LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

not understand economics. It has become the hallmark of the end of the
bourgeois era to proclaim ignorance of economics.
Yet you can not allocate the responsibility for an event, for a crime, for
an accident, until you know what has happened.
Supposing that people DID want to know what has happened during the
past three decades, during the past ten decades, or twenty, it might be
helpful to stop using such cloudy and mysterious terms as finance, the
social problem, economics.
It might be clearer to say: production, exchange, mortgages and the
lending of money. People would then know what one meant. Or would
they? Would any three of them or any two of them understand the
lending of money? Not, until the term money were correctly defined, and
the definition made so clear that everyone could understand it.
I took a banker’s opinion about money, the other day. He replied: money
is the statement of the government’s debt to the bearer. Meaning it says
how much the government owes to the bearer. I should have preferred to
say the “state” or the community owes to the bearer.
I am perfectly aware that I might as well be writing Greek or talking
Chinese with a foreign accent, so far as making this statement clear to
the hearer or reader is concerned. And the public can most certainly not
be blamed for this, as you could read a hundred books, by no means
despicable books, on economics, without finding any hint that such an
idea about money is possible.
The only statement in even an approximately similar form that I can
recall at this moment was made by a Congressman, back in 1878. He
said that an amendment offered by him to a bill about silver coinage had
been: “an attempt to keep some of the NON-INTEREST bearing
national debt in circulation as currency.”