#67 A Statement On Fiat Money

The other day I happened to listen to a podcast by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. You can listen to it here.

In this discussion, I could agree with just about everything Mike discussed. Some of the same issues he discussed we deal with here, but when he or anyone attacks fiat money as the cause of our current monetary and economic problems or those equally misinformed idiots (the proper term to use as it is used throughout this blog) who talk about “debt free money” or those who say they want “Constitutional money,” they are simply showing that they do not understand money at all.

All money represents debt, therefore to even consider a debt free money is an absurdity. It shows that the person saying such things is without understanding. Money is the accounting invention that we use as a means to split barter so that we avoid whole barter. The pieces of the system, the tokens, are just used as pieces in a game. Money is the entire system of accounting for transactions in trade of which the individual pieces are just tokens. If there were no tokens there could still be money. It would be as entries in a ledger. Indeed, double entry bookkeeping is itself an essential part of any money system. This is discussed better by many people, including E. C. Riegel. All money represents unsettled transactions and all money is backed ONLY by what it buys. So anyone who tells you otherwise or adds something superfluous to the basic definition of money is either a liar or a misinformed idiot, take your pick. We advise, please don't be either.

There are of course the “gold bugs” out there too and the “precious metals is the only real money” advocates. These people are likewise showing their ignorance and some of them their stupidity when they make statements such that “using precious metals in trade is a two party transaction” when it obviously is not; the third party in a trade involving precious metals is the person you bought your metals from. So please, let's not allow such deceptions into our discussions about money.

The only reason fiat money ultimately fails is because governments issue it, period! There are no other reasons to deny fiat money whatsoever.

I let that statement stand by itself. I invite anyone who has read this blog thoroughly and understands its proposal completely, not some slimy young know it all who can't get the “money as a commodity” concept out of his head. I invite anyone to contend with me on this issue by any historical documentation they can find. But one caveat; I wont accept a fiat currency that has failed that was issued by any government. Try and find a fiat currency that has failed that wasn't issued by a government. You wont find any, so don't waste your time and stop listening to the uninformed claptrap of those who only parrot what idiot economists say.

There are in fact several alternative fiat currency systems around the world, one in Switzerland, that started in the 1930's that I believe is still in use, though of course the community they serve is quite small. Some fiat systems have gone out of use, not failed, simply because people found the accounting too burdensome and had to quit without finding a replacement. In such cases, the community just couldn't make the transition away from the government's fiat currency.

Likewise the idea that any government can issue interest free money, said to be without debt, Lincoln's greenbackism, is likewise ... sorry Bill Still, but you are incorrect here ... no better than interest bearing issued fiat money and sooner or later such money would fail just the same and for the same reasons; governments issue it. 

Governments spend money on what they want first, not what the people want and they have no means of recapturing the value represented by the money they spend into an economy, because again as E. C. Riegel noted, governments do not have anything they can sell back into the economy that anyone wants to buy.

Governments tax back a portion of what they spend, but all that goes to pay off the interest on the money borrowed from a central bank. As we have demonstrated and it can be shown to be true elsewhere, all this interest comes out of money that was never created in the first place, so therefore it must be procured from each of us by a process of competition for that which is on purpose in limited supply and yet essential to settle our terms of barter. None of that is fair, honest or sensible and only benefits one class of people; the bankers.

Please understand that no matter how much money is ever created in this manner, there is never ever going to be enough to pay off all debts. Well, what happens when one can't pay off one's debts? Real assets are seized. This of course is never right or fair and amounts to theft by the money lenders who may very well have intended that in the first place, though they may protest otherwise.

There was thus always a clear mathematical reason why usury was forbidden and that reason should be respected. One respects nature, well at least until recently, and as we all know it is never advisable to traduce natural laws, though of course there are always those who would try. Some of these actions we would of course describe as criminal. To be discriminating, to discard the criminal, is actually a good thing. Please don't be fooled by people who dishonestly try and twist concepts, like saying that all fiat money is bad without also admitting that the reason it has been bad is that all of it was issued by some spendthrift government.

