MONEY OR YOUR LIFE

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MONEY AS AN IDEA

When people ignore the fact that money is an idea introduced to expedite trade when a barter system becomes unworkable, and they begin to use the symbol of that idea as a commodity, trouble begins.

The symbol may have no intrinsic value of its own. If money is represented by a piece of paper, then the person who issued that piece of paper merely promised to give you a similar piece of paper as a fair swap. This promise is made in order for soiled notes to be exchanged for clean bank notes.

But the money brokers may announce that your piece of paper, being English paper, may be worth one and one half times a similar American piece of paper.

Or the money brokers may be very precise and tell you that your English five pound note is worth exactly seven point six five dollars American, although yesterday it was worth seven point five six dollars. You can bet your life that by next week the figures will have changed again ,either up or down. The figures will not be the same.

When gold was used as a symbol of money the value of gold used to fluctuate and gradually increase as it became too scarce to do its job. But now that we are not allowed to use gold as money its value is declining.

This is strange if you think about it because even chocolate is increasing in value today.

The correlation between what we use as money and that for which it stands proxy is purely arbitrary

When I bought my home, in 1953, it cost me £6,000. One hundred years previously the vendors family had paid £6,000 for the property. Within another twenty years the self same property was valued at £500,000.

Over one hundred years despite massive decay and dilapidation the value of the property in pound notes had stayed the same. This means that the value of the pound notes had decayed at the same rate as the property.

Over the next twenty years the decay and dilapidation of the property had accelerated but not near so fast as the rate of decay of the value of money.

The value of the property declined, whilst the value of money declined at such an astonishing rate, that the value of the property appeared to increase.

This example serves to remind us that there is no link whatever between the value of money and the value of that for which it stands proxy. It is therefore impossible to have any real trust or confidence in money as money exists today.

The money we use today is a total mystery. Who makes it? Where does it come from?

How is it made? What is it? Who controls the rate at which it is produced etc.,etc.?

You may be told by the Governor of the Bank of England exactly how notes are printed and replaced when dirty, how coins are minted and he will tell you this with very great detail and it looks wonderful. No mystery at all!

But this is less than 5% of the money now in circulation.

What about the other 95% of the money we now use? The Governor will not mention that. It is not difficult to realise that with this degree of uncertainty as to what money is and therefore what its value is, we then observe a colossal game of gambling or guessing its value. That is what goes on in the money markets of the world.

The whole economy is a two tier system. There is the basic commerce concerned with trade in goods and services and another layer of commerce superimposed which is concerned with trading in money.

We have a free market economy or we aspire to a free market economy and we run alongside of it, or above it, a free money market.

A free money market is incompatible with a free market economy.

We try to run one beside the other because we confuse the symbol of an idea with the idea itself. This is a very human failing.

People believe that ideas come from brains. And if the truth needs to be known brains don't think, brains cannot conceive of an idea. Brains are rather like automatic telephone exchanges, they transmit messages. But they do not originate messages or think for themselves. Neither brains nor telephones can think.

Ideas come through the mind and the mind has nothing to do with the brain, save to influence the being in what it tells the brain to do.

It may take a very great deal of work to get that previous paragraph understood, accepted as truth and the data then put into practice.

Meanwhile if we wish to flourish and prosper, to use money correctly and establish a truly scientific concept of economics which will give us predictable results instead of computerised guesswork, we had better steel ourselves and recognise that money, as we use it, is a symbol of an idea and nothing else.

What we need to see quite clearly is the danger of using the symbol of the idea which we call money, as though it were a commodity in its own right and building up a whole tier of commerce based upon trading in money as opposed to trading with money as a means of exchange.

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