Category: Economy

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws”
– Mayer Amschel Rothschild

He who creates the money is the sovereign. This was true throughout history, from the times when humans first started mining for gold on the African continent to the times of kings and warlords. The coinage of money – and in those times it was mainly precious metals – was a royal privilege … until we got industry and banking. 

The Royals lost their best asset, the power to create money, to the banks. Even in the United States, where the power to create money was initially given to Congress, the bankers succeeded, with the 1913 Federal Reserve Act, to make the banks the ultimate arbiter of money creation … and things have gone downhill from there on out. 

Money wars

Wars are fought over money. Hitler, the “crazed dictator”, as it is fashionable to call him now, was actually trying to take the money power back from the international bankers. He did underestimate the challenge of a war declared by those international bankers on the German nation. 

In more recent times, we saw several countries designated as an “axis of evil”, to be destroyed, targeted for “regime change” by the policeman of the world, the United States of America. The legitimately elected leaders of those countries, characterized as “evil dictators” were targeted one by one. Some of them fell, their countries a bloody mess now, some of them are still standing, but constantly under siege. Oh yes, the salient feature that distinguished those countries was that they were financially independent, that they did not have a Rothschild controlled central bank and one of them, Gaddhafi of Libya, had the gall of proposing to establish a gold-backed currency for Africa to compete with the almighty dollar… 

This was first written in answer to a question on Quora. The question was:

How might a currency be designed that helps build the commons?

I am putting my answer in an article here on the blog, after it was previously put in a note on fb, to preserve it and make the information available. Here is what I wrote…

If a currency could eliminate or at least attenuate the profit motive, which seems to drive most if not all economic activity today at the expense of the commons …

If that currency could lessen or even eliminate poverty, which can also act as a driver for activities that endanger the commons…

it might remove some of the pressure that is put on the commons for the purely economic reasons that grow out of greed and necessity…

but to actually build up the commons, active intervention might be needed.

That brings me to the proposals Silvio Gesell made in “Die Natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung” (The NATURAL ECONOMIC ORDER) almost a century ago.

Silvio Gesell

We must realize that this book needs to be read with some patience, first because of the less-than-optimal translation that is available on the net and then because of the time that has passed since the book was written. Completed and first published in 1916, the work is a product of its time and back then, times were different from what they are today. Many of the conditions and events made reference to would be difficult, to understand. So reading Gesell’s book would also imply translating the concepts Gesell expressed into a modern day setting.

I will attempt to give a short overview of what Gesell envisioned in his monetary and social reform proposal, and how it could help build up the commons in a rather effective way.

Continue reading “Could Money be designed to sustain the Commons?”