Phoneum - mobile only cryptocurrency

Phoneum is a new mobile cryptocurrency that you can use with your mobile phone. You can use your smart phone for mining and to make transactions. If you want to learn more about the platform, you can visit the company website www.phoneum.io where they have a whitepaper as well.


The basic premise of the company is to develop an application to help people of all skill levels be able to get involved with cryptocurrency mining. There is a roadmap on the website that explains exactly how they see the project growing and how the future of the company will unfold.


The company has developed a custom blockchain technology that operates on mobile devices only. This creates a level playing field to allow everyone to mine cryptocurrency. The mining app works without causing performance loss or overheating of your phone or device. Phoneum is a decentralized cryptocurrency, that can be mined and transacted between 2.5 billion smartphone users worldwide.

The app is downloadable on the Android and Apple app markets and comes complete with a built-in miner that can be configured for the needs of the users. And its ready to be used for mining with just a few clicks. You’ll be able to mine for the Phoneum coins in no time, with your own smart device. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to send and receive coins through the app in a quick and simple way.


Now is the time to sign up and complete the kyc requirements to be one of the first to buy phoneum coins.


www.phoneum.io

Thieves Emporium

For most of mankind's existence, there was a frontier. Those who didn't fit in always had one option: Cross it. Leave. Walk away and live outside ordered society. That gave the rest of us a way to deal with the misfits and the outlaws: Banishment. Throw them out, or just let them go.

For our ancestors, living in small tribes, the border was always close. Crossing it meant leaving for unsettled lands. Those who did were the first explorers, the first to settle in Europe or Asia or Oceania or the Americas. For them, land was plentiful. They picked the best places, the fields of milk and honey.

As mankind grew, those fertile lands were all occupied by regulated societies. Crossing the border came to mean either moving to another country or going to lands that were too rough, hard, or dangerous for any settled country to want.

And still the world became more crowded. Even the harshest places were claimed by some government. Crossing the border came to mean going from England to France, China to Japan, or the U.S. to Canada. No longer did it mean leaving structured society to trade security for opportunity, regulation for risk.

Finally, about a hundred years ago, regulated societies won. All lands, no matter how rocky or dry or cold, became patrolled, regulated and governed. The wild men, the misfits, the outlaws and the eccentrics lost their final refuge.

Now, that has changed. Once again, there is a place for misfits. Wild and brutal, beyond the reach of any government, it's the last hope for those who have no other option.

Once again, there is a badlands.

 source

Can banks individually create money out of nothing? — The theories and the empirical evidence

Abstract

This paper presents the first empirical evidence in the history of banking on the question of whether banks can create money out of nothing. The banking crisis has revived interest in this issue, but it had remained unsettled. Three hypotheses are recognised in the literature. According to the financial intermediation theory of banking, banks are merely intermediaries like other non-bank financial institutions, collecting deposits that are then lent out. According to the fractional reserve theory of banking, individual banks are mere financial intermediaries that cannot create money, but collectively they end up creating money through systemic interaction. A third theory maintains that each individual bank has the power to create money ‘out of nothing’ and does so when it extends credit (the credit creation theory of banking). The question which of the theories is correct has far-reaching implications for research and policy. Surprisingly, despite the longstanding controversy, until now no empirical study has tested the theories. This is the contribution of the present paper. An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks individually, "out of thin air".

From here

DENARO E LIBERTA’

In un passaggio particolarmente luminoso della sua opera, lo scrittore Leonardo Castellani, collega direttamente l’ossessione della libertà, propria della nostra epoca, con l’egemonia raggiunta dalle forze economiche senza controllo.  Il grande scrittore argentino segnala che questa ossessione per la libertà avrebbe potuto mantenere le masse imbrigliate come scimmie che si contendono in una gabbia una damigiana di vino, mentre il Denaro (la grande Finanza) si dedicava, a piccoli passi, a gestirsi i propri affari a modo autonomo, operando in forma discreta, senza vigilanza nè restrizioni.

