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Letter to: George Trefgarne Economics Editor. The Daily Telegraph. London

17 October 2005

YouGovpoll

Dear Mr Trefgarne

As Economics Editor of possibly the best national newspaper in the world, your opinions on economics are held in very high esteem.

I do not know who devised the questions in the YouGovpoll, but they could be criticised.

The scene is set in the first question, which connects Enron with the business world.

In your own words Britons give resounding approval to wealth creation, because they admire people who make a lot of money.

Although your words are perfectly true, they do reveal how far the general public are confused by the subject of economics, your subject.

Economics should be the study and practice of creating and distributing the goods and services required by the people for their survival.

Taken beyond a barter system, economics comes to depend upon money as a means of exchange.

Money is now essential for the distribution of goods and services. We do the creation to excess and spend too many billions on trying to flog the surplus. We get ourselves into debt and try to use credit as a means of exchange,

The value of credit as a means of exchange, is pure guesswork and we gamble with the value of currency. Those with insider knowledge cream off billions without earning a penny.

The term entrepreneur should refer to those who organise the production of goods and services and the business of acquiring the means of exchange by gambling should be called capitalism, which is what it is.

Our currency is now credit and should not be regarded as wealth. That is confusion. The amounts of money to be won by gambling with insider knowledge, are infinite and there is no other way to become exceedingly rich. Floats, takeovers, the whole world of the chief executives, is fundamentally dishonest and parasitic. And yet that is where real Power seems to lie.

If we could find a way to make this clear to the grass roots, were real power actually lies, we could start to build a new civilisation. A civilisation without war, without criminals and without insanity. The ball is now in your court.