It's the Debt, Stupid. I Mean the GOOD Debt.

Sichuan man with 13,500 copper cash, same as the Qin dynasty more than 2,000 years earlier, 1917, photo by Sydney D. Gamble via Wikipedia.

My mind is still stuck on money here, and all the wonderful things I've learned about it in the last couple of weeks, of which a lot is scattered around the comments and not necessarily quite coherent, starting with the point about where money comes from. Willie Sutton was right! It comes from the bank! 

Seriously—this was not always the case, and it was never the case as much as it is now, but banks make money, by which I don't mean physical currency, the bills and coins in your wallet that represent your money, which are of course manufactured by the Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and given to the bank to distribute to the public as a convenient way for us to move our money around, as in buying things, turning them over to the shopkeeper as a token of our exchange that she can send back to the bank to inform them that the money is now hers and have them adjust her account accordingly. 

That money, actual money, is not a thing at all, but a relationship, or potential relationship, between a person who has something and a person who wants something, the relationship of indebtedness: when I give the person my dollar bill, she is obligated to give me a cup of coffee, she owes it to me—or if I don't, and take the coffee anyway, I am obligated to her, and must bring her the dollar bill later on (these tiny credit operations hardly happen anywhere any more, I think, but they used to be a normal part of life, where they'd keep you a tab at the grocer and the barber and the bar and so forth).

Literary Corner: England, My England!

Trump's redecoration of Air Force One, as reported by conservativefighters.com (update: fake, this is a known bad source).

In his interview with the so-called newspaper The Sun (via CNN) the other day, Emperor Trump was musing on how England doesn't seem to be England any more, at least toponymically: "You don't hear the word 'England' as much as you should. I miss the name England. I think England is a beautiful name. And you don't hear it very much anymore. But (the football team at the World Cup is) playing as 'England'. That's very interesting. That's good." Apparently not aware that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland field teams (none of which made it to the Round of 36, like the US, this year) as well. Then, during his exclusive tarmac interview aboard a grounded Air Force One with the hack Piers Morgan for the Daily Mail,

Under the TV are three digital clocks. They permanently display the same three times – Washington DC, local time and time in the next destination [I presume the displays of the local time and next destination are not permanent but change, in fact, as the location and intinerary of the plane change]. To the right of the TV was a brown leather sofa. Two hi-tech phones were behind it.

‘Can I pick one up and call someone?’ I asked, reaching down to phone Lord Sugar and boast about where I was.

‘NO!!!!!’ exclaimed another aide. ‘Do NOT touch those phones… please. Thank you, sir.’

The President’s staff all exude an air of delightfully polite menace. Next to the phones was a black leather bound menu containing that night’s culinary fare [as opposed presumably to the entertainment options and the locations of the emergency exits].

as Trump worked to slide away from revealing that he doesn't have any idea what Britain's industrial products might be, in advance of making a trade agreement with that ancient and distinguished country in which the United States might replace the European Single Market in Britain's economy, he got into toponymy again, but that turned out to be a dangerous subject too:

Mud From a Muddy Spring

The Peterloo Massacre of August 16 1819, engraved by Richard Carlile, Wikimedia Commons.

Another day, another Brooks ("How Nations Recover")Ten paragraphs of a miscellany of facts about early 19th-century British political economy, from around 1819 to 1847, finally naming a book, David Cannadine's Victorious Century: The United Kingdom. 1800-1906, which gets its official release February 20—you can't see any text online at all yet, and it won't be possible to do any kind of David Brooks Plagiarism Watch on this until we've forgotten this particular column, four Brooksdays from today (indeed I expect I will have forgotten about the column by sometime this afternoon)—and then three more paragraphs of purloined anecdote and a couple of paragraphs of a Magisterial Thesis, that, as you might expect, their politicians were sadly better, back in the day, than ours are now, when both sides did it but in a good way:

We have not passed a steady drumbeat of pragmatic reforms the way the Whigs and the Tories did. Over the past 15 years, the United States has managed to pass just a few major pieces of social reform — Dodd-Frank, Obamacare and I guess the Trump tax reform.

The biggest gap is in the realm of political leadership. The Victorian politicians had a stewardship mentality. They listened to the people, but stood slightly apart, deliberating, seeing governance as a shared professional responsibility. Our leaders come from a much broader swath of society, but they have lower standards of behavior, and less of a shared stewardship mentality.

Yes, if we must have two parties, why can't both of them be the same, with a "stewardship mentality" and a commitment to "pragmatic reforms" the way they were in the United Kingdom in the 1840s? It's a mystery!

So we don't have to fight them here

Palace of Justice, Damascus, March 15, photo by an anonymous stringer for AFP/Getty images, via Chicago Tribune.

Nobody should ever have to undergo the kind of horror Britain has been undergoing with the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22 (killing four and injuring 50), the Manchester bombing of the Ariana Grande concert May 22 (killing 22, many children, and injuring 116), and last night's London Bridge incident (killing seven and injuring some dozens, 21 critically).

Nor should it happen in Baghdad, where over the same period 23 were killed and 45 wounded by a car bomb in the suburb of Hayy al'A'amei on March 20, and a suicide truck bomber killed 17 and injured at least 60 at a police checkpoint in the southern part of the city March 29; seven people were killed and 12 injured in three bombings, one in a fish market in Yusufiya, one in a construction site, on April 5, and two more killed and 11 injured by bombings on April 6 and 7,  and a suicide car attack on a traffic police compound in the center of the city killed five and injured six on April 28; one killed and two wounded in separate incidents of May 3, two killed and three wounded in bombings in western Baghdad on May 6, one killed and three wounded by a bomb in southwestern Baghdad on May 9, and another killed on May 10, an employee of the education ministry, four killed and ten injured by a booby-trapped vehicle in Al-Sho'la on May 11, one killed and five wounded by a booby-trapped car near a bridge on Al-Rubaie Street on May 14, one killed and two wounded by an explosion in the north of the city on May 16, two killed and eight wounded in two shopping-district incidents including one at the market in al-Nasr wal Salam region in Abu Ghraib district of May 18, one killed and three injured in a blast near a market on May 19, 35 killed and 45 injured in four suicide attacks around the city on May 19, and three more injured on May 22, also near the market in al-Nasr wal Salam, and then on May 30, four days after the fasting month of Ramadan began, at least 30 killed and 40 wounded by a car that blew up outside the al-Faqma ice cream parlor.