However, I have noticed that when people search for BLS using AI, a whole chain of stories and information—often including quotes attributed to me—has emerged, much of which is either out of context or entirely fabricated.
This is concerning, especially when those outside the mainstream are trying to share solutions and perspectives that challenge the compliance and blindness of today’s system.
We must recognise that the so-called AI takeover is being built on delivery levels that, in many cases, are no better than the efforts of a lazy teenager responding to an encouraging parent. And the outright creation of false information and narratives—even regarding work from independent voices—is troubling.
Given that AI now tells those seeking a quick overview that the Basic Living Standard is a way to fix our broken economic system, I feel it is time to clarify: while I believe BLS is a pivotal solution, it cannot and will not work within the current economic paradigm.
The integral priority of BLS is to put people, not money, first.
The Basic Living Standard: Not Intended for the Current Economic System
I have never created or published financial models or projections to ‘cost’ or predict the impact of BLS on the current economy or financial system, because the two are mutually exclusive.
BLS was not designed to be part of, or to work within, the existing paradigm, which makes it impossible to do so.
Decision-makers, legislators, and their influencers will not openly admit that our system is structured against equity and equality.
It is only because the system works progressively against these values that the disproportionate levels of wealth and benefits enjoyed by those in power can exist as they do.
Paying Lip Service to Parity
While the National Minimum Wage should be the benchmark or minimum earnings floor necessary for financial independence, the reality is that no person can be financially independent or live free of benefits, charity, or debt on this wage when working a typical 40-hour full-time week.
The current economic and financial system survives because the National Minimum Wage does not reflect the genuine cost of living for the lowest paid, who must then be subsidised by government benefits, seek help from charities such as food banks, or go into debt to meet the growing cost of living.
The FIAT, Neoliberal, Global-Driven Money System: The Perfect Crime?
A hard truth about our broken and collapsing system is that its design centres on wealth transfer and impoverishment, relying on the ongoing creation and addition of new money to the economy.
Currency debasement devalues the worth and ownership of the masses, while creating additional wealth for the elites and enabling them to secure property, public infrastructure, and ownership of everything devalued by their actions.
System Collapse and the Choice We Must Make
The finite lifetime of what may one day be considered one of the greatest ongoing crimes against humanity is fast approaching its end.
How the masses respond to financial and systemic collapse will dictate whether the Basic Living Standard, or a similar benchmark, forms the basis of a new people-centric economic and governance system.
This new system would put people back at the heart of everything, rather than the money-centric focus we have now.
The current system is collapsing because it is fundamentally corrupt and wrong.
Introducing a system like BLS within the current system—even under the name National Minimum Wage—could not achieve its true purpose, because implementing it honestly would speed up, if not immediately collapse the current money-centric system – and that’s why nobody in power today who benefits from this system will ever agree or willingly help for it to be done.
Embracing the Shift: Making Life About People, Not Money
If we accept and adopt an economy and governance system cantered on People, Community, and Environment, we will naturally move away from financial modelling, projections, profit margins, and all the tools that reinforce money as the only important value in life.
The Basic Living Standard provides a clear focus for the paradigm shift from money-centric beliefs to what everyone needs—not wants—and establishes the basic standard for independent living without dependency.
However, BLS is not a policy that can work in isolation or as an add-on to the current system. It is a fundamental building block of the universal change we must choose and embrace, because we cannot fix what cannot be fixed.
The Basic Living Standard: The Basis of a New Way of Living
By restarting, reestablishing, regenerating, reforming, and replacing our economic and governance systems, the Basic Living Standard becomes the benchmark for guaranteeing that the lowest paid can sustain themselves and be financially independent in return for a standard working week.
It requires all businesses, organisations, and systems within a new framework of economy and governance to realign with ensuring that every person experiences this minimum standard as the foundation of society, business, and culture.
Improving lives today really should be as simple as creating a Minimum Wage and changing everything for those who need help in one day. But changing perceptions is not the same as changing the way everyone thinks.
That is why the introduction of a system that genuinely works for everyone cannot be openly embraced before the pain of collapse and the reality it brings.
Everything we know today exists because of a system built around money as a value set—a flawed belief system we have all been conditioned to accept.
Only when this system fails and excludes people, step by step, do those affected awaken to the reality that something is fundamentally wrong.
Yet those excluded are often viewed by those still inside the system as the ones who are guilty and wrong.
Out of Our Problems, an Opportunity Awaits
The collapse offers a moment when the balance can flip, and those who have been excluded may reach a critical mass that signals to everyone participating in the money game that a better, equitable way exists.
However, ordinary people must see, understand, and accept this en masse.
Whatever happens next will lead to wholesale change—whether we choose it or simply go along with it.
Only by being aware and honest about what we need, rather than what we want, can we take the leap of faith necessary to change everything and contribute to the creation of a new system where people, community, and environment come first.
The Basic Living Standard offers a benchmark for the frameworks and opportunities of a new way of living. Yet, it will remain unknown and inaccessible to those unwilling to step away from the comfort of an unsustainable relationship with the past.
Money, democracy, ownership, business priorities, and practices are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the breadth and depth of necessary change.
Everyone must own and be part of the transformation ahead, because the change is about the needs of everyone, not just the wants of a privileged few.
There’s More…
In the coming days, and hopefully as soon as this week, my next book will be published, building on all I have been writing and sharing for over three and a half years.
Evolving directly from Our Local Future, first published in summer 2024, this latest work brings more detail and focus to the mechanics of implementing a new system for economy and governance, while simplifying previous concepts to make them more accessible and relatable.
The Basic Living Standard lies at its heart, and I am confident that we can flip everything to work for People, Community, and Economy, once we see the benefits and share the determination to implement a system and new code for life that truly works with equity and equality for all.
