QUESTION6.com
The world we live in
3 - Money! Money! Money!
We are not sure what gravity really is, but we know that it will stay with us all our life. We could say the same thing about money.
It started as a good idea.
Money was created to ease the exchange of goods and services of equal value. How many of your fruits have the same value as my fish? At the time, they had no money to measure value. It was subjective. If we agree on the numbers we can make the exchange. That was the theory. In practice, my fish and your fruits will not keep forever. There was a need for an interface that keeps its value. Our ancestors used salt, shells, and animal skins. They used steer hides and called it ‘a buck’. The best solutions they could find was to use gold and silver because extracting them from the mines is hard work. If some day, we reach the point where nobody wants to work in the gold mines, we will lose our connection between ‘value’ and something physical.
This is our problem. We need a way to measure a value that will be accepted by everybody, all the time. Before measuring the temperature of water, we started by asking Nature what zero degrees is (freezing) and what is 100 degrees (boiling). Only after that could we measure the temperature of water. There is no equivalent in our financial system. No physical phenomena in Nature can tell us the value of 100 units of our currency. The value of a car is measured by different numbers in different currencies. We can compare currencies between them. We cannot compare them with a value of reference found in nature. The best solution we found to this problem is to use how much work it takes to extract gold and silver from the mines.
That was an improvement, but we wanted to do even better. Why should we keep digging gold out of the mines if we are going to put it back in the cave of a bank? It was easier to print paper. We replaced gold with paper and trust. The more money the governments printed, the less trust people had in their fiat currency. We did not stop there. Printed paper was replaced with electrical impulses sent through cables. Today, we don’t even need cables. All that remains is faith.
Money, like many other human creations, got polluted by human nature. Money controls our lives. It controls the house we live in, the car we drive, the education we receive, the people we meet, what we eat, and even who has a shot at getting elected.
Our servant became our master.
What is a bank loan?
Banks do not loan their own money. They use our money. Making a deposit on our bank account is to make a loan to the bank, without interest, and without guaranty that the bank will be able to reimburse our loan. Our money is used to make a deposit with the Federal Reserve. In exchange the Fed gives the bank the right to create about ten times as much money without any need for gold or silver. About 90% of bank’s financing is created out of thin air. The value of the loan you receive cannot be backed by the goods or services you plan to produce in the future. It is based on the money already in circulation. The loan that you get lowers the value of the money already in circulation. The bank gives you play-money and expects to get something of value in return. The system ultimately transfers wealth from those who create goods and services to those who create money. The problem is that we are not exchanging ‘something’ for ‘something’. We are exchanging 'something’ for freedom.
As long as money is only used to ease the exchange of goods and services of the same value, we can use salt or bucks or silver or gold. The problem starts when we use money to create debts with interest. It is against nature to treat time as a commodity. The price we pay for this mistake is a loss of freedom.
Debt feeds on freedom
We are trading part of our soul for body comfort. We may live longer but the soul suffocates. The situation gets worse and worse as we get car loans, student loans, mortgages, bank loans, credit cards, and the national debt.Most of the wealth we create goes to the lenders. The system shifts wealth from the workers to the new money. Politicians keep arguing over who should pay taxes. That will remain a minor issue as long as the financial system remains unchanged. It is getting to the point where governments do not even try to repay their debts.
They consider paying the interest on the national debt to be an achievement.
Politicians make waves. Money makes the tide.
We got it all wrong
Here is an example of what happens when you associate money with time and create debts.
When taking a 300 000 loan to buy a house with a 30-year mortgage at 6%, you will repay the principal of 300 000 plus a total of 347 515 in interest. To buy your home, you must also buy one for the banker! That was not the intention.
We are trading inner freedom for external comfort. We become more connected to possessions and payments than to our own deeper life. The body may be more comfortable, but the soul is under pressure.
Little by little, our life becomes organized around repayment.
Our banking system dissolves our freedom until we suffocate. Gradually we find ourselves in a society where we don’t want to live, without knowing exactly why.
There is worse:
The banks charge interest for the time we keep them waiting. They assume that the value of banknotes increases with time. They give you money and time and expect to get back more money. They pretend to sell you time, but time is not a commodity. Time is not for sale. Time is not money! You cannot put money in a safe and expect to find more money in your safe one year later. Only a banker would believe that.
Where can people find the money to pay interest? They cannot print banknotes. They cannot create money out of thin air as the banks do. We could give the banker some of the goods and services we produce, but the banker does not want fish or piano lessons. He wants money. Everybody is in the same predicament. Everyone is looking for money to pay interest.
The banks have a solution: They issue more loans to new customers. This is their way to increase the money supply that existing customers can use to pay their interest. If, someday, people stop applying for loans, banks will not receive interest payments, and the entire system will collapse. Our banking system is a Ponzi scheme that cannot last forever.
A bank loan is an exchange of money for the promise that you will spend years working to repay the loan. It’s an exchange of money for freedom. With every bank loan, you lose some of your freedom. There is a name for this situation: it’s called ‘Debt bondage.’
Getting conscious of the problem:
We are born into systems of debt, obligation, and financial anxiety that seem older than we are. We inherit our share of the national debt before we can understand what it means. Could we prevent a debt from being transferred from one generation to the next without prior consent?
