WWWM-PartC-Sect-11: An Outline of a Money System at Once Honest and Workable
Part C, Section 11
An Outline of a Money System at Once Honest and Workable
The primary function of money (there are those who would say its only function) should be to serve as a means to the exchange, and therefore to the distribution, of goods and services. In such case, obviously, it would lop off the function that money has commonly served in the past as a store of value. Silvio Gesell, whose name may stand out above all others when the money system of the future is worked out, not only maintained that this was necessary if we are to solve the money problem, but even attached a feature to his system that would make the hoarding of money impossible.115
Yet it goes without saying that a store of value somewhere—for exceptional undertakings, for rainy days and for old age—must be provided. Happily, doing so should present no difficulty. Albert Einstein, for instance, in reviewing the question, said that if the accepted money system abandoned the function of providing the needed store of value, it would simply “lead to the accumulation of property in other, more substantial form.” Gesell himself has suggestions along this line.116
Money regarded simply as a medium of exchange has been rightly defined as a certificate of work done, “a measured title or claim,” 117 specific in its amount, against the wealth of the entire community or nation. It is transferable from one man to another, and differs from a railway or theatre ticket only in the fact that while the latter are exchangeable solely for a seat in a train for a given distance or a seat in a particular theatre at a specified time, money is exchangeable for any sort of goods or services that the market may have to offer at any time. As such, money need have, and should have, little more intrinsic value than a railroad ticket or a postage stamp.
Next, money should be issued by the national Government, acting as the authorized agent for the whole citizenry, to pay for all its expenditures that may be necessary in the public interest. “Insofar as that new money is to be spent by the Government for public purposes, the Government should have the use of it interest-free.” “Insofar as it is lent to producers, the Government should have the interest on the loan, the banker merely his agent’s commission.” 118
At bottom, the credit needed to give solid backing to any sound and honest money system is a “social phenomenon.” Spelled out, this means that credit is not something that a nation is forced to procure, and can procure only, from an institution or authority outside itself, or from a specialized part of itself—as a service for which it has to pay. Nor does it need backing from anything of intrinsic value, whether gold or silver or any other commodity. Credit is something that a nation possesses by the very fact of its existence, and which is so inseparable from its existence that it must continue so long as the nation itself holds together. It is a matter of the citizens’ sense that they all stand firm in their collective faith in their country as a going concern, their faith in the potential wealth of its fields, forests, mines and rivers, and in their ability to meet the total aggregate of their needs by transforming this potential wealth into real wealth through the application of their brains and their labor. It is expressed by their confidence in their Government, that it is honestly concerned with their welfare and working efficiently to ensure and to promote it, and by their consequent readiness and will to meet any obligations and commitments their Government may assume. Thus credit comes to rest finally on the individual man’s faith that if he gives his labor or parts with goods in order to get money, money that has his Government behind it, this money will in turn be accepted by any other citizen of his nation.
The Government would issue the money by engraving bills, in whatever denominations might be called for,119 or by drawing on the public credit to write checks. The bills might look very much like the bills that we use now. The bills and checks would be paid into circulation for materials, wages, salaries (to individual persons or any manner of business concerns), to enable the Government to carry out all its authorized functions. And these in turn, whether it was individuals or businesses, from the smallest to the largest, would pass on the bills to meet their own obligations. Those in charge of handling Governmental expenditures and the issuing of money would have the responsibility of keeping a constant eye on the price-level, and of so regulating the issue of new money that the price-level would be kept stable, even from generation to generation. For it is universally recognized that the price-level automatically rises or falls according as the amount of money in circulation is increased or diminished. An increase in the supply of money on the market always tends to create inflation.
Money thus issued would not incur debt by one cent. Indeed, as long as all the essential materials and know-how required for any nation’s existence and well-being are to be found within the nation’s own boundaries, there never has been any legitimate reason why any people should have gone into debt. Nations have been led to believe that fearsome emergencies, or colossal undertakings of any sort, could be met only by borrowing money, and consequently they have accepted their being saddled with debt and the payment of enormous sums of money to meet the interest charges on such debt.
But this has been only a deceitful trick for robbing the people. To be sure, any vast undertaking has always called for exceptionally strenuous and united exertion on the part of the whole nation, but there has never been, on this account, any reason for their being saddled with enormous debt. But lest I be charged with artificially and unfairly simplifying the problem, let me first acknowledge that with the rise of the fantastically varied and crucial demands of modern technology, there are today few nations that do have within their borders all the materials and know-how essential to their existence and to their well-being. These they must somehow procure or go under in their struggle for survival. And to get them, must they not go into debt, even into enormous debt, and thus have to submit to paying enormous interest charges on the debt? How one great nation, even in recent times, was able to answer this question we shall shortly see. But to begin with, let us hold to the simpler condition in which a nation does find (or in our own past did find and may be imagined to find even today) all the essentials for its existence within its own domain.
It has been proved that the proposed way of issuing money (government issued, debtfree) works wonderfully well, on the scale both of the microcosm and of the macrocosm, both in the very small, in the case of towns and villages, and in the case of a great modern nation.