An Economy That Cannot Function Without Money Will Not Work for Anything Else
Coming to terms with the role money plays in our lives is challenging for most people. But the difficulty doesn’t end there.
We have come to value money not just as a tool, but as the benchmark by which we measure everything in life.
This leads us to a deeper truth—one that must be faced, rejected, and overcome: an economy that functions for money, with money, or through money cannot, will not, and does not work for anything else.
An economy should always serve People, Community, and the Environment. These are the only foundations that truly support a good life and foster genuine equality for all.
Most people instinctively reject the idea that any form of economy or trade could operate without money. This reaction stems not from truth, but from habit. We’ve grown so accustomed to money being present in every transaction that we take it for granted—not because it’s inherently necessary for exchange.
The reality is this: an economy designed for the people must be capable of operating without money, currency, or any medium whose value can be universally—or nationally—controlled or manipulated by external parties.
Instead, value must be determined solely by those directly involved: the buyer, the seller, and the facilitator (or a community body that sets local trade rules for the exchange of essential goods and services).
This doesn’t mean money or currency must be eliminated entirely. Rather, it means that their value must remain free from inflationary or deflationary forces.
Any variation in exchange value must reflect only the true worth of the goods, services, or contributions involved.
The Moneyless Economic System
The essential shift—both in action and mindset—is from a system where money is required in every transaction, to one where the exchange of life’s necessities does not inherently depend on money at all.
One of the fundamental truths of our world is that not all things are equal. However, the way we treat people and the planet should be equal and fair for all.
It follows, then, that money—or any form of currency used as a medium of exchange—should not be governed by a universal benchmark, especially when that benchmark can be manipulated by a powerful few to serve their own interests.
It is normal that we all contribute work to meet our needs. Therefore, the things we need should be accessible to everyone, based on the value of what they can offer through their work.
The imbalance in this equation today arises not from scarcity, but from the greed of those who control access to what others need.
This imbalance is reinforced by systems of privilege, power, and the illusion of ownership that steps beyond the requirements of genuine personal need.
Tuesday marked the rather strange pre-budget speech or open warning call from the Labour government, shouting all too loudly that Tax rises are inevitable and heading our way.
Whilst Farage attempted to get ahead of the game by making bold a bold statement on Monday about a future Reform government cutting spending on Welfare, and then Kemi Badenoch followed Reeves online with a speech that pretty much adds up to the same, the commonality between the positions of all these politicians will be missed by many for being remarkably similar, if indeed not the same.
Yes, you may ask yourself how exactly this could actually be. But the key element of one party raising Taxes whilst failing to cut spending, whilst others promise to cut spending whilst freezing or lowering taxes is fundamentally the same – because these approaches are all about saving the economic system and the economy that we have – and absolutely nothing to do with putting people and the lives of people first.
Few realise and even fewer understand that Reeves really isn’t the architect of the problem the U.K. (and the wider world) now faces.
That responsibly has been held and passed through many different hands over a period that exceeds decades of time, whilst a monetary and economic system has been introduced and then encouraged to take over every part of life and what we know as economy, with laws, regulation and even the legal system itself abused and manipulated to make money work in a way which suggests that its supply is endless.
Meanwhile, everything that has productive value to the U.K. and its economy has been destroyed, or outsourced, leaving almost nothing that can be used to sustain a sovereign nation behind. And now, even our ability to feed ourselves with our own farms on an accelerated pathway to being destroyed.
The growth that politicians obsess about has not been through any genuine notion or understanding of growth as everyday people and small business owners understand it but has instead been borne of the fear of people who should never have held the reins of power.
Politicians who fall over themselves to find, create and manipulate ways to ‘borrow’ more and more money in the form of the bonds that the government sells, which when funnelled into the right areas of public spending will multiply many times over as each pound changes hands between different business, with each transaction then meaning just the one pound is counted against GDP and ‘growth’, multiple times.
GDP then facilitates the accounting trick of all accounting tricks. Where public debt is never paid off but is cleverly reduced as a percentage of the ‘growing’ GDP balance, meaning that other than paying ‘interest’ on that ‘borrowing’, what is supposed to be a debt that gets smaller in relation to the U.K. productivity or GDP, should never actually need to be paid off at all.
What the politicians never understood – beyond agreeing to facilitate and legalise a system that basically made being in power as being as simple as a) doing what whoever pulls the strings tells you, and b) having to do nothing else other than save or spend, is the corrupt money and economic system that they have legitimised through deregulation and changes in all sorts of laws and rules, has legalised the theft of the business and infrastructure that once made the UK great, also enabled this Country to be able to pay its own way through the natural methods of productivity or what we might see as things like industry, which up until the Second World War were ours, and only ours.
Finding ways to create ‘growth’ has become progressively more desperate. Not just for Starmer, Reeves and co; but for every politician who has been anywhere near real power for a very long time. All as part of a process that dates back to at least 1971, when the FIAT money lie was properly embedded and the last remnants of the gold standard were left behind.
The same money and economic system that has been used to disproportionately enrich the few, whilst giving them the power to exploit and impoverish the masses, is also the reason why growing numbers of people can no longer afford to live. It’s why we have a minimum wage that doesn’t actually provide those who earn it anywhere near enough money to live independently and have lives which we would recognise as being their own.
As we now watch the welfare bill spiralling out of control – not because people don’t want to work – but because the system we have has pushed them and in many cases held them there – we are staring down the barrel of the gun that is the AI takeover, where many millions more jobs will be lost. Not because they need to be. But so those controlling this shit show can earn and profit even more.
