I don't deserve credit on this article. The work was Jason's, and several other of TOD staff reviewed it and provided input, including Nate and Ace. I did the HTML and a bit of final editing.

Does the current monetary system serve us, or are we slaves to it?

Do you believe in the illuminati, New World Order? The creature from Jekyll Island?

Or...

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." - Robert J. Hanlon (though perhaps Heinlein or even Goethe)

Nevertheless, we are all born into it, and have been for at least 300 years, which gives an idea of the probability of changing it for the better.

Energy flow is the key to all activity on earth. Economics is a book keeping system, a way of using an abstraction such as money to allocate available energy and resources. If the public can be kept ignorant of means of the bookkeeping the bookkeepers will be king of a mass of ignorant slaves. Money is the means and the end is control.

"[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country, and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion, by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks, which were themselves, private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control, and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups."
~Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966) p.324

If you wish to believe it was just happenstance that it turned out this way that is your choice. The modern global finacial system and "globalization" in general represents exactly what Rome stood for but on a global scale. It offers the least "happiness" to the greatest number of people.

“America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.”
~Arnold Toynbee, 1961

Since most of us who have access to computers and an education are amongst the lower tiers of the “rich” it is hard to gaze out into the world with unfettered eyes. The fact remains that the “wealth” we now posses has been stolen; our civilization has been built with military power and conquest and there are no signs of changing that course.

“What we call progress is a mysterious marriage of creativity and plunder. Civilization has flowered when human beings have devised ingenious new ways to organize production and social life, but such organization has usually been accomplished with stolen goods…. Under girding [its] extraordinary achievements in art philosophy, literature, and statecraft [are] military power and conquest.”
~Richard J Barnet

As we collectively head down the road of diminishing returns any and all arguments will be conceived to maintain the current state of wide spread inequality. All the arguments will be thinly veiled lies carefully crafted to work in the favor of the global capital Empire.

"Wherever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise."
~Reinhold Neibuhr

==Angry Chimp

thats the paradox of materialism. . what else are we slaves to?