Sitting on a peak in the Atlas Mountains last week, reading the International Herald Tribune, I learned that, besides being quite good at ballistics, the North Koreans are also able to make perfect US$100 bills.
This is interesting. We seem to be steadily heading towards a world currency -- the US dollar -- which appears to be counterfeited in unknown quatities. Certainly Russia mainly exists by means of a dollar economy in which the notes themselves, from several accounts, are manufactured by mafia printing units in Italy. But never mind the Russian ecopnomy. How much is america's economy affected by variable (and increasing) amounts of counterfeit money. How much of the total dollar currency is counterfeited? Is it 10%, 20%, 30%? From time to time the authorities let it be known that they have caught a counterfeiter. This is nearly always a small printer and a few enterprising friends. In all my 30 or 40 years of reading at least two or three newspapers every day I don't think I have ever read of the authorities discovering a major counterfeiter like the mafia. (The authorities are very reluctant to admit to the sheer volume of drugs that are shifted every year by the mafia, but they *never* admit just how much money is counterfeited.) Besides, US dollars, how many other currencies are counterfeited? And to what extent? In short, it is no wonder that the "science" of economics has deteriorated, rather than improved since the beginning of the last century. Ever since countries went off gold and began printing paper tokens, economists have been trying to measure economic systems with various measuring rods that are forever changing their lengths. No wonder that economists have little idea of what may happen next to major systems like the US economy. At any one time, they assume that the figures mean something; in truth, the figures only have an approximate relationship with reality. It's equivalent to measuring time with the burning of candles as in medieval times. While we have printed money, economics will develop no further than where Ricardo and Smith and one or two more economists left it at the end of the 19th century. Keith Hudson ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------- Keith Hudson,6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England Tel:01225 312622/444881; Fax:01225 447727; E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
