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Introduction
Movies and novels have made neural surgeons and nuclear physicists today's stereotype of the super-brain. Yet recently, when an informed high-school student sought to explain to a neural surgeon how money is brought into existence in the United States, his listener exclaimed. "Stop! That stuff is just too deep for me!"
Now, if an individual of that caliber thinks the subject of money is too deep, we might well ask how anyone could write a whole book about it and expect it to become a best-seller. Money, of course, is just about everyone's favorite subject; but that fact derives from all those wonderful things that money buys, not from the delights of contemplating such mechanisms as devaluation, inflation, balance of payments, and exchange ratios.
Incredibly, Dr. Edward Popp appears to have done the impossible. He has produced a scholarly study of money that should and could become a best-seller. His highly original work, The Great Cookie Jar, with its well-marshalled facts and irrefutable conclusions, is both a classic and a bombshell! It is a classic because no one else has told us in such simple, step-by-step fashion, just what money is, how it is brought into existence, and what the results of this method of money-creation are. It is a bombshell because Dr. Popp goes further. He shows us that our money is essentially the equivalent of counterfeit! He explains how it happened and who it is that has a monopolistic right to create our money out of nothing-and then collect interest on it. When the cookie jar is the whole money system, we have a right [p. 2] to know who has his hand in it; and if you think it is the government, then you had better think again!
For decades the reasons behind the cyclical spectacle of monetary expressions have been couched under such familiar headings as "economic uncertainty " "trade imbalance," "excessive public debt," "deflationary pressures, overheating of the economy, “expansion of the money supply," and "runaway inflation." These phrases tend to obscure rather than clarify just what is going on. Few of us have understood, really understood, just what they mean; nor, have we been highly motivated to learn. Just like our friend the surgeon, we have harbored the suspicion that "that stuff’s just too deep for me."
Well, enter sunshine, enter illumination, enter easy, delightful and exciting understanding! In a word enter Dr, Popp! His incredibly informative, totally absorbing, and topically complete treatment of the subject of money simply has no equal. This is one of those once in a century books that delivers a fresh, revealing, accurate, and coordinated picture of an entire subject-matter, and does so at the level of common understanding.
Above all, Dr. Popp doesn't leave us stranded. While not one person in ten thousand understands our present money system and not one in a million understands what a proper: money system should be, only the most rare theoretician understands how to get from where we are to where we ought to be without producing global disaster In the process. Dr. Popp is the articulate spokesman of that elitist circle.
I predict that the simple substance of The Great Cookie Jar will emerge as the primary position in the political platform of every party in America that is seriously concerned with the re-establishment of Constitutional principles and an economy of material abundance. I predict that responsible patriots in every nation on earth will then echo that American example. And I hold-I don’t know if we yet dare predict-that the clear concepts presented in The Great Cookie Jar [p. 3] eventually will become embodied in a fundamental educational course, not in the graduate schools, not in the colleges, nor even in the high-schools of America, but in the grammar-schools all across this great land.
What a fantastic vision of hope and creativity this unique book reveals! It opens vistas largely undreamed of and truly unknown. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
G. Edward Griffin
June, 1978 President, American Media
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