Why ‘Public Debt’ Is Significant
When a government is in debt, the real government is the lenders
The ‘national debt’ and what it means:
In February 2023, as politicians argued about raising the statutory limit on US national debt, the Pew Research Center reported:
Public concern about federal spending is on the rise.
57% of Americans cited reducing the budget deficit as a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year (2023), up from 45% a year ago.
Concern has risen among members of both parties, although Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are still far more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners (71% vs. 44%) to view cutting the deficit as a leading priority.
Public concern is primarily driven by awareness that servicing the debt is one of the federal government’s biggest expenses:
Net interest payments on the debt are … more than $100 billion more than the government expects to spend on veterans’ benefits and services and more than it will spend on elementary and secondary education, disaster relief, agriculture, science and space programs, foreign aid, and natural resources and environmental protection combined.
BUT THERE’S A BIGGER ISSUE AT STAKE: CONTROL OF THE GOVERNMENT ITSELF
Henry Carter Adams, an early American economist, explained the relationship between government and debt:
When a … government desires to borrow money it must divest itself for the time being of all sovereign powers, and come before its subjects as a private corporation.
It must bargain with those who have money to lend, and satisfy them as to questions of payment and security….
The broad theory of constitutional liberty is that the people have the right to govern themselves;
but the historical fact is that, in the attempt to realize this theory, the actual control of public affairs has fallen into the hands of those who possess property.
It follows from this that when property-owners lend to the government, they lend to a corporation controlled by themselves….
The moneyed interest has captured the machinery of government.
Henry C. Adams, Public Debts; an Essay in the Science of Finance (New York: Appleton, 1893 (1887)
You must be an excellent teacher, Peter - presenting "boring stuff" in a vibrant, relevant way.
But what did Henry Adams actually know about money?
Capitalism is a certain mistaken and illiterate understanding of what money itself is and does.
What is missing in the language that many people fail to bring to their presentations on monetary and social reform is this question of exchanging value FOR money. TimeBank and Mutual Credit members already know the reality - that value can only be exchanged for value and that money Is Not value but can only be a representation of the value of other things.
So when the Capitalist talks of bankers or financiers or governments creating money as though their 'unit creation' activity is akin to the genuine economic activity of the laborer or producer, that talk should be met with a challenge of the absolute illiteracy of the capitalist in not knowing the difference between the real value and the unit of abstract representation. The challenge to capitalism is not going to succeed until the very concept of money creation by some specific class or group of people is known to be as illiterate as would be a group that claims to be the Inch Creators or the Gallon Creators and that but for these Magical Unit Creators the poor peasantry would not be able to measure stuff!!
The problem is that once the populace is using this kind of illiterate system the system itself carries imperatives to which the entirety of the populace must respond unless they are willing to abandon the system.
Those imperatives include the monetization of the planet and a never ending scarcity of units that comes from thinking that the units are themselves items of economic value. All very circular but very much like a whirlpool vortex of a lack of mental acuity.
Let's End Monetary Illiteracy!
https://www.moneytransparency.com/msta-resolutions
When you study the history of this country you come to know that the original colonists almost broke free from the banking cartel when they issued their own currency in their colonial scrip. It was the imposition of the imperial currency that the colonists were to pay their taxes in that has been the form of imperial control since the days of the Roman Empire. The colonists wanted to pay taxes in their own currency or directly in "in-kind" contributions...Not in the imperial imposed currency.
(As an aside, had they consulted with Native People the colonists would have found them not suffering even from this delusion....but that is another conversation.)
If the American colonists had run their scrip system long enough they would have come to know that the free activity of the populace comes first and the currency is simply a representation of that activity. Franklin himself described the colonial scrip system as being in support of the genuine economic activity. When asked about how he could explain the prosperous condition of the Colonies, Ben Franklin replied:
"That is simple. It is only because in the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called colonial scrip, and we issue it in proper proportion to the demand of trade and industry.” But did Franklin really know that even this "issuance" ahead of activity was exactly backward and against the logic of "free" enterprise? You see, if any "issuing authority" has the power to limit the acCounting units it has the power to control and direct the actual economic activity of the populace. Proof that even Franklin had no real idea of the capacity of the colonists is found in the counterfeit flooding of the colonies that the Crown first attempted thinking that this would crash the colonial economies. In fact, it stimulated these economies! Because the limits of the colonial issuance were actually interfering with the genuine capacity of the colonial people! And this was based on the silly notion that the issuance needed to precede the activity by way of some 'monetary authoritarian power.' Unfortunately this illiterate notion was then enshrined directly into the Constitution.
Based on this unfortunate misunderstanding as to the role of money in a society Hamilton and others destroyed the possibility of getting free (in their time) from the monetary illiteracy of the colonial empire by establishing the very same system of the banking empire right here after the revolution. The Money Masters thing is an accurate enough history. And Bill Still wrote back to me with the response that money should be valueless and ubiquitous. So the question is one of knowing how "free" enterprise and self governance can only be supported when a populace knows that representation of their own activity does not come in the form of 'authoritarian issuance.'
It really comes down to knowing that money serves an after the fact bookkeeping function that is driven not by available units but by the freely chosen activity Of The People. In barter there is no unresolved reciprocation in exchange. But once a group of people desire to hold the resolution of exchange for future reciprocation and decide to use a unit based system of abstract representation for that which will eventually be reciprocated, then they must know going in that the unit of representation cannot ever be confused to be a thing of value all by itself.
So, given that the lessons we almost learned in the colonial period have yet to be learned, what are we to do? One can see that any and all attempts to make the imposed colonial system work For The People have failed. But that is because we have not first abandoned that imposed system and all of its illiterate and unworkable assumptions.
To the present day The People have never yet chosen a fully rational and workable system of unit based abstract representation of their own activity in a truly free social order. We can do that.
Please read and add to monetary and 'financial' discussions. https://www.bibocurrency.com/index.php/downloads-2/19-english-root/learn/300-you-have-been-served