Earlier this year, a whistleblowing former hedge fund manager by the name of David Rogers Webb quietly published a short book on the internet, spelling out how ownership rights to all financial securities have been subverted under the laws of every country in the world. “Financial securities”, Webb explains in his book The Great Taking, are traceable assets that hold monetary value; the broad categories being equity securities, debt securities, and hybrid securities. What this means in layman’s terms (at least according to the makers of these rules), is that private property no longer exists on this planet.
It would seem that the WEF message about us “owning nothing” was not just a slogan or empty words; the technical mechanisms to allow this to occur have already been put in place.
According to Webb, this is by design. As he notes in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08:
“… tens of trillions in losses in derivative positions were housed in the biggest banks, which were then bailed out with newly created money. The prime brokers would have failed, but to prevent that they were made banks and also received direct injections of created money from the Fed. No one was prosecuted. On the contrary, the perpetrators were rewarded with enormous bonuses. It was almost as if it had all gone according to plan.
In 2008, I noticed the failure of a small broker dealer in Florida, and I was shocked to learn that client assets owned outright with no borrowing against them were swept to the receiver and encumbered in the bankruptcy estate. I had to understand how this could possibly have happened, and eventually uncovered that ownership rights to securities, which had been personal property for four centuries, had somehow been subverted.”
- The Great Taking, pg xxviii
The Great Taking is an easy to read, well-written warning to the world replete with receipts for as many of the whats, whens, wheres, and whos that are probably possible to know, at least for anyone outside of the “Big Club” as described by George Carlin. Webb states that his goal in writing this book is to avert the worst outcomes of this “great taking” by raising awareness of its unfolding. I want to go a little deeper into the question of why, because no attempt at solving this problem will succeed for long without this understanding.
“It is my hope that in making this unpleasantness explicit, and doing so at this time when developments are becoming more apparent, that awareness might spread, and that the worst might be averted. Perhaps this Great Taking might not be allowed to happen if we each hold up our end—even the investment bankers—and say forcefully: we will not allow this. It is a construct. It is not real.”
~David Rogers Webb. The Great Taking, pg.xxxi
Tricks of the Trade
To describe the modern monetary system as a “construct” is a gross understatement. If you’re not familiar with how fractional reserve banking “works”, documentaries like The Money Masters, Power of the Purse , Money As Debt and Fiat Empire are well worth the time to grasp its mechanisms.
In a nutshell, the method of fractional reserve banking is quite simple: the government issues bonds to its central bank, and in return, the central bank buys the government debt with the money that it created out of nothing. Whether the central bank is privately owned like the Federal Reserve, or nationalized like the central banks of Canada, France and the United Kingdom, the system works the same way.
When the central banks create this new money out of thin air, they simultaneously pull more money out of the same magic hat by charging interest to the government on those loans. Governments themselves don’t create anything of value, so the interest is backed by taxes. The loans themselves can never be paid back entirely because money itself IS debt, having been created by the central banks out of thin air. If there were no debt, there would be no money.
Naturally, built into this system are bankruptcies and foreclosures. When people sign their names to bank loans for things like mortgages, they are pledging real assets as collateral. Moreover, all new loans represent newly created money, which is newly created debt, which can then be used to “back” the creation of even more loans, and the cycle continues.
Most of the proposed solutions to the problem of debt-slavery focus on the fictitious quality of this system that creates money out of nothing. Returning to a “gold standard”, for example, could help to cap skyrocketing prices of everything by limiting the money supply at least somewhat to the quantity of gold that is actually on hand.
Sometimes called ‘digital gold’, Bitcoin has gained popularity as an alternative method of storing and trading value. Although Bitcoin is clearly a construct, it was designed with built-in limits: only 21 million units can ever be created. Bitcoin and some of the other cryptocurrencies also have the advantage of being decentralized, so control of it cannot become concentrated in the hands of the few.
Precious metals and some cryptocurrencies could be worthwhile alternatives to the current financial construct, but only if the question of why we’ve ended up in a system of debt-slavery is understood deeply and acted upon. To his credit, Webb does touch on this when he states categorically that our financial system is one of subjugation. In other words, this is not just about the money; money is the mechanism, but the end goal is purely and simply control.
Control of the many by the few is also known as slavery. By today’s standards, slavery is commonly considered to be wrong. And yet somehow, debt-slavery is accepted as “just the way things are” by the vast majority people, who are mostly just busy trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in the fridge (or if they’re lucky enough, a few ounces of gold and maybe some measure of Bitcoin). So the first step to getting out of debt-slavery is acknowledging that it is slavery, and that we’re in it.
Next, we’ll need to look more philosophically at precisely why slavery is wrong. It’s easy to feel the wrongness of subjugation, especially when you are on the receiving end of it, but what exactly makes it wrong?
