[p2p-research] What is the Origin of our Money Supply?

[Ryan Lanham]

Money is hard to understand.  We didn't understand financial options pricing
for centuries but they existed nonetheless.  With the advent of
Black-Scholes, we understood options...though imperfectly.  Since
Black-Scholes, the understanding is much better...not perfect but extremely
good.

Lots of smart people in the past didn't understand money and banking.  They
said many things about it.  The questions were valid, but no longer are
so.   We understand exactly what is going on now.  There are many things
misunderstood or even not understood, but the creation and operation of
money is not one of them.

But the same is true of health.  The same is true of physics.  The same is
even true of what is the nature of things like evolution, chemistry,
psychology and politics.

There are still open questions about money...lots of them.  But the open
questions don't include how it is created, what it is, etc.

Going back and reading about physics prior to quantum mechanics leaves many
difficult issues unsolved.  We don't do that.  Instead, we use our best
current ideas.  That said, brilliant people didn't understand quantum
mechanics prior to 1890.  If we study those people's ideas, they are often
wrong.

Historical knowledge is locked in its own time.  Economics, like any science
evolves and changes.  Sometimes what is understood is wrong.  But what was
understood in the past is certainly not as clear as what is understood
now.   Some would call that "positivist."  Of course that is an attempt to
undermine the idea of a progressive base of knowledge.  I have no problem
with that other than the fact that it is typically cynical and usually based
in fear rather than the hope of clearer understanding.  At some juncture, we
need to choose the basis of our knowledge.  For me, knowledge is always
tentative and progressive.  We learn.  Learning evolves and is fluid, but
progress means we have a greater level of certainty about our knowing than
we do about knowing as it existed in the past.  Those who disagree with that
live in a metaphysical world where nothing can be said with any positive or
progressive view to science.  If that's where we find ourselves, we are in a
very sad world where all utterances have equal validity and metaphysical
philosophers know things scientists cannot know.  Personally, I doubt that.


On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com>wrote:

> To show this question has some validity, here are quotes from easily
> recognized sources about the strange situation we find ourselves -
> where most nations are under crippling debt for no understandable
> reason.
>
>
> "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue
> of currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and
> corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of
> all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent
> their fathers conquered." -- Thomas Jefferson
>
>
> "Give me control of a nation's money, and I care not who writes it's
> laws..." -- Meyer Armschel Rothschild 1790
>
>
> "If you want to be the slaves of banks and pay the cost of your own
> slavery, then let the banks create money..." -- Josiah Stamp, Governor
> of the Bank of England 1920
>
>
> "Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute
> master of all industry and commerce." -- President James A. Garfield
>
>
> "If our Nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill.
> The element that makes the bond good also makes the bill good. The
> difference between the bond and the bill lets money brokers [bankers]
> collect twice the amount of the bond plus interest. Whereas the bill
> [currency] pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some
> useful way. The People are the basis for government credit. Why then
> cannot the People have the benefit of their own credit by receiving
> non-interest bearing currency, instead of bankers receiving the
> People's credit in interest bearing bonds? It is absurd to say that
> our country can issue 30 million dollars in bonds and not 30 billion
> dollars in currency! Both are promises to pay; but one promise fattens
> the usurers and the other helps the People!" -- Thomas Edison
>
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-- 
Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
P.O. Box 633
Grand Cayman, KY1-1303
Cayman Islands
(345) 916-1712
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