MONEY OR YOUR LIFE
(Author's Preface)
The life of modern man depends upon his mastery of money.
Our political money system is breaking down and must be displaced
by one that serves the needs of modern exchange. Otherwise our
civilization will perish.
As technological improvements tend to specialize and confine
each man's production, the need for the exchange of products increases,
and, therefore, man's dependence upon money makes the mastery
of this vital agency more and more imperative.
Production grows more mechanical, while consumption, on the other
hand, has no machine technique; it still operates by our hands
and bodies. Therefore there can never be mass consumption to coordinate
with mass production. Consumption remains private and individual.
Production grows more interdependent—requiring the coordination
of many machines and many hands—while the function of
consumption cannot be shared or mechanized; it is human, individual,
self-dependent.
To fulfill the function of consumption (without which production
is purposeless) the individual must be, as buyer, a self-starter
and self-stimulator, and therefore, money power, sufficient to
buy his production, must be at the command of every man. Otherwise
the people cannot coordinate their consumption with their production
and this deficiency causes the production machine to clog and
recoil with vicious consequences. Not only are these economic
results painful in themselves, but they cause the people to turn
to political intervention as a remedy, and this complicates the
problem and increases the peril.
WE MUST HAVE LESS RATHER THAN MORE POLITICAL INTERVENTION AND
THIS BOOK WILL SHOW THAT IT IS POLITICAL INTERVENTION THROUGH
THE MONEY SYSTEM THAT BREEDS ALL OUR ILLS. PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
MUST, IF IT IS TO BE PRESERVED AND PERFECTED, HAVE A PRIVATE ENTERPRISE
MONEY SYSTEM. THE POLITICAL MONEY SYSTEM IS INHERENTLY ANTIPATHIC
TO PRIVATE ENTERPRISE AND INEVITABLY TENDS TO COMMUNIZATION.
Our mass production power must be balanced by our individual
buying power and our buying power is dependent upon our individual
money-creating power. Money cannot meet modern needs by descending
to the people; it must rise from them. Until this is comprehended
mass production must continue to miscarry. We, as consumers, must
literally make money or be stymied. Government cannot assume this
responsibility for us. Every individual producer must exert the
right and assume the duty of creating money, if there be need
therefore, to buy the value of his own production. There cannot
be full distribution of wealth without full distribution of money
power. He who would make must also take—in ratio. Each
of us must have the ability to create fountain pen money with
our own hands. Machine production must be coordinated with handmade
money.
Recurrent business slumps, mal-distribution, over-production,
unemployment, panics and depressions are but the gentler reminders
that our industrial life is in danger. In the end war presses
a gun against our head with the demand—money or your life.
Must our economic and political maladies be compounded into periodic
cataclysms and our civilization be destroyed before we master
money?
Typical of the stress laid by economists upon the need for sustained
purchasing power is the following quotation from "The Dilemma
of Thrift" written in 1926 by William Trufant Foster and
Waddill Catchings:
"In fact, adequate, sustained consumer-demand
would do more than any other means now within human control
toward increasing wealth, abolishing poverty, maintaining employment,
solving labor problems, increasing good will among men generally,
and maintaining the peace of the world. No means of preventing
war holds out such large immediate possibilities as this...
It is, therefore, difficult to exaggerate the importance of
finding a means of sustaining purchasing power. The next world
war, if it does come, may well be the last war—at least
the last war in which the present nations will have any interest,
for it may well destroy civilization itself."
Well, "the next world war" has come and is upon us,
and whether or not it is leading to the destruction of civilization
will not be determined by the outcome of the military phase of
the war. The issue cannot be determined by military victory. Its
cleavage is not the battle front. Both Axis and Allied Nations
are committed to the system of government-created purchasing power,
whether they be classed as fascist, communist or democratic. The
broad question that will determine the fate of humanity is whether
the evil practice of synthetic buying power by governments shall
continue to the inevitable collapse of the social order or whether
the producer of wealth will exert his natural buying power and
thus avert disaster.
Without reservation I assert that the whole fate
of society hinges upon the one question of whether it can at this
critical juncture gain mastery through the mastery of money and
thus coordinate purchasing power with producing power. The issue
is—money or your life.
—E. C. Riegel
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