Merlin, commerce and the hypnotist.

When I first heard the word fiat currency, I ignored it. My life as a hypnotist was too busy to be bothered with the world of commerce and finance. As a practitioner of the Old Religion, I just had to visualize what I needed and my dollar bills would pay for it. I had plenty of money for gas for my jeep, fuel to heat my house, property taxes to support the town, food to feed my family, clothes, books, vet bills and even money for the luxury of vacations and a weekly massage. Then one day, although I was actually making more money in my practice than the previous year, and my expenses had stayed the same, slowly I noticed my finances getting strained, and then very strained. I started cutting back my massage to every other week, then once a month, and then occasionally, until now I don’t get them at all. Mom always told me to pay cash for everything, “If you don’t have the money, don’t buy it!” But then slowly, I just didn’t quite have enough cash to buy the kids their supplies for the new school year. Prices were going up, as were my rates as a hypnotist, but my rates as a hypnotist could not keep up with the rising costs of every day needs. My house had doubled in market value in such a short time; my banker said I had lots of equity and, “why not get what you need? Just write out a check on your equity line of credit”. That’s when Merlin said to me, “Kate you have to listen to me now. You have got to allow yourself the space and time to make an effort to gain a basic understanding of the money system. You need to understand what inflation is? You need to know what fiat money is and more importantly what the shelf life of a fiat money system is. You need to know why America went from a sound constitutional money system based on wealth, to a destructive monetary fiat system based on expanding debt. Because when debt stops expanding, the system dies along with all those who participated in it that didn’t exit in time. Kate, I hope you still aren’t in dollars?”