RAILWAYS

British Rail provides a perfect example for the illustration of basic economic principles which have universal application, usually ignored with apparent impunity.

The discomfort of the commuter could enable us to focus on key principles with benefit to one and all.

The original concept of the Railway was so exciting, romantic and deliriously delightful, in the days of the stagecoach and the lumbering ox or horse drawn cart, that its pioneers had sufficient inspiration to win support from the people to overcome all obstacles.

Those obstacles were unbelievably great and impossible to resolve, but all melted like butter in the sun, under the enthusiasm and inspirational zest of the people. There were two magical sources of power, a worthwhile goal and an inspired workforce. 

The Victorians had already learned skills in management and with a real goal, good management and an inspired work force, the impossible was achieved almost without comment. But now all that is disrupted and lost and all for the need of monetary reform. 

A very simple explanation of the degradation of British Rail has been our failure to understand money.  The money to create and put the railways into operation did not exist.  New money was needed and no mechanism for the creation of new money existed other than digging gold out of the ground.  But that could not be done fast enough and the arch enemies of mankind, the bankers, moved in on the scene and started pouring credit into circulation as a substitute for money, which gained huge amounts of interest for the banks.

This corrupt and unethical practice destroyed the goal, which became the acquisition of money instead of the railway dream, a blight on management and the betrayal

of the workforce, turning them into near slave labour.

Pope Leo X111 put it this way.

“On the one side there is the party, which holds the power because it holds the wealth, which has in its grasp all labour and all trade; which it manipulates for its own  benefit and its own purposes, all the sources of supply  and which is powerfully represented in the councils of the State itself.  On the other side there is the needy and powerless multitude, sore and suffering.

Rapacious usury, which although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless under a different form but with the same guilt, still practiced by avaricious and grasping men. So that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the masses of the poor, a yoke little better than slavery itself”. 

More recently, Pope Pious X1 spoke of the same problem.

“In our days, not alone is wealth accumulated, but immense power and despotic economic domination is concentrated in the hands of a few.  This power becomes particularly irresistible when exercised by those who, because they hold and control money, are able also to govern credit and determine its allotment. For this reason supplying, so to speak, the lifeblood to the entire economic body and grasping, as it were, in their hands the very soul of the economy, so that no one dare breathe against their will”.

Historians do not yet see all this and have other weird and extraordinary reasons for failure, such as privatisation or nationalisation or some other ideology or “ism”.

When we learn to recognise the situations in which new money is needed and is essential, and also learn how to issue new money correctly, the banks will be stripped of their power. Power will be restored to the people, as in a true democracy.  Life will become a fun game for everyone and no poverty anywhere. The motivation for global-warming will be gone and the social ills of drugs and crime will disappear.

The dream that was British Rail will be fulfilled.  The commuter will travel in comfort, punctuality will be assured, as will safety.  Speed will be a luxury and no longer a necessity.  Time once again will become affordable. In other words Britain will have the very finest railways in the world.