Idea

Surely there is some banker somewhere who would be willing to write a book titled more or less “How we rob you blind and why you should care”.  It seems very reasonable to suppose that most senior bankers understand the system well enough that, if they took a moment to consider what they do, they would realize that yes, of course they provide the “capital” to fund and continue economic growth, but that yes also, of course, they create the money ex nihilo–or some large part of it–and that by creating money you dilute, necessarily, the value of all existing money, and thereby steal, invisibly, some portion of the economic output of everyone who creates real goods and services.

I might perhaps profitably quote Keynes again, who in his first major work, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, told the truth:

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.” 

I will note there of course he is assuming the government controls the process of money creation. 

(Any other solution would be absurd, right?  You wouldn’t just hand the money over to the money people, the banks, would you?  That would create mass outrage, would it not? 

I’m being facetious of course.)

Moving on, I’ve long wondered: what is the actual reserve ratio for most banks?  People out there know what it is for particular banks.  As far as I can tell, individual banks can keep literally perhaps 1% of their alleged balances in physical cash and on the books, and reach the 10% or whatever it is required by the Fed through overnight loans, each and every night.  There may be billion dollar banks who in all their vaults have no more than a few million physical dollars.  With funny money, it’s all keystrokes and access.

Such a person would understand why we have business cycles, how excessive lending always leads eventually to a correction that may hurt banks in some places, but rarely hurts individual bankers, whose own fortunes are untouched.

There are millions of people out there who could write this book.  We really only need one, and at that there are plenty of ghost-writers–co-authors they are usually called–who could create from a basic first person narrative a compelling, and salable, story.

In my personal view, fixing our monetary system–giving their wealth back to the people–will need to be an intrinsic part of how we deal with automation, which is to say better and better robots, and smarter and smarter AI.

Over a hundred years ago, Oscar Wilde pointed out that one key outcome of increased economic productivity is the ability for there to be a leisure class which, for the first time in history, did not depend on slavery.  We make the machines our slaves, albeit at the risk of being overthrown and destroyed by them.

A cultural flourishing remains possible, even in the more or less immediate future of 10-20 years.  We can undo all our damage.  We can right all the wrongs.

But we need strong voices speaking strong and clear messages from the rooftops, messages of hope, of possibility, of goodness, and of beauty.