How on earth does The Wizard of Oz come into this?

Frank Baum wrote this as a protest to the gold and silver primary base value to money (yellow brick road and silver shoes, note; red in the 1935 movie for dramatic effect in new colour technology), the promises of government that turned out to be no more than a small man with a megaphone behind a curtain ( as in the film) in the emerald city (Washington DC and green concerning the ‘greenback dollar’).

The promise of restoring the gold and silver standard to the workers was a bluff that, as seen later, would only benefit the owners of the finite metals.

What does this mean? The gold standard?

The idea behind this is that both gold and silver are finite. So a country has x amount of the materials, which is all its money (unless it discovers more, but the reality is that it’s based on each country having a finite amount of gold and silver). At first, this seems quite obvious, but the problem is twofold.

1) When an economy grows (like in the game of Monopoly), it needs more money to grow, so more money has to be issued to stop the economy from falling into stagflation (money being expensive due to rarity). Gold and silver, in this case, the actual essential commodities of land, food and water, rise in value due to scarcity in relation to the finite gold/silver, but labour doesn’t (in fear of wage inflation), so people can no longer afford to buy the basics, including the very products they make which unless the currency is devalued by creating more, but remember you can’t because gold and silver are finite. Eventually, you end up in an economic depression (the 1930s) because businesses can no longer operate when nobody is buying their product, i.e. warehouses full of stuff that nobody can afford, and when staples like food become relatively expensive, dropping the price of products will only favour the wealthy who are few and rely on labour for their rents. 

2) When there is an economic depression (1929 crash) or war, and the government needs to intervene to employ the unused natural resource of labour (that needs money to pay tax and stay out of jail) to revive the economy (FDR New Deal 1933-1937) or fight/produce in the war machine. Again, the currency will inflate as it is finite, so the owners of said metal gain whilst doing nothing (rentiers), and the people have less money to share whilst the economy expands. Their spending power reduces while the owners increase. The gold standard approach has always crashed and burned at its end.

So, the promise of paths paved with gold and silver shoes was a lie, and this lie was only revealed once you got to Emerald City and met the Wizard of Oz. He could no more solve your problems than anybody else. It was all a charade. In most things in life, we work through ourselves and within our communities, but the things we can’t do also turn to the government. There needs to be transparency and openness in government, not myth and magic.

For me, Glinda the Good Witch represents the reality of many good people in positions of power. Not all are the wicked Witch of the West or the deceitful and weak Wizard of Oz.

I see many politicians who are out of their depth but cannot admit it as hapless wizards, then a mixture of good and bad witches, on experiencing more bad witches than necessary of late, now (UK July 2024) reverted to more good Glinda’s. 

 Getting back to the original point concerning money. Rachel ‘Glinda’ Reeves (UK new chancellor of the exchequer), the City of London (Emerald City) has for too long manipulated the government with the bond market and the impression that the government needs to ‘borrow’; it doesn’t (i.e., QE), but for the moment in law, it has to go through this archaic gold standard process when we have fiat currency (by decree) that is issued out of nothing, no gold whatsoever involved!