The power to create money is equivalent to splitting the atom.
John Law (1671--1729) is a forgotten prophet of economic theory, though everything we do today is based on his Money and Trade Considered: with a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money (1705). Schumpeter described him as “in a class by himself … in the front ranks of monetary theorists of all time.”
But it was Marx that really understood Law, “the pleasant character mixture of swindler and prophet.” Law’s misuse of his own theory exposed in embryo, spectacularly (and disastrously), how the stock market and speculation would lead to “a new mode of production”, where “enrichment through exploitation of the labour of others [becomes] the purest and most colossal form of gambling and swindling,” reducing “more and more the number of the few who exploit the social wealth.”
1893, 1929, 2008, anyone? Law was dismissed as a charlan and murderer,* the confidence man behind the Mississippi bubble in 1720. A Scottish economist who believed that money was only a means of exchange that did not constitute wealth in itself, and that national wealth depended on trade. Did I hear ‘banking is theft’ and ‘globalization’?
Gold as money: misplaced concreteness
Banks are behind our boom-and-bust economy, creating money in the form of loans (mostly to industry, but also mortgages), conducting our industrial policy behind our backs. Why? Are they really so omniscient, so capable of steering us into a bright future? Shouldn’t they have public policy shaping their lending? Isn’t charging interest on money 
Seventeen years on, there is little that remains of 9/11 as physical evidence. The site of the tragedy was quickly cleaned up, too quickly in the view of many. Was that to hide incriminating evidence that exposes the real perpetrators, or just the instinctual reaction to a messy scene of destruction that you prefer to forget about?
The recent interest in a basic income (BI) parallels the suddenly growing acceptance of marijuana. Could this be more than a coincidence? In the 1920s--30s, the idea of government intervention to regulate the economy was right down there with frivolous use of stimulants as the devil’s work. 
