At the outbreak of the Great War in July 1914, Great Britain was bankrupt. So how could it fight for four years and win, and what is the relevance of this today?
The answer to that question is easy, when the chips are down, the value of money is purely psychological, but the value of goods and services is not. If you find that point difficult to grasp, try a little thought experiment. If you were trapped in a snowdrift on a back road, one that could last for days, and had no communications, what would you rather have in the back of your SUV: a pile of gold bars or a pile of blankets, a large can of drinking water and a supply of biscuits, dried fruit and tinned sardines?
As long as resources can be both produced and distributed, a nation at war will find a way to continue, even with no money in the bank. There were already historical precedents for this: the famous Greenback issue by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War, and before that the issue of its own debt-free money by the bankrupt Island of Guernsey.
On August 7, 1914, the British Government followed the same path and issued Bradbury notes based on the credit of the nation. You can read a bit about this here. There is now a campaign underway to bring back the Bradbury so that the British Government can again issue its own credit debt-free rather than borrow at interest and repay the banksters in perpetuity. If we don’t do this, what will happen? In 1933, Louis Even published a short story called Salvation Island. In this, a banker who is allowed to issue the credit of a small desert island ends up owning the lot and enslaving its inhabitants. This is what has been happening to us for decades; who is it that is dictating to our governments what they must do, what vital public services they must cut, what assets they must sell off in order to service the irredeemable debt to the banking system? It is organisations like the European Bank and the IMF. We are in effect all slaves because our governments are in thrawl to the dictatorship of finance.
If you live in the UK, you are cordially invited to join this lawful rebellion against their tyranny. And if you don’t live in the UK, thanks to the Internet including especially YouTube, you can find a similar organisation near you, in whichever country you live. If you live in the United States, you might begin by signing this petition.
Thirty years ago, financial reformers were dismissed as conspiracy theorists and cranks. Now, after a series of financial scams including PPI, the conspiracy and the conspirators have been unmasked, and the truth about debt-free money – the fact that it works – is all over YouTube.
[The above op-ed was first published August 7, 2013.]
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