Here is the reality: most industrialized nations are on the path to
bankruptcy. Here in the United States, at any rate, we cannot possibly
hope to pay all our bills over the long haul without draconian measures
that could only get through Congress once a crisis is already upon us.
This is problem one.
More fundamentally, though, we must grasp
that MONEY CREATION IS THEFT. The problem is not just that it enables
boom and bust cycles, but rather that banks–uniquely–create nothing of
intrinsic value. They create claims on the wealth of others from
scratch. This is why we read global banks have some $32 trillion in
cash reserves. All that wealth, if it had stayed in the hands of
producers, would have gone to generalize prosperity. Instead, we have
seen its steady concentration.
How is it, many of you have surely
asked, that in an age when productivity is through the roof, that we
have to work harder and harder to achieve standards of living scarcely
better than those of our grandparents, who for their part typically
owned their homes by age 50 or so, who set aside a retirement, and who
paid cash for their cars?
The answer is that we have adopted a
fundamentally flawed paradigm. We ASSUME that money will automatically
lose some portion of its value every year through inflation. What we
are failing to grasp–because very few see what SHOULD be happening, but
isn’t–is that money should be INCREASING in value. The value of our
labor should be going up steadily. It should be getting easier and
easier to pay for everything. There should be no poverty, and no
unemployment.
You are quite right that the fix will need to be
radical, and the proposals as I understand them both of the Chicago plan
and Positive Money fail to go far enough both in eradicating existing
debt, and in eradicating the power of money creation.
My own
plan, which follows a more in-depth treatment of the issues just
discussed, is here. I call it a “Blueprint for a Capitalist
Revolution”: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html