Hi Y'all!
Please allow this oldster to support the thesis behind the book , "Grip of
Death."
The elemental ideas have been around since H.C. Douglas proposed them more
than half a century ago.
There is however what is called "progression." That is the ideas, totaly
valid, are invalidated by changing circumstances over time and also
technologies.
My caution is that we should not throw out the proverbial baby with the
bath water.
Banks, those private money printing companies, serve a very important and
useful purpose in an economy. That is, if they are regulated and restricted
to do that which they were originally intended to do.
The purpose of money is to facillitate trade. Not just international, but
"all trade". Government money used to be intrinsic. That is it was
substantiated by a utilitarian metal such as iron or gold. More recently,
(recently in historical terms) with economic activity growing faster that
the supply of gold could handle, paper money supplimented, then replaced,
the money that had an intrinsic value.
Essentially there are two kinds of money, legal tender money and credit
money.
Governments create legal tender and spend it into circulation. Too much
causes inflation too little causes economic stagnation since the goods
people have produced cannot be readily exchanged.
The problem with government issued money is that, once issued, it stays in
the economy, irrespective of the amount of goods produced that need to be
exchanged. Unless it makes its return mandatory by forcing taxation to be
paid in legal tender. That is rare.
Credit money is created by the privately owned, Government Chartered,
Banks. The money (credit) creating functions of the Chartered Banks are
":Regulated." In large part, current money problems, (inflation and
deficit) can be attributed to what some of us remember as the "Big Bang",
the deregulation of the Chartered Banks, beginning with the Bank Act
Changes in 1968.
The reason we need the Chartered Banks (credit) money creating services is
to do what money does, it facilitates trade. Originally Banks created
credit money by "monetising" bills of lading. The amount of money created
was substantialed by the value of the collateral value vested in the goods
"laded", or loaded for sale in the vernacular. The goods were then
transported, the person "buying them" paid for them and the credit money
that had been created was paid back. Thus, by discharging the debt the
credit created to facillitate the trannsfer of the goods disappeared.
The process left the long term underlying volume of legal tender stable,
providing a stable medium of exchange for the populance.
A major shift in banking practice was to use credit money as pseudo
ownership. As long as the debt was not discharged, the interest bearing
credit money could continue to work for the banks. The banks also found
that by with-holding legal tender from the populance, the demand for term
bank credit money increased, also increasing their profits.
The solution to the problem is to restrict the banks to the function they
were intended to fulfill. That is to facillitate trade of goods over the
short term and not use its credit creating authority to claim ownership of
real property.
The really biggest problem is to find a way to get back to a regulated
system without destablising the economy.
Ed Goertzen
Peace and goodwill
Ed Goertzen,
Oshawa,
L1G 2S2,
905-576-6699
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SIGNATURE - About bureaucracy "….it ceased to be merely a servant of
social institutions and became their master. Bureaucracy now not only
solves problems but creates them. More important, it defines what our
problems are - and they are always, in the bureaucratic view, problems of
efficiency." "... this makes bureaucracies exceedingly dangerous, because,
though they were originally designed to process only technical information,
they now are commonly employed to address problems of a moral, social, and
political nature." "... bureaucracy has broken loose from ....
restrictions and now claims sovereignty over all of society's affairs.
"Technopoly" by Neil Postman 1992 Pp. 86
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