Then, people are very taken in by ideas they assume are real alternatives to the present monetary order when they are not. The so called “Austrian” school has taken in many. It advocates usury as part of their understanding of a good monetary system. They support banking as it presently exists, virtually unchanged except to perhaps prefer that bankers assume far less risk. These are the same folks who demand a return to gold and the notion of a gold backed limited quantity money supply as if scarcity of the money has anything to do with economics or trade when it actually does not, or to put it better certainly does not need to be. We already countered Rothbard here 

So let's put some more flesh on our contention: we say, along with E. C. Riegel, that no real honest money needs have any intrinsic value in itself whatsoever. We say that if it did, whatever that intrinsic value would be would affect the transactions in which it participates.

For instance, if I'm selling something and someone desires to make me a payment in dollars, there would be a price in dollars for that means of payment and if they decided to pay in precious metals they might get a better deal if precious metals were rising in price as measured in dollars. I'd likely not be willing to take any precious metals if I knew that their relative value against dollars was going down.

I hope this makes sense so far. I also have to remind people that all prices of precious metals are determined by people in far away cities over whom no one has any control. So holding gold or silver can be and right now is a losing proposition simply because the brokers in these foreign places have determined their relative prices and not you or me.

Whether it's Keynes and his fiscal pumping of fiat currency in when markets are down and taxing back when they are high, as if he or anyone really knows what the equilibrium price on anything relative to anything else can or should be, or the “Austrians” who advocate nothing really but a return to horrible 19^th century money and banking, there is no help relying on the bankers' dialectic. Why get yourself stuck on the horns of their dilemma?

If you really want something better, you'd better be prepared to come up with another standard for your money. And E. C. Riegel did that, which is why this blog exists. He based his idea of money on a single transaction at a particular TIME to which all other transactions using his money would relate, calling it a Figure 1. Riegel chose to base his money, the Value Unit or Valun, on the dollar's purchasing power at the end of a particular fiscal year; 1939 or a later year.

We guarantee that even if we'd chosen a dollar in 2011, that we'd have seen a fall in the dollar against the Valun by now. But we chose a different approach because we wanted to slay both monetary dragons at once, both the Keynesian and the “Austrian” and to do that we fused the two together by saying that our proposal would base our Value Unit or Valun on a transaction involving paper money and precious metals at a particular TIME. We chose 2 November 2011 because it is an easy day to remember and because our chosen start position or Figure 1 was $2,160 which has special significance as that is the geometric number of years in an Age, so that's an easy number to remember. We said that 1,000 Valuns at 2 November, 2011 would equal $2,160 on that date.

So being theoretical, following our ongoing experiment, how much was a Valun worth in dollars at inception? $2.16. How much is a Valun worth today? Nearly $3.00. What would happen should the price of gold exceed the inception price of $2,160 an oz? Whatever that new high for gold would be, would become the new Figure 1 for all Valuns. We would never allow the inception price of gold to dollars (or any other currency) to be set lower. That would go against the design of the system and destroy the community's confidence in the money's purchasing power.

Yet governments and banks have in the past devalued money for the most absurd reasons, usually having to do with a government's inability to pay off debts or for bankers to secure repayment with real assets; think what happened in Iceland and Greece as two recent episodes.  Devaluation was threatened as a means to "save the banking sector."  In Iceland's case, they wanted to make the Icelandic currency cheaper prior to the country entering the eurozone so a few could profit from the exchange, while in Greece, they wanted exactly the opposite; for Greece to leave the euro and return to a devalued drachma.  

Fiat issue in the Valun system is proposed to take two forms, both described by E. C. Riegel in some detail, as if he were just sketching them out. First for the indigent, the impecunious, the poor; they would be allowed to issue their own money, but only as much as the community deemed acceptable to maintain a minimum subsistence. Second, one would issue Valuns that one worked to bring into existence, by a “self financing” of labour concept that is one of the most strikingly original features of the proposal.

Understand that while the first means allows the poor to live some kind of life, presumably all the labour anyone would perform would demand more money than the poor get to issue and that's fine up to the point where the business costs out their products in terms of Valuns to determine how much something would fairly sell for in Valuns. Obviously if something costs too much in competition with someone else's product then it wouldn't make sense to even produce them, or at least one would have to have a unique feature that would make the product worth the extra Valuns.

The question arises, well how does the state pay for itself in a Valun system? This is simpler than it seems too. If states had recourse to no other money than the people's money that they issue, the governments would truly be at the mercy and sufferance of the people, not as it is now. Governments would have to borrow money as zero interest loans since usury is not allowed and pay it back by taxing the people for it. It would be pretty obvious that if lending were high and taxes were high, that the people would certainly scream louder than now for the heads of their states.

