People are more and more waking up to the fact that there is a âJewish Connectionâ between our present economic system and the Jews. I have long maintained that the âMystery Babylonâ could only be the Jews, but a former schoolmate of mine, who grew up to be a lawyer and an Episcopalian minister (which makes him doubly disgusting to me), pointed out the beginnings of Jewish economic philosophy in Genesis 46 and 47.
You are already aware of the story of Joseph, rising to the power of Pharaohâs finance minister, but a more detailed description of his plans and policies are given away in Genesis. When Joseph invited the tribes of his father and brethren into Egypt, he had this story planned out for the Pharaoh:
Genesis 46: 32: âAnd the men are shepherds, for their trade hath been to feed cattle; and they have brought their flocks, and their herds, and all they have.â
Then Joseph advised his family: â
âŚwhen Pharaoh shall call you, and shall say â What is your occupation?â That ye shall say, Thy servantsâ trade hath been about cattle, from our youth even until now, both we, and also our fathers; that ye may dwell in the land of Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptiansâ.
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What ensued from that is a sharp contrast of economic philosophies. Israel took their herds to Goshen, and Pharaoh let them grow and trade freely, as well as making them ârulersâ over his own herds and flocks(Gen. 47:6).
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 It was then that the famine had taken hold in Egypt, and Joseph had been fortunate enough to store grain for the Pharaoh. There was no bread in the land, so the Egyptians were forced to buy grain from Joseph, who happily took all their money. As the famine extended, the Egyptians came again to Joseph, and asked him for a solution to the problem, as they had no more money. Joseph worked out another deal (Gen. 47:16), and asked for their cattle.
Of course Israel was officially in charge of the Pharaohâs cattle, so they had free reign in the land to trade and build further fortunes. Then the Egyptians ran out of cattle, and the famine persisted. The next step was socialism, verse 19, suggested by the people: âBuy us and our land for bread, and we will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may liveâŚâ. |
All the land then became the Pharaohâs. The next step was simply to gather the people into cities. They were effectively caged so the armies of the Pharaoh could keep an eye on them.
But Joseph was very shrewd, as he left the land of the priests untouched. They had effectively the same freedom as Israel, and their leadership with such freedom would no doubt support the Pharaoh and justify his position as a god before the people. So, the Egyptians said, “In God We Trustâ. Joseph had separated church and state, but had given exemptions so the church would be inclined to support the state. Very shrewd.(Gen 47:22).
 All that remained was for Joseph to give the people seed to plant, so they could grow wealth for Pharaoh, and Joseph laid a tax on them, Genesis 47:24:
 â And it shall come to pass in the increase that ye shall give the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own for seedâŚâ
 Sound familiar in principle?  “And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day, that Pharaoh should have the fifth part, except the land of the priests only, which became not Pharaohâs.â
 Verse 27: âAnd Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possession therein, and grew and multiplied exceedingly.â
 The plan was simple enough: first, get control of the money. If the control of money is taken from the people, they are forced to begin trading possessions. Once possessions are taken away, the people are easily managed to become obedient citizens. If the religions are free, and if they are given their freedom by being servant to the king or the government, they will tend to support the benevolence of the government, with lines like âthis divinely ordered capitalist systemâ.
 The interesting twist is found in Genesis 50:20, as Joseph was about to die:
 âBut as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people aliveâ.
 But notice that Israel had free enterprise and wealth, while the Egyptians had traded their freedom and possessions away for security, even serving a priesthood that owed its âfreedomâ to Pharaoh.
| What we see in our own government today was laid out in principle thousands of years ago. Of course, we also see that free enterprise doesn’t serve the needs of empire and war. Israel became equal slaves to the Egyptians, forced to labor for the Pharaoh, because the Pharaoh had seen, in Exodus 1:9, ” The people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we”. |
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The problem, as Pharaoh correctly saw, was that a free people tend to act in their own self interest, and if Pharaoh should wage a war with other countries, Israel might well choose to serve his enemies out of self interest. The motivation of government to grant “security” is well shown by that example. Since Israel was not willing to become “equal” with Egyptian citizens, they became subject to forced labor, with their possessions taken by decree. What Israel saw as slavery, other Egyptians would see as justice, “equality”.
