|
There is a silent but deadly war going on; one the Korporate Media nor
their slaves in government dare say anything about. Here are some of the
battlefields:
Scarcity in the Guise of Plenty
False promises are the money world's stock in trade. Most often its Sirens sing not of greed but of a universal material paradise-a world in which modern technology will banish poverty, war, and violence by providing everyone with a life of material comfort and luxury. Yet behind the promise lies a disturbing paradox. Although money-world institutions profit from the mass production and distribution of goods and services and are leading proponents of growth in production and consumption, scarcity plays a central role in their global quest for profit. Any economist will happily tell us that scarcity
creates
value.Intelligent people pay money only for goods that are scarce. Which has the greater real value: air or diamonds! Air is free, diamonds are pricey. Life says air, because we must have it to live, and provides it in abundance. Money says diamonds, because they are scarce, and its institutions limit supply to inflate the price. That's the money world's little secret. Though it
promises abundance, its preference is for scarcity-the source of its profits. If wastes contaminate our municipal water supplies and create a scarcity of potable water, the money world profits from the sale of bottled drinks. Where there is a scarcity of good public transit, it profits from cars, gasoline, and road building. When soil fertility declines, it sells us more fertilizer. Where jobs are scarce, it finds labor cheap. The money world thrives on scarcity, not abundance, and its greatest prize is a monopoly that allows it to restrict supply. Even the system by which money is created is itself
designed to create scarcity. Most of us casually assume our money is created and issued by government. In fact, most of it is created by banks lending it into existence. Herein lies a seldom-noted problem.
Say a bank provides me with a $100,000 mortgage. It
opens an account in my name and credits it with the amount of my loan. In so doing it creates $100,000 that I then spend into circulation. So far,so good. The catch is this: the bank expects to be repaid with interest, which on a long-term mortgage might require total repayments of $200,000 or more. Because all the other money in circulation was also created through lending by banks that also expect to be paid back with interest, there simply isn't enough money in circulation to pay the banks their due-unless the economy grows fast enough to expand borrowing at a rate sufficient to create the money required to repay the principal and interest on previous loans. Bernard Lietaer, international money manager and a designer of the European currency, explains the implications: "The bank expects you to pay back $200,000 over the next twenty years, but it doesn't
create the second $100,000-the interest. Instead, the bank sends you out into the tough world to battle against everybody else to bring back the second $100,000.... So when the bank verifies your 'creditworthiness,' it is really checking whether you
are capable of competing and winning against other players-able to extract the second $100,000 that was never created. And if you fail in that game, you lose your house or whatever other collateral you had to put up." [20] In a debt-based money system bankruptcies and bank
failures can be avoided only by continuous economic expansion. This is an important source of the money world's growth imperative. The system is designed to create winners and losers, with a bias in favor of the banks that make the money and against the working people and entrepreneurs who produce the real wealth. It is also a system designed to be unstable, because it must either grow or collapse. For most people, the resulting life-and-death struggle
for a means of living creates a pervasive fear of scarcity that triggers a mass impulse, even among the very rich, to acquire and hoard beyond real need. The hoarding of money in turn increases the scarcity of money in circulation and further escalates the fear. It becomes a vicious cycle of escalating fear and scarcity. There is another way in which money creates scarcity,
which we will visit more fully in Chapter 3. The insatiable demand it makes on corporations to produce ever greater profits creates a powerful pressure on corporate management to destroy real productive capital, the source of all real wealth, to generate quick profits. In contrast to the scarcity of money, which is to a large extent artificial, the loss of real capital creates real scarcity. As a species, we face a fateful choice between the song
of life and the song of money. Both promise life, but only one can deliver. [20] Bernard Lietar, "Beyond Greed and Scarcity", an interview by
Sarah van-Gelder in YES! A journal of Positive Futures, Spring 1997, pp. 34-35.
For thorough examination of the nature and consequences of debt-based money
systems see Michael Rowbotham, The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt
Slavery, and Destructive Economics (Charlbury, Oxfordshire, U.K.: Jon Carpenter
Publishing, 1998).
From ch1 of "The Post Corporate World" by David C. Korten. ISBN
1-57675-051-5 |
