Mary Mellor’s “Debt or Democracy”: Why Not Quantitative Easing for People?
Perhaps the leading champion for reforming the current money system is Mary Mellor, emeritus professor at Northumbria University in the UK and author of the recently published, eye-opening book Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice (Pluto Press, 2015, distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press Books). 
Mellor recently published an oped piece in The Independent, the British newspaper, that summarizes some of the key themes in her book. Her essay focuses on the “myth of handbag economics” – the idea that government budgets are comparable to household budgets. This distorts our understanding of how the money supply works, says Mellor, and inexorably leads governments to adopt fiscal austerity policies.
The critical political question that is rarely asked, said Mellor at a policy workshop last September, is: Who controls the creation and circulation of money?
She notes that the government, as the sovereign, has the authority to issue new money – an ancient authority known as seignorage. But in practice, governments have surrendered this authority to the commercial banking sector, whose lending creates nearly all of the money in circulation as debt.
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