Money out of thin air and nothing for the poor

15_march_2016 A letter a day to number 10. No 1,372

Tuesday 15 March 2016.

Dear Mr Cameron,

Let’s talk about money. Money is neither a natural resource nor is it a finite resource. Money is entirely man-made, 93% of which is now made out of fresh air, just numbers on a computer screen. Think of money like buttons, is there a universal limit on the manufacture of buttons, a natural cut off point at which no more buttons will or could ever be created? What would we think if someone said there were not enough buttons to go round and the poor would have to do with ever fewer and the disabled, in particular, would be targeted and deprived of any special needs buttons?

Just look at the money that the Bank of England gave to the financial sector in Quantitative Easing, £375 billion of brand new money out of nothing, for free. That’s £5,850 for every child, woman and man in the UK, magicked out of fresh air.

George Osborne doesn’t seem to have any trouble laying his hands on money, he’s been the biggest government borrower of the last 70 years and, wherever he gets it from, there’s plenty more to be had, he hasn’t bled that money pot dry, just us.

I wonder how Tim Peake might have reacted if his motability had been stopped at the last minute (because you’d grabbed back the £16 million of taxpayer money you donated to the ISS) and he was left stranded on Earth never to make it to the 100 billion Euro – International Space Station?

It seems we can afford anything except the poor. We have money for wars, Trident, MPs pay rises, expenses, gold plated pensions and champagne, endless money for Iain Duncan Smith to challenge court judgements which find for poor people, anything but the poor themselves.

I put it to you that money is an ideological weapon to control ordinary people. It’s the universal currency of control. There is no shortage of money, but there are vast seas of legislation to prevent it getting into the hands of the great majority of ordinary people. It’s a rigged game, a marked deck, a Ponzi scheme, a scam. There’s no point having so much money that all it’s good for is papering the parlour, it has to be a system that works for all as a means of exchange for goods and services. The problem we have is manufactured scarcity by people intent on cooking the books in their favour. So we have free markets, which incidentally are not free but heavily loaded in their favour, and we have the vast majority of ordinary people with the entire game loaded against them. Osborne will happily spend £20,000 in legal fees trying to protect bankers bonuses whilst stealing the food from children’s mouths. There is a reckoning to be had over money and it is long overdue.