Castellani in definitiva ci propone la tesi per cui  tutta questa sagra di diritti e libertà che assaporiamo come se fossero delle golosità non sarebbero altro che delle esche che il denaro ci lancia per mantenere le masse  distratte, come si gettano le carrube ai maiali, mentre il Denaro (la grande Finanza sovranazionale) si concentrava e si moltiplicava in alcune poche mani, mentre circolava liberamente con destinazione ai paradisi fiscali, nel contempo si assicurava la sua intangibilità (e impunità) attraverso trattati e marchingegni giuridici.

Si tratta di una tesi straordinariamente suggestiva. Se gettiamo la vista all’indietro, scopriremo che la “spiritualizzazione” del Denaro (questo è il momento in cui tralascia di essere un simbolo che rappresenta il valore dei beni, per trasformarsi in una nebbia delle finanze, scollegata dai beni che in principio rappresentava) coincide con il tempo e con il tramonto delle libertà come mezzo concreto per ottenere un finalità concreta,  con la sua sostituzione per mezzo di una libertà astratta che è una libertà fine a se stessa e che infiamma le masse con idee utopistiche, imbrigliandole in una splendida e demogresca rappresentazione falsata. Le libertà antiche erano collegate concretamente ai lavori svolti della gente, alla terra che offriva il sostentamento, alla difesa delle proprie famiglie ed alle loro forme di vita.

La libertà astratta ha riempito la gente di idee stupide ed esaltanti che, a volte gli impedivano di mantenere i piedi per terra (obbligandoli ad abbandonare il proprio lavoro, la propria terra e la propria famiglia), li insuperbivano di tale modo che mai più ritornavano ad elevare la vista al cielo, visto che la loro unica religione, a partire da allora, era costituita dalle stesse successive richieste che la libertà astratta gli forniva, assorti nei loro disdicevoli ideali utopistici, il Denaro si era dedicato a completare la spoliazione, ben sapendo che il suo latrocinio sarebbe passato inosservato; per quanto, se in qualche occasione tale latrocinii risultavano troppo ostentati, il Denaro ha auspicato nuove Dichiarazioni Universali di diritti e nuove libertà o ha ampliato già quelle esistenti, di tale modo che la golosità delle pseudo conquiste che la sua egemonia garantiva, acquistasse una maggiore varietà fino a trasformarsi in un fantasioso negozio di dolcetti.

Così che il Denaro si è inventato un modo fantasmagorico di riproduzine che gli ha permesso di moltiplicarsi in foma esponenziale, mediante mega speculazioni borsistiche e sistemi bancari di riserva frazionaria. Con la particolararità che, ogni volta che il denaro fantasmagorico voleva tramutarsi in denaro fisico, doveva saccheggiare i beni reali, dissanguando la povera gente che neppure si rendeva conto del latrocinio, perchè continuavano ad essere nella loro gabbia, litigandosi fra loro come scimmie.

Il Denaro si è inventato anche l’abuso della persona giuridica e il principio della responsabilità limitata, che annullava i concetti tradizionali di proprietà e di società. Concetti che erano una volta collegati indissolubilmente alla responsabilità personale dei suoi titolari, mentre il Denaro ha determinato la trasformazione della proprietà in un entità con vita propria che, mentre si accresce, ripartisce gli utili ma, quando viene dichiarata in fallimento, lascia in salvo il patrimonio dei suoi titolari.

Il Denaro alla fine si è inventto la libertà di circolazione dei capitali, che gli permetteva – ogni qual volta doveva dare cinicamente lezioni di patriottismo alle scimmiette in gabbia – di abbandonare come i ratti la nave che si andava affondando, di sfuggire alla vigilanza del fisco, imboscarsi dietro presta nome, crearesocietà offshore nei paradisi fiscali, fondersi in una nebbia di società finanziarie impercettibili.

E tutto questo mentre le scimmiette nella gabbia chiedevano, con acuti squittii, più libertà di espressione, o più diritti di facciata. Il Denaro, nello stesso modo in cui in altri tempi gli aveva concesso giornali patinati (che lui stesso finanziava), diritti per coppie gay e aborto alla rinfusa (che permetteva di pagare salari miserabili ( vista la minore prole e le minori spinte a lottare per un salario dignitoso), oggi ci concede Twitter e cambio di sesso in modo da far sfogare le scimmiette con la piazza virtuale (che il Denaro ha accettato molto bene come si aderisce ad una giardino di infanzia) e tutti si rifocillano senza pericolo di moltiplicarsi.

