Chapter 3, Section 2, Know Stealing
3.2 Money Is A System
Money is not what people tend to
think it is. General confusion about money opens the door for the
earnings of producers to be silently stolen - in broad daylight.
Are Coins and Dollar Bills Money?
Coins and dollar bills are part of a money system, but they are
not money. They are money tokens. Being a money token
is like being a car tire.
A tire is not a car, but it is part of a car.
The definition of money based on
practical reality prevents us from calling coins and dollar
bills money. A token is not money. A token has no meaning outside of
a money system. At the same time, the money system depends on money
tokens to interact with people.
It is the token along with all other parts of the system that
when combined together are money.
Tokens
Think about some of the tokens we regularly use...
If a quarter is twenty-five percent of a dollar, what does that
mean? How can a metal token be twenty-five percent of a paper token?
Is a sledgehammer twenty-five
percent of a book? The question doesn't even make sense.
Is a quarter twenty-five percent of a silver dollar? A one ounce
silver dollar is lately worth between $30 and $50. Does that mean
that a current US quarter is worth between $7.50 and $12? No.
Why is the ounce of silver in a silver dollar worth a different
amount than the value stamped on the coin? How can a 2011 silver
American Eagle have $1 stamped on the outside, while the coins sell
every day for $30 or more?
If you deposit a silver dollar in a bank your account will be
credited $1. If you take the same dollar to a buyer of silver he will
pay the silver price, which currently ranges from $30 to $50 an
ounce.
Why is a one dollar bill valued differently than a five dollar
bill, when they are just alike except for the number printed on the
bill?
Tokens are ever-changing tools of plunder which are a small part
of a money system.
Money Is Not...
To understand what money is, we need to first understand what
money is not.
Money is not a substance. If it were, then it could be
weighed. If you were going to weigh money, what would you weigh?
Would you weigh the paper or the coin? What would the weights mean?
Money is not an element.
If it were an element, it would be defined by protons, neutrons and
electrons.
Money is not an object. Most units of money are ledger
entries or data on a computer hard drive.
A ledger entry can point to a cow or an acre of land. In that
case, the entry is an item on an inventory list. But with money, the
inventory is out of balance from the beginning.
If too many people come for their silver at the same time, the lie
is exposed. That is known as a bank run. Eventually there is
no inventory. That is known as Central Banking.
Magnetic bits on a computer hard drive store all data for a
computer. So which magnetic bit is money? And when the bit
is set for some other file, is that bit still money?
Of course the hard drive bit never was money. It is a part
of the record of an obligation known as a debt.
On one side of the obligation is your home or car or business.
On the other side of the obligation is a bit on storage
media that last week was an email or a picture of some banker's
fishing trip. Today it is a record of your commitment of real
property in exchange for a banker's commitment of nothing but a
record keeping system that churns out money units from nothing.
Money has no clear definition. Money is loosely and
deceptively defined as anything the bankers and government can
convince people to use as tokens in a record keeping system.
Remember the list of synonyms for money?
Money Is A System
Money is not an object.
Money is a system.
Money is a system of record keeping that is designed to capture
wealth, centralize power, centralize authority and rule people. The
objects we sometimes refer to as money are actually tokens in a
record-keeping system. Without the system, the token would be
worthless in exchange, except in terms of the tiny usefulness of the
cheap material from which the token is made.
National currencies are tokens in a monetary system. A token from
one country is rarely accepted in daily exchange for goods in other
countries. Canadian dollars would not be accepted at McDonald's in
South Carolina. The Canadian tokens only have meaning within the
Canadian money system.
Only a small percentage of the trillions of US dollars are ever in
the form of coins or paper bills. The tokens are only a small part
of the overall money system.
Banks issue loans which create new units of money from nothing.
These loans are entries on a ledger that indicate a borrower
has agreed to either pay back the money units plus interest, or else
forfeit his property which is pledged as collateral.
When checks are written or debit cards are used, the ledger
entries change from bank to bank and customer to customer, but no
tokens are ever involved. This is sometimes referred to as checkbook
money.
What we tend to think of as money are only worthless tokens.
The real power and nature of money is in the system.
Money is a system that uses an ever-changing combination of tokens
and ledger entries to plunder productive people who are forced to use
the system through illegitimate law.
