David McElroy

So you think the money you have in the bank belongs to you, huh? Does it really? The Europeans who have money deposited in their banks thought the same thing. Now that the continent is a financial basket case and the joint currency is on the verge of falling apart, Europeans are learning who controls their money. Will Americans be far behind in learning the same thing?

As it starts to seem likely to Greece will pull out of the eurozone and go back to its own currency, EU officials are trying to figure out what to do. One of the possibilities that they’re considering is limiting the amount of money that people are allowed to withdraw from banks. Another is instituting border checks and “capital controls.” (That’s a polite way of saying that people can’t move their money out of the country.)

If someone can tell you that you can’t have access to your money, is it really yours? If someone can tell you that you can’t spend your money out of the country — or send it to a bank account somewhere else — is it really your money?

Buckminster Fuller was an architect, engineer, writer, inventor and futurist, but he was also a rebel who was kicked out of Harvard twice and never finished there. After he was admitted for the second time, he was expelled for “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” He had no interest in the existing systems and practices he found. He was only interested in inventing the future — in bringing to life the vision he saw in his own mind.

Fuller saw different ways of designing and engineering buildings, among other things. He didn’t try to convince architects and engineers that their conventional designs were wrong. He didn’t care about fighting them. He simply went about the work of inventing what he saw in his mind’s eye. He was very conscious of this approach.

“You never change something by fighting the existing reality,” Fuller said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

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Ronald Reagan supposedly gave some advice to George Bush in 1988 when Bush was gearing up to run for the presidency. I can’t find the exact quote, but it was something like this: “Unless you’re the incumbent, always run on change. People always want change.”

Politicians can promise change every single election and never have to modify their basic message. Why? Because nothing substantially changes. Especially in the U.S. system, positive change is very difficult, because the system is designed to slow change down.

Even when there is change, you’ll always find it tending — over the long term — to be in the direction of government taking more and more power. For those who would like to roll back the power of government — libertarians and some conservatives — that’s a problem. (It’s actually a problem for left liberals at times, too, at least the ones who want more individual rights in some social areas.)

The weight of the evidence suggests that voting doesn’t produce change very often — and it never seems to produce change that actually reduces the size of government. Yet for some reason, some libertarians and all conservatives seem bound and determined that if they will just find a way to win this election — for whatever pathetic statist the Republicans have nominated — things are going to be different this time.

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