The result would of course be that states would have to get out of certain businesses and allow private enterprise to take over those activities. In fact there's probably little that any state needs to do other than protect its citizens from loss of life liberty or property without due process of law. Try and get any government anywhere to abide by that restriction under the present system. It's simply not going to happen.

With more freedom, more competition, an end to monopolies and the end of government coercive measures, things would sort themselves out according to the wants of the people, not their governments and certainly not those who society owes everything to under the present system; the bankers.

One of the core features of the present system is that nowhere is labour rewarded adequately for what it sacrifices in time and effort, sorry. And we certainly do not include all those positions where people are paid far more than their work is worth, sorry. And yeah, we're being sarcastic. There are always calls to raise the minimum wage when all that does is raise the price level for everything. We'd rather see people decide in each instance just how much each job is really worth. They can't do that now. If they did, perhaps less foolish, stupid and dangerous jobs wouldn't even exist as they would never pay for themselves in an honest monetary system. I hope that's understood.

People get so distracted by the tokens of a money system and assume that those by themselves are the money. No, those are only token pieces of the entire monetary system. Gold and silver coins as they circulated through that system were likewise just the tokens of that system which happened to be made of gold and silver. Ancient Spartans made theirs out of leather and some other communities used seashells or even bails of cotton or tobacco. There is no fundamental difference and moreover such discussions attempt to ignore the real elephant in the room; usury. We're sorry, but until that dragon is slain, there can be no fundamental change whatever.

So, if money need have no intrinsic value, then the cheapest form it can take the better. Printed paper certificates looks to be an adequate representation. But let's make them more beautiful than any of our present money and let's use one side of each bill to advertise a member business, since another aspect of money and economy that is often neglected is the community the money serves. Let there be so much difference in these designs that no counterfeiter would ever be able to keep up with all of them. We explained all of this in other papers.

Money is created and it is also destroyed. One way money is definitely destroyed is in depreciation of a capital asset, a machine or property that loses its value over time. If I bought a car for $40K but had run it for 100,000 miles, even if I kept the car in very good condition, it would still have lost a portion of its initial cost to me. That money is lost for good. Another way money is lost is when I paid too much for labour or that labour didn't produce a result that enabled me to recoup the loss, in some cases affecting the viability of the business itself.

Let's say I paid someone $80 to clean my gutters and downspouts simply because I couldn't get someone I knew who I could have had do it for $40. I'm out that extra $40. If I paid someone to work on a product that was expected to net my company $200,000 a year but that product fell behind schedule so that it wouldn't even be worth anything when released as it had been made obsolete by the time it was ready for sale, again, I'd be out whatever money was risked to make that $200,000. That's the way things go.

How much more extra money does one expect to see floating around chasing goods in a government issued system? Far more since the government spends money on things that are probably never supposed to be used; all military industrial gadgets, weapons, etc. There's where your inflation comes from and as long as there is inflation and more debt than there is money, everyone must race to catch up so that only a few at the top (the true “useless eaters' of society) can live nice easy lives of luxury on the backs of the rest of the people.

Also, and this too must be mentioned often; reliance on gold and silver does not guarantee an end to inflation. In the 16^th century where only silver and gold were used, there was a 100% inflation entirely due to the import of gold into Europe from the New World. The gold bugs conveniently never mention that because they don't want their idealistic bubble burst. These are people who bought high and held for decades simply because they couldn't sell for what they bought their dang pieces of metal for, who still cling to the idea that their “money” is the only real stuff. They are ... mistaken.

So honestly, do you want something better? You must ignore what the cheats, liars and other so called “experts” have to say and just go by common sense. In a Valun system, if you are poor, old, weak, disabled, etc. the system will help you. But if you have skills, talent, ambition, drive, the desire to really do something exceptional, you will be able to and no government will be able to stop you. But of course you'll probably never be as rich as a Gates, Buffett or Soros to name just a few, though I might be surprised. The people who finally decide to go to and develop the moon or Mars may defy my expectations.

David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com

Current Hypothetical Value of a Hypothetical Value Unit

#66 On Value and the Creation / Issuance of Money

Source for any and all stock market charts: here.   

