You personally can eradicate poverty from the whole world in the year 2005. As Nelson Mandela reminds us, poverty is a man made condition, it does not occur in nature, not in the wild.
All we have to do is stop creating poverty and poverty will not be there. In order to do that, you have to take the trouble to understand poverty, what it is and how it is created.
That may not be easy. As you can see if you look, poverty is well established in a big way. A huge proportion of the human race live in the direst poverty. Obviously no one yet understands poverty or it would not exist.
So it must be difficult to understand, which it is. But it is possible for you to understand poverty by reading this paper. The first step in understanding what poverty is, is very simple. But not so easy as it looks. Poverty is a shortage or even an absence of money. Well what is money, that is the core basic difficulty, which defeats everyone.
Everyone imagines they know the meaning of the word money, so it becomes very difficult to explain what money is, to someone who already knows what money is. Very difficult!
Money is an idea. Nothing else.
Do you see the difficulty? An impossible difficulty. How do you get your teeth into a problem which sort of does not exist.
And that is what we are going to do in this paper. Money is an idea in which people must be able to have absolute trust, that it represents the value of that which you wish to buy or sell.
Notice for one moment how easily that trust can vanish. You have a perfectly valid foreign coin or bank note and you present it in a shop and it is suddenly worthless. Valuable the other side of the Channel, but not here. Also notice what time can do to money. When I was a boy a bar of chocolate cost two pennies. Today the shape of that bar has changed but not the quality of the chocolate, and that self same quantity of chocolate will cost me 35 pennies today. When I was a boy there were 240 pennies in the pound. Today there are only one hundred pennies to the pound. 70 years ago a pound would have bought me a hundred and twenty bars of chocolate. Today I can only buy three bars of the self same chocolate for £1. The chocolate hasn't changed but the value of money is very different.
Trust in the value of money has slipped.
I mention this to show that money is slippery stuff, without which we have poverty. Therefore to tackle the problem of poverty, we must first take a look at money. What is money? where does it come from? who makes it? how do we decide its value?
Questions which are never asked, never answered and we have poverty. Money is an idea in which we need to be able to trust, trust absolutely. Obviously we need to know where it comes from and who makes it. Now it gets difficult because we imagine we know and we do not know. We imagine that money is minted or printed by the Government. Maybe money was, once upon a time, but not anymore. We now use electronic money which comes out of a computer.
Who makes electronic money. We don't know, the Bank of England is very secretive. But some one taps the keys of a computer, someone in Threadneedle Street.
All we know is, that money it now a complete mystery. How do you trust a mystery. It cannot be done. It isn't done and the value of money becomes pure guesswork. Perfect conditions for a gamble and we have money markets. Casinos, where insiders rip off billions of pounds without lifting a finger to contribute to the creation of the wealth, they take out of the kitty.
Do you see how difficult it becomes to understand money when you start to look. No wonder poverty reigns supreme. But let us turn this into a fun game, by ripping it apart. In reality money is issued as credit. We have it in writing from the Government that new money is constantly issued into circulation as credit.
We are supposed to believe, that because credit is backed by assets, it is the same as money. But it is not. Try paying your income tax with your credit card. No dice, it doesn't work.
Try taking a barrel of crude oil into the sweet shop and asking for a bar of chocolate. It doesn't work. No chocolate. An asset however valuable, is not money. Credit backed by assets, is not money either.
But the instant that credit is accepted as a loan, the law states that the borrower now owes money. The borrower must go earn real money to pay the interest on the loan and to redeem the loan by turning credit into money for the bankers pocket.
This is now called laundering credit and turning credit into money. The easiest way to get credit laundered, is to give credit as aid to poor nations. They then have to grow food and make cheap goods for sale in an overcrowded world market, to earn the money, to pay the interest on the loan of credit. No real chance of redeeming the loan, they are not supposed to. The idea of aid is to enslave with debt, so that for ever more the poor nation works for the company store.
Dead easy for the bankers to cross off the debt with the stroke of a pen and just as easy to provide more credit as needed. That does not eradicate poverty, which is our goal.
But of course if you have followed this briefing sheet on Poverty with diligence and really and truly understand what poverty actually is, you now know perfectly well, that all it needs is understanding and poverty is then history. www.monetaryreform.org
