EASTER WEEKEND 2017: Good Friday
THE FUTURE OF MONEY; THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE. (3)
THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE
In the two previous blogs I came to the conclusion that money in its present form – created out of nothing – is a killer.
Already we live in a world where nothing is sure anymore: money has simply added to the turmoil and has plunged the world into the most perilous instability.
Having money is nevertheless the goal for most people. Money can buy multi-million dollar yachts, can buy respect and, for a while, fulfill our heart’s desire, even though we know that money cannot guarantee life or mental and spiritual security because money is a human invention and as such, in the end, all what is human fails.
Look at our world realistically, through the eyes of eternity, the only way a Christian can look at the future. Today, this very moment, there are more than seven billion people in the world. Most of them now huddled into cities that survive only by virtue of money which, in turn depend on a wider world that is increasingly subject to extremes in the weather: either too hot and too dry or too stormy and too wet, which makes the future more uncertain than ever. Also all cities live by the power of finite, polluting carbon power.
Already many millions are on the move from drought-stricken Africa, but increasingly also from the war-ravaged countries of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, while each week we hear about unrest, bombing, and religious strife in Egypt, Pakistan, India and elsewhere. Add to this the global financial world loaded with debt, with its overextended banking and insurance industry no longer able to exercise the JUBILEE option, because this would cause their immediate collapse.
Then there is the natural or rather the unnatural state of the world because we treat our planet as if it is inexhaustible. A realistic look at the world around us tells us differently. The earth is a dissipative structure, which means that it is finite, has an expiry date. All signs today indicate that we have long passed its ‘best before’ date.
That happened centuries, ago. It could quite well be that the period 1600-1750 was the best, the time just before the CARBON AGE, the years in which Johann Sebastian Bach and G. F. Handel composed their music, the era in which Rembrandt and the other great masters created their ever-more valuable paintings: indeed the Golden Age of creativity.
Then the world had a mere One Billion people: basically the planet was still there to be discovered: the natives of Africa, India and China and the Americas still lived their sustainable lives, even though European sicknesses were already then were killing many there.
Perhaps even the Middle Ages were preferable. Harvard historian Juliet Schor cited leisure conditions during that time:
“The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”
How unlike today.
Take the USA. There, in order to feed the family, maintain two cars, keep up with repairs on the single family dwelling and pay for medical care, almost every household needs two wage earners to stay ahead of bankruptcy. They have been lulled into a terrible trap. A great portion of the USA is so poor because they live too far from stores and work and need cars as much as they need food, shelter and clothing thanks to the structural suburban make-up of North America, dependent on cheap and abundant energy. There wage growth is stalled while everything else is going exponential: population growth, income disparity, energy consumption, Global Warming, Pollution, just to name the most obvious. Our entire system, our old-age pensions, our medical aid, our tax collections all are based on constant growth, plainly impossible in a Finite World.
The Middle Ages saw no growth at all! The Golden Age – 1600 to 1750 – saw hardly any. We have been conned to believe – blame corporate TV – that we always need more. And that’s precisely why we are heading for disaster.
That today a financial and atmospheric disaster is looming is evident in slowing growth, in old debts not paid off but rolled over into new, larger ‘assets’ which rapidly are becoming liabilities.
Tomorrow’s inflation, due to Climate Change, will make life more expensive at the same time when robots and higher interest rates will decrease income, accelerating collapse of financial institutions, insurance companies, banks, and pension plans. Already many pension plans are failing or cutting payouts. The impending failure of the financial system is likely to be at the center of the storm.
The greatest danger
The greatest danger is that we have built a system that has no fallback position: we cannot go backward. No longer can we return to a simpler society with horses and buggies, with localized economies, also because we have growing population pressures and shrinking resources.
Money now has become to us what the potato was for the inhabitants of the County of Mayo in Ireland of the 1840s. When money fails in its function, all cities, Toronto, New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow will fail. China alone now has 100 cities with a population exceeding 1 million. All these cities will starve. Karl Marx, the famous author of Das Kapital predicted that every city has a little Ireland in it.
Under these conditions, what is the money of the future?
Money and the future are intimately connected because money represents FAITH, an item that is fading fast. In the Middle Ages everybody unashamedly had FAITH. Very few have so today.
After the war in 1945, with America expressing faith in the future of Europe, it donated via the Marshall Plan some Five Billion Dollars to Europe, the so-called Euro-Dollars, for the reconstruction of that devastated continent. That’s when a new car cost less than $2,000.
