WhatIsMoneyFor.pdf

What is Money For?

By Ezra Pound

We will never see an end of ructions, we will never have a sane and steady administration until

we gain an absolutely clear conception of money. I mean an absolutely not an approximately

clear conception.

I can, if you like, go back to paper money issued in China in or about A.D. 840, but we are

concerned with the vagaries of the Western World. FIRST, Paterson, the founder of the Bank of

England, told his shareholders that they would profit because "the bank hath profit on the interest

of all the moneys which it creates out of nothing." What then is this "money" the banker can

create out of nothing"?

Let us be quite clear. Money is a measured title or claim. That is its basic difference from

unmeasured claims, such as a man's right to take all you've got under war-time requisition, or as

an invader or thief just taking it all. Money is a measure which the taker hands over when be

acquires the goods he takes. And no further formality need occur during the transfer, though

sometimes a receipt is given. The idea of justice inheres in ideas of measure, and money is a

measure of value.

MEANS OF EXCHANGE

Money is valid when people recognise it as a claim and hand over goods or do work up to the

value printed on the face of the ticket, whether it is made of metal or paper. Money is a general

sort of ticket which is its only difference from a railway or theatre ticket. If this statement seems

childish let the reader think for a moment about different kinds of tickets.

A railway ticket is a measured ticket. A ticket from London to Brighton differs from one for

London to Edinburgh. Both are measured, but in miles that always stay the same length. A

money ticket, under a corrupt system, wobbles. For a long time the public has trusted people

whose measure was shifty.

Another angle. Theatre tickets are timed. You would probably not accept a ticket for Row H,

Seat 27, if it were not dated. When six people are entitled to the same seat at the same time the

tickets are not particularly good. (Orage asked; Would you call it inflation to print tickets for

every seat in the house?) You will hear money called "a medium of exchange," which means that

it can circulate freely, as a measure of goods and services against one another, from hand to

hand.

GUARANTEE OF FUTURE EXCHANGE

We will have defined money properly when we have stated what it is in words that cannot be

applied to anything else and when there is nothing about the essential nature of money that is

omitted from our definition.

When Aristotle calls money "a guarantee of future exchange" that merely means that it is an

undated ticket, that will be good when we want to use it. Tickets have sometimes stayed good for

a century. When we do not hand over money at once for goods or services received we are said

to have "credit". The "credit" is the other man's belief that we can and will some time hand over

the money or something measured by money.

Most men have been so intent on the individual piece of money, as a measure, that they have

forgotten its purpose, and they have got into inextricable muddles and confusions regarding the

total amount of money in a country. A perfectly good hammer is useless to pick your teeth with.

If you don't know what money is FOR, you will get into a muddle when using it, and still more

will a government get into a mess in its "monetary policy".

Statally speaking, that is from the point of view of a man or party that wants to govern justly, a

piece of money is a ticket, the country's money is a mass of tickets for getting the country's food

and goods justly distributed. The job for a man today who is trying to write a pamphlet on money

is not to say something new, it is not to think up something or prove a theory, it is SIMPLY to

make a clear statement about things that have been known for 200, and often for 2,000 years.

You have got to know what money is FOR.

PURPOSE OF MONEY

If you think it is a mantrap or a means of bleeding the public, you will admire the banking

system as run by the Rothschilds and international bankers. If you think it is a means of sweating

profits out of the public, you will admire the stock exchange. Hence ultimately for the sake of

keeping your ideas in order you will need a few principles.

THE AIM of a sane and decent economic system is to fix things so that decent people can eat,

have clothes and houses up to the limit of available goods.

THE VALUE OF MONEY

Take money in such a system as a means of exchange, and then realise that to be a just means of

exchange it must be measured.

What are you going to use to measure the value of anything? An egg is an egg. You can eat it

(until it goes bad). Eggs are not all the same size, but they might serve among primitive people as

an approximate measure.*

Unterguggenberger, the Austrian monetary reformer, used WORK as a measure, "Arbeitswert,"

10 schillings' worth of work. That was O.K. in a mountain valley where everyone could do pretty

much the same kind of work in the fields. Charlemagne had a grain measure, so many pecks of

barley, wheat or rye worth a DENAR, or put it the other way on. The just price of barley was so

much the peck.

