As a global society, we can have almost everything we can imagine. The ideas of scarcity, that ‘We can’t afford it’ or ‘It’s too expensive’, are hangovers from the last 100 years of economic thought. There are a few natural constraints that we need to pay attention to, of course, but it is time to forget the concepts of poverty and scarcity and look at reality instead of economic theory.
We are currently standing at a fork in the road of human development. The road on the left leads to greater poverty, greater scarcity, destruction of the value that society has created over the last few hundred years, lower standards of living, and a generally less enjoyable life for almost everyone. The road on the right leads to greater wealth, higher standards of living for everyone, and a quality of life that few people are able to imagine. The road on the left harms everyone; the road on the right benefits everyone.
We have the freedom to choose, right now, which of these roads we go down. Currently the choice is being made by economists and politicians, and they have chosen to take the road to the left – the route to poverty and declining living standards.
Why would they do this? Is it because the road to the right is too hard to travel down? No – taking the road that benefits everyone simply requires a few small changes to a few legal documents and a slight tweaking of a few computer systems.
The truth is that the economists and politicians are completely unaware of the road on the right. They have been conditioned to believe that the road to general poverty is the only one that is open to them. In many ways, it is beyond their mental powers to imagine that the road on the right could even exist.
This article is the road map for the road on the right – the road to greater living standards, a more stable economy, and generally a better life for all.
To understand how we get there, you’ll need to go through a few shifts in mindset. You’ve probably been conditioned into a certain way of thinking about the economy, and you’ll need to see it differently (and more accurately) to understand how we take the alternative route.
The Solution to Our Current Problems
We have just experienced one of the worst financial crises in history (one which was completely predictable by anyone with an in-depth understanding of the fractional reserve banking system). As a result, governments worldwide are now talking about ‘cut backs’ in public spending. In short, they are telling us that we can no longer have what we’ve already successfully been having, simply because there ‘isn’t enough money’.
The Solution In Short
The solution to our current problem – and the route to greater wealth and prosperity for the entire economy and society – is to:
1. prevent the creation of money by privately owned companies (ie. commercial banks, through the fractional reserve banking system)
2. make the state (national government) the sole organisation that can create new money
3. spend this money into the economy – debt-free – through government spending and/or direct distribution to citizens
The Spectre of Inflation
However, as soon as we make this suggestion, the old knee-jerk reactions arise: inflation, Weimar Republic, and Zimbabwe. This argument states that increasing the money supply too quickly will cause prices to increase. Those who use this argument to argue against the idea of government-created money are usually ignorant of the fact that the banking system inflates the money supply by 7-11% per year, every year. This bank-created debt-money has undoubtedly produced inflation – for example, a 3-fold increase in UK house prices in just 10 years.
Guarding Against Inflation
When it comes to inflation, the real question is simply, how much can the money supply be increased each year without creating inflation? Once we know this (from research and trial and error) then we simply ensure that the money supply does not increase by more than this amount.
Under the current fractional-reserve system of banking, control of the money supply rests with an army of mortgage brokers and loan officers (since almost all new money is created when loans are made). It is very poor logic to assume that thousands of commission-hungry debt-brokers will control the money supply in a way that benefits the economy as a whole.
Therefore, the risk of inflation should actually be less if we give the power to create money back to the government, under strict rules and principles. Like most people, I would not be comfortable with the idea of allowing our elected government to create as much money as they need to win an election, so we need to separate the control of the money supply from the elected politicians and hand it to an independent monetary board, such as the Monetary Policy Committee in the UK. This group would have the remit to increase or decrease the money supply in such a way that does not cause inflation (beyond a specified ‘natural’ rate of inflation, such as the 2% target rate used in the UK).
Three Constraints on Money Supply Growth
I am proposing that government creates as much money as is required to do everything that needs to be done, subject to three key constraints:
- The money creation must not produce inflation, or deflation
- The money creation must not encourage us to use natural resources faster than they are being replaced
- That money creation should be done in such a way that people do not question the value of the money and do not lose faith in it .
We have addressed the inflation issue above. I will address the others below.
