[ExI] Money Games

[Damien Broderick]

At 01:22 PM 12/14/2008 -0800, Stuart recommended:

>a cartoon that explains it quite nicely ...
>
>http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279

Barbara Lamar the tax lawyer comments:

I don't buy Paul Grignon's statement that if interest is charged on 
loans of "real" money, the bankers end up with all the money. This 
would only be true (even on a theoretical level) if the banks could 
loan money in excess of their reserves.

Also, I think his idea to have "the government" do the banking is 
naive. The main cause of the present mess is that a small group of 
people have a monopoly on the control of money. When a few 
individuals have this much power, the temptation to misuse the power 
is always too great. Based on my reading of history, I can't see that 
it would have made any difference whether or not the Federal Reserve 
Act created a system in which private banks were involved, or whether 
it had created a government owned central bank. Thee have been plenty 
of cases where government owned central banks caused every bit as 
much trouble as the federal reserve system.  The root of the problem 
is concentration of power and a legal system that allows individuals 
to avoid responsibility for their wrongdoing by hiding behind a 
corporate or sovereign veil.

Here are some things we could do that would actual be likely to work:

1. Change corporation law so that management and shareholders can be 
held liable for damage done to other persons by the corporation.
2. Get rid of central banks.
3. Get rid of government regulation of banks and set up a private 
regulatory organization to which membership is voluntary. This would 
be far more likely to work well than government regulation.
4. Reverse court opinions holding that depositors are creditors of 
the bank, rather than the owners of the funds they have deposited. 
When I deposit $100 in the bank, the bank should not increase the 
balance of their assets by $100 -- my $100 does not belong on the 
bank's balance sheet at all.