Foreward

Very few people ever ask the following questions:
What is money?
What is its purpose?
Who should it serve?
Where does it come from?

If enough people asked those questions, we would likely not be in the financial mess we are in around the world. The problem is, collectively we are much like the proverbial frog in hot water, and do not realize the current system we are in, and how it came about, because we have been immersed in it for centuries and do not even question its appropriateness.

Let us start with what it is. Wikipedia defines money as “… any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context…” In essence, money can be anything that a group of people agree is to be considered as money and thereby used to conduct transactions (the purpose question).

Further, with respect to that “what question,” we see that in addition to metal coins, historically things like shells, salt, animal pelts, tobacco, grains, wooden sticks and even mirrors have been used as money. So, money can be just about anything. Wiki goes on to further state that most money in the world (both national currencies and alternative currencies) have no intrinsic value and their value is derived by social convention. In essence, money is worth what we collectively say it is.

Which leads to a more fundamental question, who should money serve? And that gets to the heart of the question this book is intended to address. Few would dispute that the current financial system serves the wealthy very well, but not so the rest of us.

And by understanding where money comes from today, we can understand that the current system was deliberately designed by the wealthy, to serve the wealthy, and to extract wealth from the rest of us.

If the financial ecosystem we all live under today, were to be put to a vote of the people, who thinks that a majority would say that system should only serve the wealthy and not the rest of us? The answer is obvious, very few of the non-wealthy would vote in favor of such a system. Instead, they would likely vote in favor of one that benefits us all, not just the few.

Fortunately, we not only can ask that question today, we can do something about it. It begins by understanding where most of the money comes from today and how that system got put in place in the first place. I then will explore an alternative approach that we the people can adopt, one that has already been proven in previous times, that produced a prosperity rivaling the most prosperous places on earth today. And we can achieve that again today. We just need to know how and then to choose to do it. It is up to us.