The government is broke and broken. Raising taxes is the only way that they can service the forlorn hope that enough growth can be create that will turn on the taps of borrowed money once more, so that the real damage that is now bursting into open sight from decades of mismanagement and yes treachery can hopefully be hidden.
Then the politicians can resume taking their happy place in the limelight of the Westminster merry go round and the wheels of money myths will spin for another day and avoid hitting the ground of reality once more.
Unfortunately for us all, the reality that the U.K. has pretty much zero productivity left means that the money, cash, property and ownership we have of anything is the only potential saviour in terms of financial resources that out of their depth politicians actually have available to them.
If a new politician or political leads were able to take over today and face up to the situation and see and be honest about all of this for what it really is, they would recognise that the choice they have is to either embrace the collapse which has been inevitable from the moment that private interests took over money and the economy, or keep playing along – which means taxing and taking from everyone and everything, until everything collapses anyway, and nobody has anything left worth having – because the need to save their own skin and position dictated that there was simply no other way.
Overview
Key Messages Simplified
• The UK government is financially broken, and politicians are trapped between two bad options: accept collapse now or prolong it by taxing and impoverishing the public.
• Rachel Reeves’ pre-budget speech signals inevitable tax rises, driven by a £50bn shortfall and falling productivity.
• Other parties, like Reform UK and the Conservatives, offer economic strategies, whether through spending cuts or tax freezes, that are all variations of the same flawed approach: preserving the current economic system at the public’s expense.
Core Arguments
1. The Economic System Is Rigged
• Decades of deregulation and manipulation have created a monetary system that benefits the wealthy while hollowing out UK productivity.
• GDP growth is an illusion, inflated by repeated transactions rather than genuine value creation.
• Public debt is never truly repaid—it’s masked by GDP growth, allowing borrowing to continue indefinitely.
2. Political Consensus Protects the System, Not the People
• Whether politicians raise taxes or cut spending, they’re all trying to save the same broken system, not improve lives.
• Reeves, Farage, and Badenoch are functionally aligned, despite different rhetoric.
3. Collapse Is Inevitable Without Radical Change
• UK productivity has been destroyed, with industries outsourced and even UK agriculture now being undermined.
• AI-driven job losses will worsen inequality. Not because they’re necessary, but because they’re profitable for elites.
• The only remaining assets people and small businesses have —cash, property, and ownership—are now becoming the last financial lifelines for the government and politicians who simply shouldn’t have the power that they do.
Final Warning
• Politicians must either confront collapse honestly or continue taxing until everything collapses anyway.
• New leadership must be willing to reject the current system, rather than perpetuate it for personal or political survival.
Each of us see the problems this country is facing from different points of view.
Whilst conversations about the crisis now unfolding with a range of different people would almost certainly deliver a range of common themes, the emphasis, value or meaning of each of them will almost certainly be different.
However, the one commonality, which isn’t about anything that we all have in common at all, would be the solutions that almost all of us will have based on our own world view, that in the bigger scheme of things, may be in no way similar at all.
Ironically, because so many of us have so many interpretations of the whys, hows and whats that have got us all here, and share them with what will be a relative few, we spend next to no time – if indeed any time at all, thinking about any of the common problems that we all really do share.
We certainly don’t think about the ways we can work together to create a better way of life for everyone and then how we get the leaders and mechanisms in place that will actually get us there.
The devil is in the detail
It really is no accident that the UK is in the kind of mess that it is. Because life has become so very complicated – and deliberately so.
The more detail, the more distracting and the more impossible a solution to just about anything might seem. Even to those amongst us who really can see that the status quo cannot continue and that no matter how bought into the things we like about the way we live – which we want to keep but don’t recognise that they are actually the part of the problem that’s making everything so impossible to fix – we really do need to snap out of the fixation with noise that’s doing none of us any good.
We must recognise that the things that work well for everyone and will work even better for everyone are much simpler than what we have been convinced we need.
It is inevitable that we will keep tripping ourselves up each and every time we think of the next step as being only about putting our own self-interest first.
Unfair, Unjust and Unworkable living, demonstrated best by Tax
Perhaps the best example of how we get lost and misdirected by the detail of what needs to change for us, rather than focusing on what needs to change so that it works for everyone, relates to the question of tax, taxation and everything else that means people like you and I are stumping up cash that we could often do with being able to spend, just so we can live without debt or in some cases rely on handouts or even food banks.
Yes, even framing the ‘tax issue’ this way will make some prickly – and that really is the point.
The UK Tax code is today thought to be over 21,000 pages and 10 million words long, giving everyone the distinct impression that the subject of how the bill for government action and delivery gets paid for (ostensibly on our behalf), needs to be tailored specially to everyone as if bespoke governance is the only kind of governance that’s really fair to everyone.
This is ‘The day when Britons stop paying tax and start putting their earnings into their own pocket’. Or alternatively, the final day of the year when every penny we’ve earned goes to the government – if we start counting on January 1st, which was this year (2025) calculated as being June 11th by the Adam Smith Institute.
The reason I’m using this figure isn’t to piss anyone off by drawing attention to the fact that as an average, we arguably all work for no other reason than to keep the wheels of government turning every year for at least 5 months.
I’m doing so because it may be the only way to look at the relationship all taxpayers have with the government in the same way. Given how easy it is to get sidetracked by the question of what everyone earns!
June 11th 2025 was the 162nd day of the year (as 2025 is not a leap year), and with 365 days in 2025, this means that in comparative terms, people are giving over 44% of their earnings (162 days divided by 365 days), before they can even begin to think about what they need to spend money on, in turn before anything that they might actually want.
