How to Pay for What We Need

From the American Scholar web site -- an article by Richard Striner:

http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-pay-for-what-we-need/

The conventions of our money supply are so arcane that explanation is daunting. Journalist William Greider once observed that the American process of money creation is “a powerful mystery to most citizens.” Indeed, he wrote, it is a mystery to most elected leaders, who tend to believe that the process is best “left to the experts, a forbidden area where politicians [are] not supposed to intrude.” In Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, Greider quoted the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who went so far as to assert that “no President really understands these things.”

If that’s true, it’s nothing less than a major civic tragedy, one we should not allow to continue. Why should we tolerate a state of affairs in which people use economic jargon instead of giving an intelligible answer to the following conceptual questions: Where does modern money come from? And what does it consist of?