Questo perchè l‘unica moltiplicazione che il Denaro vede di buon occhio è la propria; alle scimmiette rimarrà sempre la consolazione di ubriacarsi di libertà.

from here

Sortition

In response to the deepening crisis of representation, direct democracy today comes up as an alternative proposal, put forward by the social movements arising worldwide. On the one hand, populists and party functionaries, in an attempt to attract the votes of the vast majority of people who are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs, have declared the semi-direct democracy approach of the referendum as their solution to the current crisis. The social movements themselves, on the other, through their own practices, have highlighted the direct democracy approach of networks of face-to-face assemblies. Discussions in political debates about reforming representative democracy in order to allow for broader citizen participation are becoming more frequent, while activists on the streets discuss and attempt to create autonomous structures beyond the state and Capital, which can potentially serve as groundwork for a fairer and more direct-democratic society.

Unfortunately, activists from different movements and the supporters of the aforementioned ideas often miss or even consciously neglect one practice in particular – choosing by lot (or Sortition), originating in the Athenian politia, where the very concept of democracy is rooted. According to Aristotle choosing by lot is a sign of democracy while elections are a sign of oligarchy. In the Athenian Democracy, sortition, together with the institution of the general assembly, allowed the citizens “to rule and to be ruled.” The logic behind the sortition process originates from the idea, also arrived at by Lord Acton many centuries later, that simply “power corrupts.” Most empirical evidence from their time to ours, points to this conclusion. For that reason, when the time came to choose individuals to be assigned to empowering positions, the ancient Athenians often resorted to choosing by lot.

The supporters of direct democracy often have a complete and detailed vision of what a society managed by local assemblies and coordinated by federative councils on a regional level would look like. But when it comes to the question of how the members of these federative structures should be elected, often no satisfactory answer is presented. No matter how decentralized the structure of a society becomes, the danger of emergence of formal and informal hierarchies, undermining the democratic processes, is always present and the search for mechanisms for their prevention should be a concern of everyone, as long as people want to keep direct democracy functioning. According to Michel Foucault “power is everywhere and comes from everywhere.” In this line of thought, power is not limited only to one central structure (the state for example) or to the concentration of material goods in the hands of an elite. It is everywhere, reproducing itself in our relationships, language, culture, etc.

If we view this logic from an antiauthoritarian perspective we can conclude that the danger in a society based on direct citizen participation, for example, elected delegates to become “professional politicians” (in the bad sense of the word) is very real. In many groups today, even in ones that are part of the anti-authoritarian specter, unofficial hierarchies keep emerging and participants often do not have the means to confront these problems, which slowly corrodes the relationships between the activists or even leads to the group’s breakup. Choosing by lot is a mechanism precisely suited for dealing with that problem, preventing the establishment of strict “political” roles.

Another key aspect of sortition is that it promotes an active citizenry. In order to function properly, a direct democracy needs autonomous individuals, capable of critical thinking and interested in public affairs, or in other words: active citizens. Institutions, utilizing the mechanism of sortition, serve as universities on citizenship, where people immerse themselves deeply in the political life of the society for a certain period of time and acquire a sense of responsibility, and depending on the size of the community, all of them, or a large percentage of the population, passes through that process. Also, by knowing that they can be chosen at any moment, the people are thus stimulated to act responsibly and to care about the common affairs of the society on daily basis.

Sortition can also potentially help with the emancipation of women. While in a representative democracy (with elections as its main mechanism) governments are dominated primarily by men, in an institution where members are chosen by lot, a society may decide for the configuration between men and women to be equal. This also applies for marginalized communities. In general, during the electoral processes they almost always remain unrepresented, while in the case of sortition this can be regulated by the society itself.

Of course, thinking that sortition alone can prevent the emergence of demagogues and “professional politicians” is naïve. But if it's implemented together with short periods for holding the position, revocability and rotation, similar to the model that emerged in Ancient Athens, we get a comprehensive package of mechanisms that serves to prevent the occurrence of oligarchy.

