Andy Chalkley was born in England in 1951. He passed exams and went to Sir Thomas Riches’ Grammar School in Gloucester where he sat even more exams. He passed a few of these and went to Imperial College, London and sat even more exams. He rejected the exam structure and completed a post-graduate year at a Teaching College without realizing that he would subject others to exams. He then got a job driving buses in Sheffield, UK to earn the money to travel overland to India. On the way, he got a job teaching English in Tehran followed by a job driving semi-trailers to the Persian Gulf, including Khorramshahr and Bandar Abbas. After a fortuitous evening meeting with friendly Australian, Andy added an Australian migrant visa to his overcrowded passport. In Singapore, he went into a travel agency to find out the price of the cheapest ticket to Australia and was told that the cheapest flight was to Perth. Having never heard of the place, he asked a couple in the street about this city of Perth and was told that “Perth is a nice place”. So he flew to Perth where he found a job as a mathematics and science teacher. He has lived there ever since.

Andy was always inventive. As a three-year-old, after hearing his mother complaining about the cold (in London) he invented a device to keep her warm. He called it an ‘electric chair’ !! Still inventive, Andy warms his lounge room in Perth with a combination of mirrors that direct winter sunlight into the room. This augments a novel glass brick ‘Trombe’ wall incorporated into the outer brick skin of the house. His preferred transport is a 45kph electric bicycle he built himself from parts.

In 2012, Andy realized that he was living quite well. He owned his property, but realized that his children would not be able to purchase properties of their own and neither could he afford to buy them properties. Similar anxieties were voiced by the countless young people who Andy deals with on a daily basis in his partybus business. Regularly the young tell him that they “despair that they may never be able to purchase a house.” He reasoned that he belonged to a nation living on credit. Money was available, but only if you borrowed it. The same with the government. It was the time of the emergence of the Occupy Wall Street. He became a regular at the local Occupy group. Like most activists, they were good at saying what was wrong, but not very good at finding solutions. Andy wrote a comprehensive pamphlet for them which was very popular, much admired, and much loved. But Andy’s engineering and mathematical background found fault with some of the statistics he had included. The first puzzling statistic was that the average debt in Australia was $43 000. This struck him as incorrect. He believed that the answer should be zero. Some people put money in the bank. Some people borrow the same money. His logic told him that, if the average debt was $43 000, then there must be more debt than money. The debt statistics appeared illogical. Surely there could not be more debt than money. Another item struck him as being seriously incorrect. On the websites of the IMF, World Bank and, for some reason, the CIA, there were lists of the debts that the nations of the world owed to the IMF/World Bank. Every nation owed large quantities of money to the IMF/World Bank (except four tiny nations that were listed as zero). No nation was positive. Logic told him that this was incorrect. Surely half should be in credit and half in debt. Surely it was impossible for all the nations of the world to be in debt. He had included the questionable statistics in the pamphlets as they were called ‘official figures’. Further inquiry revealed that the IMF/World Bank was not like the United Nations, but was, in fact, a group of privately owned corporations similar in structure to any multinational corporation. They paid no tax and were not answerable to any nation nor any official jurisdiction. The debts were private debts owed by governments to a multinational corporation calling itself a ‘World Bank’. He soon realized that every nation was desperately selling off national assets to multinational corporations to pay interest to a multinational corporation. These corporations all had interwoven ownership arrangements. The next study was about debt. Was it possible to have more debt than money? After many logical approaches, the conclusion was that it was possible to have more debt than money. This brought him to question why a nation would be in debt. He puzzled over the authority to create money. Surely it is the nation that has the authority to create money. Why then would a nation be in debt? Something was going horribly wrong with the money system of the world. Andy’s pamphlet started to grow into a book. Andy tackled the money situation like a typical engineer. An engineer will pull everything to pieces and then attempt to put it back together and whilst not accepting current thinking. Andy has spent his life fixing things. He doesn’t own anything that doesn’t need fixing. It doesn’t matter whether it is a broken gearbox, a broken computer, a broken transport system or a broken heart, Andy will fix it.

The book started to dominate his life. Money was a bit different to the measurement units in other disciplines. Measurement standards tend to involve items that do not change in magnitude, but money was constantly variable. Money doesn’t even purchase the same volume of goods at similar shops. Money is highly flexible and it also seems to simply ‘appear’ as the Money Supply grows each year. The annual increase in the Money Supply is greater than the amount created at the central bank. It seemed so very strange that money simply ‘appeared’! His book got bigger and bigger and had more advanced concepts than those he had been reading about in economics books and papers. Andy decided to break his book into three sections, each section becoming a separate book. On a visit to Greece in 2016, local interest in one chapter on Greece persuaded him to convert the chapter into a book in its own right. He changed his mind and adapted the chapter to create this book. There are other books are to follow. Andy intends to write a book about the breakdown of western society through the breakdown of Christianity. Religion has concepts which are required to operate a civilized society and these concepts do not exist in the Western nation state. Part of the system our ancestors improvised was a system of rules to encourage cooperation to create a civilized society. The rules were implemented by individuals who were later called,‘religious’ people. It relies on people deciding for themselves whether their actions comply with a moral code. In a religion, errors are called sins, based on a moral code inculcated in youthful years. Actions are either punished or rewarded after death by passage to heaven or hell. Under a nation state, the punishment is more immediate. The nation-state only has negative rules and so it is difficult to encourage good behavior. The inappropriately named justice system becomes a mechanism for gain rather than justice. Individual rights start to override the rules that enabled the cooperative system essential for a civilized society.

But first, Andy needs to fix the money system. He believes the money system has been distorted for personal gain rather than the cooperative approach needed for a successful civilized society. The hoarding of money turns out to be one of the worst things you can do with money. Hoarding, personal self-interest, the making of money from money, the tax system, and government policy, all encourage that which will destroy civilization.

Copyright © 2016 by Andrew Jack Chalkley

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First Edition, 2016

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104 000 words