For a moment, let’s forget the amount anyone is actually earning for themselves, as we know that some have considerably more than others, whilst many just don’t have anywhere near what it takes to live without struggling to make ends meet, and then take it as read that everyone is giving up 44 Pence in every Pound they earn (£0.44).
After realising just how much of everything we do have taken from wages and then what we pay for that includes some form of tax, it doesn’t take much to realise that government or rather the model of government that we have is simply unaffordable, unsustainable and that we must do everything we can to find a different and much better way to pay for the things that we share.
Regrettably, the complexity of rules and regulations supposedly there to benefit and protect us don’t stop at taxation.
One of the reasons that every part of life, that doesn’t already relate to the question of financial affordability in some way, seems so difficult or restricted, is because our freedoms and therefore our independence from the system and government are already being actively controlled in many different silent rules that have deliberately been put there using the excuses like health and safety, and protecting us or someone in some way.
Even if we aren’t actively being followed around by a police officer all the time the fact that we are aware of and abiding by these rules usually adds up to being the same.
Government isn’t what it should or was ever supposed to be
Whilst many would actually like to see the wealthiest in our society directly paying at least 44% of their income to the government to help run everything outside of our front doors, we still need to keep some perspective when it comes to the obvious question we will come back to in a moment about who pays and begin with the question, ‘Does government actually work?’
Government certainly functions. Even the deepest or most vocally critical of what government in the UK does will find it difficult to argue otherwise.
Because no matter the organisation or service that comes under the rather large umbrella of government, they all continue to do something. Even if they are not delivering what we might agree to be the correct results. And that’s the only reason it can be argued that it all works.
However, functioning and succeeding are not the same thing.
The time is long overdue that we all took a very hard and questioning look at every part of government and decided what, if anything, public services should or could be; just exactly where the scope and reach of government should end, and then and only then, what many believe to be the most important question of all, ‘How whatever government and the public sector does is paid for and by whom’.
Whilst it remains the case that there are services, infrastructure and even public facing roles that every modern society needs to be provided by the community, so that everyone can have universal experiences and opportunities which will always be the same, no matter who, where or what you are, the practical approach to not-for-profit service delivery – which this really should in almost all cases be, is not the same as the public sector and system of governance that we have today.
Every part of government and the public sector that we have today is focused on delivering (political) and therefore biased agendas which will inevitably advantage some people more than others in some way. Or is all about the jobs, terms and conditions for whoever the incumbent employees are who currently have the jobs.
There have always been politicians, officers and suppliers who for many reasons have chosen to advantage themselves in some way, if and where they failed to have the integrity to exercise their roles properly. And regrettably, it’s the position of trust we gave them all that enabled them to behave in such questionable ways.
Yet even more shocking reality that we all face today is that the whole public sector and everything that runs within it is now dysfunctional in terms of delivery in some of the most critical ways.
It has only been able to become this way because decisions have either been made (or not made) at the very top by people who really should have known better, and whose actions have allowed or facilitated everything that serves the public unwinding in this way.
Money before People
Regrettably, like so many areas of life today, the role of money – which stretches far beyond the scope of the tax question that we’ve already considered – is also the key element within the dysfunctionality of government and public services across the UK. Because the poor leaders that we have are obsessed with the idea that the only way any problem can and will be fixed is by having enough money to spend – no matter where it comes from, which is itself is these days even better for some politicians who dare not do anything which could restrict what they are already committed to spend.
Idealism and agendas cost a lot of money. Because their implementation requires the creation of systems, rules and infrastructure somebody wants but nobody needs.
The very perverse outcome from decades of government and the public sector serving itself, its people and whoever or whatever influences them, is that the changes that have been made in every way imaginable to support this are now costing too much for either the Taxpayer or government itself to sustain.
We have a VERY BIG problem. Because nobody in government or who wishes to form one either can or will be honest about the true depth and breadth of the mess that the UK is now in.
With Tax rises thought to be well on their way this coming Autumn, the reality that too many of us face is the 44% (or probably much more) that we are already contributing to this public sector black hole through so many of the things that we buy, pay for or earn, are set to keep going up.
All to cover the exploding costs of incompetence, waste and the furtherance of playing up to what are very dangerous egos. Because somewhere in amongst all of this the point has been lost that government does not and never did have the right to exist over the people that it was created to represent.
For any kind of government to be unrepresentative of the people it represents, would by its very nature and intended purpose mean that it represents someone or something else.
Money: The drug wrecking everything to enrich and empower the few
The way that money actually works, how it is controlled and worst but not least, how it is actually created at will, is the truth that sits behind everything bad, that few of us will willingly believe.
It’s much easier to believe that it is all good rather than even having the potential to be bad – even when almost everyone can see the destruction that money or the lack of it is causing to everyone in some way or form.
At the heart of the money tree and its root and branch system sits the mechanisms that supposedly fund government, but actually do so by doing everything to help grow the volume of money that is in circulation, so that the public spending – and the only way that politicians know how to get themselves out of trouble, can leverage ‘growth’ so that the entire shitshow can be hid.
Unfortunately for all of us, the exponential growth of the ‘money’ that has entered circulation, particularly since the responses of government to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Covid Pandemic of 2020, has wildly contributed to the inflationary spiral that accompanies such an expansion of available cash.
The creation of money that doesn’t relate to anything else like productivity or output devalues the money and incomes that normal people already have, as well as what they have the ability to earn.
It does so at breakneck speed whilst the real value of everything is funnelled towards those who control and benefit from what is a fully legal, legitimised but nevertheless completely corrupt system that appears real, because they have typically become millionaires and billionaires in the process.
Put simply, the lowest paid and most vulnerable now have zero chance of ever being able to earn enough to live independently of benefits, charity, debt or worse.
For as long as the money madness continues, the bubble containing all of those who are branded as being a drain on the system will rapidly continue to expand.