It is important to note that while sortition can be a principal method for appointing most administrative roles in a direct-democratic society, some of them will still have to keep the electoral element. Some tasks demand expertise that most people lack, and because of that it is necessary that the citizens be able to choose between the experts they have. For example in Ancient Athens, naval admirals, architects, etc. were chosen through elections, while sortition was the dominant way of choosing members of the Boule [1], magistrates etc.

Today the process of sortition is not a widespread practice in governance. The most famous example is the Citizens' Assembly in British Columbia. It offers empirical evidence on what the choosing by lot can look like in practice, though in a non-direct democracy.

In 2003 the Local Government of British Columbia, Canada created a Civil Assembly chosen by lot and aimed at formulating a referendum proposal for a new electoral system for the local parliament. Until then the electoral system in British Columbia was standard, based on elections, whereby the winner formed the local government. Many residents, however, were unhappy with this model, feeling that their voice was not being heard. This led to the creation of the Citizens' Assembly for Electoral Reform, comprised of 160 delegates chosen by lot among all the inhabitants of the province – one man and one woman from each of the 79 electoral districts of British Colombia, plus two delegates from the indigenous communities.

The work of the Citizens' Assembly passed through three stages. From January to March 2004 delegates gathered every weekend in Vancouver to explore alternative electoral systems through an intensive series of lectures, seminars and discussions. Each delegate received a fee of $ 150 for each weekend of work. In the second stage, the summer of 2004, delegates took part in a series of public hearings across the province to discuss alternative electoral models and to hear reactions and feedback. In the third stage, the autumn of 2004, the Civil Assembly met again every weekend for intensive discussions at the end of which delegates prepared a referendum proposal for a new electoral law. To the surprise of many they did not choose a straightforward system of proportional representation, but rather what is known as the Single Transferable Vote system [2].

In May 2005, the Assembly’s proposal was submitted for voting. However, the referendum did not pass, because electoral activity was 57.3%, slightly below the required 60%. One reason is that this referendum was confined to the framework of representation, which in the past decade has been in a serious crisis that deepens with time. But this experiment gives us valuable empirical evidence that we can use in the construction of other types of systems beyond representative democracy.

From all we have said until now it becomes clear that sortition is an organic part of direct democracy. It plays a dual role – it helps facilitate the daily administration of larger areas, while preventing the emergence of hierarchies. In itself, sortition is not enough, as demonstrated by the experience gained from the experiment in British Columbia. But in combination with the institution of the general assembly, like the politia of Ancient Athens, it helps build sustainable, democratic processes and active citizenship.

Sortition can be used in different contexts, as was shown in the aforementioned examples. Neglecting it at the expense of other institutions is a mistake, as it is a mistake to restrict direct democracy only to the so-called ''political'' area, as populists with pro-capitalist views are trying to convince us today. It is difficult to imagine how a group, a society or movement will operate in a truly democratic way if it does not use all the mechanisms of direct democracy, and instead chooses only some of them, replacing the rest with undemocratic ones. The fact that some direct-democratic institutions and mechanisms may produce negative side effects, which is a principal concern, does not mean that we should abandon them. Precisely through the implementation and experimentation with these types of institutions, structures and mechanisms, we will be able to find their weaknesses and correct them.

From new-compass

Why we need to beat Russia

We may see Syria as a testing ground for Imperial Power. Russia has tested our influence and shown the World it’s wanting, so it’s crucial to appreciate why and of what consequence.

Our Imperial weapons give definite form to our Empire. And nothing has shaped our Empire more than the FIAT. The deformation began in 1971, when the US imposed her Power to re-define the rules of the monetary system for her sole benefit. The ability to print IOU’s in exchange for real value is more clever than theft as we borrow and do not pay back in kind due to inflation. Our enemies, adversaries and vassals must found their financial systems upon the printed dollar which they must purchase with hard earned money. That seizure has financed a vast network of military bases, bribery, assassinations, coup d´états and perpetual war.

