Money started as a good idea
but we abused it.
2 - Could money be the culprit
It is a question of freedom. We created money as a servant, but our servant became our master. How can you explain that we live in a society where everybody is busy paying his debts, and the result of all this hard work is to increase the National Debt and leave more debts to our children?
Something is definitely wrong. It is money that decides the house where you live, the car you drive, the education you get, the people you know, what you eat, and even who has a chance of being elected.
We spend all our lives paying for our credit cards, bank loans, mortgages, life insurance, retirement plans, and car loans. There is a name for our predicament. It is known as “debt bondage.”
It started as a good idea.
How do you exchange fish for perfume? Not easy. We needed an interface. Approximately 3,000 years ago, we used salt, grains, shells, and cattle as intermediaries. Later came coins of gold and silver. There was no problem as long as we were exchanging things of the same value. We even found money does not have an odor!
We kept thinking of better ways. That’s where the problems started. Why go through all this work of getting gold from the mines if we are going to put it back in the cave of a bank? We thought it would be smarter to print paper money. We went one step further. We replaced paper money with electrical pulses moving along wires. We replaced something physical with faith. Today, we don’t even need wires. What is left is faith.
What is a loan?
A loan is an exchange. You receive money, and you make a commitment to work for many years to repay it. You receive money and give some of your freedom. Cash belongs to the material world. Freedom does not. The two don’t mix.
Bankers do not loan their own money. They create fiat money. The value of your loan comes from devaluating the rest of the money in circulation. To be fair, you should be able to pay back your loan with money that you create yourself, just as a banker does. That would send you to jail. The banker is stealing value from others and giving it to you. That makes you complicit in stealing.
There is even worse
When you sign your loan, you commit to pay interest. A fisherman can use his loan to catch more fish. He could pay the banker with some fish. Where can he find money to pay interest? There are no banknotes at the bottom of the ocean. Don’t expect to get paper money from other people. Everybody is in the same boat. Everybody must pay interest on their loans. By signing a loan, you pretend to create money! That would be illegal.
The answer is built into the financial system itself. The money needed to pay interest will be generated by lending to more borrowers. The system requires new borrowers to create new fiat money, which will enable the previous borrowers to pay their interest. ”Ponzi scheme” comes to mind. You may be held liable for participating in fraudulent activities.
You could blame the individuals – of course! Nothing obliges them to take loans. This is like a drug pusher telling his clients that they should not OD.
The system moves value from those who create it
to those who create fiat money.
We live under constant threat.
What would happen if some people in a foreign country failed to pay their credit card bills or mortgages? Could that trigger a global financial crisis? All it takes is a spark to start a fire that could spread worldwide. Money was created to facilitate the exchange of goods and services of equal value. We abused it and lost our freedom.
A better use of money would require a higher level of consciousness.
Our relationship with money must change. The price you pay for a painting should be based on the value this painting represents to you today, rather than on the profit you expect to make later when you sell it. We should not buy something only because it is expensive. We should not judge people on their bank accounts. We should not choose a profession only because of its salary.
Stealing something makes you a thief, even if nobody notices that something is missing. To kill somebody makes you a murderer even if the police never find you. We must be aware that whatever we do to others, we are also doing to our society and ourselves. We belong to the society of the Homo sapiens. Nobody will survive unless the Homo sapiens survive. The best way to serve ourselves is to serve others. When the body is giving, the soul is receiving. We must take money out of the driver’s seat and put it back in the passenger’s seat, where it belongs.
Imagine a world where money is secondary. Instead of sorting the countries by their GDP we would sort them by their level of happiness.
The primary concern of the CEO would be to better satisfy his customers rather than his shareholders. The pharmaceutical industry would develop cheaper and more effective medicines based solely on the 250 truly essential molecules. Instead of judging people by their bank account, we could judge them by the way they use money.
Keep dreaming...
The solution will not come from politicians. We gave them all the time necessary to no avail.
Politicians make waves. Money makes the tide
We find it difficult today to imagine a financial system that is not based on interest and currency devaluation, as was the case a few centuries ago; our predecessors could not have imagined a government without a monarch.
A problem will remain
As we create more goods and services, we need more money to buy and sell them. We cannot expect the extraction of golf from the mines to follow the development of the economy. The two must be disconnected. This is the source of the abuse. At the government level, an assembly of economists—selected for their expertise—could decide how much fiat money can safely be created and allocate the budget for the year, and no more.
In short
Money should be used only to help the exchange of goods and services. You cannot place money in a safe and expect to find more money when you open it a year later. Money is not a plant. It does not grow on trees. To associate money with time is abusing the system.
The financial system should create its own tools. Agriculture made the plow and the tractor. The electrician, the dentist, the plumber, and all the professionals had to create their own tools. We can expect the financiers to create their own tools instead of abusing our money and keeping us in debt bondage.
Today’s system widens the gap between the rich and the poor by transferring value from those who create it to those who create fiat money.
We have tolerated this financial system for so long because we don’t know of a better one. We are in the position of people who lived under the dictature of a king and cannot imagine any other mode of government.
The price we pay for this abuse of money is a loss of freedom.