THE SHADOW AND THE SUBSTANCE
Peter Lock
Economic Reform Australia


The distinction between the shadow and the substance was never more important than in today's financial system. Financial wealth is only the shadow of real wealth, the real wealth of natural resources and human brains and brawn. Before saying more about this distinction, it would be useful to consider another imaginary situation of this sort in the context of today's economic and social realities. We will refer to a hypothetical city called Metropolis.

Commercial disaster had overtaken the public transport system of this city of Metropolis. It could boast the finest trains, trams and buses with their complement of technicians, drivers and other personnel. Its roads and railways were in the best of repair. There was a whole population ready, needing and willing to use this essential service. All farm produce and the products of industry were piled up waiting to be transported. Yet all movement had stopped. There were no tickets.

In the past, the Public Transport Authority had printed their own tickets, but now another private printing company had obtained a legal monopoly for all such printing and was demanding to be paid, not just for their labour and materials, but also the face value of the tickets themselves. That was not all. The tickets would always belong to the printing company and those who used them would have to pay a further percentage of their face value for the privilege of using them.

Such a debt system was commercially absurd and self-destructive. It effectively meant that the ticket-printer virtually owned the whole transport system for all of the latter's ticket sales' revenue was forfeit to the former. It also meant that the Transport Authority would always be operating at a huge loss since it would have no revenue of its own to pay its running costs of wages, maintenance, depreciation and new rolling stock. The shadow was dictating its terms to the substance and was now the master of all who were totally and slavishly dependent on it.

Most of today's money supply, namely cheques and plastic credit cards, is not real wealth but only a bank issued ticket or make-believe shadow entitlement to real wealth. Banks, as creators of the community's financial credit, have obtained a legal monopoly for the providing of such tickets for the exchange and distribution of real wealth and behave no differently from the above printer of the transport tickets.

The economic crises right throughout the world indicate that there is something wrong at the core of our knowledge and understanding of how to run the business side of humans' global and community house-keeping activity.

We are confronted with a state of affairs which permits a surplus of ordinary essential goods and services whilst millions are living at poverty level, in need of most of the commodities that are, in reality superabundant. To add to the paradox, it seems that the privation of these have-nots, is due to the very existence of the surplus for the haves. In the global marketplace all countries endeavour to consolidate their position by disposing of or dumping their real wealth while trying to avoid taking any other country's real wealth in return. More absurd still is the growing of grains and their profitable feeding to animals to eventually and inefficiently feed a relatively small number of affluent humans. This accompanies also the wholesale destruction of foodstuffs for market reasons whilst millions are dying of hunger.

It is completely inconceivable that these apparent contradictions can be written off as being inevitable due to natural causes or to the defects in general of human nature. No reasoning person can reconcile a state of affairs in which the genius of men and women has succeeded in mastering the very energy of the atomic nucleus and of transporting themselves to the moon, and yet at the same time is incapable of solving the most basic and elementary economic riddles of our age.

Professional economists and self-styled experts and authorities in these matters express so many conflicting opinions and proffer such contradictory advice that the world is more confused than ever. The national debt of all countries to the banking system is increasing exponentially and can never be paid because the interest burdened principal must of necessity be increasingly greater than the amount of actual money in circulation. For some already, and for many others soon, the interest owing alone will exceed the total amount of their money in circulation. We are on the verge of catastrophic global bankruptcy. Academics realize such, but have no notion how to avoid it. It is time that the scientific logic of self-functioning-feedback-systems, unhampered by any preconceived theories and self-interest, be allowed to pass judgment on the situation and to shed light on a marketplace shrouded in the darkness of impending doom.

There can be no adequate understanding of the suicide or survival alternative facing humanity without a proper perception of the financial reality that it is the abuse and prostitution of the role of money which is the root cause of all economic evil and hence of most of the social disorders threatening the future of society.