In terms of money, currency, finances and such, have you ever stopped to think about why our money is called a one dollar bill, or 5 dollar bill, or 10 dollar bill, etc? In terms of money, currency, finances and such, what is a bill? When you receive a bill in the mail, like monthly bills, from the electric company, credit card company, telephone company, auto loan company, mortgage company, tax collector, and the like, what does this mean; bill? Does this not mean you owe somebody a debt? Is the word bill in this context generally one and the same with debt? For example, when you get the monthly electric bill and the paperwork for the bill indicates, for instance, the bill for this month is $75.00, does this not mean you owe a debt of $75.00 to the electric company? Utility companies make a good example for sake of discussion.

For many years, as a convenience to the people, there have been alternate payment centers set up all around the country for people to take care of their utility bills in person. Around these parts, for many years there was such an alternate payment center housed within the local Sears & Roebuck outlet. I do not know if that center still operates, but over the years, other alternate payment centers have sprung up. Several stores in this area - for instance the combo grocery / drug stores that are common these days, will now accept payment in person for various types of utility bills. Some of these will only accept payments on behalf of specific utility companies, while other stores will accept payments on behalf of other utility companies. The point is, these centers exist. In fact I have been making somewhat regular use of them for various personal reasons. Anyway, the question remains: how is it that I get a $75.00 bill from the electric company, I go down to the local grocery /drug store, I hand them the copy of the bill, plus I hand them 3-20 dollar bills, 1-10 dollar bill, and 1-5 dollar bill, they take this, count it, stamp the copy of the bill, hand me back a copy of the receipt paid, and that is pretty much it... as far as I can tell, everybody (the principals) involved are okay with this system. The question remains: how is it that I am billed $75.00 by an entity, for which I then hand over 5 bills in exhange, and seemingly everybody involved is okay with this?

This has been and continues to be just one among the many mysteries I've been contemplating for a while. There are some clues that I've stumbled upon and continue to stumble upon as I go along. Some times these clues sort of accumulate enough that they help provide at least a framework of some understanding, but you know how these things go. Many if not most of us are often surrounded with stray clues and snippets of explanations floating around, but other than these odd clues floating around for us to either ignore or pay some attention to as the case may be, that's pretty much all we have to go on, to guide us. I mean, I say this in comparison to, for instance, the situation whereby it seems pretty clear to me that we do not often need to worry about the problem of too many people waiting in line to explain to us in full detail these mysteries that surround us. For some reason there does not seem to be a concerted effort, for instance, a whole bunch of schools, television stations or other interested parties to swamp us all with informative, educating information to help solve some of these kinds of fundamental mysteries. Anyway, a relevant clue in this case can be found on dollar bills themselves.

Stamped in small font but unmistakable plain English is a caveat that upon contemplation of seems to be implying that our dollar bills, our system of money, currency at that, $1s, $5s, $10s, $20s, $50s, and $100s, all of them alike, represent debt. Compare this to a previous era when the statement engraved on our currency stated that the bearer of said note could exchange the note for equivalent value in gold or silver, on demand. In the current era, the clue is that these bills are designed to point out that they are to be accepted for all debts public and private. This still does not explain how or why debt collectors generally seem to be okay with accepting bills for payments of bills. I'm not making this up. Look it up! I'm just thinking otu loud, trying to make some sense out of all of this currency system. These dollar bills are also referred to as notes. Many years ago, if I showed up late for school or left early, teachers might get upset unless I handed them a note from somebody else, after which the teachers were then seemingly okay with this. The power of notes, eh?

In the old Christmas movie there is the famous line "every time a bell rings, an angel gets it's wings". There is another line that says that every time a dollar bill is exhanged for all debts private or public, the Federal Reserve earns a royalty. Since they own the patent to FRNs, they exact a useage fee each and every time one of their dollar bills is officially recorded as having been exhanged for all debts private and public. It eventually becomes more clear that these notes have since there inception been intended to manifest as debt. The system that puts these notes into circulation requires that the production of these notes incur a debt, in the form of interest, for services rendered, you see? This guarantees that the amount of debt attached to the notes will always be more than the face value of the total notes in circulation; debt. There is a related mystery; the notion of a nation so saddled with debt from the long term habitual use of exchanging patented money notes that it can spend it's way out of debt and back into prosperity by way of circulating more and more of these notes which of course necessitates more and more debt being generated in order to manufacture more and more of these notes for circulation. From where or how, theoretically, comes the money to pay the interest on these loans, I may never know, but this kind of interest is interesting to me. It is even more interesting that I may never know how or where the additional money is to come from to pay for the additional royalties racked up each and every time a FRN is officially registered as having been used "spent" for all debts public and private. While the people at large can no longer exhange these notes for silver or gold on demand, the FRB requires that the interest paid to it for having produced these notes must be paid in gold. So, on the one hand, dollar bills are seemingly okay to be exchanged for paying certain kinds of debts, light bills... "lite bills", if you will, just not okay for paying the kind of heavy bills racked up through the many years of having created the dollar bills themselves. Isn't that something? The producers, the very copyright patent owners of these dollar bills allow these bills to be exchanged with pretty much the entire spectrum of debt collectors .... EXCEPT themselves. By implicatin this seems to be teh FRB's way of saying that it does not have much faith in it's own dollar bill product.... the veritable hall monitor who will not accept their own note. That is some exceptionally interesting interest.