“Most people believe so much in money as a measure of value that they have forgotten its purpose, and have fallen into such deep confusion regarding the total amount of money circulating in a country. A perfect hammer is useless for cleaning your teeth. If you do not know what money is for, you will be confused when using it, and certainly a government will then end up in a deadlock regarding its 'monetary policy.' (…)

The work of a person who today tries to write a pamphlet about money is not to say something new; it is simply to make a clear statement about things that have been known here for 200 years, if not here for 2,000 years. You must know what money is needed for. (…)

When an entire state has not or cannot acquire enough food for its people, that state is poor. When there is enough food and the people cannot obtain it through honest labor, then the state is rotten and no expression of language can convey how rotten it is. However, when a banker or a professor tells you that the country cannot do anything because it lacks money, they are telling you a despicable and dirty lie, so base and foolish, that it is like someone saying that roads cannot be built because there are no kilometers.”

EZRA POUND (1885-1972) was an American poet and essayist. He is considered one of the most significant poets of the Anglo-American literary movement of modernism. However, he was also the author of lesser-known economic pamphlets. He believed that the dominance of money had created a new order of things, where the aristocracy of money had replaced the aristocracy of the spirit, which until then had been the guide and beacon of civilization.