''The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but also the government's greatest creative opportunity."

Abraham Lincoln

WHY do governments choose to borrow money from private bankers - bankers who create this money out of nothing - as interest bearing debt?

How can it be that those that create all the real wealth in this world are in debt to those that merely create then lend the tokens that represent that wealth?

Could it be in the words of Marshall McLuhan

"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity".

The truth is that 95% of money is debt created out of nothing by private banks at interest. Government then legitimises this money. By law it's exchangeable for the nation's bank notes & coins - only 5% of all money.

The core problem mathematically is usury or interest charges. The debt money is created out of nothing by private banks and as the interest on the principle is not existing in the societal “money pool” more debt has to be created to enable the potential for repayment.

The banks theoretical spend the interest into the economy but further up what is effectively an exponential curve. Economists do argue about the detail but an economist is someone who will tell you tomorrow why what he predicted yesterday did not happen today. 

If compound interest were charged on tokens of exchange value and constantly reinvested the loaners will end up owning virtually everything. When usurers digitally type money into existence as fiat currency and charge interest on it then naturally the accretion of “money” to the creator / usurer is even greater.

Mathematically this is expressed as an exponential curve.

“The greatest short coming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”

A.A. Bartlett, physicist.

A money system based on privately created money as debt has a fixed default to crash. It is absolutely incompatible with the possibility of a just, creatively intelligent and equitable system for human development.

Put simply, the role of money should be to link underused resources with unmet needs. The goal to be an equitable, sustainable society where we leave this planet in better shape than when we arrived. This is a simple and straight forward money management task.

The path to economic & political independence from the global banking system

Sound Money - the People's Currency - Wise souls over the ages have devised various systems to facilitate this equitable and sustainable economic framework. The following proposals (para phrased) are advocated by monetary reformers from around the world. These ideas have been spectacularly successful when adopted. [More]

i) A National Treasury creates non-cash or bank-account money out of nothing, as private banks do now, providing as much as is needed to increase money supply to balance the production of goods & services in the economy. This money would be used by government as debt-free public revenue for sustainable, socially beneficial development. Government would put this money into circulation by spending it, like other revenue, to create common wealth.

ii) A National Treasury provides interest-free loans (administered by the banking system) available for public capital projects; environmental capital projects; micro-credit; small farms & businesses; student loans; and provided wider ownership is thereby furthered, for private capital investment.

iii) Banks as money brokers. No other new bank-account money denominated in the national currency should be allowed; to lend money commercial banks will be required to borrow already existing money from elsewhere, thus becoming brokers, linking potential lenders to potential borrowers - as many people wrongly assume happens now.

iv) Restrictions on international capital movements, applying taxes on national financial transactions, an international Tobin tax [1] and site-value levy as set out by Henry George [2]

Wealth, mostly as the economic value of land and corporate holdings, intellectual property rights etc. is created by society as a whole and should be shared by all.

The maths of usury and of privately created money as debt, result in wealth being systematically concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. [UN figures]

The mechanism for the systematic accretion of wealth to the wealthy should not be held in the unrepresentative hands of a tiny minority of the planet’s people. People must be the masters of money or be the slave to those that control the global money system.

A national treasury dedicated to stimulating sustainable, society enriching infrastructure and overall wealth creation facilities can be built on the existing banking network. A sane, equitable, money system accords social justice to the majority and limits the power of the wealthy. It would mean "another world is possible" ..... as asserted by the G8 Protestors.

Nurturing the honest co-operation of human kind is an ever present challenge. [More]

VIDEO: A good introduction to the global monetary system, usurped by private interests from the nations, can be viewed on Google Video. See [Money as Debt]
BOOK LIST: [Money reform]

NOTES

[1] A Tobin tax is the suggested tax on all trade of currency across borders. Named after the economist James Tobin, the tax is intended to put a penalty on short-term speculation in currencies. The original tax rate he proposed was 1%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobin_tax

[2] Henry George (1839-1897), was the last of the great Classical economists. His first book, Progress and Poverty (1879), was the best-selling book to that date, save only the Bible. George wrote several other popular but substantial books, and also had an international reputation as a lecturer, speaking throughout the English-speaking world, from Australia to England. He greatly influenced philosophers and politicians from Leo Tolstoy and G. B. Shaw to Clarence Darrow, Sun Yat Sen and Winston Churchill, among many others.

Like Tom Paine, George drew a sharp distinction between land and capital. Capital, he said, was a subset of wealth, i.e. that part of wealth which is devoted to economic activity; to production, transportation, sales, or services provided for profit. Like labour, capital represents human effort and deserves fair recompense. Land, however, is another matter.

It is produced by no person, and whoever uses it prevents others from doing so. Moreover, most of the economic value of land is created by society as a whole, not by the "owner".

Population growth creates demand for land and for resources, and population, together with public roads, pipelines, and utilities cause the value of land to rise even if the owner does nothing with it.

Since the economic value of raw land and its natural resources results entirely from social action, that value should be shared by all and not accrue to any single "owner".

George said that this result could easily be accomplished by taxing away all or most of the "economic rent" -- i.e. the rent that raw land or its resources would bring on the open market.

George added that society should collect the rent not only from land and natural resources, but also that accruing from special privileges such as patents and licenses like taxi licenses, radio and TV licenses, satellite orbits etc. which enable a few to profit from monopolies. Everything beyond a fair return to the inventor or license holder should accrue to society as a whole.

[3] The above are guidelines not set in stone. A free society geared to creating an enriching sustainability social evolution of our human species must experiment with both money systems based on the above and methods of controlling greed and corrupt self interest.

[4] Full quote of Abraham Lincoln:

“The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles… the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master and become the servant of humanity"
[5] The Federal Reserve Bank of America [which is not federal, and has no reserves] actually posted this pdf on the Chicago FED's web site. Modern Money Mechanics is the story of money from the horses mouth. There is nothing in the UK that spells out the official charter for banks to make money out of nothing. This pdf file if no longer available from the FED. They say "it is out of print".
http://ia301505.us.archive.org/2/items/ModernMoneyMechanics/MMM.pdf[6] What should money represent?

Dr Peter Bowman, tutor at School of Economic Science, and member of the Council of Management of Henry George Foundation reflects on Karl Polanyi's 1943 book "Great Transformations" which explores what happened to sow the seeds of self-destruction in our present monetary system. Polanyi's thesis is that it was a deception.
It was the pretence that the primary elements of the economy, namely land, labour and credit, are commodities that can be traded in the market in the same way that actual commodities can. He pointed out that these primary elements of the economy are patently not commodities in that they are not man-made goods. [Read more]

[7] The poster of this information, Anorak Notes, thanks participants of the

[Global Table]

for opening wider the door to the enriching vista of a "people's currency".