Is it part of the human rights that we can
make debts to be paid by someone else?
We wanted to build a society based on individual freedom. We failed! We did not lose a battle against an enemy. It was a failure that we engineered ourselves. It happened gradually, year after year. Today, the cancer has metastasized. It is affecting everybody in every country. All over the world people are waiting for politicians to tell them: “Give me a chance. Vote for me and I will give you back your freedom”. We are so desperate that we would vote for them without checking their credentials.
Imagine a world where money is secondary. The CEO’s primary goal would be to satisfy his customers rather than his shareholders. The pharmaceutical industry would focus on creating cheaper and more effective medicines based on the 250 molecules we really need. Instead of judging people on their bank accounts, we would consider the way they manage their finances for the common good. There’s nothing wrong with making money as long as we don’t let it get in the driver’s seat and govern our life.
We should stay close to nature.
With time, our food will root. The value of our house will be depreciated. Everything we create loses value with time. The same idea should apply to money, but we decided the opposite. We assume that the value of money increases with time. Our financial system goes against nature. The banks would not need to make loans if the banknotes in their safe could reproduce.
Money should be treated like everything else that we create. We should let money depreciate like our food, our house, our computer, our car and our furniture. The implementation may not be easy. We could start with some ideas from the food industry: “This banknote will not be valid after the date printed on the top right corner”. We have not found yet a way to make banknotes shrink with time.
Fortunately, we have computers. Many countries don’t use paper money anymore. People pay everything with credit cards. It would be easy for computers to lower your bank balance a tiny bit every day.
People should be able to exchange their work for money and exchange their money for goods and services without incurring debt. They should be able to live in a society without national debt.
Our financial system needs to make its own tools
Dentists, plumbers, teachers, and every profession had to create their own tools. Medicine created X-rays, vaccines, and MRI. Our financial industry followed the path of least resistance. Instead of making their own tools like any other profession, they misused our money. Instead of limiting the use of money to the exchange of objects of the same value, they mixed our money with time. That should be illegal. There should be no exception. The financial industry should create its own tools like any other profession, instead of abusing people’s money.
Of course, deciding how fast money should be depreciated is not something to place in the hands of politicians. They have not been selected for their expertise in economy. It could be safer to place the economy in the hands of economists.
A better use of money would require a higher level of consciousness.
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. Stealing money serves the body and is detrimental to the soul. Our way of life makes us focus on the body. The price we pay is the corruption of the soul. We need a financial system that would incorporate the effect that money has on our soul. Does this business make me a better person or am I selling my soul?
We need money that smells!
We have a good excuse. The body needs food and shelter. This is our priority. The first 1000 (of any currency) is used for our survival. The second 1000 is not as useful as the first one and the third even less. Above a certain level, focusing on money becomes a waste of time. What is left, after our death, is the change in our soul.
Every year, the countries are sorted by their GDP and their level of happiness. The two orders are not the same!
GDP per capita
1 Luxembourg
2 Switzerland
3 Ireland
5 Norway
6 Iceland
7 United States
8 Qatar
9 Denmark
10 Netherland
11 Australia
12 San Marino
13 Austria
14 Sweden
15 Belgium
16 Germany
17 Finland
18 Canada
19 Hong Kong
20 Israel
21 United Kingdom
22 France
36 Japan
67 Russia
72 China
143 India
Level of Happiness
1 Finland
2 Denmark
3 Iceland
4 Sweden
5 Israel
6 Netherland
7 Norway
8 Luxembourg
9 Switzerland
10 Australia
11 New Zealand
12 Costa Rica
13 Kuwait
14 Austria
15 Canada
16 Belgium
20 United Kingdom
23 United States
24 Germany
27 France
41 Italy
51 Japan
59 China
72 Russia
126 India
Some systems have been evaluated successfully.
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In the UK, the London Community Housing Cooperative is a prime illustration of how residents can come together to create affordable housing solutions. They proved the potential of community-based financing to solve social issues without incurring debts.
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Also in the UK, the crowdfunding platform Seedrs, allows investors to back cooperative businesses such as the Bristol Energy Cooperative. They successfully raised funds through community shares to set up a renewable energy project, thereby avoiding debt.
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Cooperatives prioritize the welfare of their members over profit. One notable case is the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, which has grown into one of the largest cooperatives in the world. Founded in 1956, it operates in various sectors, including manufacturing and retail, and has successfully created thousands of jobs while fostering a sense of community among its members.
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In the US, the Organic Valley cooperative united 1800 farmers and created a marketplace for organic dairy products.
Financiers will say that these are only examples of ‘lab testings’ that never made it to ‘mass production’. However, these tests prove that there is a way out of debt bondage. It can be done!
Our relationship between the individual and society must change.
When our ancestors killed a prey, they had more meat than they could eat before it started rotting. They gave some of the meat to others. Their relationship with other members of the group was based on the idea of giving instead of taking.
The problem is that nobody wants to be the only one giving when everybody else is taking advantage of you. That requires a society where every individual is convinced that he will not survive unless his society survives. We may think that this is pure utopia until we discover that some people are already using money in a different way. They focus on the effect that transactions have on the soul
rather than their effect on the bodies. They know that being alone on Earth would not be a paradise. It would be hell.