It's the middle of January, 2016. Pondering present market conditions, looking at the stock market, figures for the DJIA, a classic upside down M or W formation with bottoms at around 15,400 and 15,950 and a corresponding top between them in the neighbourhood of 16,800 occurred between late August and early October of 2015. It was inevitable, given that classic chart formation, that the market would surge back up to nearly 18,000. Market technicians look for these patters for buying and selling and so do their computer programs. There is an observable curve, technicians refer to it as a moving average, in the market performance over the past two years which gave the limiting potential of the market surge to no more than 18,200. It didn't make it that far, confirming the force of this natural curve. Limiting factor up for this market is around 17,750 which means right now it can't make it that far. The long term trend is down.

The present drop can be analyzed by looking at the charts of market performance for the past few trading days. So far, we have seen worse than this, as the fall in the market late last August was deeper, but we have not seen the depth of the present fall yet. The figures from market close for 16 January show a low around 15,845 confirming two recent lows in as many trading days, with the added downward pressure of the moving average.

Stocks are commodities. They trade in known quantities all the time; there is always someone, a stock specialist, who knows how much of each one of these stocks exist, who owns the lion's share of them, etc. There are other commodities that are in the categories of the consumables; they are used up, so require replenishing (these include energy from combustibles), the durables; those things that are used for their durability, metals, minerals, wood products, glass, etc. Stocks are part of those man-made commodities we call securities. There are two varieties, equities and debt instruments. Stocks are in the former category and bonds in the latter category. At any time there are at least ten times as many bonds for sale as stocks.

Some think of equities as the economic piggy bank of an economy -certainly one which is largely made up of state chartered corporate entities whose pieces are sold to the public as shares; stocks. When the market is up, the piggy bank is full, when it falls, the money in the piggy went somewhere else and the shares fell in price. The man who bought the stock high when the man who owned the stock had bought it low a few years back and sold it, is left holding an asset he can't afford to sell; he loses his money -until that stock may somehow manage to rise again to the point it was purchased for. 

Some consider this wealth exchange, but that's only because they're confused concerning that what is really wealth. Again, as we have and will consistently maintain throughout this blog, wealth is only that capable of producing an income. If it can't do that, it aint wealth. We aren't going to be fooled any longer by those parading themselves about with all their fancy stuff that they think someone out there wants for the money they paid for it, while meanwhile none of that “stuff” provides them directly with any income, or any return, upon which they could rely for basic necessities. Now presumably the people who should know about this stuff, and the best and brightest of them certainly do know, will always maximize the “return on investment” for their clients; what literally did that invested money produce in terms of itself? That is certainly income then and thus demonstrating that money invested in equities can produce income and is therefore true wealth. However, as everyone also knows, stocks can and do lose their value relative to invested dollars in other stocks and therefore equities can also diminish or even eliminate one's wealth. Where did one's wealth go when a stock deal turns bad due to market conditions?

This has always been an interesting question and can be explained using other items, not just stocks. It runs something like this: Tom buys a couch for $800 while Bill buys the identical couch for $500. As we've said all along, what really backed the money Tom and Bill used had nothing to do with gold in Ft. Knox or anything related to “money as a commodity” that some speculators in far away cities were wagering on. No, what backed the money they spent were the things they bought with it, period. It doesn't matter how much of this money was out there, as for one thing, and the most obvious giveaway that the “Austrians” and others are liars when it comes to this, is that not all the available money is ever wagered (bid) on every sale. If someone sells couches for $500 cash and $800 financed, the same couch varies in price in that store by $300 or 37.5% which means that Tom's identical couch is that much more expensive than Bill's and all the difference in price and value exchanged boils down to the differences in TIME required to settle the transactions.

Down through history, those who have advocated that money be just another scarce commodity and that this guarantees an end to price inflation have attempted to base their concept on one or other of these various commodities. But there is something missing here. Has anybody recognized it yet? Some say it would be TIME and probably they are right, and TIME has its uses concerning money matters, that's for certain, as the example above shows. The missing value gets down to something every human being has to one extent or another, the time to do something that has a profitable outcome in terms quantified by money, any money would do. This time allotted to paid labour we'll just call labour, and it is a commodity also, the most important one, for without it very little else could be said to have any value at all.