Use of Natural Resources
A lack of money should never prevent something been done if there is sufficient labour and natural resources to do it. When we have far more labour than is currently in use (consider the hundreds of millions of unemployed across the world) and a certain amount of natural resources, then the only constraint on what we can do should be the natural resources.
Consequently, we could create money to fund massive improvements in (for example) public transport. The money created will pay the engineers and workers on this project, as well as paying the people who create the vehicles, and the people who dig the iron ore from the ground to make the steel required for those vehicles. Once it has been used to pay for the initial project, this money will be re-spent by the tens of thousands of people who worked in some way on the project, creating more demand in the economy and in turn creating further jobs.
In other words, everything that we could imagine – excellent health care, brilliant public transport, world-class education – is financially within reach once we restore the power to create money back to the state.
We could achieve all this without creating inflation, but we might also find that we are depleting our natural resources. Consequently, we need to apply this second constraint – that money creation should not encourage the excessive depletion of natural resources.
What does this mean in practice? It means that although we might be able to financially fund say, 10 major public transport projects in one year, we might need to spread these over a number of years to prevent the excessive use of natural resources.
In short, money is an artificial constraint on the economy. The only real constraints that we should be concerned about are the quantity of labour (how much can we practically get done in 12 months), and the quantity of natural resources (at what point will we run out?). In most countries the supply of labour far exceeds the demand for it (hence considerable unemployment), and therefore labour is not really a constraint.
This leaves us with one constraint on what we can achieve – the quantity of natural resources.
Maintaining Faith in the Currency
This final constraint is a little abstract and harder to measure than the first two, but it needs to be kept in mind.
Money is useful as long as people will accept it in exchange for goods and services. If we are in London, I can give you a £10 note and you will take it because you know you can use it. However, if I give you 30 million ‘Meticais’ from Mozambique, you’ll probably refuse it as it has little use to you while you’re in London.
This is an important point to appreciate – money gets its value not from what it is (gold, paper or digital numbers in a computer database), but what it can be exchanged for. Money doesn’t need to be backed by gold, silver or government bonds – it is backed by all the goods and services that are for sale in society[1]. Therefore, as long as people are willing to provide a service in exchange for money, knowing that they can use the money to buy other services from other people, then the money has value.
This final constraint then, is more of a public relations issue than a genuine economic constraint. Inflation would be the first indicator that people are losing faith in the value of the money, so by preventing inflation, we should have no further problems. It is however important to prevent people – the public, the press, and even economists – from taking the knee-jerk reaction view that government creation of money will make the currency worthless.
The Impact of These Changes
What is the impact of permitting the government (exclusively) to create money and spend it into the economy, subject to the constraints above? How will this lead to greater wealth and higher standards of living for all?
Let me restate that the current mindset of scarcity in society is one produced by decades of poor economic thinking. The only real constraints on what we can achieve are labour and natural resources. We have more than enough labour in the vast majority of countries, hence mass unemployment and severe poverty affecting the majority of the world’s population.
Our current method of supplying money to the economy requires that people go into debt to provide the means of exchange. If no-one goes into debt, we have no money, and cannot trade. Government has been duped into handing over the printing press to a small number of privately owned companies, and borrowing the money that they could have created themselves, at an infinitely greater cost[2]. Not only this, but they have also allowed the banking system to create this money almost exclusively, foresaking £200 billion per year in potential government spending, pushing up taxes and reducing the disposable income of the population.
If this £200bn per year had been created by the government instead of the banking system, we could have cleared the national debt and paid for incredible improvements in education, health care and all government services, all within the space of about 5 years.
The possibilities that arise from returning the right to create money back to a public entity are incredibly exciting when we look at countries such as the US and UK, but become revolutionary when we look at poorer countries.
I am writing this from the centre of a South American city. Yesterday, I saw a taxi screech to a halt in the middle of the road in order to avoid a 4-foot wide hole in the tarmac (which would have surely damaged the car). The hole needs to be repaired, but, as in most countries, things aren’t done here because there ‘isn’t enough money’. The government doesn’t collect enough in tax revenue and then – like all other countries who have been duped into using fractional reserve banking – borrows money instead of creating it.
