The Power of M

Recently, I mused about some of the 3-word phrases of instruction and encouragement uttered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and others among his playmates. The most recent is: ‘Stay at Home’. Repeat them often enough and they become a mantra to be repeated without thinking. “What do we want?” “When do we want it?”.

Idly, I mused about the expressed urgency to have the whole nation connected to broadband internet and the money government was putting into private companies, such as Openreach, to obtain this result. Why would government choose to spend taxpayer’s money to hurry up private companies to do what they would get around to doing anyway in the fullness of their own commercial time? Why? Surely, there are more important things to spend it on. I see the ‘hurry-up’ related to ‘Stay at Home’? As in, we need the hurry up first before we can get to promoting Stay at Home.

(For those who are unaware, Openreach is a functional division of telecommunications company BT plc, that maintains the telephone cables, ducts, cabinets and exchanges that connect nearly all homes and businesses in the United Kingdom to the national broadband and telephone network).

Before drifting to sleep, I wondered if I could create a three-word mantra to throw back at the chanters. I came up with “Money, money, money.”

Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man's world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man's world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It's a rich man's world

Ah, money. In Jewish and Christian tradition, the love of money is condemned as a sin primarily based on texts such as Ecclesiastes 5.10 and 1 Timothy 6:10. The Jewish and Christian condemnation relates to avarice and greed rather than money itself. Wikipedia

And that led me to ‘The Power of M’. Everything in life seems to be ‘Monetarized’; or ‘Militarized’; and then ‘Monopolized’. And ‘Magnified’.  I Mused.

Beginning with money. Was it just chance that among my reading that morning included:

"The fact that these foolish people are often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that they are not independent. In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with them as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of them. They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy the human soul.” (meaning = having the qualities of a devil; devilish; fiendish; outrageously wicked: a diabolic plot; pertaining to or actuated by a devil.) - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

And: "The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So, the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them." - John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

Or, as noted above, the love of money is a root of all evil.

Monetarized (or do I mean Monetized?)

If there were to be no ‘money’ it is likely there would be no reward system involving competition. We would revert to barter which, stripped down, means ‘you do this for me, and I’ll do that for you. Deal?’  Or, as the Book of Genesis puts it: Genesis 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Not much room for freebies and handouts there. If you don’t work, you don’t eat.

Militarized

There were no standing armies in days gone by. Roughly armed men of the land were assembled by the King to fight on his behalf as and when the need arose. Some were paid with salt – salarium – salary. Salārium n (genitive salāriī or salārī); second declension

1. a salary, stipend, allowance, pension; originally money given to soldiers with which to buy salt

2. a meal

But that is schoolboy stuff and philosophers and soldiers have thought much on these things.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hope of its children.” - — Dwight D. Eisenhower

So, money and military go hand in hand, it seems. Aha-ahaaa! All the things I could do If I had a little money, says the politician. I can help you there, says the banker.

Monopolized

Everyone should understand that almost everything that a government spends money on is part of an enormous Ponzi scheme.

(Ponzi Scheme = A fraudulent investment plan in which the contributions of later joining members are used to pay earlier contributors, giving the appearance that the contributors ‘investment’ dramatically increases in value in a short period of time. A pension scheme can be a Ponzi scheme when it is run by government because usually incoming funds (tax income) involves no long-term investment. When income (tax) falls below outgoings, the shortfall is made up by borrowing from central banks which happily provide interest-bearing credit.) Illegal if YOU do it. Perfectly OK if government and banks do it.

Magnified

Now a question. Do all of us understand compound interest? It is the mathematics of a banker. Compound interest (or compounding interest) is interest calculated on the initial principal, which also includes all the accumulated interest of previous periods of a deposit or loan. 

Compound interest can significantly boost investment (lending) returns over the long term. While a £100,000 deposit that receives 5% simple interest would earn £50,000 in interest over 10 years, compound interest of 5% on £10,000 would amount to £62,889.46 over the same period. That’s why credit cards and mortgages are so expensive no matter what you are told about the interest rate.

What could we do to overcome or avoid the Power of M? Good question. We couldn’t go back to simple barter. It is difficult to imagine how we could obtain anything beyond our daily bread if the basis of exchange is barter.

We could take away from private bankers the right to print interest-bearing credit ‘money’– hear them weep at the very idea – and have our own government provide the needed liquidity. It has been done before!

“In August 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, to avoid the imminent collapse of the private banks and the Bank of England itself, Parliament passed a Bill through Parliament in two days which authorised HM Treasury – not the Bank of England – to create, issue and control money that was debt-free and interest-free because it was based entirely on the wealth and potential of the British nation. The high-street banks reopened and people who had planned to withdraw their savings in gold were more than happy to accept these new Treasury notes created by HM Government and there were no problems at all concerning inflation. The private banking system was saved from collapse but unfortunately the politicians (who were, and still are, subservient to the wishes of the City of London) went back to borrowing debt-laden ‘money out of thin air’ from the private financial sector which resulted in the bankers being able to make a killing out of the killing on the Western Front.  And it also meant that the National Debt went up unlawfully from £650 million in 1914 to £7,500 million in 1919.” – Justin Walker. www.britishconstitutiongroup.com and www.newchartistmovement.org.uk

That must be worth thinking about. Mmmm!