My name is Simon Gruffydd Foster, a Welshman living in a small mountain village in Wales, Pontycymer - although I am not as parochial as that sounds. As a long-distance sailor I have travelled to and lived in many far-flung lands from Africa and the Caribbean in the south and northward bound to the land of the midnight sun in the Norwegian Arctic and Iceland. My favourite port of call is Newfoundland, but I'll leave that for another post. Basically, I've been around ;).
So ... I plan to change the world, one nation at a time ... that's quite a bold claim - let me explain.
This is not some diabolical world takeover plan. This is about planting seeds of change, like catalysts, watching them grow and transform the world we inhabit. The change needed is money, or rather the nature of money. Let me explain.
Our current supply of money, virtually world over, is fabricated from private corporations called banks as a debt to be paid back with compounding interest. This results in us (governments and people) owning far more money than even exists. To keep up to the demands of debt repayments we been thrown into a treadmill of mindless "economic growth" causing environmental destruction, social disharmony, growing gap in wealth distribution and destitution - just to name a few of its many negative repercussions.
The solution is mind-bogglingly simple. We switch from a destructive private-debt based money supply to social credit. It's just a matter of changing the accounting rules that govern the creation and distribution of money. Any government could do it tomorrow - if they understood the stupidity of basing a national money supply on debt and the amazing benefits of shifting to a social credit-based system.
Once the burden of compound interest is removed, a nation would be propelled into almost unimagined prosperity. The cost of almost everything would drop while working wages would rise. Taxes could be reduced and programmes like a Universal Basic Income could not just be viable, but economically beneficial. It would be like removing a life-depleting financial leech from the system so we can breathe freely again.
So why only "one nation at a time"?
To make significant changes to the world it makes sense to start at home. My home country of 3 million people is small enough to make the kind of changes we need.
Here in Wales, we have our own government, and if you don't know someone in power, then you probably know someone who does know that person, or at least know someone related to a person who knows that person. Barring that, you can just pick up the phone and talk to that influential other.
That's the beauty of small countries. People in power are never too distant or unreachable.
So ... if we can change one nation, we can change the world? How so?
If we are successful in shifting Wales to a credit-based economy, the changes to our nation would be so compelling it would only be a matter of time before other nations followed suit.
They would follow suit not necessarily out of admiration, but out of simple economic necessity. No nation mired in a debt-based economy could compete with a social credit-based economy, just in terms of price - even with our higher wages.
That's because the largest cost to debt-based economies is servicing the debt - a burden that grows larger every year. Free of this burden, Wales would fly. Other nations would have to switch to a social credit-based system of money just to catch up.
So ... I am planting a seed of change in my home, Wales. And Wales will plant a seed of change in the world.
The alternative of doing nothing and watching the world slip ever deeper into debt-dependency, recession, and destitution is not an option I want to contemplate.
The changes we seek are already under-way
I believe 2017 will be know as the year cryptocurrencies got a foot in the global economic door. An essential difference between cryptocurrencies and and fiat money (pounds, dollars, euros, etc.) is that they exist outside the world of banking and they are not based on debt. With a market cap approaching a trillion dollars, they can no longer be ignored. Any nation could adopt a cryptocurrecy as its monetary base. Cryptocurrencies provide more privacy and security than traditional bank credit (their credit - our debt).
As economist Professor Steve Keen pointed out the other day,
"Blockchain technology could be used by trusted party like a central bank to produce digital money which could be then given to everybody in the county. At the moment central banks only interact with the banking system and some non-bank financial institutions. And suddenly, central banks could interact with us directly. And that to me would be a means by which we could use the digital currencies to cancel the excessive level of credit created money which has been caused in the private debt bubbles. That’s probably the major innovation; central banks taking on blockchain technology producing digital currency and giving us all a bank account at the central bank which could be used as a way of bringing about the people’s quantitative easing.”
The future is here. All we have to do is see the opportunities and grab it with both hands. First Wales. Then the world.