Our Disadvantage Derives from Ignorance

Here are a couple of snippets from Earle Davis's Vision Fugitive, which was published over forty years ago. As relevant as ever, it would seem. (My underlining.)

Our disadvantage derives from ignorance of what is going on and lack of power to change the procedure. Pound insists that banking privilege in creating credit is completely different from freedom of business in all other matters of production and distribution. The idea that politicians would ruin the economy by using the government's right to print and issue money seems to him to be puerile. No politicians, he says, could hurt the general economy more than private unregulated money creators have done throughout modern history. (83)

When banks call loans or restrict credit, the mount of real money in circulation goes down in proportion. Call enough loans and depression is a cinch. Pound's argument is that no business class has the right to expand or constrict a nation's credit deliberately. This right is the privilege of the nation as a whole, and nations should take back from the banking class the special privilege which is now theirs, the ability to control the flow of credit and the distribution of goods that depend upond the amount of money in circulation. (84)

As I see it, the present system was defended by the idea that politicians would botch up the credit system. We now know that private bankers are just as capable of that.