The leadership void or black hole
When a country has such shit, incompetent leadership, and has done for the period of time that the UK has, it wouldn’t be unfair for any of us to be asking, ‘How did we get them?’ and ‘How did they get to where they are?’.
However, as we all need to realise, very few of us do ask these questions or indeed any questions that are like them. And because we don’t, each time an election takes place locally or nationally, we are, as a majority, making the same mistakes over and over again.
We are chewing at the very same shit sandwich with the bits just wrapped differently with words, rosettes and faces – all hiding the same miserable self-interested and dangerously incompetent content that always delivers outcomes that are the same.
Because we have a very bad, self-destructive habit of going along with the idea that the political fairies come along and give us all a genuine choice at election time – as all good democracies surely would, we have not only accepted that government after government and council after council has worked on all of our behalf. We have also jumped into an elephant trap of our own making that tells us these same fairies will deliver the politicians to choose from at the next election, who will sort out and solve the very same mess that they and their own kind created (with a little help from their friends) in the first place.
Sadly, there are no exceptions to the reality that we must face that there are no real leaders in politics today.
The so-called leadership we see, and what the people we identify as leaders say, is much more likely to be aligned with us hearing and seeing whatever we need to fuel our own confirmation biases than it either is or ever will be about the solutions and outcomes that we might not be ready to hear about, but nonetheless actually need.
Victim or Victimiser: There is no longer an in between
As a society and culture, we are collectively suffering what might be the worst type of addiction of all. Simply because it is majority of us are addicted rather than the few.
Meaning that that same majority is completely out of touch with the realities of what that addiction does and will remain so, until the supply runs out – which is where all those who cannot afford to live independently within the current system have or are beginning to find out.
Money, or rather the way that money is used by those who control the system – and that means government and politicians, who are very much under their control too, has become the key factor in every equation and consideration in our lives.
The role of money and its reach has dehumanised everything to the point where money and the power, influence and control it is perceived to give at every level of life has become more important than the value of life and community itself.
Few realise just how their lives are completely at the mercy of the ability to spend, borrow and achieve the momentary of transitory hit that this money centric, Moneyocracy we inhabit demands of everyone and which is enforced by the barrage of non stop marketing and remote, typical digital pressure which comes at us constantly and demands that we all conform.
Money; what it does, what it can do and what it says about you is the qualification and gatekeeper that runs through every part of functional life and if you are in, you are in and if you are out, you really are all the way out and fully at the mercy of those who continue to be ‘in’.
The tragedy of the system is the ruthless and methodical way that human behaviour has been used against the masses by the few and the experts they pay who understand it.
The sweeties and trinkets that have been flowing towards for decades have only been bettered by what has appeared to be the endless ability to secure more and more credit to buy it with, all the time becoming more and more essential to secure as real earnings and wealth have been stripped by the printing of all this extra ‘pretend’ or non existent money that even relatively wealthy people have no chance of keeping up with.
The irony is that those of us who continue to believe we benefit from what the establishment is doing and therefore acquiesce or go along with it are – through our actions – making those who cannot the victims.
All for no better reason than this whole situation could not exist without the elites treating the masses as a resource that is not real. But is instead just like oil, coal, precious metals, forests, farms, land and even animals – and just something else for those who ‘own them’ to exploit.
We all need to contribute to what we share in life. But real life cannot continue if we are required to contribute everything we have
Whilst we must all accept it is correct for everyone to contribute to the upkeep and maintenance of the systems and infrastructure that serve us all, from the moment we step onto the pavement or road outside of our homes, what we share is not and never should become more important than the right to have a fully independent, functioning and self supported life experience.
The system that we have discussed is at breaking point and cannot continue as it has, or as it is today.
Those in charge don’t know how to do anything other than borrow or tax us. And as the system can no longer sustain the borrowing that idealism and agendas have made necessary, the current government are now looking at everything they can tax beyond everything they already do.
One way or another, the system is going to collapse. Because we are all living unsustainably in a system that itself is unsustainable and at the centre of which is a plague which is the absence of real leadership, replaced with what is instead no better than incompetent management that makes it the most unsustainable part of it all.
Real life and a money-centric economy are mutually exclusive outcomes
Government already costs us way too much – even at 44%.
That’s before we even begin to consider the work and additional value to public service that charities and other nonprofit organisations bring, that we are all in one way or another contributing to too.
The whole model of economics needs to be restructured and redeveloped so that it supports life, rather than feeding off it like the giant parasite that the financial system and the role that government plays in it now is.
A realistic level for everyone to contribute to ‘the community’ would be around 10% – without any form of exception for anyone.
We should also be considering the added requirement that everyone able to work also contributes the equivalent of 10% of their working time and the skills and experience they offer, to help make our communities, their governance and infrastructure work.
Thereby creating real buy-in and ownership for what we all share, whilst drastically cutting the scope and influence of an out-of-control sector, and the ballooning costs that are actually paying for lots of agendas snd idealistic ideas, but very little that is actually about people and certainly nothing that’s doing everyone equally any good.
The identity, qualification and process of finding good leaders
Good public leaders, public representatives and public servants, would not facilitate or contribute to the creation, implementation and furtherance of agendas, ideologies and idealism that doesn’t serve the genuine best interests of those who they have been elected, appointed or recruited to serve.
Yet we have been experiencing decades of exactly that. And we have no hope that this will change if we continue to rely on a system that needs to change giving us the leaders who will then do the right thing when it comes to the delivery of that change.
Contrary to accepted thought, we do not need money to play the role across society that it has been deliberately engineered to do.
