The financial sector collapsed, and I am not referring to stock market prices, but to something far more fundamental.
- "But top executives of CONSOB 3 were later tried and subjected to very severe sentences ...".
- "True, they had pocketed fabulous rewards from the largest multinational consortiums who bought half-price the Italian excellence. But even that was not the fundamental event: we know that money is more fundamental than finance".
In fact, everything could be blocked or reduced, except for the payment of wages. And the collection of taxes and duties also had to be suspended for months. As these measures succeeded to calm down the protests in Italy, discontent grew in the rest of Europe, with increasing rebounds of reprimands, recriminations, accusations, threats, ultimatums, between Rome, Brussels, Paris, Berlin. The Visegrà d cartel was screaming louder than all, while the Troika 4 remained on the sidelines as much as it could. The mainstream media followed the classic strategy of shifting attention to marginal issues, debating about all except wages and taxes. Meanwhile in Italy wages continued to be paid, and taxes were not collected, in a European collective squint whereby the Italians were fully playing, by obligation, a role of cicadas that until then had been stereotypically reproached to them.
As a matter of fact the ECB was silent and paid. Scolded and paid. Launched ultimatums and paid ...
Meanwhile, epidemic outbreaks multiplied in Europe and the USA, not enough to equal the mortality rates that the common influence claims each year, but more than enough to feed the war of all against all, in a kind of musical chairs game whereby yesterday's accuser was becamig today's infector: an apparently comic scenario, in essence a tragic one.
Then, after three months, that virosis died away, so much so that today it is mentioned only in ultra specialistic textbooks of medicine and biological sciences. But any secondary school student knows what "Spring 2020" is. Maybe he does not understand well when his parents talk about the times when they had to work hard to pay the rent or the mortgage and other strange taxes, however, if questioned, he promptly replies: "Spring 2020 marked the end of the dogma "Money is Scarce!". Why? Because a third of Europeans found themselves forced to live as cicadas, not for three months like the Italians, but enough for everyone, cicadas and ants across Europe, to realize that wages, taxes, mortgages, bills were not paid with gold coins, a scarce metal for real: they were paid with the electrons of a computerized system. And everything can be said about electrons, except that they are scarce!
- "Yes, I confess that, at the time, me too I was rejecting my students if they were not reciting the refrain: "in the banking computerized system the electrons perform the same function as gold, so they must be scarce!".
- "We were all like this: half narcotised and half blackmailed, otherwise you could never get the university chair! Today we call crazy anyone who mentions some old economic theory. Before 2020, we called crazy anyone who queried the dogma of monetary scarcity".
That house of cards crumbled because the Europeans, thanks to that viral-media epidemic, made a series of concrete and collective experiences that categorically denied three centuries of monetary theories and practices. At first they found that the real economy, albeit temporarily halved, was proceeding smoothly. In fact, after the initial shock, around the proverbial "thousand bell towers", a thousand local coins proliferated, based on the formidable precedent of Giacinto Auriti's SIMEC 5, and thanks to intercompany discount coupons. Meanwhile the average income, multiplied by the suspension of taxes and of many other payments, as well as by the drop in luxury and consumerism spending, allowed the citizens to put aside in a month as much as they could not save in the previous year. A further pleasant surprise came in the summer, when everyone could afford long and comfortable holidays, with family or friends, thanks to a fraction of the money set aside in the spring.
The Cassandra's warnings were of no avail. With the ECB at the head, they anticipated disasters in the form of "a return to the times of double-digit inflation". Indeed, the more the Cassandras raged in the media, the more workers raised barricades in defence of the benefits (re)achieved, and the less inflation showed signs of growing. In hindsight today, the "experts" of those days turn out to be either confused or reticent, however stubbornly clinging to the dogmas of "debt-currency".
- "Clinging by hook or by crook, by the IMF diktats or by the NATO pistol at their temple! We must recognize that that virus was truly providential because it paralysed the USA in the following months, allowing us to free ourselves from the old yoke. Today the dollar is one of many currencies in the world basket, and the US citizens are happy with it, but then their "deep state" would have triggered a world war to defend the dollar monopoly"...
- "Yeah. So the IMF had to admit what is peaceful today: that inflation does not come from excess money but from scarcity of essential goods and services. And that the "essential" category includes everything that satisfies not only the physical, but also the psychic, social and aesthetic needs of people and organized groups".
Today, with a 95% sustainable economy, there is no limit to the production of goods and services. The widespread robotization allows us to work a few hours, a few days a week, and only for passion, for pleasure, or in any case by choice. Once the bogeyman of inflation has fallen, each of us perceives the unconditional universal basic income, from the cradle to the grave, and the accusations of "playing cicada" no longer hold because those who want to be an ant, even just a little, get more than generous monetary incentives (money-credit, without interest).
- "And do you remember the taxes? Today we study them as an archaeological object... ".
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