 The lesson, from Genesis to Revelation, is not lost on the Jews. Their history has been one of adaptation and control by trade and commerce, from Babylon to the present day. As historian Max DiMont points out in “The Indestructible Jews”, they have developed the beginnings of our present banking system, developed a process of common law by which nations would be ruled, and were selected as the finance ministers for gentile kings due to their ability to charge interest on non-Jews. As Joseph did in Genesis, once they gained control of the money, all else follows. This lesson is not lost on Christians either. They took the banking system from the Jews and began “saving souls” for God, king, and country, using the same formula.
 Karl Marx laid out the formula quite well. When money becomes the “universal equivalent”, the general purchasing power, all things can be had for money. But people do not sell for money, wrote Marx, until the possessor had “alienated’ himself from the property. This meant, wrote Marx, that the “so-called inalienable rights, and the fixed property relationships corresponding to them, break down before money”. He was, after all, a Jew. He was also quite correct in that regard. What Marx wrote, Joseph had long ago put in practice.
What would be your idea of an alternative economy, Ralph? I’ve listened to people all my life who critique both communism and capitalism, justifiably so. Seems there was even a group back in the 1920s, the Technocrats, who were early proponents of a cashless society, but they could never gain enough support anywhere in the world to impliment their theories.
I believe that right now, there are huge changes bubbling right below the surface involving electronics. I’m not sure whether these will bring a better quality to our lives, or gradual enslavement. Old money in the USA has never really been a fan of the Keynsian economics which created and empowered the middle class. They hate the federal reserve, they hate the social safety net, and they’ve never gotten over having to share control and power.
BB
“Old money in the USA has never really been a fan of the Keynsian economics which created and empowered the middle class. They hate the federal reserve, they hate the social safety net, and theyâve never gotten over having to share control and power.”
Thqat depends on what you refer to as “old money”. The Federal Reserve is an evil institution. It works on very simple principles. Imagine ten people who all borrow money to buy a house for a hundred thousand dollars at ten perecent interest. The bank loans each of the a hundre thousand apiece, but doesn;t create the money for payment of interest. So, you have ten people borrowing a total of a millio dollars, with a hundred thousand to pay, which was never created for the market. This means there is a shortage of money in circulation, so the peole will have to either spend less or produce more to create greater profits. A hundred people borrowing the same amount at the same terms boosts the amount of mon ey that doesn’t exist withn the market, so the debt increases, meaning that even more peopl ewill have to either spend less or find a way to create greater profits for themselves.
What occurs is two forces working in opposition to each other. If a large segment of the people are spendi ng less to make payments, business wll tend toward recession, and profits will decrease. If the bank is to increase business, it must make the cost of loans lower, which means more money in circulation , to stimulate borrowing. But more money in c irculation wil drive up prices, so the people still have to spend less or invest money in investment hedges.
F ortunately, the practice of creati ng more money over time made house buying a good investment. If you bought or built a house in 1950, the payments you were making 20 years later would be pocket change, easily paid. Houses were the backbone of the economy, but this still didn;t change the debt situation. Denbt had to increase, and safety nets had to be built to support the people who failed. As we saw recently “quantitative easing” in the form of massive printing of money has hade virtually no effect on the economy, except to attact investments to the stock market, because there’s nothing else going in the market.
If housing picks up, prices rise, which means housing will slow again.
Even with a de-centralized banking system based on free banking, if paper money is issued freely, the people wil still have to decide whether to buy less or make more profits to repay the loans. In either scenario, the economy will tend toward recesion or depression, unless the government steps in with massive i nfusion to the economy, stimulus packages that create artificial markets or demand. The sim ple fact is, we have wars in the Middle East with U S involvement today, because we’re trying to build a market to pay for the debt created by an artificial economy.
I can trace a number of reasons how we got in to this mess, and why we are already developing grass roots movements to get us out of it, none of them even close to the crap you’re hearing on the news.
Here’s a video(about 15 minutes) on the emerging economy, you mght enjoy:
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_kemp_robertson_bitcoin_sweat_tide_meet_the_future_of_branded_currency.html
Don’t be fooled by the “TED” title, it isn’t related in any way to Garner Ted.