This one is obvious; look around you, go anywhere, everything you see that can be attributed to human activity was the result of labour. Most, not all, of that labour was paid for with money. Therefore everywhere it is possible to discern immediately how the cost of labour is related to everything, especially anything that has a more or less permanent basis. All our towns, cities, harbours, highways, railways, airplanes, etc. are all possible because of labour and would never have existed without it. We'll return to the importance of this understanding as a basis for honest money issuance. By “honest money” we certainly do not mean precious metals, which are commodities, that some people without pausing to consider the obvious, have rushed to the assumption that since they were used as money in the past that somehow they are uniquely fitted to perform the function as money and nothing else. There's a lot more rubbish hoisted about precious metals too, but that's all right; we intended to find a place in our monetary proposal that would make a useful place for precious metals and precious metals dealing as a wall between our money and theirs. A few, mostly foreign readers not Americans, have understood this part of our proposal and understand immediately why it was chosen; because there is no reason to trust any money that has the name of a bank or government printed on it.

Meanwhile, here's the reality: We have all, well most of us, been living under a “top down” or “trickle down” monetary system. It starts with the central banks at the top, lending all the money to governments as their “best credit risks” and getting their cut, which does not exist, out of the rest of us who use their money.

The government gets this money first and spends it into the economy by buying things. It pays for things for itself (which we don't want) and others (trading partners of the biggest private banks). The government cannot trade back into the market in exchange, so it taxes some of what it spends, not all, back to balance off at least some of what it spent. The inevitable result of not cancelling back what one buys with what one sells in comparable value must be price inflation; more money chasing fewer goods is the usual quick explanation, but it's a little more complex than that as location and other factors influence price and as we already said, not all money is available to every sale which voids the whole money as commodity idea when it comes to prices and buying decisions. You have side betters on prices of every exchangeable commodity. These are the commodities futures markets and they also include speculations on the future value of money by various currencies and the ratios between these form the basis of day to day international trade. There are various “side agreements” between trading partners attempting to keep prices for various widely traded durable and consumable commodities fair and predictable over as long a term as practicable.

What about those at the bottom economically, who form the majority of the world's population? Those with jobs work for fewer and fewer exchangeable value tokens (local money) in exchange for their labour. What of those who can find nothing to do to earn their daily bread? What of the growing percentage of homeless tent people living in our major cities that no one is talking about? If everybody around the world just stopped working, even for a week, the world would not perhaps grind to a halt, but it would be noticed.

The top down, centralized, monopolized, corporatized, federalized, economic black hole that steals wealth and shrinks income for the rest of humanity does not work, is unstable and built on the premise that some somebodies calling themselves bankers should be entitled the privilege of issuing money for the rest of us, clearly a mistaken concept. These and their supporters are the same maniacs, the promoters of bigness, who are the banker's best customers because there is more money to be made on bigger transactions, who can't even clean up after themselves; Fukushima and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and expect to FORCE all kinds of things on us like bad air (Geo-engineering), bad water (fluoridation, etc.) and bad food (GMO's). They expect us all to just sit back and take it, dumbed down, watching shadows move on our huge TV's inside our caves (yeah Plato's cave), just ordering out what we need, never going anywhere anymore, because ... well, just because. One only goes out to go to work anymore in many places.

So what do we do? I pointed out that The Inner Track was an objective position one takes in one's life. I don't expect many to take me up on anything, otherwise the response to this blog might have been more substantial than it has been, but for those that do, taking an objective position on one's life is the result of a “sizing oneself up” process; what skills or talents do I have? What could I improve on? What would I naturally like to try to do? -to actually do? etc. This process, observation and evaluation of oneself should never end, contrary to what one may have been told. As long as one is alive, one has the opportunity to acquire new skills, discover new talents and have greater experiences; to build the capabilities to earn income into oneself, to work toward enhancing one's wealth. One takes stock of oneself and then, measured by the usual monetary yardsticks, one endeavours to keep mind and body together by finding someone else out there who will pay for our skills and talents, etc. We'll get back to the importance of having our talents, skills, etc. recognized in a moment.

In the process of taking an objective position on one's life, one becomes as much an observer as one is an activist; one watches oneself, what what one does, how one responds to others and to different situations, the easy as well as the difficult, one gets to know oneself hopefully as a best friend and then takes good care of oneself by seeking reward and avoiding trouble. One builds self confidence and assurance by the knowledge that one has successfully completed various tasks. No greater satisfaction has one than they who can look upon a nice stack of accomplishments.

