In Desperate Need of Money

["John Gelles" <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

            Ryan's kind posting of "A New Way Forward" offers
            a half hour of reading uninterpreted sense on much of
            the problem we face: Outside the financial world,
            producers seem ready to repeal basic scarcity of real
            wealth -- in comparison with the needs of real people.
                    With this power (from science and technology),
            producers would repeal, as well, the business cycle.

            Within the financial world and all its controlling roots,
            including voter attitudes, political and business habits,
            and the vested interests of bankers and lenders, we
            create the fact that a great many people and political
            movements are "in desperate need of money".
                    They need it to buy personal and reformers'
            items, -- even though theoretically there would be no
            scarcity (and virtually anyone could afford them), if
            producers had the opportunity to ramp up production
            of a great many necessities to leave them as free as air.

            Ryan's piece was offered only in its first part. In part
            two we may expect something like a social dividend
            of money to relieve us all from desperate need of it.

            In practical terms, prescription drugs and the money
            to buy them may serve as an example of how we all
            should be thinking about money. Many experts tell
            us the investment by drug producers is huge and much
            of it does not yield a successful product. To keep
            research effort solvent, the price of the few products
            that prove useful must be high. The experts are right.

            The issue is not the price of these drugs, it is who should
            pay it. If only those who can afford them pay for the
            drugs, the industry might be under-financed. So govern-
            ment should pay a large part of the price. Yet, if govern-
            ment does this, there may be too great a temptation for
            fraud.
                    So government should pay not only for the drugs
            but for anti-fraud enforcement.

            Now if all this is done, there will be no money to pay for
            ordinary retirement benefits for baby boomers in coming
            decades -- we are told. We will have spent the money
            today that should have been saved for tomorrow.

            But we know that so long as accelerating inflation does
            not result, today's spending is a help to today's economic
            performance. And it helps tomorrow's possibilities by
            building facilities and knowledge that will be needed
            tomorrow.
                    If such spending were not allowed, its absence
            would  NOT  be money saved for tomorrow -- it
            would be opportunity evaporated with the passage of
            time.

            How can we explain that it is the things money will buy
            that voters must think of first. Then the choice of money
            system to promote production and exchange of these
            things can be considered?
                    How can we do this when we cannot explain it
            to ouselves?

              John Gelles   jjgelles@xxxxxxxx
                                  http://www.1944.org
                                  http://www.rain.org/~jjgelles/


            P.S. When volume of messages on PKT drops to
            the current low level, it takes forever for the ten
            percent limit to open up.