People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 December 1895 — WHO HAS? [ARTICLE]

WHO HAS?

The masses of the people, however, have no scientific knowledge of finance, and never will hVve. Who has? What is it? Wnat is money for? Simply a convenience in swapping; that is all. I have a.cow more than I want. Jones lacks a cow and wants mine. Instead of hunting up something I want worse than I

do a cow, he pays me an agreed price for the cow in something called money, and takes the cow. Smith has a day’s work to spare; I want a day’s work more than I can do. Ido not want to promise Smith a day’s work ir return so I give him the price of a day’s work in money, and he gives me the day’s work. And that is all there is of it. The only use there is for money is to aid in exchanging commodities, to enable people to do this in a more convenient way than swapping one commodity for another, or barter. What will answer this purpose? Anything that will be as good in the hands of the one who receiyed it as in the hands of the one who gives it. and that will be as good one day as another, and all the time. What will fill this description? Anything set apart for that purpose by the sovereign power of a people, and made a legal instrument for the discharge of obligations. See the decieion of the Uuited States Supreme Court rendered in 1884 by the unanimous bench save a single dissenting Justice. This is the “science of finance” as understood by the Supreme Court of the United States, and that portion of the “masses of the people” who affiliate with the peoples party. What is tne Globe Democrat’s understanding of the “science of finance?” That a certain privileged class that has made it a business to get possession of the bulk of a certain commodity or natural product called gold, shall be able to say to the entire people of the civilized world, “You must not exchange your labor or its products without getting my consent, and measuring the thing in my gold which I will make from time to time to represent a greater and greater portion of your labor and products, so that finally I will get the greater amount of all you can produce by your hard labor simply for the privilege of letting you swap what you produce for what your neighbor produces. But even then I will not let you have any of my gold; if I did you might eventually turn the tables on me and make me buy it back, but I will invoke the aid of the ’‘science of finance,” and let you have something that isn’t worth a speck of fly dirt on your kitchen ceiling, but which my “science of finance” will force you to have confidence in, and which I can use as an instrument of the most infernal plunder that ever cursed God’s creatures.” Who best understands the “science of finance?” The Supreme Court’s understanding of it is a simple and honest means of exchanging labor and products; the G. D.’s understanding of it is that it is complicated means of robbing the poor to make the rich richer; of plundering the workers to enrich the idlers. We will give the Globe-Demo-crat an entire column of space in the Progressive Farmer in which to defend its system, or to show that we have not correctly outlined it.—Progressive Farmer.