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Banksters vs Humanity: Round 14

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The 'money' is somehow in the goods themselves. Money is not something "different" from real economic value. Producing stuff that has real economic value simultaneously produces "money".

The economics profession models Adam Smith's imaginary medieval village of farmers, tradespeople and craftspeople -- producing and trading technologically simple necessities of life among each other -- expanded to global scale.

In Smith's utopian village, everybody owns their farm, their home, their shop, and their productive tools. There is no money or money debt. There are no money-issuing banks. There are no mortgages held by banks and there are no interest payments made to banks. Everybody who can, works. There is always a scarcity of economic goods so there is always a need for workers and a ready demand for all goods that are produced. Families produce primarily for their own consumption, and trade their surplus goods with each other in the village marketplace.

There are no governments, no public debt, no taxes, no armies, no police, no lawyers, no teachers, no bureaucrats. Work that produces no directly usable or tradable economic value is not "work". Welfare for the needy is provided by their family, or possibly by a community church charity.

Government -- if it is acknowledged at all -- is an unnecessary "interference" with the self-regulating workings of the market system. Smith's villagers exercise their own moral government on each other: trading with and socially-economically enriching their good neighbors, and shunning and impoverishing the a**holes and crooks.

{Unless the a**holes and crooks manage to gain a monopoly on the supply of some basic human need -- money, for example -- in which case the villagers are forced to deal with these people out of economic necessity. As CH Douglas explained in his 1935 Money and the Price System speech to the King and government of Norway, "In the modern world it is possible to do without almost any single material thing...but it is practically impossible for any of us to go through twenty-four hours without either money or "credit" -- which attaches to the belief that we shall have money available sooner or later. The monopoly of the control of the money system is the great over-riding monopoly of the world as it is worked at the present time."}

Smith's "market discipline" is moral discipline. But moral discipline has zero effect if you never see or know the people who are producing bad stuff and profiting from it. Moral discipline can't touch people who are insulated by extreme wealth; insulated by distance; insulated by anonymity. Moral market discipline only functions on a village scale where everybody needs to work for their daily bread; and where everybody knows each other and sees what each other is doing.

Smith's village is the foundation -- the basic model -- that economics treats as "reality". That such a village has never actually existed on Earth is no impediment to the modelers. Today's Rube Goldberg economic models try to "add in" all the real world 'externalities' like government, money, banks, taxes, social services, structural unemployment, vast unsellable surplus production, the inflation of "needs" by advertising, and on and on and on. It never occurs to them that the foundational premise of all their modeling is simply wrong; that Smith's utopian free market village has nothing to do with "reality". Not in 1776. Certainly not now.

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I spent my working life as an independent small business owner/operator. My academic background is in philosophy and political economy. I began studying monetary systems and monetary history after the 1982 banking crash that was precipitated by (more...)
 

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