Saying we lack money is like…

It's like a ticket collector on a train telling passengers who want to board: "You can't get on — we've run out of tickets!" — even though all the train seats are empty.

It's like a woman going to the post office in May to buy a stamp and being told by the clerk:

"Sorry ma'am, we've run out of stamps — we've reached our annual quota. Please come back next year!"

The sign (the ticket) must match reality. We should issue as many tickets as there are available seats, and as many stamps as there are items to mail.

It's like a construction foreman telling workers: "Stop working! We can't continue —we've run out of centimeters!"

Money is also a unit of measurement — it allows us to compare the value of goods and services. Like any unit of measurement, it's a symbol, not the reality itself, and it must be adjusted to match reality.

Likewise, in the case of postage stamps, it is not the number of stamps available that should dictate how many letters can be mailed, but the opposite:

The number of stamps should be adjusted to match the number of letters.

You understand the absurdity in all three examples — the train, the post office, the construction site: everything is blocked due to a lack of numbers, of symbols.

Saying "we're out of money" when products are physically available is just as absurd.

This situation is only getting worse, because today, more and more production is done through automation and robotics, and less and less by human labor.

(As shown in the previous issue of MICHAEL, many advances in artificial intelligence are enabling the creation of robots that replace human workers.)

If fewer people are earning wages, and we continue to distribute purchasing power only to those employed in production, we are headed for disaster.

People will starve in the midst of an abundance of goods — produced by robots.

This is why Economic Democracy proposes a monthly dividend to every citizen, based on our common heritage of natural wealth and technological progress — so people can have the purchasing power to buy what is produced by machines.

We call it a dividend, because each citizen is a co-owner of the country's natural resources and of the inventions passed down by previous generations.

And where will the money come from to fund these dividends? From the source of numbers itself — in this case, a National Credit Office, acting as the central bank of the nation, issuing all the money needed for the economy to function properly — interest-free.