The PRINCIPLE of EXCHANGE

In a game of tennis, if you cannot give back better than you receive, you lose. When the tide goes out and you forget that it will return, you may drown. Unless you have a purpose in life, in which you can believe, you can never be happy, because people value above everything else, their own self-respect.   You cannot win self-respect in a vacuum. Self-respect depends, in one way or another, upon a two-way flow with others.  At the bottom of the scale, if you cannot counter or return a blow, you lose self-respect. But higher up the scale, having to depend on charity, without returning a smile or a word of thanks, can be degrading.  Not an ideal state at all.  When a person takes something without giving anything in return he loses his self-respect.  A criminal is merely a person who has lost his self-respect.  You can find that phenomenon at all levels of society, and most dramatically at the top. 

“Fair exchange is no robbery”.  “Give and take”.  “A labourer is worthy of his hire”.  “Reward industry, punish indolence”. The idea of exchange is part of our language.  Yet the rules of exchange are broken with a vengeance in modern economics.  We punish workers for working by charging PAYE and we reward the indolent with welfare. We hold in the very highest esteem those who can rob us of the most money. We throw into prison those who cannot pay their debts, as a result of being robbed, by money men.  Moneymen literally make money, billions of pounds, creaming off the wealth created by others, with no contribution to the creation of that wealth. They have no awareness of their need to exchange.

Taking money with no exchange is theft. If the theft is big enough, it is not seen as theft, and is given our very highest rewards.

A thousand money men in the City of London are rewarded with a million pounds each for their labours as thieves. Thousands of us have used their cheap money, which they allow us to use as credit to out-bid each other for a home. Then if we fail to process enough credit to prevent repossession, we are left with nothing.

We can see that credit is an abuse of money. It is dirty money.  Getting credit “clean” either involves getting credit recognised as debt, or sending it to “the cleaners at the laundry”.

The principle of fair exchange is abandoned in modern economics with disastrous consequences to us all.