Koan claims to be "decent and honest" but considers the writer of this a sociopath. I feel queasy reading that because it has more than a passing resemblance to what is happening today to money: < "Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion ? when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing ? when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors ? when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you ? when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice ? you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are. >
But she's wrong about gold. Gold is just a material and is not essential for money. The very thing she values most, which is the mind of Man and their creations, need not be attached to a material object to hold value. I'm in the process of inventing a better way of doing it. I'd better hurry before Big Ben and co blow up the financial system entirely.
As the financial system goes belly up, people are less and less crowding into Big Al Gore's Church of the Apocalypse. They have got enough actual apocalypse going on for real without signing up for some promissory environmental note.
Mqurice |