Power and control are certainly not a gift that should be secured within the hands of a distant, faceless, unanswerable few who we will never meet and whether intended or not, are treating humanity as a resource and no better than a numbers game that they can do with as they like. All as if they are now, as the result of decades of manipulating the system and bending it to their will, the new gods of everything with everyone else’s destiny theirs and only theirs to decide.
The truth that few see is that the centralisation and push for remote control of everything that globalisation and everything that walks alongside it has been, has been the active and complete restructuring of our society and culture, so that nothing can or will work without the say so and direction of those who make all the decisions.
None of this was accidental. Locality, local relationships, local businesses, local supply chains, local decision making and everything that goes with it promotes sovereignty and independence. It encourages and grows a living environment and cultural model that is good for everyone other than those who want to advantage themselves and be in power or control.
Meanwhile, the downsides of centralisation and everything that goes with it are the for every one of us to see.
However, despite the various attempts, compelling rhetoric and highly credible narratives that work so well when playing up to the addiction for material living that we currently have, there is an alternative and much better alternative to running life and everything that we and our communities need. And the real upside of this real alternative is that it centres completely around putting normal people and our local communities back in control.
The fact that generations of political leaders and those they favour or are influenced by have misused and abused their position to create a system with faux legitimacy – simply by legalising immorality to make it appear moral and therefore unquestionable, doesn’t make it right. And it certainly doesn’t become right, just because those in power today continue to insist and behave as if it is so.
We have a legitimate right to hold power and control over our own destiny.
The power of collective decision making should sit as part of a new structure of governance within our communities, amongst people and representatives who we ourselves select and know we can trust.
A moral obligation arguably also exists to reset the entire system and the various devices such as money and the tools of governance the existing system uses, so that we once again bring the focus of everything in life back to people, to humanity and to creating the best kind of environment that we can to ensure that every person has the life experience that everyone – and not just a selective few should have.
However, nobody else will step up or step in to do this for us – no matter how compelling or necessary this might seem.
Whether addicted or not, the choice and the steps necessary to return power to people and to our communities, and with it the creation of a genuine democracy we can all trust and believe in, are ours and only ours to take.
Nobody in the public sphere today can or will do this. None of them will give us back the influence that is rightly ours. Because they all imagine themselves as leaders who can only lead by having absolute control over everyone and everything else.
We don’t have a roadmap agreed for the future.
But there are plenty of ideas we can share about the outcomes that will serve all of us equally well and in a balanced, fair and just way.
This is where the conversation should start.
The one thing we can be sure of is that real leaders do actually lead. But also know that it is real equality, balance, fairness and justice that applies equally to everyone where the pathway to everything good for everyone really starts.
You don’t need to be a trained economist to know that the model of economics the world uses and the way economics is revered like work of the gods today is wrong.
In fact, it is probably better if you aren’t, and that you aren’t involved in economics, banking or corporate wealth creation either. As you are much more likely to be objective and untainted by ‘being in the tent’ in some way.
The misplaced ingenuity of the economic system and how it works has made it as complex as it is mind boggling. But that doesn’t give any surety or guarantee that how it works and what it achieves is in any way good.
For those actually thinking about why money is the common factor in everything across the world that is now going wrong, the complexity of the economic system is being exposed to light as the smokescreen that it is giving the hallucination of credibility to all the darkness and malevolence that has been so cleverly hidden within.
How can something so clever and complex not be real, is a question that many would employ as a riposte to counter the suggestion that there is absolutely no legitimacy to the FIAT monetary system, MMT, Free Markets, Globalisation and Neoliberal Orthodoxy that we have been subjected to for 5 decades or more.
But isn’t it the case that any good game that feels good to play is only good for those playing, because of the complexities and therefore levels for ‘the players’ that are involved?
How many carrots does it cost to buy a wheel?
To really understand why the world now has got the relationship with money so wrong – even though it was deliberately made this way by corrupt interests who have changed the laws so that their crimes have been legitimised and wiped clean – we really do need to stop for a moment, count to ten and think about what money is, or rather was really intended for.
In so far as the accepted narrative of human history goes, the whole pathway of our development has been progress that moved towards today in a linear fashion, stepping off from very primitive times when man couldn’t even speak, let alone farm for food.
The point here is not to argue whether or not any accepted version of the evolution of man is true. But to set the first picture back at a point when everything was considerably more simple. Long before more and more of those complex ideas or complexities became involved in how people trade.
Then, as now; different people did different things and produced different foods, goods and services to others as the direct result of whatever it was that they did.
For the purposes of this explanation, let’s assume that there are already fishers, farmers, growers, millers, bakers, saddlers, farriers, blacksmiths, cheese and butter makers, butchers, water carriers and pretty much someone or some small business providing all the different forms of foods, goods and services that we need to provide for life, from around a village green.
Some days a baker doesn’t want fish and a fisher certainly doesn’t want a saddle or leather goods daily. Even though they probably need something made to protect them against the elements from time to time.
However, everyone needs something regularly. Whether it’s for their own consumption, or it’s there to help them complete and provide output or goods from their own work.
Bartering and exchange, or swapping goods or even hours of work are of course a very straightforward and sensible way for two parties to make a transaction when one has something available that the other needs.
But the real benefit of bartering and exchange comes from being localised. And its weakness soon showed when the transactions were required to take place over distance, or for items – like that saddle or something equally special – which in day-to-day terms, are rather obscure.
Money, or coins of some kind used at first, created a transactional value, or to be more accurate, a medium of exchange.
The creation of a medium of exchange meant that one person’s goods or efforts could be exchanged for coins that could then be exchanged for whatever that person wanted themselves. All without there being any excessive delays or the need for a very complex or convoluted chain of different transactions to be involved.
