies.

In economic reality, these federal “regulatory agencies” become nothing more than a tool by which the big players in the marketplace dominate and eliminate their competition in the other third of the market. It is why the Big 3 were able to stop innovators like Preston Tucker and were able to write their old antiquated factory systems into law under the pretext of safety despite the fact that newer systems improved both worker safety and production. The end result of that lack of competition was the failure of GM and the open nationalization of Government Motors. In some ways socialism is more honest than fascism.

As a result of similar processes in every area of human endeavor, our economy has now been totally bought and paid for. Regulated in favor of big politically connected businesses and against individual small business entrepreneurs.

So, contrary to what you conveyed in your letter, over the last hundred years, the people of our nation have lost a considerable amount of tangible freedom along with the economic equality that goes hand in glove with real economic opportunity.

We have more gizmos but we are not more free.

The American economy was much more of a free market economy back when America first freed itself from the tyrannical clutches of the English king and his Mercantilist Protectionist economic system, They created a system of imperfect but unmatched private entrepreneurship and free exchange. See De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, where he described that the main difference between America and Europe was the lack of class restrictions and the great democratization of wealth to the Average American, which stemmed from an unprecedented amount of freedom and opportunity.

America never reached the ideals we discussed in our classes or that the best of our Founders dreamed of, but the closer humanity has come to a true system of self-ownership and free exchange, the better off the masses of people have been. It was this freedom that allowed America to become the most powerful nation on the planet. From the end of the American Revolution through to the beginning of the Spanish American War, despite America's economic imperfections, it was still the Land of the Free relative to the rest of the nations of the earth.

It was this freedom that allowed and encouraged the Average American of the 19th century to live a life of unparalleled freedom, enjoying unmatched abundance, with more time for leisure than any other people on the planet. This is because at that time in America, there was a democratization of economic power as the Old World privileges of hereditary wealth and nobility gave way to the meritocracy of the New World complete with the democratization of wealth that accompanies economic opportunity for all.

It was not coincidental that the technological advances of the Wright Brothers waited until a time of expanding freedom, which gave two modest bicycle shop owners abundant enough resources in the real terms of time and materials to design, build, and test multiple variations of flying machines. They did not have a government grant. They did not have any federal or state or local government funding of any kind. They did not file for any permits. They did not conduct EPA impact studies. They did have an economy where a few hours of work in a bicycle shop provided them with the necessities of life and enough leisure time to spend pursuing their impractical dream of making machines so men could fly like the birds. No king in Europe, no matter how much money he had, was willing to invest in such a hair-brained scheme, but in America, our ancestors considered it a self-evident right for the people to own and control the most valuable human resource, time. It was this combination of human ingenuity and real economic surplus that led to the unprecedented democratized American wealth of our nation's first hundred years.

Time is exactly what the current system is designed to monopolize. The average American worker spends 60 plus hours a week at work, commuting to work, getting ready for work, and recovering from work. The average family has at least two income earners - or did before this New Depression began after Bernanke's intentional inflation of the American Dollar, which started under Bush and has been continued under Barack Hussein Obama de Mumbassa's monetary and fiscal policies. Even in, the “good times” of the late 90's the average family of four with two income earners, had a lower lifestyle - in terms of leisure time and economic security than their one income counterparts from the 1960's.

In the last one hundred years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve, the American people have suffered three major depressions, each caused by the institutionalized legal plunder of the counterfeiter's at the Federal Reserve. See The Great Depression, the Malaise and Staglation of the 70's and this New Depression. Over the last hundred years, the private banking corporations have used their monopoly power to counterfeit fiat paper currency, gaining an even larger stranglehold on the American economy than they had when they first pulled off the Jekyll Island conspiracy; moving from a banking system they controlled through illegal collusion and fraud to one they controlled through unConstitutional legislation - and fraud.

Over the last hundred years, We the People have lost considerable economic freedom and personal power. It is true that in that time, technological progress was greater than in any time in human history. But, this technological growth was not the result of increasing economic freedom. Instead, it occurred despite the increasingly collectivist nature of our modern American economy.

For instance, a solid historical argument could be made that we, as a society, would already have “Free Energy” if not for the collusion between the secret government and the large politically connected corporations that constitute the Military Industrial Complex. See Nikolai Tesla and Stanley Meyer. Indeed, one of the biggest mysteries of modern science is the operation of Royal Raymond Rife's microscope, which at the turn of the 20th Century, achieved greater magnification than a modern electron microscope - and did it without killing the microscopic organisms being studied. This amazing technological achievement was destroyed after Rife was killed and his lab ransacked. An interesting class discussion would be to try and construct a utility curve for Free Energy and the kind of life extension and improvement technologies that would go along with Rife's discoveries.

In short. Free Exchange is good. Modern Corporate Crony Capitalism is bad. Some OWS protestors are ignorant of basic theoretical understandings that they would have if they had attended Hillsdale College. As American citizens determined to Live Free it is our responsibility to educate these poor distraught masses to the real causes of and solutions to the societal problems we face as a nation. And, turn off your T.V. This OWS movement is a mass awakening of the American people, the ones you described as “rationally ignorant” because they chose not to inform themselves of the real world around them because of the conscious or unconscious belief that the system was constructed such that their individual actions were so insignificant as to be virtually meaningless. Well, after years of neglect, the American public is slowly waking up to the problems infesting our nation. They are still largely ignorant. Now, it is incumbent upon people like us, who understand these simple truths to convey to these neo Rip Van Winkles that man is better able to govern himself through voluntary agreement than through the compulsion of tyrants - petty or global. That the answer to big banks is not more government oversight. For, it is government manipulation of the market that led us down this yellow brick road toward modern Fascism.

Today, as the entire world is on the verge of a global transformation from totalitarian militarized police states to real self governance, it is incumbent upon we, who understand the theoretical underpinnings of personal and economic freedom, to alter or abolish the tyrannical government we are suffering under. That means meeting with the formerly “rationally ignorant” American voter you mentioned in class who is now “consciously incompetent” in terms of citizenship. That is, the people whose apathy and ignorance allowed bad people to do bad things in our economy and our communities and who are now becoming conscious of the fact that they have had the wool pulled over their eyes and their economic lives stolen from them by a rigged fascist neo-American police-state, need informed Americans like us to help fill in the gaps in their knowledge. To paraphrase Jefferson, all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce the American people under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of We the People.

Freedom is the answer. What is the question.

In Liberty, with Eternal Vigilance,

Jim Duensing

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