Letters - 16 December 2011
From legalised counterfeiting to the winter fuel allowance
Legalised counterfeiting
Sue Holden (4 November) says that ninety-seven percent of our money has been invented by commercial banks. I do not know if her horrifying percentage is correct, but, however much it is, it is too much – it is nothing but legalised counterfeiting.
Fundamentally, an economy comprises nothing other than the voluntary exchange of real goods and/or services by members of a community. Such exchanges are two-way processes and money was invented to facilitate these by acting as a record of value between the two halves of the process. This enabled them to be decoupled from one another, in time and location, so freeing economic activity from the constraints of bartering.
Money was so widely adopted that ordinary people came to believe that economic exchanges could not take place without its involvement. Consequently, money (rather than goods and/or services) became the determinant of economic life. This misperception suits the state and bankers. Before the dawn of digital electronics, money had to have a noncounterfeitable physical form to keep the trust of the public, and someone had to produce this money. The state and bankers leapt at the opportunity the digital age offered because, along with producing the money, it gave them a lien on the economic life of the community.
Money is just a commonly accepted record of value within a community and it only works if it is a truthful and honest record. It belongs to the community – not to some special interest group within it. In order to get a new perspective on money, Friends could have a look at www.ces.org.za; CES is a web-based monetary system that anybody can join.
Rory Short
Robin Hood Tax
I agree with David Pawlyn (2 December) that it is desirable for a Robin Hood Tax to be implemented globally and that, were it to be implemented on an EU only basis, it would undermine the competitiveness of London, Paris and Frankfurt relative to New York.
There is the factual question of whether tax revenues from the UK financial sector would rise or fall. But suppose they fall. Should we not seek to discover what is right? Is it more important to slow down the speculation that raises the price of food for the hungry, steals houses and businesses from the vulnerable, takes land from poor farmers and indigenous people, has put Greece on the rack and threatens to wreck the Euro – or is it more important to maintain UK tax revenue?
The City of London, of course, resents any regulation and bankers always threaten to move abroad to avoid it. However, practices are allowed in London, such as naked short selling*, which are forbidden in New York and many other countries. The City should not profit from immoral and destructive practices. It seems that, in the EU, it is the UK that opposes the Robin Hood Tax that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the European Commission support. Though their position may be a pragmatic one, we should be ashamed that David Cameron, on our behalf, opposes the tax when it would combat so much harm.
*Naked short selling means selling shares today when you haven’t got them but think you can pick them up cheaper tomorrow (before you have to deliver the certificates), so making a profit.
Gill Westcott
Reaching out
I have two suggestions:
1. To change time of Meeting: On Saturday evening some people stay awake longer than usual and especially young people in clubs until morning. So, on Sunday morning almost no young people are at Meeting. Shall we hold onto church tradition or adapt to the reality of the twenty-first century?
2. Each week a group of three to five people visit another Meeting so we can meet and share different experiences.
Galib Drakovac
Winter fuel allowance
Unlike Ioan Thomas (9 December), I credit the winter fuel allowance to the energy element of our household budget. Subsequently, I send to an appropriate charity, earmarked for mitigating fuel poverty, a sum equal to the winter fuel allowance. It is paid for out of my taxed earned income; so it is, of course, eligible for Gift Aid. Strictly legal and in ‘right ordering’, I submit.
John Bowers
The Palestine problem
‘Believing too much and thinking too little’, as Alan Billings pointed out recently, is part of the human condition. This human frailty leads us to form assumptions about issues that are far from our daily lives on the basis that what we read and hear about them must be so. In these frantic times we have not the space to sift through the overwhelming mass of information available about a particular situation, let alone ask the why and how of it.
The existential insecurity of Israel versus the inalienable right of Palestinians to be human is an issue that, with the passage of time, has become increasingly confounding. Herbert Dobbing was imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the first world war, in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s birth. From 1948 to 1957, he found himself in Lebanon as head of Friends High School. Cause for Concern – A Quaker’s view of the Palestine Problem is a slim volume of what Herbert searched for and found to be at the root of the turmoil we see today, lapping at our own shores. The facts he puts before us stare us in the face and go a long way to dispel the cobwebs that the passage of time has woven into myths.
‘A single wrong turning at the outset leads the traveller far from home; a single unchecked assumption leads reason woefully astray’, Herbert says in chapter four. His experience of the Light has made us bring over to London from Beirut the remainder of the 1970 print run of Cause for Concern, for sharing with Friends. Please contact either of us for a copy.
Jonathan Coulter (jcoulter01@yahoo.com)
Qavi (qavima@gmail.com)
Christian language
There is surely not one nontheist Friend who would scorn any part of the traditional Christian language. That may be the attitude of atheists in the Dawkins mould but not among Quakers who value their fellowship with all regardless of how they would describe the Light that guides and inspires them.
Even if some of us are not comfortable with ‘the God language’ that does not mean we do not understand and deeply respect it. And true, we may, any of us, be led astray by unconfessed personal impulses or by an evil spirit but these may equally find expression under the concept of God. Look at the history of Christianity itself.
I like to think that what holds us together in real unity of spirit is the vibrancy of continuous Quaker action in the world – good and loving and peaceful – and the way we can share all our concerns and support and influence each other, even in silence.
Ruth Jennings
I do understand the concern of Frank McManus (28 October). It is frightening that ideas can change.
When George Fox challenged the established church of his day, most people were appalled. Fox himself might be appalled at some of the changes that have happened during the past 350 years. For example, few Quakers still use numbers for the days of the week and the months of the year. He may even have been surprised at the acceptance in the twenty-first century of homosexuality as normal, the refusal to beat children, the abolition of slavery and the fact that there is no heaven up above the clouds.
Little did Fox know, however, that theological scholarship during the intervening years would bring about an appreciation of the multiplicity of religious faiths in this world, and the subsequent realisation that all so-called Holy Scriptures were actually written by men, who imagined Gods. Hence such different interpretations of just who or what God may be. Even in Fox’s day the scriptures were not taken literally by the elders of Balby, as they were by other Christians.
Humanity is coming of age, and no longer needs a heavenly parent on whom to rely.
Nick Bagnall
The correspondence concerning the value of the word spiritual leads me to worry about the debate on spirituality among Friends. One Friend questions the relevance of the word while another dualistically contrasts spirit and flesh and quotes Paul of Tarsus to back him up. In fact Paul uses three different words: spirit, body, and flesh. About the body he is neutral. Paul contrasts spirit with flesh, in the sense of a dual between the timeless (eternal) and the temporary (earthbound). But Christianity in general is ambiguous about the body – after all, orthodox Christianity talks of God becoming flesh and dwelling amongst us.
Can we get away from the old dualisms? Can we not respect flesh and the earth as embodiments of Spirit, so that the way we live our lives in the here and now is a witness to our reverence of the divine? Perhaps after this life is over and our bodies have decayed, we may have another way of seeing – we’ll find out sooner or later. Our task now is to cherish the fragile and honour the unique incarnation of Spirit which we each are. We are spiritual beings of flesh and blood. That’s what makes us whole women and men.
Harvey Gillman