In 796 A.D. it was 2 denars. And in 808 A.D. it was 3 denars. That means that the farmer got

more denars for the Same quantity of barley. And let us hope he could buy more other goods

with those denars. Unfortunately the worth of all things depends on whether there is a real

scarcity, enough or more than can be used at a given time. A few eggs are worth a great deal to a

hungry man on a raft. Wheat is worth MORE in terms of serge in some seasons than in others.

So is gold, so is platinum. A single commodity (even gold) base for money is not satisfactory.

STATE AUTHORITY behind the printed note Is the best means of establishing a JUST and

HONEST currency. The Chinese grasped that over 1,000 years ago, as we can see from the Tang

STATE (not Bank) NOTE. SOVEREIGNTY inheres in the right to ISSUE money (tickets) and

to determine the value thereof.

American interests HIDE the most vital clause in our** constitution. The American government

hasn't, they say, the right to fix prices. BUT IT HAS THE RIGHT TO DETERMINE THE

VALUE OF MONEY and this right is vested in Congress.

This is a mere difference in legal formalities and verbal arrangements. The U.S. Government has

the right to say "a dollar is one wheat-bushel thick, it is one serge-foot long, it is ten gallons of

petrol wide." Hence the U.S. Government could establish the JUST PRICE, and a just price

system.

THE JUST PRICE

Out of barter grew the canonist doctrine of the just price, and a thousands years' thought from St.

Ambrose to St. Antonino of Florence, as to HOW to determine the just price. Both the Douglas

social crediters and modern Catholics POSTULATE the JUST PRICE as a necessary part of their

Systems. The valid complaint against Douglas is that be didn't invent and set up machinery for

ENFORCING the just price. A priest recently reported to me that the English distributists had

about got round to realising that they had no mechanism for instituting and enforcing just price.

Only the STATE can effectively fix the JUST PRICE of any commodity by means of state-

controlled pools of raw products and the restoration of guild organisation in industry.

THE QUANTITY OF MONEY

Having determined the size of your dollar, or half-crown or shilling, your Government's next job

is to see that TICKETS are properly printed and that they get to the right people.

The right people are all the people who'tfe not engaged in CRIME, and crime for the duration of

this pamphlet means among other things CHEATING the rest of the citizens through the money

racket. In the United States and England there is NOT enough money. There are not enough

tickets moving about among the WHOLE people to BUY what they need - EVEN when the

goods are there on the counter or going to rot on the wharves.

When the total nation hasn't or cannot obtain enough food for its people, that nation is poor.

When enough food exists and people cannot get it by honest labour, the state is rotten, and no

effort of language will say how rotten it is. But for a banker or professor to tell you that the

country cannot do this, that or the other because it lacks money is as black and foetid a lie, as

grovelling and imbecile, as it would be to say it cannot build roads because it has no kilometres.

(I didn't invent that phrase, but it is too good to leave idle.) Roosevelt and his professors were on

the right line with their commodity dollar, BUT they hooeyed and smoke-screened and dodged

the problem of having ENOUGH TICKETS to serve the whole people, and of keeping those

tickets MOVING.

It is the business of the STATE to see that there is enough money in the hands of the WHOLE

people, and in adequately rapid EXCHANGE, to effect distribution or all wealth produced and

produceable. Until every member of the nation eats three times a day and has shelter and

clothing, a nation is either lazy or unhealthy. If this occurs in a rich state the state's; rir.hss are

not fnllv etrmlnved

All value comes from labour. Wheat from ploughing, chestnuts from being picked up. BUT a lot

of WORK has been done by men (mostly inventors, well-diggers, constructors of factory plant,

etc.) now DEAD, and who therefore cannot eat and wear clothes.

