Goods, Money and Purchasing Power: Who Owns Money?, 2

So if those quids are charged with an interest, they are not yours: they are on loan to you. Where is “the property of money”, then? It is with those who loan it: banks; central banks and other banks as well. We’ll not get into detail now, here the point is that if they can give it in exchange for purchasing power it is their property, and even more that if they can afterwards charge an interest and demand it back, it continues to be their property, not yours.

You and your fellows are like the parts of the body, to exchange your products and purchasing power to survive you need the blood circulation; and you find yourself borrowing that blood from someone who charges a bloodsucking interest on it and can demand it back at will, leaving you without blood.

We’ve said that basically purchasing power is acknowledged production: you produce a product, the product is acknowledged as valuable so the acknowledged product is purchasing power. Its purchasing power gets born after it is produced, when it is acknowledged as valuable. It is worth noting how this takes place even before it is accepted in exchange for the first time, because the reason it is accepted in exchange is obviously that it is acknowledged as valuable. The product you just produced is yours, so you give it in exchange, and therefore its purchasing power is yours. Purchasing power is earned with production.

In producing something one incurs in certain costs and work, so there is a certain ratio between the amount of these and the resulting purchasing power produced. Moreover, supply and demand can have an influence, in that if the product is scarce and needed, its purchasing power is raised, or the other way around. This ratio is a matter of ethics and exchange: does one give a fair amount in exchange for what one receives, or is one stealing purchasing power?