As a result of my move across country I am lagging behind with my weblogs. In a word I am scrambling. Nonetheless my memory of Friday is of text messages. They came with this flavour. ‘I have read back through your text messages and find myself bewildered…’ When men bond they tell each other that when a woman is upset the wise man takes it seriously. Women will be pleased to hear this. But they will not like the next bit because we men also say that a wise man will take no notice of what the woman says is wrong. This men must figure out for themselves.

There is a government consultation document doing the rounds about a land tax…a sort of Henry George Lite. But not that light. It will raise a billion pounds a year for Her Majesty’s Treasury. The tax would be levied on the rise in value of a piece of land once it receives planning permission. The money raised would fund new infrastructure. This way there will be schools and shops for the residents when they move into their new houses. Glad tidings indeed.

You win some. You lose some. A day’s train ride away in Luxembourg the European Court for Everlasting Integration has told Her Majesty’s Companies House that Limited Liability Corporations can offset European losses against British profits. Ouch! No comment from the first or second lords of the Treasury on how much this will cost the long-suffering English tax-payers. Maybe not a lot. Marks & Spencer who won the case don’t contribute much to our national coffers. Most multinationals figured out long ago to book their profits in foreign tax haven.

I was on the move all day starting with a one-hour session at Rye Library. Next a stop-over at Hastings Library en route to Bexhill where I worked diligently and politely with several council officials to establish the fact that £ 3.95 per week was a little low for my local reference rent. The last time I looked it was £79. Unfortunately this minor adjustment meant that the pittance I receive for my mooring fees and harbour dues of £16.82 per week could no longer be paid. My housing benefit entitlement was zero. At times like this one thinks of dolls and pins. It does not take much to switch on the paranoia. But Mr Ridge rang me back just as he promised. And he apologised nicely, assured me that it was just an arithmetic error and was quite certain that Rother District Council would get back to me with a reassessment of their reassessment. When they do I will reassess my paranoia alert level.

That sorted I took a taxi out to the far flung suburbs of Bexhill to collect the computer monitor I had purchased over the telephone through the good services of the Friday Ad. Monitor, speakers, taxi and train fare came to £30 so I can now state with confidence and precision that second-hand monitors in Wales are half the price of monitors in England.

In Spain they call them bin Ladens because everyone knows that these € 500 banknotes exist but they are rarely seen. There are € 185 billion in circulation. Next comes € 181 billion of fifty euro notes. A briefcase filled with € 500 notes is six times as valuable as one filled with $ 100 bills so the five hundred euro bills are increasingly the currency of choice for drug-traffickers and stupidity service operatives. There are now € 565 billion euro-notes in circulation and € 17 billions-worth of coins. This compares with $ 700 billions-worth of dollar denominated notes and coins…half of them outside the United States.

This accounts for about a twentieth of the dollars and euros sloshing around the globe. The rest is written into the bank accounts of the most favoured clients of the commercial banks by the central bankers’ double Dutch book-keeping and the debt-usury money system they dis-manage.

Give the banks a euro of your hard-gotten gains and they will deposit twelve euros in the specially privileged accounts of their most favoured clients. It is called fractional banking. This is how the Capital Adequacy Ratio works. The French once wielded this financial tool to manage their money supply. The British and the Americans prefer to control dis-patronage directly. After the revolution banking will become a department of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and a Freedom of Money Creation and Destruction Information Act will ensure that ordinary people know who gives money to whom.

Richard Douthwaite has written a Schumacher Briefing entitled The Ecology of Money. ‘Young journalists,’ he tells us, ‘are taught to ensure they answer six questions in every story they write: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?’ He suggests we get in the habit of asking these same questions of every type of money we encounter: commercially produced money; people-produced money and government-produced money.

George Bernard Shaw never allowed his detractors to get away with false dichotomies. Pubic Property vs. Private Property was one straw man he was particularly fond of demolishing. There are three categories of property: personal possessions, private property and common wealth. Professor R.H. Tawney took this further and discriminated between working property and idle property. A similar analysis is called for as far as our money systems are concerned. Perhaps then Socialism would become what Shaw always insisted it should be…equal money.