When “we the people” understand
money, we, the people, will issue money for the things we want and
not for the things we don't want. When we, the people, understand
money we will reclaim the right to issue the currency. When we the
people decide we want something that will increase the common good,
we will issue the money to accomplish it.

This is possible because when we
understand the monetary system we will know how very determining it
is. It determines how we conceive of ourselves and society because
it determines what we must do to obtain the money we need to live our
lives. Understanding money is crucial to creating a just,
sustainable and abundant society because it is the monetary system
that gives rise to our current, unjust, unsustainable and inequitable
society. This can be readily appreciated once you know that all our
money is created as debt to profit the banks.

Believe it or not, if everyone paid off
all their debts there would be no money. Because the money is issued
as the principle of a loan and the interest is never created there is
always more money owing than exists. In order for there to be enough
money to pay the interest new loans must continually be originated
and so the debt must continually grow. Banks do no lend their money,
or their depositors money, as most people believe, but create the
money they lend as an accounting entry – your promise to pay
becomes their asset and the money they lend you is their
corresponding liability, which they write into your account. They
monetize your promise to pay! When you lend someone money, or invest
it, you have to lend money you actually have (you don't get to create
it), you have to forgo the use of your money, and you put it at risk,
so you feel justified in charging interest. It is because you don't
know that the bank just issues the money they lend you that you feel
the bank is also justified in charging interest. The problem here is
that banks, controlled by the privately owned Federal Reserve System,
determines how much money is in circulation and therefore whether
there is enough money available for everyone to meet their
obligations. And these obligations arise because money is issued as
debt.

Bubbles (think Dot com and housing
bubbles) and crashes (think October 2008), inflation and deflation,
recessions and depressions, are all a function of how much money
banks are lending. If you doubt this then just think through what
happened in the fall of 2008. More or less from one day to the next
banks stopped lending and the housing bubble burst! The bailout was
supposed to assure that banks would keep lending but they didn't,
they reduced the money supply by a third – similar to the Stock
Market crash of 1929 as detailed by Milton Friedman. What you don't
know, and Milton Friedman doesn't say, is that this time they
significantly increased the permanent money supply. Since all money
is created as debt by an accounting entry, as the debt is repaid the money is extinguished.  The
permanent money supply has to be the debt that is never paid down.
That is the Federal Debt.  (Andrew Jackson was the last president to pay it off, or even pay it down)  And to top it all off we can only borrow
money for what the banks consider profitable to them!

When we understand money, we will sit
together in town meetings and imagine how we would like our society
and our community to be. We will come up will all kinds of
wonderful, inspiring ideas, and there will be capable people inspired
to take on these projects. Rather than wonder where we will get the
money to implement them, or take on debt, we will issue the money, debt and interest
free, to accomplish them. When these projects succeed they will
increase the common good and generate ongoing value, and we will be
able to issue more money to represent that value. If a project fails
we will know that there is too much money in circulation and some has
to be removed. We will rediscover the lost science of money, and
because we know that money always only represents the real goods and
services available and because we know that we have the right to
issue the money needed to increase the common good we will be able to
create the society of our dreams. We will fund what we want, and we
won't fund anything we don't want.

In order for us to get to this place in
which we can create a just, sustainable and abundant society we need
community divisions of the Common Good Bank, which, because of the
design of the bank, allow us to compete with the existing debt based
monetary system and still issue money for the things we
democratically decide we want, debt and interest free!