The beauty of the system, at that point, was that the money in use could only relate to the agreed value of the transaction.
It would have been good for everyone, once the related practicalities involved were ironed out, if that system had continued without further ‘progress’. The relationship we all have with money could then have remained the same in relative terms – as that unit of exchange and nothing more.
Unfortunately for mankind, progress very quickly created wealth disparity or what we call wealth inequality today.
This imbalance was itself made progressively worse by the inter-generational transfer of property and wealth (and the power it buys) which has snowballed over time. Quite literally meaning that people can be advantaged or disadvantaged by birth, even before any one of the many other factors that skew life opportunities can come into view.
One of the most unfortunate elements of the human condition is the innate desire to always possess and accumulate more. For no better reason than the basic fear we all have of experiencing lack. With the rather perverse dimension that those who have more guard it more jealously than others, probably because they believe they have much more to lose.
The power and influence that money has given people who really weren’t fit to have the responsibility they had over the lives of others, has only got worse over time.
As industry and technology has improved and made it easier and easier to avoid genuine consideration for the consequences of their actions upon others, the human cost has become increasingly irrelevant, whenever the opportunity to make more profit was involved.
When promissory notes or what we know as cash came into being, a giant leap forward was taken towards the system that we have now, where the accepted wisdom is that the value of the money – or what we are agreeing to exchange as being representative of money – is being exchanged under a mutual understanding of trust, that is shared across society, and not just between the people where the specific transactions are involved.
Trust is of course belief. And as those with power and influence at the centre of the banking system realised that having currencies pinned or anchored to anything meant that they could only ever use or suggest they were able to use the money or sensible multiples of the money that they knew they either held, were owed or could earn within a certain time frame, they knew that they would have to create a new system that would release these chains. So that in terms of the money that they could create and use in the future, the only restraints would be dictated by them.
We should be under no illusion that this process of creating an economic system that could lead to limitless wealth and the control of everything for those who controlled it, wasn’t a plan that developed overnight.
The economic system that we have today was created and implemented over decades and carefully constructed so that it would make life much easier for the interests and in particular the politicians who needed to be bought. So that the useful idiots who gained power under the illusion of democracy would obligingly pave the way with system changes that have legitimised this otherwise criminal system at every step of the way therein.
When everything is about money, the answers to every question can only be found in monetary terms.
The money we have today and the way that it comes to and is taken from us – the economy – is the direct result and design of this massive, corrupt and inhuman game that the worlds wealthy, powerful and influential – the elites, decided to play.
The money we have in our pockets, bank accounts and have the ability to earn changes value quickly at the will or as a result of the actions of others.
Meanwhile, the direction of travel for the general population has always been that we are and always would become increasingly poor, as the value of the money which is typically what the poorest in society have only been able to hold, decreases faster than the rate at which our skills and experience develop or there is any chance to earn more so that we can keep up with or counteract the fall.
It was always intended to be this way. As those with wealth always knew that the real wealth was the control of assets and anything and everything that could then rented out to everyone. All as the world became increasingly poorer and their ability to grow control and rent out everything the money they created had bought them gave them even more.
It is ironic that billionaires now have so many zeros on their balance sheets. As everyone who has been a victim of what is probably mankind’s greatest con is now beginning to realise that they have been left with zero. Or if they are lucky, a diminishing amount of liquid capital that isn’t worth a lot more.
I would like to add at this stage that this essay is not an attack on any individual for whatever it is that they may believe they possess, control or have influence over today. Many of those with excessive wealth, power and influence today have just played along with the rules of a very clever game. One that has removed the balance, Justice and morality from every part of life and has done it so successfully that the poison it has replaced values with is embedded across cultures and normal life to the point that even the academics and leaders in finance and economics believe in the legitimacy and correctness of an entire system which is bewilderingly anti-human at its very core.
In simple terms
The simplicity of the mechanics of an economic system and more specifically a monetary system that revolves around private banks creating money from nothing – a process which is carefully hidden from view – so that government always looks like it is borrowing or rather selling bonds to private interests to finance everything, whilst those banks also lend money that doesn’t exist to us through loans, finance, credit cards and even pay day loans, really do make it horrendously difficult to accept that this is one massive confidence scam. Especially as everything is hidden in plain sight by little more than the disinterest that we typically have in anything that goes beyond having our perceived needs met.
However, let’s think about it as if we were reading a story about two friends at the start of their working lives; one with the motivation to work hard and deliver through their own industry, whilst the other has had life easy and just wants to find another easy way to get more, and we can then perhaps see how this gargantuan scam rolls out when exposed to light.
The diligent and easy living friends talk one day, looking at property that they would both like to own.
The diligent friend commits to working hard and earning the money to buy what they would like to own and leaves, promising to catch up when this outcome has been achieved.
Meanwhile, the easy living friend knows that he has the contacts and ideas necessary to go away and print enough of the money he needs to buy that same property today. And that he can do this from nothing, which will work out well for him but not his friend, so long as he doesn’t speak openly about what he’s doing. Uses his contacts to change a few rules so that what he’s doing is legal. And he doesn’t keep printing more money to buy everything else so that it becomes obvious what he’s been doing all along. Afterall, nobody will know if he uses the money he then earns from renting out that property to pay all that money back…
The money that the easy living friend has created, has just increased the amount of money that exists.
This means that because there isn’t actually any more property, production or anything else with ‘real’ value that corresponds to the increasing pool of money, all of the money that’s available is now worth much less than it was.
The real world impact of this fantasy being made reality is that the diligent friend will have to worker harder, longer or both, to pay for the property that the easy living friend has just taken without effort.
What is more, the easy living friend is now offering to rent the property he’s bought to the diligent friend who now realises that he may never be able to afford to buy it.