America has been the sole beneficiary of World War II, inheriting an up-to-date manufacturing economy, fully functional, while Europe’s industrial base was totally destroyed. It had to start from scratch, and the US dollars were a great help.
The result was that in Germany the Wirtschaftwunder (German for “economic miracle”) could take place, enabling the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II.
Today, also thanks to thorough trades training there they maintain an economic advantage over the USA, where not manufacturing but money manipulation has become the main industry, thanks to the US Dollar being the World Currency.
That advantage is now disappearing with the rise of China and Russia who are basing their joint currency on GOLD.
GOLD and SILVER.
I believe that the collapse of the financial system and with it the collapse of society may and can occur in the near future. Anything can turn it on, either an immense natural disaster, such as an enormous earthquake – one is overdue on North America’s West Coast – or an unexpected default from a large institution, even the USA government with its enormous debt load and unfunded liabilities.
What I can say is that the money of the future will not be money as we regard it today, where the bankers are like God, creating it ex nihilo, out of nothing.
The historic function of money
Of course if we go back far enough, to primitive humanity, the so-called hunter/gatherer period, there was no need for money. There were enough edibles available in nature to sustain the rather small population in a world where game was abundant, where fish abounded, where wild apples or fruit of any kind were readily at hand. Then too there was total equality because there was no need to hoard.
The onset of agriculture created inequality: the clever became masters, the less qualified serfs.
God did not want this to happen so he instituted regulations as outlined in the Five Books of Moses the cancelling of debts and the restitution of lost properties. Of course, humans being human and greedy, never practiced these laws, and now never will.
Historically money has been gold and silver. When Peter and John encountered a lame person at the entrance of the Jerusalem Temple, who held up his hand for some monetary assistance, Peter said: “Silver and Gold we have not, but we can cure your paralysis”.
When Judas betrayed Jesus he received 30 pieces of silver.
When Abraham bought a burial site for Sarah, his wife, he talked to the owner who said (Genesis 23: 15): “Listen to me, my lord; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, but what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.” (16) Abraham agreed to Ephron’s outrageous terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weight current among the merchants.
The money of the future, for it to be trustworthy, will be based on silver and gold, substances compact and valuable because of their scarcity. In the past, these metals have always occupied that function. Considering the much sounder basis of gold and silver they are preferable to fiat money, strictly based in trust. That trust is now fading fast.
How God disappeared.
I vividly recall the Dutch war-time economy, heavily relying on the countryside to feed the city. Nothing could be imported, no bananas, no oranges, lemons, tobacco, or chocolate. Fortunately there were a lot of small farmers, making a living on 10-12 hectares – 25-30 acres – with a dozen cows, pigs, chickens, growing potatoes, wheat, oats, all cultivated by simple non mechanical means. A lot of this found their ways into the cities. My grandparents were that kind of country folk, so were my uncles.
Today all that is gone and so is God. Everything became industrialized, big barns with thousands of chickens, either for eggs or broilers. These people rely on the city as much as the city dwellers themselves. It all depends on carbon-based power sources and lots of money because the investments are huge: robot-milking machines cost $500,000 each. Once money collapses, everything does. Chaos, universal chaos.
I know, I paint a bleak picture. Yet when we look at today and project what will be the result, then the conclusion is dire. We have allowed ourselves to be caught into a trap from which there is no escape. With God gone we have set ourselves up for failure, relying on finite substances, that also prove to be totally poisonous, killing not only ourselves, but all substances on which our society depend.
A call to repent.
Fortunately the Lord, in his wisdom, has foreseen this. The germ of this situation was already present in the Garden of Eden. It needed a few millennia to develop to the point where it is today, but, it seems to me – and I realize that this is a guess – that soon the time will be full and we must prepare ourselves to face the ultimate reality: which is what James Lovelock has labeled: THE REVENGE OF GAIA and the Bible calls CHRIST’S SECOND COMING.
Money and the future are intimately connected: both are based on FAITH. The current world has put its faith in fiat – self-generated – money.
The real money of the eternal future is also based on FAITH. The real, infallible money of the FUTURE is the faith that is based on the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary’s Hill.
On this Easter weekend we know that He is alive, that he has prepared a New Creation which awaits our coming, paid for by his life-blood. That is the true “money” of the future. That’s why John 3: 16 is the most important text in the entire Bible.