Money as Debt

I found the film, "Money as Debt" to be rather frustrating. In a sense, it told me many of the things I already know, but that I do not usually think about. For instance, it never occurred to me that without debt, we would have no money. I had held the belief that once more people were out of debt, we would ultimately have more money. However, this is clearly not the case.

The video explains that in order to solve this issue, we first need a different conception of money in general. I believe that many people see money as a simple piece of paper that we can always make more of. We take the amount of money that we have individually seriously, but I do not think that we take the concept of the actual printing of money seriously enough. In other words, we do not necessarily care so much where our money comes from, just as long as we have it. It does not occur to us that every loan from the bank is ultimately pushing our country deeper and deeper in debt, as long as we ourselves have the loan, we're happy.

The video explained that when money was created from gold and silver, it was much easier for people to keep tabs on the amount of money they had because they would have to physically locate more gold and silver in order to create more. Now money can be created at anytime, basically.

Grignon challenges us to ask four questions to ourselves and our governments. Number three states asks "How can a money system based on perpetual accelerating growth be used to build a sustainable economy?"

My response is simply that it is not logical to believe that perpetually accelerating growth and sustainability are compatible. There is no way that we can keep growing as we are if we want our economy to remain sustainable...and I think that this is something we are already seeing in our society today. I, of course, do not have all of the answers on how we can possibly change our growth or our sustainability, but I do believe that we need for others to see how this is a problem and that these two factors are incompatible.