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics at Yale, writing when the great depression of the early Thirties was at its worst, described how it had been resorted to first in the German mining town Schwanenkirchen and in Woergl, a town of some 4,000 in Austria. And in both cases it worked no less than a miracle. The fame of its fantastic success in actually bringing about an extraordinary prosperity, even amidst the crushing and ruinous depression which gripped the rest of Germany and Austria, caused it to be taken up in many other places, and even created a demand that the money system of the entire land be modeled after it! As this would have meant the end of the Jewish system of debt, drastic measures were taken to stamp it out. Legal action was brought against those who had introduced it, an emergency law proscribed it, and thus, wrote an informed observer, “Schwanenkirchen and other towns where [the Woergl idea] provided the life blood of economic activity are on the dole again.” And the orthodox system resumed its squeezing of the life-blood out of the German and Austrian people.120 (Please be sure to read this note.)
Nevertheless, the tales of the fantastic success of the Woergl idea led Professor Fisher to send a personal representative to the scene to observe firsthand what was going on, and to verify the facts whose fame had leapt across the Atlantic. Here, in the U.S., to those caught in the throes and literally desperate horrors of the Depression, which was leading to hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies, losses of homes, hunger, misery, and countless suicides, the word of its success and of the simplicity of its operation led to its spreading like wildfire. Some score or more towns were trying to save themselves by following in the footsteps of Woergl and Sonnenkirchen. Many more were preparing to follow suit, even “several large cities.” In fact, Professor Fisher’s correspondence and other sources of information revealed that “four or five hundred communities in every state of the Union” (sic) were taking “a definite turn toward the Woergl or dated type of Stamp Scrip.” It was to promote this movement and to guide it that Professor Fisher wrote his book Stamp Scrip. Perhaps it is not without significance that this book received no notice from the Book Review Digest, has long been out of print, and is now difficult to find.
But before the movement died out, or was stamped out, the idea it grew out of had amply proved its soundness.
But the opponents of the idea, the supporters and hangers-on of the orthodox, Jewish money system, would be quick to argue that though it might work very well as an emergency measure, and on the small scale, for towns and villages and even perhaps for some cities, it would never do as the money system for a nation, especially, a large and highly industrialized nation. And in particular, how could debt be avoided when a nation did not have within its borders all the resources and know-how essential to its existence?
Interestingly enough, and, I submit, very significantly, the antagonists of the idea, in defining the nation where they believe it could not work, have rather exactly described a nation in which, there’s no denying, it did work. The nation I have in mind is Nazi Germany. Hitler began his rule by breaking with the international bankers. He believed that Germany could never be a sovereign and really independent state so long as she had to live on borrowed money. Instead of going to the bankers for money to buy what she had to procure from abroad, she bartered (that is, swapped) some of her surplus to obtain what she needed from the surplus of other nations—without debt being incurred on either side. And with this approach Germany was soon crowding out all competitors. Moreover, for the money required to finance her vast programs for a complete regeneration of the life of the German people and for making Germany the most powerful state in Europe, he simply issued what money was needed, on the authority of the German Government, and based it not on gold, of which he had none, but on the productive wealth of the land within German confines, combined with the productivity inherent in German brains and German labor.
And it proved sound. It worked. In less than ten years, Germany became easily the most powerful state in Europe. It worked so magically and magnificently that it sounded the death knell of the entire Jewish money system. World Jewry knew that they had to destroy Hitler’s system, by whatever means might prove necessary, or their own would necessarily die. And if it died, with it must die their dream and their hope of making themselves masters of the world. The primary issue over which the Second World War was fought was to determine which money system was to survive. At bottom, it was not a war between Germany and the so-called Allies. Primarily, it was a war to the death between Germany and the International Money Power. In this war, Germany fought for Europe, the racial homeland of Nordic White men and the cradle of Western civilization, while Britain, France and the United States were deliberately tricked into betraying their own kind and joining hands with their Jewish enemies to make the International Money Power the master of the world. The plain consequence was that we fought to fasten the manacles of slavery on our own wrists, and we probably sealed the White man’s doom.
I greatly doubt that any intelligent man can make a thorough investigation of the facts without being forced to this conclusion. Whether or not he will then have the courage to acknowledge his conclusion, and act on it, is another matter. But there can be little question about the facts themselves.
The story of the Jewish Money Power is, for me, the nastiest, ugliest, basest chapter in human history. Doubtless the Jew will reply that this is only the way it looks to Aryans. And perhaps his reply is just enough. Certainly, I doubt that Jews (at least, Khazar Jews, “German” Jews) will ever come to understand our sense of honor. And the lamb will lie down with the lion long before such Jews and Nordics come to understand one another or make any genuine peace.
The Jewish money system, as we have seen, has become a well-nigh irresistible instrument not only for bulldozing the nations of the world this way and that, but also for fleecing peoples of their money to finance their own destruction. It has enabled the Jews also to put a fearsome amount of muscle behind every other instrument that they have shaped to their purpose.
Impressum