“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.” — FDR letter to Colonel Edward House, Nov. 21, 1933

All our lives we’ve been told that economics is boring. It’s dull. It’s not worth the time it takes to understand it. And all our lives, we’ve been lied to.

War. Poverty. Revolution. They all hinge on economics. And economics all rests on one key concept: money.

Money. It is the economic water in which we live our lives. We even call it “currency”; it flows around us, carries us in its wake. Drowns those who are not careful.

We use it every day in nearly every transaction we conduct. We spend our lives working for it, worrying about it, saving it, spending it, pinching it. It defines our social status. It compromises our morals. People are willing to fight, die, and kill for it.

But what is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? Who controls it? It is a remarkable fact that, given its central importance in our lives, not one person in a hundred could answer such basic questions about money as these.

Interviewer: So if you were planning a family, you’d want to know where babies come from. And this is a lot about banking. So let me ask you: Where does money come from?

Interviewee 1: Where does the money come from? The government prints it. It’s printed off.

Interviewer: How is new money created?

Interviewee 2: By labor. People work and produce wealth, and the money is supposed to match that wealth.

Interviewee: Where does money come from?

Interviewee 3: Well, I have a pretty different outlook on money. It actually comes from, like, trees, right?

SOURCE: Occupy Vancouver answers “Where does money come from?”

But why is this? How could we be so ignorant about a topic of such importance? “Where does money come from?” is a basic, childlike question. So why is our only response the childlike answer, meant as a joke: “It grows on trees”?

Such a profound state of ignorance could not come about naturally. From the time we are children, we are curious about the world and eager to learn about the way it works. And what could lead to a better understanding of the way the world works than a knowledge of money, its creation and destruction? Yet discussion of this topic is fastidiously avoided in our school years and ignored in our daily life. Our monetary ignorance is artificial, a smokescreen that has been erected on purpose and perpetrated with the help of complicated systems and insufferable economic jargon.

But it doesn’t take an economist to understand the importance of money. Deep down we all know that the wars, the poverty, the violence we see around us hinges on this question of money. It seems like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be solved. And it is.

https://www.corbettreport.com/federalreserve/