L. Ron Hubbard Schools Richard Nixon: Sailing on the Apollo Nov 27 – Dec 3

On November 18, we started a new feature here on Fridays: the Voice has obtained hundreds of copies of L. Ron Hubbard’s previously unpublished “Orders of the Day,” which he gave to crew members as he sailed the Mediterranean. Our documents cover the period from 1968 to 1971, and this time we’re looking at what was happening the week of November 27 to December 3 during those years.

After the jump, LRH chastises the U.S. president for not clearing a word…

This week, in 1969, the Apollo survived a bad storm — and old-school celestial navigating by Captain Bill Robertson was in part what helped the crew come through.

But for our report this week, we’re going to focus on a single Orders of the Day from 1971. For his dispatch on November 27, Hubbard cut loose with something that was obviously foremost in his mind. Take it away, Commodore…

MISUNDERSTOOD NIXON

Imagine my surprise and hilarity to find that President Nixon is pursuing current economic policies because of a misunderstood word.

The devaluation of the dollar and the increase in prices are placing considerable stress on our own economy and making it necessary to do considerable reorganization.

In studying the economic reports I receive weekly from the American Institute for Economic Research and the American Institute Counselors, Inc., this fantastic piece of information came to light.

The word “inflation” is being used in a mis-defined definition by the Administration. All this Wage-Price freeze that Nixon has been putting on is because he thinks the word “inflation” is caused by and means “prices increasing.” He and his beer hall buddies publicly state that “the rate of increase in prices is synonymous with the rate of inflation.” Therefore, all one has to do is freeze wages and one will cure inflation.

According to Webster’s International Dictionary inflation is: “An increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods resulting in a substantial and continuing rise in the general price level.” In other words, if there is too much money and too few goods you will have inflation. This is the standard economic definition of the word.

Because he does not know and possibly does not want to know the correct definition of the word, Nixon’s policy is to freeze wages and prices. This, at least, solves a mystery which has existed for some time. Why did the United States Government continue to print endless avalanches of bonds and currency and flood them all over the world and even engage in the most expensive possible no-win wars without realizing that it would bring about a destruction of the dollar?

Of course, it would also make many American administrations guilty if the true fact of inflation and its actual definition were recognized. At any one time all they had to do was stop steamshovelling money into oddball areas as fast as they could print it. This, by the true definition of inflation, poured vast sums of money and credit into the world without keeping pace with production.

I thought something was adrift when Nixon first came to power when he said that his program involved contracting production in the United States. This, by reducing the amount of goods available to be bought, would of course cause the money in circulation to lose value. He pursued this course because he had a misunderstood word. He thought inflation meant “rising prices.”

As the real clincher, however, the papers and reports I have been reading, even though they are written by super economic experts, omit entirely in their proposed solutions the simple idea of increasing production until it brings about a lowering of prices. According to anything I can see here, this would be a startling new idea to these economists who are criticizing Nixon. Indeed, that rather obvious idea is not even represented as a word in the English language. In Webster’s we have “deflation” as meaning “a contraction in the volume of available money or credit resulting in a decline of the general price level — contrasted with inflation.”

In other words, it’s quite beyond all these people to solve their current “money crisis” with a simple idea of increasing production in order to handle inflation. Apparently it does not even have a word or definition in the English language.

Looking over this literature I see that when I studied economics at Princeton University I came to some conclusions which were so obvious to me that I thought they were a part of the textbooks. Now, reviewing this, the idea of increasing the amount of goods in an autonomy as a planned action to defeat inflation is apparently brand new.

Anyway, the economic trouble we are handling and our hard work to survive and remain viable is being made necessary because of a misunderstood word. The only trouble is, it is not we who misunderstand it. It is the person or persons causing the trouble. As they don’t know the definition of the word they, of course, could not be expected to be able to handle it as a problem.

Listen. Don’t you think it’s about time we got shoes on some of these people?

LRH, COMMODORE

Perhaps Gerry Armstrong or Kate Bornstein or someone else who was aboard the Apollo at this time could tell us what it was like to receive such dissertations from the Commodore, and what sort of a response he was looking for.

And how about our readers with backgrounds in money matters — how would you grade the old man’s shot at macroeconomics?

As for studying “economics at Princeton,” one supposes Hubbard is talking about the 3-month military administration training program he attended near the end of WWII which took place in some buildings at Princeton. But then the old man was prone to a bit of exaggeration.

The Top 25 People Crippling Scientology
#1: L. Ron Hubbard
#2: David Miscavige
#3: Marty Rathbun
#4: Tom Cruise
#5: Joe Childs and Tom Tobin
#6: Anonymous
#7: Mark Bunker
#8: Mike Rinder
#9: Jason Beghe
#10: Lisa McPherson
#11: Nick Xenophon (and other public servants)
#12: Tommy Davis (and other hapless church executives)
#13: Janet Reitman (and other journalists)
#14: Tory Christman (and other noisy ex-Scientologists)
#15: Andreas Heldal-Lund (and other old time church critics)
#16: Marc and Claire Headley, escapees of the church’s HQ
#17: Jefferson Hawkins, the man behind the TV volcano
#18: Amy Scobee, former Sea Org executive
#19: The Squirrel Busters (and the church’s other thugs and goons)
#20: Trey Parker and Matt Stone (and other media figures)
#21: Kendrick Moxon, attorney for the church
#22: Jamie DeWolf (and other L. Ron Hubbard family members)
#23: Ken Dandar (and other attorneys who litigate against the church)
#24: David Touretzky (and other academics)
#25: Xenu, galactic overlord