If you can see and understand the basic mechanics of how this situation works, you only need scale up the same principles to understand how the massive, growing amount of money – and the ridiculous inflation and the growing cost of living problem we are all facing, has been created and is now growing at a ridiculous rate.
It is an unavoidable, inescapable fact that if one person or set of people are able to buy real, tangible things that have value to us – whatever those things might be – with money that doesn’t actually exist, they can take lawful possession of those things and do with them whatever they so choose – as any legitimate owner would be able to do so.
However, the illegitimate creation of the money and the legitimised theft of assets, businesses, infrastructure and everything else imaginable that it has financed means what they have been doing is just one part of a multifaceted crime against everyone else.
The crimes that follow the created money pathways include the impoverishment of the masses.
Yet they become even worse when we consider that public services and infrastructure such as utility companies have been bought up with fake money.
Entire business sectors like the pub trade and small, local shops have also all become unviable because fake money has financed industry expansion of big retail and all their centralised supply chains, that would not otherwise have been possible.
To cap that all off, markets and the practices of big business and finance have been deregulated through the drive for ‘Free Markets’. So that those making money can make more and more, because the rules that once protected us all and small independent businesses have been removed, whilst regulations that cost us, exclude us and disqualify us from our own independence and from taking part have instead been imposed under the pretence that they help and protect us.
The whole pathway of illegitimate money creation using the FIAT system leads or rather has led to the doorstep of nothing less than worldwide system control.
The only thing that now gives us the opportunity to save ourselves from a very challenging fate is the reality that those with their hands in the till have already broken too many of the rules of their own game.
The whole system is starting to collapse before the great reset or imposition of the next new world order has conclusively been imposed.
The Future of Money
I could stop there. But in lifting the stone or exposing what lies beneath it to light I am certainly not alone.
Before continuing further, I would encourage anyone who has read this far to do their own research and use as many different sources and mediums as they can to uncover and draw their own conclusions about all of this and what is really going on.
My real interest and passion is what happens next for us and for our future. Once we have got through this horrid time and whatever turbulence and challenges that we now face, once we have got to the other side and left them all behind.
What we should perhaps all be able to conclude – once we have dealt with our own addictions and attachment to the way that endless money supposedly works for us all now – is that money should never hold its own value. Should never be speculated upon, and the power of its creation and policing should never be under private control.
What is more, the value of legal currency should never be pinned to anything that can itself vary in value, especially when whatever that currency is pinned to is in short supply or can be controlled manipulatively or otherwise at will.
People are the only legitimate economic constant
If everyone did what they do, only took what they need and were happy to share or exchange what they didn’t with whoever needed it in return for something they did in return, there would never be need of money of any kind, ever again.
Whilst I can see that to many the idea that everyone just does what they do today for nothing and that in return, they get just enough of what they need of everything else in return might seem fanciful, this suggestion does nonetheless make a very important point about everyone only taking or expecting to have access to what they actually need.
Need is NOT the same thing as want.
Too much want is what has led to a situation where there are people right across the world today who don’t have access just to the things that they need.
An economy – a legitimate economy – will function only to provide for the needs of people within it.
There isn’t an argument that can counter this legitimately. Any argument made against this, no matter how compelling or well elucidated, is inevitably built upon one person being able to obtain or accumulate more things than others. Because the alternative system favours their interests more.
These are the fundamental basics of greed.
Locality based economies and economics
Everyone who can, should play their part or contribute to the function of a legitimate economy, in whatever role they are able. So that everyone who is active, then comes together to become the sum of all the parts – with the sum of those parts being the community, which because of what members can do together collaboratively, will be greater than what everyone would be able to do by working alone.
The value of a legitimate economy should therefore be based upon the number of people who are active within it and include what they input or contribute to that economy individually and therefore collectively.
If every member of the community does what they should be doing, and the needs of everyone being met are always prioritised and planned for or budgeted for as they should be, the whole system will move closely towards self-containment, with the amount of money in circulation always being closely related to the number of heads within the population.
A localised and online local market exchange system that focuses on bartering and exchange for foods, goods, services and work being made universally available alongside cash and digitally transferable money, should also exist so that everything works in a circular fashion and everyone’s particular needs are always met in ways that favour everyone.
The needs for public service, infrastructure, community activities and everything beyond should be met by everyone who is able to work volunteering the equivalent of 1/10 of their working week and their skills or experience to the community. Thereby meeting whatever needs and community income generation requirement there may then be.
Excess goods produced, surplus service capacity and over production which is specialist to the community would also be traded with other communities and traded where any additional requirements beyond the scope of community production exist.
The blight of greed-driven thinking
The only reason that an economic system that will work like this, which promotes freedom and financial independence of the masses, would not work, is because those who would no longer be able to define themselves as being different to others through the accumulation of additional and unnecessary wealth will argue that it isn’t practical and cannot work.
Even within a genuinely egalitarian approach to economics based along these lines, it is a fact that some could always do better, because they choose to do so through their own industry. Whilst many others – and the majority at that, would be happy to just make the contribution that was absolutely necessary, knowing that they would be happy, healthy, safe and secure because all of their basic and essential needs were being met.
It is part of the capitalist myth that entrepreneurialism and creativity in commerce cannot exist when the ability to earn or rather profit is capped.
The real truth of the matter is that everyone will be productive and make a valuable contribution when anything that goes beyond what it takes to look after themselves and those who depend on them is a choice and the ability to just live a normal life without dependency on anything beyond themselves hasn’t been denied by the actions of others.
Nobody has the right to take or have more than they need and certainly not when it can only come to them through the exploitation and infliction of pain and suffering of any kind upon others.
Adam Tugwell 