An old buddy of min e in the early alterative currency movement, Michael Linto, wrote that “money is an information system by which we deploy our productive efforts”. Keep in mind that money develope din a machine age, and became a symbolic, specialist function to organize mechanical processes. Today most e verything is oving at near light speed worldwide, which means that mechanical. “whistles, bells, and pulleys” are just too slow. The fed eral reserve waas created to stimulate a slow moving mechanical syste, and now is simply too huge to properly resond to electric speed. This means the decision-making power MUST break down to smaller units over time. Electri speed resembles biological processes, not mechanical processes, and the upheavals you see today, including ‘terrorism”, is caused by the power of electronic communications empowering individuals against the state. The move toward ‘transparency” in government, more openness and sharing, all this is the result of electric speed. Money as we knew it is undergoing change, and with that society as we knew it. An excellent book to read on the sweep of history from ancient times to present is “The Sovereign Individual” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees- Mogg.
BTW, Loved the graphics.
The graphic are only half the fun!
So, why were herdsmen “abominations” to the Egyptians when the Egyptians had cattle and sheep (and herdsmen) themselves? What was the difference?
Certainly a worthwhile question, Corky. My mind retreats to Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, And Steel”. Diamond has an interesting theory of human evolytion and civilization which I of course take several steps further, but most interestingly, it was herdsmen of the early Indo- European Empire who gave the great gifr ot empire to Egypt and later empires: the chariot, along with domestication of the horse.
Diamond, in his book, poin ts out thayt Eropean empores formed and conquered other civilizations because domestication of animals gave them a wider rage of immunity to disease than many cultures, such as the Aztecs, who were defeated by the Spanish. Borrowing from Howard Bloom’s “Global Mind”, I submit that not only did domestication give greater immunity, but it also gave greater intensity and desire of the people to spread themselves worldwide. Because we are mostly a collection of mi croorganisms that interact, those microorganisms are parasites y nature, and tend to sprread themselves by glombing on to a host for reproduction.
Israel was a wandering group of nomads who were priarily cattle herders. Most likely, they were the offscouring of different cultures, and were left to cattle herding, which gave them advantages of immunity and allowed them to wander, and also made them a restless people, lookig for persoal opportunity. I doubt that it was cattle herding of itself that was despised, but the nomadic way of life, as many Westerners shunned gypsies once.
Here was a case in which a random group of people moved into Egypt and took up residence primarily as cattle herders, with that being their means of identification. Even worse, they were protected by the Pharoah.
The Biblical account, whether true or not, points out that Joseph quickly created laws that gave advantage to Israel by keepng them free from the collectivizing laws he created for Egyptians, but of course he did the same for the priests. Interesting that Joseph elevated Israel to being equal with the priests of Egypt. That was a power dispute just waiting to boil over.
Yep, the nomadic way of life. Not under the thumb of any government or kingdom…free. Like the indigenous people of the New World before the Europeans discovered and conquered it. Hated for their freedom to come and go as they pleased…uncivilized.
No doubt, Corky. I’m not saying the Genesis account is true exactly as written, but writings of people like Jared Diamond and Howard Bloom indicate that cattle herders had a strong need to wander and find new land for their cattle. Interesting recent theories in epigenetics propose the possibility that the genetic mixture caused by domestication of animals may have developed more aggressive drives in these types of people. Since it was the Indo-European cattle herders that expanded their territory, and did so by domestication of the horse and creating the chariot, it is possible that they were acting under more powerful genetic drives of the mocroorganisms that began to combine in greater force inside of them.
Wouldn’t it be something if all our civilizing and empire building was nothng more than germs that got inside of us and needed a sybmbiont to spread them around, like the “fluke” microorganism gets in an ant and causes it to climb the juiciest blade of grass, so a cow will come along and eat it, which gives the “fluke” an eenvironment in which to reproduce itself?
You make an interesting point about the REgyptians. Since they already were familiar with cattle herders, they were also immuine to the germs spread by other cattle herders , and they didn;t want to catch the “wanderlust” of shepherds.