The Gods Among Us

In the beginning there was Money.  Well, not exactly.  There was barter.  There was a high degree of vertical integration, which is a fancy way of saying if you wanted something back then, it was pretty much up to you to grow it or make it yourself.  What trade existed was largely between members of the tribe or village or group.  If some guy made a pretty cool hunting knife, and his wife was nagging him for a deer to butcher and eat, a trade of the knife for the deer (or parts of it) might take place.  Trading was simple, uncomplicated, and very very slow.  Life was brutal and short.  At the end of the day, when you had run out of you, you had also run out of future.  You aged quickly and died young.  When groups of nomads found a place to their liking, they sometimes stayed, settled in, and became agrarian.  Society became more complex, and slightly greater specialization of labor became possible.  One family could grow things from the soil; another could domesticate animals as a source of meat.  There was still no Money.

Trading in this primitive context was still taking place among the so-called Indians on this North American continent when the first Europeans arrived.  The native Americans were fascinated with some of the baubles brought over by the Europeans and willingly traded furs for them.  Eventually some commodities became so commonplace and essential to daily life in primitive societies that they took on new importance as a means of facilitating trade.  Salt, because it was needed by everyone for daily purposes, came to assume more importance as a form of “money” than it formerly had as just salt.  Since everyone had salt, and used salt, goods and services were traded using salt as the store of value and medium of exchange between trading partners.  The same was true of other things of universal value, including furs.  Because of their prized ornamental value and scarcity, gold and silver  became universally accepted as Money. 

The term store of value is very important.  Without some universally accepted warehouse of value that had been produced, all exchange was limited to what could be immediately produced and immediately consumed.  No long term planning was possible, and without long term planning, the Industrial Revolution with its complex machines and processes was impossible.  Modern society was impossible.  The invention of Money was a prerequisite to all the amenities of life as we know it.  Without the invention of Money, we would all still be primitives.  In spite of Rousseau’s idealization of the Noble Savage, the Garden of Eden it was not.  Man was the victim of ignorance, superstition, disease, and unmitigated natural disaster the likes of which are only occasionally experienced today in the poorest parts of the world.

In primitive society, wealth was limited to whatever a person could produce in a day, or a month, or a year of his own individual effort.  All other wealth was acquired by confiscating the values produced by others at the point of a spear, or in time, at the end of a gun.  All great monuments of history were made possible by the confiscation, not only of others wealth, including their grain, their herds, their tools, but also the confiscation of the people themselves, physically.  People became property, to be used and exploited by their conquerors.  When Rome was starving because of crop failure, their solution was to conquer Egypt with their legions, make that part of North Africa a vassal state and require them to ship their grain to Rome at prices Rome dictated.  You might say that Rome “nationalized” Egypt;  Cleopatra, in name at least, still “owned” the means of production, but the prices were dictated by Rome, her Master.  For a while, she was able to continue her pretense of being in charge of her country, of being Queen.  Then one day Caesar extended an invitation she could not refuse:  to come to Rome to visit, as his “guest”.  The dress code for the event was a little intimidating–naked, in shackles, to be paraded as the spoils of war through the crowds of Roman rabble and oglers, the nobility and the great unwashed.  Cleopatra committed suicide.

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Why the Bank Always Wins

The BIG BANKS, that is.  The Big Banks always win.  And Big Money.  R-e-a-l-l-y BIG Money always wins.  Money so big it moves around the globe swiftly and silently and at the speed of light, and you can’t even attach a name to its owners.  We’re not talking about the neighbor down the street with the new Mercedes that he is so proud of.  We are talking about money so big it can bring down governments, and prop up governments, dictate terms to governments.  We are not talking about the millionaire next door.  Nor am I talking about your lovely neighborhood bank, or even the biggest bank in your state.  I am talking about the people who decide which banks fail and which ones don’t.  I am talking about the people who allow some banks to fail so that  THEY can buy up the failed bank’s  assets with pennies on the dollar—oh, and that’s pennies on YOUR (tax) dollar, not THEIR dollar.  The politicians are their pawns, who are rewarded and punished according to their compliance and cooperation.  The only thing these people fear is, well, YOU.  You are part of the herd, and they fear the herd.  These people don’t like democracy, they don’t like the light, and they only pretend at transparency.

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Empires have always been about the control of the many by the few.  It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire, and the most amazing feat of the British Empire is that it controlled so much of the earth’s surface with the tiniest of military garrisons and outposts scattered around the globe.  In most of those places, if the local populace had risen up against them, the tiny British garrisons would easily have been overrun and sent packing.  They had the greatest navy in the history of the world, but no navy could have kept them safe everywhere, and especially inland.  The secret of their superiority was the quality of their information.  They knew the value of information; they knew that information was power.  The maintenance of power required keeping the masses in ignorance.  And as long as the masses could be fed, amused, and kept poor, nothing would ever change.  It was important to keep the masses poor, because that kept them too busy and too tired to interest themselves in anything other than the tyranny of survival.  And the purpose of empire was to extract wealth from far flung lands and bring it home to a privileged few.

