This is the latest chapter to be published of my new 2024 edition of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. It summarizes the dimensions of the money problem and the pathways toward solving it as we described them in the previous chapters, and elaborates upon the various functions of money and finance and how they can be handled in ways that are honest, fair, and empowering.

Here is a brief excerpt:

The political money system is the keystone in the arch of power. —Thomas H. Greco, Jr.

Having laid the necessary foundation in the first eleven chapters, we can now proceed to summarize the requirements for solving the money problem. We have shown how money has been politicized and how the control over its creation and allocation has become, what I call, “the keystone in the arch of power,” a power which is at once financial, economic, political, and social. Those who control money are able to control everything else. The inherent dysfunctions of the present monetary regime derive mainly from the following structural elements:

• • The monopolization of credit by the banking cartel in collusion with national governments
  • The creation of money by banks as interest-bearing “loans”
  • Legal tender status for official debt-money
  • The elimination of any operational concrete measure of value and unit of account

We have seen how that system:

• • Enables national governments to finance endless wars and other projects that are wasteful, destructive, and contrary both to the wishes of the citizenry and to the common welfare
  • Enables banks to reap inordinate profits while deciding to whom and for what purpose the money shall be distributed among “borrowers”
  • Gives a small, elite “super-class” the non-bona-fide money to acquire an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s real wealth and the ability to control political and economic affairs worldwide
  • Forces the exponential growth of debt, and destructive competition for an always-insufficient supply of money for all debts to be repaid

Emerging Exchange Alternatives

The most graceful and promising approach to empowering ourselves and our communities is through voluntary, entrepreneurial activities that can liberate the exchange process and reclaim “the credit commons.” So long as people have the freedom of association and the right to contract it will be difficult if not impossible for governments to prevent the creation of exchange media and mechanisms by private initiative. We can thereby, step-by-step, reduce our dependence upon bank borrowing and political currencies, taking control of our own credit and organizing independent means for allocating it directly to those individuals and businesses that we trust and wish to support. Riegel reminds us that, “there is no constitutional or statutory barrier to the inauguration of a private enterprise, non-debt, non-interest, mutual money system.” Only popular control of credit and competition in currencies can transcend the money problem. As Ulrich von Beckerath has observed, “Extension of exchange transactions without State money is in reality the beginning of a new system of settling accounts, indeed the beginning of a new economic order.” A new economic order is precisely what is needed at this point in history.

You can read the entire chapter at Future Brightly.