In his book The End of All Evil, Jeremy Locke defines evil simply as “the destruction of freedom”. Essentially, whatever removes or obstructs peoples’ freedom to make their own choices is evil. Slavery and evil are both the exact opposite of freedom.
Freedom, Locke continues, is created by the understanding of principles. Principles are truths that describe reality. These can always be discovered, but never created. For example, understanding physical principles like gravity helps us to make choices like not walking off the edge of a cliff.
“A principle is a truth that creates freedom. A law is a lie that creates slavery”.
~Jeremy Locke, The End of All Evil pg.9
What are the principles that pertain to personal property? As John Locke expressed it, “Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself”. You own your body, as I own mine and everyone owns theirs.
Your body rightfully belongs to you and you alone because you came into possession of it without violating the rights of anyone else, and you are solely responsible for maintaining it (nobody else can eat, exercise, think, or go to the bathroom for you). As your property, you have the inherent right to do with your body whatever you want, as long as those actions don’t violate the rights of someone else.
A person who does not own their own body is called a slave. But a slave can’t really exist, only the condition of slavery. This is because whatever the circumstances, your body is still your property. Anyone who makes a claim on it has no right to do so.
Even if, for whatever reason, you volunteered to be a slave, that would not make it so. You still acquired your body without violating the rights of anyone else, and you remain solely responsible for maintaining it. You could behave like a slave (work for free, obey the commands of your “master”), and even think like a slave (believe that someone else has a right to command you), but you cannot actually BE a slave according to the laws of nature. In the same way, I could decide to call myself a man, dress and act like a man, and even undergo surgeries to give my body more masculine traits; none of this would actually make me a man. A woman cannot BE a man, and a person cannot BE a slave.
“Principles describe reality. They are knowledge that help you make use of your world”.
Jeremy Locke, The End of All Evil. pg. 9
Mind-control
The word principle literally means “what comes first”. Principles can’t be created or destroyed, but they can always be discovered. When principles are deliberately obscured to prevent others from understanding them, that is mind control.
Just as there are physical principles, like gravity, this world also has moral principles. Like gravity, moral principles can’t be seen directly but can nevertheless be understood through observation. Sometimes referred to as the “Law of Freedom”, it can be observed that the more a society adheres to the principles of morality, the more that society is free. The inverse can also be observed.
One of the most successful aspects of modern mind-control has been convincing people that there is no such thing as objective morality. As long as people believe that morality is relative, they will continue to be confused and therefore, enslaved.
The Way Out
Moral principles are like a circle comprised of two halves: one half is non-aggression, the other is self-defense. These work in tandem, and can’t be separated in a free society. Whatever we do going forward will have to be based in moral principles if we are to reclaim freedom.
The principle of non-aggression is simple: don’t violate the rights of someone else.
The principle of self-defense is simple: if someone violates your rights, they forfeit their natural right to non-aggression.
Thomas Paine encapsulated this perfectly during the American Revolution when he wrote:
“Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief breaks into my house, burns and destroys my property, and kills or threatens to kill me, or those that are in it, and to "bind me in all cases whatsoever" to his absolute will, am I to suffer it?”
~ Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, #1 1776
In Paine’s time, the Great Takers were somewhat easier to identify and fight against than they are today. This is partially because the wrongful owners of this world are now very well insulated behind governments, international corporations, and the military and legal establishments that protect them. Mostly though, they are harder to resist because basic principles have been successfully obscured through mind control. Not many people alive today would even understand what Paine was saying, let alone stand with him in battle.
That said, a bloody revolution is actually not the best way to change circumstances. A lot of people get hurt and killed, and as the word “revolution” indicates, you’re really just going around in a circle. We should always be prepared to defend our rights by whatever means necessary and available, but we may be in a better position today than ever before to solve this problem in a meaningful and lasting way. We have both the lessons of history and the ability to communicate knowledge across vast distances, all at our fingertips.
Climbing out of our condition of slavery will rely largely on our own willingness to adhere to the dual principles of non-aggression and self-defense, and to share the understanding of these principles with others. Just imagine if the principle of non-aggression had been taught to every child of the past: there would be no adults today willing to seize anyone’s property on behalf of the Great Takers!
In fact, a version of the principle of non-aggression is familiar to most of us. It states: “Do unto others as you would have done unto you”. This is known as the Golden Rule. But because individuals have different preferences about how they like to be treated, the meaning of the Golden Rule is crystallized when it’s stated in the negative:
Do NOT do anything to someone else that you would NOT want done to you.
Even if it’s because you’re “just doing your job”.
Whatever what we use to store and trade value, what matters is the level of consciousness from which we are using it. Whatever alternative system or parallel economy we create will need to be build on solid principles if it’s going to achieve its goals. Rather than any “gold standard”, our societal adherence to the Golden Rule and our readiness to defend ourselves against those that don’t is the only way to stop the plans of the Great Takers and leave the world in a state of freedom for future generations.