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The Global Poker Playoffs: a short story about Money Supply

Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the godfather of modern banking, purportedly said “Give me control of a nations money supply and I care not who makes the laws.”  What did he mean by that?  Is it true?  Since the Federal Reserve Bank controls the money supply of the United States as the world’s largest and most influential Central Bank, does this mean that this institution is more powerful than Congress, more powerful than the Executive Branch of the government, that it operates above and beyond the control of the Republicans or Democrats?  Is the Federal Reserve above the law?  Was Rothschild right?  What exactly is the money supply, anyway?

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Why the Federal Reserve Exists

Here we go with the vocabulary thing again.  I promise to make this easier than your last root canal.  The Federal Reserve Bank is a central bank.  Central banks are created to control and manipulate the money supply.  The money supply is the aggregate total of all the money in circulation in an economy.  It is often referred to in the media and the industry as M.  Controlling the money supply frees governments from the responsibility of living within their means.  It makes it possible for them to counterfeit money.  All governments have laws making counterfeiting their currency illegal.  That is because all governments have a monopoly on counterfeiting and do not tolerate competition in the business.

Governments counterfeit money in the exact same way all counterfeiters do; they print it, and slip it into circulation into the economy.  They spend it.  They spend more money than the economy produces because they do not want to live within their means.  They do not want to live within their means because they use money to buy votes.  They give out goodies in return for favors; favors in the form of legislation that promotes the welfare of one group over another group; favors that line their individual pockets, reward their friends, punish their enemies, and above all, favors that get them re-elected.

Other reasons are given, of course, for the existence of the Fed.  But it is axiomatic that all governments seek continual expansion of their powers, and control of the public purse and the power to tax is the Holy Grail for power seekers.  The founding fathers of this country feared government more than anything, and the Constitution they framed was to protect us, not from foreigners, and not from each other, so much as from our elected government itself.  The debates about economic policies are a sideshow and a distraction; the main event is the relentless expansion of executive power and the quiet transfer, not only of wealth, but of personal liberties as well.  Without economic freedom based on individual rights, private property, and the right to keep and dispose of our earnings as we choose, there is no freedom at all. Read more..

Financial Literacy: Why Governments Secretly Like Inflation

The dirty secret of all governments is that contrary to popular opinion, they do not hate inflation.  All governmental corruption begins when they discover the power of the purse, and that they can use the public purse to perpetuate their power, privilege, and benefits.  Over time all legislators and power brokers arrogate to themselves the means to stay in office and the luxuries it affords at the general taxpayer’s expense.  So of course we hear how the purpose of the Federal Reserve and Congress is to maintain a strict control over inflation, that the Fed is independent of the government, and that it is immune to political influence.  At best this is a Trojan horse.  Inflation is the primary tool used by every government to live beyond its means, and by its “means” we mean its ability to tax.  For taxation is the Achilles heel of all governments, for carried to excess it inspires armed revolution and fall from power.  Governments raise taxes at their peril.  Inflation, however, is a hidden tax, for it is how the government spends and borrows beyond its ability to repay.  By printing money and increasing credit, thereby increasing the money supply, the government creates inflation.  How does this happen?

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Financial Literacy: How Fractional Reserve Banking Multiplies the Money Supply

One of the reasons why so few people show an interest in economics is that in today’s world the subject is complex and defies simplistic definitions.  But that is so true of much of our modern society.  It is not uncommon these days for older folks to refuse to learn e-mail and to shake their heads in wonderment at their grandchildren deftly manipulating electronic hand-held games totally beyond the grasp of their elders.  What IS of grave concern is the fact that the achievements of our scientists and engineers have aided and abetted the dumbing down of successive generations.  We have heard much of the income gaps in our society; we hear much less about the widening chasm between the educational level of the designers and engineers of our world and the end-users of our world.  Not to mention the grade inflation of our educational system.  Hence we sometimes find students in Advance Placement who still cannot read and write well.  I would be remiss in my duty to you, my reader, to imply that you can understand the economic world you live in without effort.  There are times when you will still have to reach for the dictionary, and hopefully you have several in your home, and even more hopefully, they are well worn and used!  Or more likely, you have an online dictionary marked as a favorite.  Even though I exert considerable effort to simplify and clarify an otherwise arcane and difficult subject, I would suspect that my articles have little appeal to those addicted to instant gratification.  I simply do not know how to reduce some concepts to a sound byte level.  Take for example, the concept of the money supply. 

The money supply is a very important concept with those entrusted with the well-being of our macro-economy (the BIG picture).  There are, for example, endless arguments among economists about what properly constitutes the money supply.  We’ll skip most of that stuff and stick to essentials.  Let’s start with the fact that in the profession and in the media, the money supply is referred to as M.  Yep, that’s it, M as in Mickey Mouse, Mars bars, or of course, M&Ms.  To me, the latter connotes Money and Masochism, which sort of go together.  Of course, economists talk of M1, M2, M1a, etc.  That is largely to impress us.  Or maybe to impress themselves.  It has absolutely no effect on the accuracy of their predictions.    But it seems to be a requirement imposed upon all financial advisors and analysts to use jargon composed of largely a minimum of four or more syllables per word to convince us that, like all priesthoods, they know what we cannot possible grasp with our feeble minds.  But let us bravely press on . . .

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