Daily Times

“The greatest shock of this decade is that more people are about to lose more money than in any time before in our history. But the second greatest shock will be the incredible amount of money just a relatively small group of people will make at exactly the same time.” – LarryBates, The New Economic Disorder

Since the dawn of modern economics, several models have emerged in the economic literature to combat poverty in the horizontal as well as the vertical angle. Each model has its own mastery but most of the economists fail to realise one important factor of poverty in this modern world. The factor that is an impediment in eliminating poverty from the world is’compound interest’, whichis also responsible for the evolution of economic collapses at government as well as at community level.

In the words of Larry Bates, “The servicing of this debt requires the Federal Reserve to always be in a posture of creating more money in order to stave off a collapse… This is simply compound interest in full operation… all of this within itself is inflationary.”

Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy wrote in the Cartesian Economics, “You cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt (compound Interest) against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth (entropy).

The Islamic model of Zakat and other charity models in the economic literature should be studied and explored worldwide to beat the dreads and extremities of poverty

Banerjee and Esther Duflo in their book Poor Economics: A Radical Thinking of the way to Fight Global Poverty discuss the contrasting approaches by Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly. Sachs holds ‘Poverty Trap’ responsible for prevalence of poverty while Easterly implicates aid as a driving force for a downtrodden society. The authors of the book argue that both Sachs and Easterly may be right, but the point that I consider worthy of mentioning over here is that the cycle of poverty will continue around the world until and unless the system of economic and social disorder in which we live today is reformed.

In my view, the interest and usury based Fractional Reserve Banking is responsible for the ‘debt trap’ while child sexual abuse and terrorism are in charge of the poverty trap. For these reasons, eradication of interest based fractional reserve banking, child sexual abuse and terrorism is the need of this era. The assumptions of my model for eradication of poverty are very simple:

Abolish interest and usury based fractional reserve banking.

Eradicate child sexual abuse as it leads to various psychiatric and psychological disorders plus pathological conditions like that of HIV and Neisseria gonorrhea.

Eliminate terrorism and proxy wars

The interest bearing activities like subprime loans, collateralised debt obligations credit default swaps and margin trading should be discarded as soon as possible. The Islamic model of Zakat and other charity models in the economic literature should be studied and explored worldwide to beat the dreads and extremities of poverty. Similarly, the demurrage and time banking should also be given due coverage in the print and electronic media for the benevolence of mankind.Every human being has the right to become rich if he is born poor, but if the poor dies in unchanging conditions it implies that either it was/is his fault or there is/was a flaw in a system around him/her.

The writer is a medical officer at Type-D Hospital, Banda Daud Shah, DistrictKarak