“The title of this piece is deliberately not self-explanatory, it’s a ‘bait-and-switch’ technique to get the blinkered through doors to places that I believe should be open and transparent.
“But many are closed and kept from view – Invisible except for this ‘Think Twice’ signpost,” I mumbled incoherently.
At least it was incoherent to my gardener who asked me why I was talking to myself in the kitchen while making morning coffee.
I’m talking about money, I told him; it’s all about money. His questioning look drew me into this:
There was once a Dutch community that wanted to build a levy against the sea. So they got the government to build it for the common good. The government built the levy, printed the money into circulation to pay the builders and accepted that money back as payment of taxes. Having ‘borrowed’ the money from itself, the government charged no interest and paid itself back from the collected taxes in about ten years.
Nice little self-sustaining economic ecosystem there.
I had my man’s attention now, as he needs a fence around his property: Another bunch, I continued – Scottish villagers much more canny about money – wanted to rebuild their marketplace.
So they went to the bank, borrowed the money at interest, refurbished their market and paid back the loan over forty years with interest amounting to over ten times the original capital borrowed.
My gardener didn’t think those Scots were all that canny.
The OpEdNews injunction to “Think Twice” on ‘controversial’ matters is a good one, an open door policy that puts certain decisions into its writers’ hands, where they belong.
I also believe that ideas in today’s holistic Internet world behave like viruses and can ‘infect’ the human body corporate almost instantly, adjusting our view of the truth along the way – Hillary’s ‘Battle of Bosnia’ is an excellent example of ‘going viral’ on the web, fine-tuning the truth without perhaps needing to think twice about that one: The final verdict emerged from the ballot box.
SO, HAVING WITH DUE DILIGENCE thought (more than) twice, I’m opening a door to a hopefully rational discussion on a subject of some controversy. I will define terms as I go along – anyone can fine tune or refute them at any time:
My mind is hopefully as ‘open’ as that word implies so I reserve judgment until I have all, or as many as, the relevant facts available in front of me.
Fundamental to this comment is the fact that I adhere to the summaries of ‘acceptable’ behavior as described in most religions, including the injunction to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.
I believe that there are no excuses for behavior outside that injunction – and that includes a lot of aberrant behavior!
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