Tuesday, June 02, 2015
Quotable: Banking & War
One element, however, tends to go flagrantly missing in even the most vivid conspiracy theories about the banking system, let alone in official accounts: that is, the role of war and military power. There's a reason why the wizard has such strange capacity to create money out of nothing. Behind him, there's a man with a gun.
True, in one sense, he's been there from the start. I have already pointed out that modern money is based on government debt, and that governments borrow money in order to finance wars. This is just as true today as it was in the age of King Phillip II. The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism.
Source: David Graeber. Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House Publishing, 2011) p. 364.
Labels: banking, conspiracy, debt, militarism, money, War