What’s not to like? All that Power without taxing the produce of the American people. So why have we lost in Syria?

Let’s begin by appreciating that the global “FIAT system” is responsible for our moral crisis and departure from virtue. As we embrace further the gods of greed – listen to the masses cheer for Clinton and Trump – we must recall that virtue is knowledge of what is good. We are getting weak because we have forgotten what is good for us.

The root of this evil is our love of easy money, or FIAT money, defined by those with power as “wealth by decree” which places an arbitrary value upon “wealth issued by men” such that buying power has no natural governor, as it did when gold was freely traded along currencies in truly free markets. But whom, may we ask, has the power to decree wealth? And with such great power to do so, who can be trusted with such great responsibility?

No one. That is who.

But nonetheless, governments and monarchies throughout the ages have been entrusted to issue wealth by decree. All have failed, because power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So in every FIAT timeline we see the more powerful become wealthier and the wealthy become more powerful, because it is they who control the issuance and distribution of wealth. Inequality of Wealth, therefore, always reaches its peak at the end of the FIAT timeline. As social position offers more favours than purpose and production. What has happened is what always happens – you have a system politicized to such an extent that political access – and not profits from innovative new solutions – Become the core of the incentive structure.

Notice how productivity declined after Bretton Woods and later when Bretton Woods was abandoned. One of the problems of easy money, not the only one mind you, is the financialization of the economy. Financialization drains key human capital and generates malinvestment. Nuclear engineers are doing MBA’s so that they can work as investment bankers! Trillions of dollars have been invested in real estate developments that provide no productivity gains. Easy money kept fracking companies alive –producing an endless glut of gas that had nowhere to go but heat tar sands in Canada – what waste!

This is the real economic evil of our current monetary system – malinvestment – with two insidious effects:

1. A halt in fundamental scientific breakthroughs and
2. The West, apart from Germany and Norway, has run at a loss for decades

If the common man had a say in all this, he would declare his modest holdings to be the pinnacle of wealth, by his decree. He will offer you his apartment for your mansion, his hot dog for your lobster, his bike for your car and so forth. If this sounds ridiculous, then think how absurd it is to offer stacks of paper for these same items, which (based upon the numbers and signatures printed upon them) you would gladly accept, by decree.

We know that paper is just as intrinsically worthless as the electronic digits they represent in a bank account. The issue here is who holds the power of decree. The little people never will. The monied men hold this power – like a parasite feeding upon any who deign to offer value at the marketplace.

And that is the cut of the second edge my friends. That is the death blow. The Fiat produced a parasite – the financial sector – that in its greed is killing the real economy. So when we read about absence of opportunity with such empathy, know that the parasite suffers too, as the problem of debt reaches higher toward senior capital.

When we see debt piled on debt just to prolong the dying system, take note that a few monied men enjoy the fruits of this easy money for a time before defaulting … and with no collateral to make lenders whole, many walk away with nothing more than an impaired credit rating – into a waiting system where debt is harshly devalued.

Monsanto can darken the sunflower harvest in the Ukraine, and Allianz can steal a few tranquil Greek islands, but the ambience is never quite the same as when hard working people had their just rewards, and goodness and charity and kind souls rejoiced – with compassion and cooperation – while loving the narrative of a life written while desiring only the product of their work.

The world this Global Reserve Fiat creates is one of misery and strife where evil and greed feeds upon the spirit, and the world becomes an immoral wasteland of modernity. The worker is discriminated against as all pressure and stress is heaped upon his future, as the law discriminates between debts held as an asset vs. debt held as a liability.

You see, reader, while we all hold “deposits” at banks, which is an euphemism for bank debt, only the lending class (and I use this term in the broadest sense) get to hold debt on their balance sheets as a wealth asset, whereas the little people hold debt as an obligatory liability. If there is a default, all the better as the law allows them to seize the “secured” assets as collateral. Is there a flaw in my thinking? Let us see…

You may say that banks are able to hold debt as an asset because they have the capital to cover that debt – to which I would say, “Really ??!!” As we understand the nature of debt in this modern era of aging debt, and the derivatives that attempt to hedge those obligations, this is simply not the case, as the lessons of Enron, AIG, Lehman, MF Global – ad nauseam – clearly prove. The empire of debt is hallmarked by misery for the masses though this is no accident, for a system cannot discriminate in and of itself. Financial laws are written by and for the hidden agenda of monied men, how can we conclude otherwise? A few of which see war or systemic crisis as an opportunity to rewrite the social contract e.g. the tax payer takes over bank debt, see Ireland, Britain and soon Australia and the Eurozone.