There are things that need doing (a better public transport system, better roads, better facilities for the favelas and shanty towns). Yet because we don’t have enough numbers in a computer system, and we have handed the power to create these numbers over to profit-making entities who have no interest in the welfare of society as a whole, then these things don’t get done.
The Possibilities
What could we do if we encouraged the governments of poorer countries to re-gain control of their currency? Let’s assume that the government in question:
1. is responsible
2. wants to help rather than harm the economy
3. observes the constraints that I have outlined above
They could take some of the people from the massive pool of unemployed or underemployed, and pay them to repair the roads and extend the public transport system, creating many more jobs and benefiting all the people of the city. But before that, they would need to train these people, so they would create jobs for engineers who could pass on the skills, and administrators who can run the training centers. They would also need the raw materials, so they can pay other people to dig them out of the ground.
The point is that, if we have the resources, people willing to do the work, and people willing to train those people, then we can do everything we need to do. We should never be constrained by a lack of money.
Now, I’m trained in the economics of developing countries, so I know that the above is a simplification; that there are issues of imports, foreign exchange, corruption, and incompetent politicians to deal with, but all these challenges are surmountable, once we realise that we can restore the power to create money back to the state and create money for public benefit rather than private profit. The monetary system is one of the main causes of poverty in all countries that use fractional reserve banking. By ending fractional reserve banking, we can have a standard of living that is many times better than the current state of affairs.
We Are Already Creating Money, so How Should We Spend It?
We have already addressed the concern about inflation, but it’s worth restating it here, since this is the issue that people find hardest to comprehend.
We are already creating money – in the UK, £200 billion was created in 2008 alone, inflating the money supply by around 12%.
This money is already being created and spent into the economy, so it’s simply ignorant to argue that government creation of money will suddenly produce hyperinflation. The money supply is constantly growing, and constantly being debased. The real inflation rate (in the UK) is likely to be far in excess of the carefully measured Consumer Price Index.
The question we need to ask is, how do we – as an economy and a society – want to spend this money? Should it be pumped predominantly into the housing market (as it is at the moment), so that it can further inflate house prices and further reduce the disposable income of all citizens – poor and rich alike? Or would we rather spend this newly created money on socially useful projects, that make society as a whole wealthier, rather than poorer?
And another question: who should get the benefit of this newly created money? Should it go to the relatively small group of people who work in banking, or should it be distributed more evenly across the economy? The £200 billion created by the banks in 2008 will generate up to £250 billion of profit over the next 25 years. This £250 billion is wealth that must be transferred from the rest of the economy to the few people who work in banking or the shareholders of banks. It is wealth that is diverted away from the high street, from shops, from local businesses, and from productive activity.
Do we want to enrich 6% of society at the expense of the other 94%? Or should we implement the reforms that I am proposing, which will benefit 94% of the population at the possible expense of 6%? Politicians take note: something that benefits 94% of the population is usually a vote winner!
Time To Wake Up!
I started this article by saying that we are at a fork in the road. Our politicians, economists and journalists currently believe that the road to poverty is the only one that exists, and as a result, that is where they are taking us right now. But it is time for a revolution in terms of economic thought to take us down the road to greater living standards for everyone.
Ignore economic theory for a second and look at reality. We have enough people to do everything we need to do (but not enough money to pay them). We have enough knowledge. We have enough natural resources – we have enough knowledge and enough ‘manpower’ to solve the natural resources problem, but again, we don’t have enough money to pay them to do so.
The only real shortage we have is a shortage of money. The answer to that is simple – create more money. But rather than creating it as debt, via the fractional-reserve banking system, we should create it debt-free for the benefit of the economy and society as a whole. As soon as we start doing this, we will find that many of our current economic problems start to disappear.
At this point in history, there is no greater advance that we could make than to take the printing press away from the banks and hand it back to the people.
[1] With thanks to Jamie Walton for this insight.
[2] If government creates £1bn, the real cost to government (and therefore to taxpayers) of this creation is £0 – they only need to add a number to a computer database. However, if they borrow £1bn, then the cost to the government (and taxpayers) is in the region of £2-3bn (when interest is factored in). This is £2-3bn that is diverted away from the real economy (from businesses and shops) and funneled back to the banking sector.
