In God We Trust, All Others Cash

In God We Trust,
All Others Cash

Most people believe when Jesus cleared the Temple of Money Changers it was because of the despicable business the Moneychangers were doing within the confines of the holy Temple. However, most scholars agree that the primary reason that the Moneychangers were tossed from the Temple was that they were causing such a ruckus doing business that it was impossible to do the church’s work. But, of course, there was more to this episode than simply eliminating noise and commotion because when Jesus cast the Moneychangers out he said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves.” Why would Jesus say that the Moneychangers were turning the Temple into a house of thieves if the Moneychangers were only causing a disturbance? Well, it seems that the Moneychangers had a monopoly on creating a certain coin that was used by worshipers in the Temple and the Moneychangers used this monopoly to charge interest on the coin (money) they created and in so doing had become quite wealthy making money off of money. Wait a minute. Does this sound vaguely familiar? Of course it does because the United States Federal Reserve Banks, the United States Federal Reserve, AIG, Financial Institutions and endless others in today’s modern economies, does exactly the same thing, i.e., they create money and then charge interest on it when other people or entities use it. This begs the question; why did the charging of interest for the use of money motivate Jesus to call the Moneychangers thieves? The answer to this question is much easier than it would seem because throughout the history of civilization the charging of interest for the use of money was considered a grave sin and an abomination. Anyone who engaged in such a despicable business of making money off of money was shunned as being not worthy of any honorable standing in the community. I will leave it to each reader’s conjecture that perhaps this dishonorable practice of making money off of money is where a particular racial discrimination got its start and still exists throughout much of the world today because it was, in general, been only one race of people that thought it was not dishonorable to engage in the business of charging interest on the use of money. The fact that this race of people were nearly the exclusive practitioners of this business of making money off of money can go far in explaining how this age old scourge of discrimination got it’s start. Well that was then, and this is now. I will wager that most people consider the charging of interest for the use of money is only another way of making a profit and therefore this profit making is Capitalism in operation, i.e., if it’s Capitalism, then it cannot be a dishonorable thing to do nowadays as it was in days gone by. Well perhaps. I won’t bore you with a standard definition of Capitalism but basically one invests their real money into a privately or Corporate held business and that business then does business well enough to make a profit that is returned to the investors. The investor now has a capital gain in addition to the original capital invested and the investor can now use the capital gain to invest in new businesses, and viola, a vibrant economy. The profit earned from doing real business was earned by creating something of real value that the business sold, so therefore, the capital gain achieved is real money because was created by the real bussiness creating something of real value. You see, here’s the thing about making money off of money, it’s not a real business. You might turn a profit from making money off of money but in so doing, nothing was added to the economy because no real business was done to earn the profit and create real money. The money made off of money is not real money because nothing of value is the basis for the profit money. And it follows if the economy is awash in “not real” money, money will lose its value to the point where the economy will eventually fail. The only way an economy can continue that is constituted with “not real” money is for continuous inflation to occur and constant inflation is indeed the characteristic of the modern American economy. The political trick is to keep inflation as low as possible in order to continue the economy for as long as possible, but it will eventually fail for some future generation. This, of course, gets us to the subject of credit. Credit is the modern, new and improved, way of making money off of money, but the results are the same; the money made from extending credit is not real money and the economy will eventually fail. You can see first hand what credit can do when multiplied by “leveraging”, credit default swaps, and endless other ingenious ways of making money off of money but, of course, the money made is not real money and this “not real” money is what is causing the current financial crisis. Oh well, In God we trust, all others cash.