Now, no one's labour stands on its own: a person with a known skill builds a reputation and the better one's reputation the more people vie for your time to do things they'd like you to do. Right now, everywhere in the world, we need more people to take stock of themselves in this way. The road to success does not consist in becoming just another chief among chiefs, but in how best to be or become an indispensable contributor to a worthwhile enterprise. What then is a worthwhile enterprise? It starts with anything that contributes to a community's stock of reliable consumables; food and energy or building materials or useful articles, many of which may not be consumable commodities in the sense that they are used up, but those things we might better consider appliances because we use them up over a longer period of time until they wear out and need replacement. We say such articles depreciate in value as they wear out.

When it comes to occupations of labour, there are certain advantages people have over others, so there can logically never be any complete equality as social justice fanatics (another bunch of idealist lunatics) may want for everybody. Likewise, just because one may be very young or even very old, may not necessarily mean one is limited by these from achieving a considerable monetary reward. Just as there are differences in compensation in terms of dollars, euros or yen, so too would there be in Valuns.

We feel the need to stress often the revolutionary aspect of our proposal; that people everywhere aught to be paid with their own money. Well, as long as we must live under the beast governments and work for their masters behind the current monetary curtain, we must use some of their money. But we have already indicated, and we are far from being a lone voice on this matter, that all present money is illegitimate based on the rules of its own issuance; that banks have usurped a fundamental human right as well as enacted a financial system (the loaning of money, not its more often widely misused sense) based on usury which is fundamentally unsound. 

E. C. Riegel's original proposal was to have everyone that is paid in dollars (or some other currency) be likewise compensated in Valuns based on one's willingness to pay in dollars any actual increase in income taxes such remuneration would represent. All matters concerning an income tax on Valuns would have to be worked out by a competently organized chartering society, the proposed International Value or Valun Exchange Society or IVES. We would need competent legal assistance here and have placed the need to attract adequate legal talent to this cause as relatively high. If the proposal is to have each worker issue Valuns as an interest free loan to the account of their employer prior to a succession of pay dates, then since the employer does not pay his employee and since the employee buys his job with money that he issues, which is not dollars or any other national currency, then it has been argued that there could be no income tax levied. We have advised that when a state decides to do whatever it does and uses FORCE to accomplish it, that taxes even on money that is not its own can certainly not be ruled out and must be anticipated. We admit that we find the idea of a state taxing labour an insane idea, but is it any more insane than deciding to grant a monopoly to a private central bank which demands interest be paid using money that was never created? THAT is what all usury is. All we allow in our proposal is for the transaction makers to pay a tiny transaction fee; Riegel's one tenth of one percent. It must always come out of money that was created elsewhere and there are only two ways to create Valuns; you work for them or your community deems you poor enough to issue your subsistence. Any extra money in a Valun system filters up through the most productive channels so that the most productive earn the most money and naturally rise to the top of their societies. Not the way it is now. The way it is now, it pays to join the corrupt hegemony that rules by fraud and trickery but pays well as every other useful occupation seems to be ground down to the least common denominator and even that will not work forever, all due to the impossibility of ever satisfying the demands of usury to pay back debt, the great cancer in the present monetary order.

We've seen the market slide more and more. The system is ultimately going to crash and there's nothing anyone can do to save it. Oh, the plunge protection team is always at it to try, but eventually it will get away from them. They aren't gods. Their system wasn't all good to begin with and there is no hope of saving it. But what would ye have to replace it? Giving the monopoly of money issue to any government is still a usurpation of a natural right. Why can't some pundits out there get that through their heads? They're idealists of one stripe or another; that's why and as usual their idealism blinds them. Too bad. The real people will eventually insist that only money they themselves issue can have any real meaning and the proposed solution accomplishes that with a monetary instrument that is impervious to being manipulated, that is capable ultimately of ridding the world of poverty and war. Since the internet has brought us all closer together, so more people are becoming aware, isn't it about time to consider another way to do things? We know who the governments answer to, not their people but their creditors. That leads to all kinds of pressure being applied simply for the profits of the capitalists, not the good of the people. We each have to begin now to take an objective position on our lives, ask ourselves what are our talents, where is our greatest wealth (that which can produce an income) to be found? Then we should be looking for a monetary system to measure that wealth. How much does it pay to do anything? Increasingly, more want to know and will want to know.

David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com