L. W. Nicholson
As the national debt goes up, the value of the dollar goes down. The federal debt, now (Oct. 12, 2001) at $5.8 TRILLION, plus all other government debts including state, county, municipal, plus all private debts now total some $34 Trillion and is increasing at about a trillion per year. AND, the value of the dollar has declined to less than 10 cents since 1940.
Further, there is no budget surplus, the debt has increased every year for at least the past 30 years. You may log on to the Treasury Department’s web site to verify this.
This uncontrollable debt simply proves that the monetary system is not working in this technological age. An entirely new economic control technique is absolutely necessary to avoid another major depression even more devastating than that of the 1930’s. This is a fact of life as the new millennium gets underway and we will do well to plan accordingly. The “Barter System” has become fully antiquated by the advance of technology and the growth of extraneous energy consumption. This “system” must, after thousands of years of use, be discarded and replaced with methods more compatible with the age in which we now live.
As if the above problems were not enough for humans to adjust too during this century, we are also faced with unprecedented environmental problems. Resource depletion, (including soil, water, mineral, and fossil fuels) Air pollution, global warming, etc. All the countries environmentalist, all those who are expecting to solve the looming energy crisis under the dictates of a monetary system which, itself, is approaching a condition of collapse, must begin a major search for an economic method which can allow the greatest ecological change in human history to be made.
Can one actually expect that the trillions of dollars required to turn around this mad rush toward an environmental collapse can be made available within the time frame required, by use of a “Barter System” “designed” for conditions previous to recorded history, by use of dollars which must be kept scarce in order to have value? We must wise-up and realize that this “system” is not as important as human survival.