Look at the workers as they make their way home on the subway, standing tightly together, neither wanting nor caring to utter a word to one another, their grey features melted by the stress of their “wealth as debt”. Their one shot at consciousness ground away while vampire and zombie stories speak to their existence. Look at the once prosperous cities around you, like Detroit, or Camden, crumbling into 3rd world ghettos. Not exactly a world that the 1% wants to live in, but one they deserve – one of their making.

They can insulate themselves in the Hamptons for only so long until the sirens sound. It has always been this way, and it will always be this way, until man changes his nature by recognizing what is good for him.

Now, the East – China / Russia / India – challenge the Global Reserve Fiat. And when the dollar fails, and it will: For debt is the essence of fiat, and when it defaults, the system defaults with it.

Fiat Debt is unstable for two reasons:

1. Because no natural ecosystem is able to sustain unlimited, continuous exponential growth – as all 100% fiat (debt-based) valuation systems require. More debt is required to repay existing debt plus interest. The basic operational problem: you can inflate a system easily by issuing new “secured” debt against collateral and thereby increasing collateral value (think about mortgages as buying power to buy houses, pushing house prices up, collateral looks fine even if debtors cannot pay interest or principal – as long they can easily refinance or banks can sell recovered properties in a real estate market spiked by easy credit and demographics (like in the US from 2001-2005, or London and Sidney now). Easy credit can paper over affordability and to some extent demographics. Now this definitely does not work in reverse; you cannot even stop because once credit stops flowing, prices start to tatter; and in the latter stages even an decrease in the rate of increase might be enough to crash the system.
2. Because it is entered into and created so lightly, and it is based on the assumption of a fixed future performance by an entity or individual. And when the 98% – their future burdened by intolerable debt, unemployment and declining wages – decide to walk away? The fear of that decision has been driving interest rates down for decades, to make it bearable not for the good of mankind but to prolong the system. This brings into relief an internal contradiction: wages decline in sync with interest rates because the bargaining power of workers evaporates as Central Bankers reduce the cost of capital, contributing to the substitution of labour and labour wages by that of the machines and AI software. Until the workers walk away from more debt for less income, we watch this balancing act between debt pretending to be wealth, and wealth being treated as a “bad investment”. All performed for the benefit of gradually changing our definitions, as we evolve into a new equilibrium determined by the East – Their collective gold reserves will be large enough to re-price the currencies and free the markets.

As we look at the precarious nature of our faith-based money, we must acknowledge the moral implications of “dishonest money”. Seizure by decree, whether judged just by Constituted Power, is immoral. But the fact that dishonest money is so easy to create, control and redistribute helps one understand the wave of immorality that has swept over our world.

Paying tribute with labor and exchange rates is not enough for the empire of debt. Rather, its vassals must accept and embrace the ideology of the empire as well – “Wealth as Debt” and Globalism. It’s their separation in language which causes the confusion – Globalism and Absolutism – for they are one and the same thing.

When Russia and China stockpile honest money, they attack our most potent weapon and father of our decline. Our Imperial weapon will die by both edges of its own sword, one being the contempt with which it is so easily created to bend the will of the world to its bidding, and the other sharp edge which the wicked are blind to recognize: The evil that sound money prohibits.

Will Russia and China attack the fiat dollar using overt enemy action? Possible, but not probable: as they can simply undermine “confidence” in the FIAT and wait upon the 2% to bury the blade. The Dynasties of Wealth - Have you ever wondered how we hedge our holdings through turmoil?The top 85 patricians of which own more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion humans – will move first. The 1%, then 2% and whoever else left standing will be forced to follow through.

