Once upon a time the Swedish Temperance League had enough political clout among the aspiring lower classes and angst-ridden middle classes voting for the governing Social Democratic Party that the party were persuaded to demonise Alcohol as the root of all evil and the cause of poverty, adultery and sloth among the Peasant Classes…by then linguistically ennobled as Blue Collar Workers...and proud of it.
Salt and Sugar would have been demonised too had Swedes known then what Science tells us now...were every barn and basement equipped with the apparatus for cash-free production of the substances for personal use from the products available in abundance in the local fields and surrounding countryside.
Local economic competition was always essential to ensuring private commercial interests would be vocal in their support of putting local producers out of business and regulating the market…a euphemism for opening up local trade to outside interests. In the short term this might even benefit local people if local monopolies had grown too fat and could be displaced by foreign merchants. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.
But once these adventurers had coalesced into foreign monopolies…and eventually they would see that it was in their shareholders’ interest for them to fix and then hike prices…then local villagers and urban parishioners would be worse off than before.
These are but three examples of substances that would nowadays be on the same proscribed lists of Hazardous Substances as Cannabis, Heroin and Tobacco but for the accident of their early historical appearance in the port towns of the overdeveloped world and the daily needs of local communities.
As a tribe Swedes are nothing if not pragmatic. Collectively they do not knock their heads against a brick wall. Their instincts are always to fight fire with fire. So to prevent the free trading of Estonian cigarettes across the Baltic from Tallinn and beyond they reduced taxes on Swedish cigarettes until the Risk-Reward Ratio for smuggling no longer made sense to either the consumers or the merchant adventurers trying to make an honest living supplying their need. Entrepreneurs are rational creatures and move on when the bottom falls out of a market.
If we are to teach our children well then this is all they need to learn about Commerce when in Infant School…and there is no need to start them before the age of seven. Then when they move up into Junior School at the age of nine they can be taught about Money and how its creation and destruction makes the world go round.
Of course models, games and simulators will be needed and these must accurately represent Central Banking techniques and the fractional banking practices employed by their Commercial Banks. Their creators need to know what they are doing.
But one of the wonders of the Internet is that tools like this only need to be developed once and then every school in the world can use them. This is the sort of 21st century project Bill Gates should be funding in Cambridge instead of privatising failed 20th century organisations like the United Nations. Tom Greco did some work on this in the 1990s before Real Computers were invented…6BC as the new 1994…by creating a Board Game of Money Monopoly.
25 years ago Jay Forrester’s System Dynamics Group at MIT’s Sloan School of Management were also heading in the right direction with their National Economic Model…before they listened to Federal Reserve Board Disinformation and got spun off into the weeds. Pity nobody pointed Professors Forrester and Maas in the direction of Human Ecology by Thomas Robertson so they modelled what really takes place instead of what they were told was going on.
On a trip to the UK in 1983 I tried unsuccessfully to get people interested in setting me up with a team to take the MIT model as a departure point for the development of a British National Economic Model based on the System Dynamics approach. But System Dynamics turned out to be too new a field. However it is worth trying again 25 years on now the Real World and Computer Software are up to speed…and I know the right questions to ask the experts.
But back to the Schools Project. We would start the children off at Level One with Church Mints and Exchange Banks in the Middle Ages. Then by Level Three they would be adding Tea Clippers and Spanish Galleons…and finding out why Marine Insurance made good sense. By Level Six they would be managing the Real Bank of Wessex, selling Halal Mortgages and making poverty history…by regulating economic trade in and out of their bailiwicks.
Once the cleverer students reach Level Nine they can begin creating and integrating financial systems for different public purposes. What better way to introduce them to the Societal Inversion that has transformed a Cathedral Culture producing Livingry into a Money Culture hell-bent on ever-increasing delivery of Killingry?
A decade hence England would have an informed electorate able to assess proposals from the political parties...Bankers to join the Institute of Chartered Accountants from the Right; Get a rope and hang the bastards from the Left; Pensioning off the Looters or running them out of town from the Centre ground.
How nice to get shot of the current nonsense about supply and demand and market forces as some sort of Deus ex Machina and Law of Nature.