Chapter 1 – The Golden Rule

HE WHO HAS THE GOLD RULES – That phrase seems truer than ever, where the rich are getting richer and the gap between them and the rest of us grows wider.

But – it does not have to be that way!

MYTH: The rich and powerful control the world and the rest of us are helpless victims, and we cannot do anything to change that.

REALITY: We are not helpless! We can address our own needs, regardless of what the rich and powerful do. The only thing standing in our way is the lack of knowledge on how we can do that – and the will to act on it. That is what this book is all about. It describes how we the people can take control of our own financial destiny and forever change our future for the better. 

It all comes down to money – who issues it and who controls it.

Imagine If We Had . . .

 

·         All the money we need to address climate change	·         Thriving small businesses
·         Jobs with living wages	·         Fully funded non-profits
·         Personal debt reduction	·         Free health care for all
·         Plenty of money for infrastructure	·         Fully funded public education K thru 4-year college
·         Energy produced mostly from renewable sources	·         Food security for all with locally grown food
·         Fully funded state and local governments	·         Clean water, air and energy
·         Healthy and vibrant local economies	·         Free child and elder care
·         Universal blight remediation	·         Basic income for those in need
·         Plenty of money to support the arts, science, technology and more	·         Funding to launch 100% of for-profit and non-profit startups with a viable plan

A key to understanding the current conditions is to understand that the global financial eco system was designed by the rich, for the benefit of the rich, and not the rest of us. That is why governments throughout the world fail to ever permanently fix the major problems that beset the rest of us.

As stated in the Introduction, the bulk of the money supply in the world originates as debt provided by the wealthy, through their banks. And the banks they do not create the interest to pay for the loans they issue. And that interest is then pulled from the wealth of the rest of us meaning that debt is extractive to the rest of us, not additive. Thus, problems cannot be solved with money that is essentially extractive, not additive. You do not build wealth when you take out more than you put in.

Thus, governments CANNOT fix the key financial problems in the world given the nature of money today, how it is issued and who controls it. To expect otherwise is to affirm Einstein’s purported definition of insanity “…doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Or put another way “If we always do what we have always done, we will always get what we always got.”

So, if the current financial eco system cannot fix things, then the obvious answer is that we need to come up with another solution that is not dependent on the current system. The great futurist R. Buckminster Fuller said it best when he stated “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

To apply that to this task at hand, that means we need to come up with an alternate financial ecosystem, one designed by the people, for the people. In essence, we need to issue our own money – the “peoples’ money” as it were.

It turns out that the idea of the people issuing their own money is not a new one. In fact, as this article[i] from the US Federal Reserve points out “The government isn’t the only entity allowed to issue money. Private citizens and businesses can too, and throughout U.S. history, they often have.”

In the following Chapters I will drill into these concepts to get a better understanding how money is created today, who creates it and controls it, and how we can change that paradigm to better serve all of humanity, not just the wealthy.

That is followed by examples of successful programs from the past, that can serve as models for modern implementations of the concept. I then explore how local organizations can setup their own local program, or team with another one that already has the pieces in place that can be deployed rapidly.

[i] https://thefedandprivatemoney.com/