It has long been a fashionable belief on the extreme left that the world is run by a cabal of wealthy white men, known generically as the ruling class. On the extreme right, a cabal of International Jews or Zionists are often portrayed as the villains. Then there are those who claim the Freemasons are the real ruling elite. Others blame the mass media or even the trade unions, while there is one organisation whose members believe the Queen of England is the spider at the centre of this web of subversion and that the British Royal Family controls not just the all the governments of the world but the international drug trade.

We can and often do laugh at such claims, although they are not all entirely without merit. Only a fool or a mischief maker would claim that the mass media exerts no power at all over our lives, that Zionism is a benign philosophy or that union muscle is a spent force. That being said, the real power behind the throne is and always has been money: the people who control it, and the people who create it. In the past few months we have seen a phenomenon known as the credit crunch. Banks in the United States, Britain and worldwide have lost countless billions on “toxic assets”, and suddenly they have no money to lend. So where has it all gone? More to the point, where did it all come from in the first place, and why can’t the wheels of industry turn without it?

Money comes into existence in one of only two ways – as a physical medium – and as credit. The physical medium includes cash and coin, but commodities can also be used as currency. (Let us not be pedantic about this, if you can spend it – trade it for goods and/or services – it is money). That is the physical money, then there is credit, ie non-physical money. Credit has no tangible existence; up until fairly recently, it existed only as figures in a ledger, nowadays it exists primarily as blips in cyber-space. It is important that everyone understands this – credit has no tangible existence, and is therefore not true wealth. You can’t eat credit, you can’t wear it, you can’t drive it, you can’t read it, you can’t repair a hole in your roof with it.

A three course meal, a cotton shirt, a motor car, a book, a slate on your roof, a trunk road, a mains water pipe, a piano lesson, these and a zillion other things constitute real wealth. Consumer goods, capital goods, raw materials, infrastructure, services, are all manifestations of wealth that enrich all our lives. Credit is none of these things, but unless we have credit or money (in one form or another) none of us can have any of them. In other words, unless someone writes figures in a book and says these are for you, we can’t have anything. How insane is that? If this applies to individuals, it applies also to businesses, corporations, and most of all to governments. Yet it need not, at least not to governments, because every sovereign government has both the right and the duty to create credit in sufficient quantity to provide the goods and services its citizens need. All of them. And in this day and age there is no reason it can’t. So why are sovereign nations suffering from the credit crunch as well as individuals and companies?

Since the dawn of civilisation, governments have at times sought to control every aspect of their citizens’ lives, none more so than in the current Orwellian era. We have seen censorship of everything from the mail to the theatre, government control and regulation of foodstuffs, especially drugs, and licensing or official approval needed for every product and service under the Sun. In most cases, the State has absolutely no business interfering in our lives in such fashion. The primary function of the State should be to provide national and civil defence, a criminal justice system, and major projects such as infrastructure, notwithstanding the participation of private enterprise in all these fields.

It is ironic therefore that the State should relinquish the one power that it should rightly own, the power to create its own credit. And it is even more remarkable that it should not only relinquish this power to a private consortium – the banking system – but that it should pay the bankers for the priviledge of doing so.

It is this mechanism that has led to the world drowning in debt; individuals, corporations and most of all governments are all massively in debt to the banks. And we are told this debt must be serviced, or life as we know it will cease to exist. This is total lunacy, because just as credit has no tangible existence, so does debt – every debt – have both a debtor and a creditor. The whole world cannot just be in debt, that debt must be owed to someone or something. And the owner of that debt is the banking system, yet even as I write these words, governments worldwide are bailing out the banks with taxpayers’ money, which they hope the same banks will lend – ie sell – to the private sector in order to get the economy moving again. All such loans will of course be made at interest, which simply piles more debt on irredeemable debt. This is lunacy, total lunacy.

The publication you are about to read came into my possesion around 1980. At the time, its ideas sounded radical, so radical in fact that my own bank manager, in Leeds, dismissed it as “that bloody load of rubbish”. Obviously Mr Baer hadn’t heard of quantitative easing.

Although The Money Trick is written from a specific ideological perspective I would ask the reader to ignore this, and the ad hominem attacks which will follow as inevitably as night follows day. This is a fairly substantial pamphlet, so I have extracted the core truth, the conclusions of the Australian Royal Commission On Money, which can be found at pages 56-7.

A side note here, a pamphlet called The Money Trick was first published in 1932; this was not a scholarly study but a satire on the financial system by N. Dudley Short. The original was followed shortly by the Louis Even satire Salvation Island, which I updated in my 1994 science fiction pamphlet The Gift Of Ramu.

Even’s classic can now be found in full elsewhere on the web; before I scanned The Money Trick I was unable to find a copy in cyber-space, but this very morning I have found an extract.

Read and learn.

Alexander Baron,
Sydenham,
London

March 10, 2009

The Money Trick – complete
The Money Trick – Australian Royal Commission extract (pages 56-7).

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