Here's a quick impression of what is wrong with our current socioeconomic system. What are your thoughts on this, and what do you think is the best way to begin making it better?
Humans are born with the desire to be safe. We grow up learning that we are living in a body and one of our jobs in this life is to keep that body safe from harm so we can survive. It's probably our body's strongest drive.
Over the centuries, humans have developed different strategies to accomplish the mission of staying safe. Since recorded history, one of the main ways we have done this is to form groups with other people and share the responsibility of keeping our body's safe.
As we developed bigger and bigger groups, this process grew into groups called countries first allowing and then electing governments to oversee the process of keeping everyone in the country safe.
To the average person in the country, it appeared to be a much easier strategy to be able to allow other people to take on that job. Then the average person could focus their time and energy on other, more exciting things.
We allowed the government the power to use force. to imprison and sometimes to even kill others that we labeled as bad people – people who intend to do us harm- so that we could go about our business knowing that the job of us staying safe was being handled.
During this time, some people discovered the significant role that money could play in this process. It seamed that those with money were able to get into and stay in positions of governing easier than those without it. These people discovered that they could use money to influence those in governing positions and that the button of control over a government was in fact money itself.
Through many experiments these people developed a system of central banks and fractional reserve banking. This allowed them to have complete control over a counties money system. Without using any of their own money, they were able to use the money of the people in a country, lend it back to their government with interest and then have the people guarantee to pay the money back if the bank went broke through doing this. They were also able to control interest rates and print money on demand.
Without most people noticing it, the power the population had handed over to our governments to keep them safe was now completely in the control of the few who controlled the central banking system. While we went on assuming that we the people were electing our government to fulfill the duties of keeping us safe from the bad people, the government itself was now answering only to the people who controlled the central banking system because that's where the people in the government were able to get their money to do ANYTHING, including the job the population wanted them to do which was keep them safe.
Without most people noticing it, the power to use force, imprison and kill people had been stolen from the people we had outsourced those duties to.
Without most people noticing it, the worst people – the people that intend to do us the most harm – were now in control of keeping us safe.
So that's where we are now. So what got us into this mess? Is it the fault of the people who control central banks? Maybe. Is it the fault of our politicians who have gone along with this and not told us about it? Maybe. Or is it our fault for being too eager to hand over the responsibility of our safety to people we don't know or have any direct influence over? Again, maybe.
What do you think? What do you think is our best next move towards making it better?
-Andy