Only Gold has the history, depth, unique qualities, loyalty of the elite and transitional power to challenge any man, any nation, any system on earth, past, present and future. The Dynasties understand this, because they have both witnessed and authored this axiom across generations of asset accumulation.

When they vote, they vote with their ability to make markets, and then reap the profit from the market they make, offering favor to those who protect their interests. They easily control men through greed and are beholden to Gold alone. Gold transitions their wealth recycling system through change.

As the sand peters past the last curve of the hour glass the Dynastic hand is clear to see. So the Neo-cons need to beat Russia, and soon, as only Globalism can keep the markets enchained. 

From The Saker

parasite economics #1

IT IS a running joke among my friends that none of us does anything useful for society. Lawyers, bankers, chartered surveyors; all of them exist to advise other people who have created wealth. One of my friends was an engineer (he actually designed a railway bridge) but joined the useless brigade by becoming a consultant. Your blogger is the lowest of the low; a parasite on parasites. Financial journalists exist to comment on the habits of other people who simply shuffle pieces of paper (or rather rearrange digits on a computer screen) for a living.

But when you start to think along these lines, it becomes very hard to decide who is actually creating all the wealth. Farmers used to claim a kind of economic virtue; they produce the food that prevents all those factory workers from starving. And that virtue has been transfomed, in modern economic parlance, to the manufacturing sector which produces realstuff and not all those ephemeral service activities.

This virtue has always seemed overstated. Are all manufactured goods intrinsically superior to services? Would you rather have a wig or a haircut? Just as there is only so much food we can healthily consume, there is only so much physical stuff we need. We have service-dominated economies because people like to consume services from TV programmes through video games to leisure activities like eating out. When General Motors sells a car, the chances are that it is selling it to someone who works in the services sector; so who is the parasite in this situation?

At the national level, we can say that most countries cannot produce all the things they need (or at least desire). Britain, for example, needs food from abroad. So it needs industries that can export stuff in order to generate the earnings that pay for imports. Here the bankers start to look a lot more valuable; Britain's invisible earnings from financial services are highly valuable. Even your blogger looks less parasitical; The Economist makes most of its sales overseas, so makes a modest contribution to Britain's upkeep.

At the global level, however, the national accounts cancel each other out. The debate evokes the old saw about the island that prospers because everyone takes in each other's washing. Or as Burt Bacharach and Hal David put it more memorably in Lost Horizon "The world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows where it really ends". One man's income is another man's expenditure.

All this explains why the current economic debate is so hard to resolve since as Messrs Bacharach and David added in the same song "everything depends on where you are in the circle that never begins." Take the public sector versus private sector trade-off. Some say that the public sector is a parasite that depends on the wealth generated by the private sector. And we can probably all agree that there is a point at which the public sector can overwhelm and crowd out the private sphere. But look at the problem from a different point in the circle. Who educates the private sector workers? Who keeps them healthy (in Europe at least)? Who provides the roads and public transport? Who provides the legal system that guarantees property rights or the police that patrol the streets? All functions provided by the public sector.

Every dollar borrowed to pay for stimulus is a dollar that must be repaid from future private sector taxes, say those on the right. The government has no money save that it confiscates from the voters. True enough. But every dollar cut from benefits or from the public sector wage bill is a dollar that will not be spent buying goods and services from the private sector. Those who want a balanced budget* immediately might not like the results.

Indeed, the huge public sector deficits seen in the western world are, in large part, the result of decisions made by the private sector to stop spending. At the aggregate global level, the deficits and surpluses of the private and public sectors must add up to zero (since the balances of individual countries cancel each other out). The public sector has acted as a giant backstop.

All this suggests that some humility is needed from both sides in the economic debate. We cannot run huge public sector deficits forever but that is not the same as saying that we should never run a deficit, nor that we should balance it now. We do not want "too much" government interference in the economy but there are plenty of vital services that the government provides. We are all of us economic parasites in a way, since we are dependent on the decisions and the well-being of others.

* Some people want an amendment that balances the budget only over several years. It is very hard to see how this would work. In Britain, Gordon Brown had a rule that balanced the budget "over the cycle"; when things got tough, he simply redefined the cycle.