SOCIAL CREDIT

In respect of this legacy of mechanical efficiency and scientific advance we have at our disposal

a large volume of SOCIAL CREDIT, which can he distributed to the people as a bonus over and

above their wage packet. Douglas proposed to bring up the TOTAL purchasing power of the

whole people by a per capita issue of tickets PROPORTIONAL to available goods. In England

and U.S. today available and desired goods remain unbought because the total purchasing power

(i.e., total sum of tickets) is inadequate. Mussolini and Hitler wasted very little time

PROPOSING. They started and DO distribute BOTH tickets and actual gopds on various

graduated scales according to the virtues and activities of Italians and Germans. Douglas may

object that this is not "democratic" (that is egalitarian) BUT for the monetary scientist or

economist the result is the same. The goods are getting distributed.

There is a slightly different angle in the way these different men look on justice. They all agree

that deficiency in a nation's total purchasing power must be made up. Ten or more years ago I

said, that Mussolini had achieved more than Douglas, because Douglas has presented his ideas as

a greed system, not as a will system.

Both Systems, Fascist and Douglasite, differ as the day from night from the degradation of the

DOLE, from the infamy of the British system wherein men who are out of jobs are paid money

taken from men who do work, and where the out-of-works are rendered progressively UNFIT to

work or to enjoy the sensations of living. Not only are they a drag on workers, but they are made

a drag on all people who are trying to maintain a decent standard of living. The whole scale of

values is defiled. Every year sees less sense of SOCIAL VALUE; less sense of having people

lead lives which do not harm others; of lives in which some measure and prudence is observed.

There is nothing new in creating money to distribute wealth. If you don't believe the Emperor

Tching Tang issued the first national dividend in B.C. 1766 you can call it something else. It may

have been an emergency dole, but the story will at least clear up one muddle. The emperor

opened a copper mine and issued round coins with square holes and gave them to the poor "and

this money enabled them to buy grain from the. rich," but it had no effect on the genera] shortage

of grain.

That story is 3,000 years old, but it helps one to understand what money is and what it can do.

For the purpose of good government it is a ticket for the orderly distribution of WHAT IS

AVAILABLE. It may even be an incentive to grow or fabricate more grain or goods, that is to

attain abundance. But it is NOT in itself abundance.

INFLATION

The term inflation is used as a bogey to scare people away from any expansion of money at all.

Real INFLATION only begins when you issue MONEY (measured claims) against goods or

services that are undeliverable (assignats of the French Revolution issued against state lands) or

issue them in excess of those WANTED. That amounts to saying: two or more tickets for the

same seat at the same time, or tickets in London for a theatre performance tonight in Bombay, or

for a dud show.

Money can be expended as long as each measured claim can be honoured by the producers and

distributors of the nation in the goods and services required by the public, when and where they

want them. INFLATION is one danger; STAGNATION is another.

GESSEL'S STAMP SCRIP

Gesell, the South American monetary reformer, saw the danger of money being hoarded and

proposed to deal with it by the issue of "stamp scrip." This should be a government note

requiring the bearer to affix a stamp worth up to 1% of its face value on the first day of every

month. Unless the note carries its proper complement or monthly stamps it is not valid.

This is a form of TAX on money and in the case of British currency might take the form of l/2d

or Id per month on a ten shilling note and Id or 2d. on a pound. There are any number of possible

taxes, but Gesell's kind of tax can only fall on a man who has, in his pocket, at the moment the

tax falls due, lOO-times, at least, the amount of the tax.

Gesell's kind of money provides a medium and measure of exchange which cannot be hoarded

with impunity. It will always keep moving. Bankers could NOT lock it up in then- cellars and

charge the public for letting it out. It has also the additional benefit of placing sellers of

perishable goods at less of a disadvantage in negotiating with owners of theoretically

imperishable money. I am particularly keen on Gesell, because once people have used stamp

scrip they HAVE a clear idea about money, they understand tickets better than men who haven't

used stamp scrip. I am no more anxious than anyone else to use a new kind of stamp, but I

maintain that the public is NOT too stupid to use postage stamps and that there is no gain in

pretending that they are too stupid to understand money.

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: