The Return To The Land Of Oz

by Robert Jennings, Innerself.com

Dorothy Gale III never quite believed the stories. Not fully. Not the way her grandmother told them. But she loved to listen. As a little girl, she’d curl up beside the old woman on a wide front porch in Kansas, the air thick with cicadas and the scent of cornfields. And the stories would spill out like magic.

They were always told the same way, with the same rhythm, the same pauses, the same glint in Grandma Dorothy’s eye: the yellow brick road, the flying monkeys, the Scarecrow who thought he had no brain, the Tin Man without a heart, the Lion too afraid to roar. And the Wizard—always the Wizard—bellowing nonsense from behind a velvet curtain, until one little girl tugged the veil and changed everything.

Except… she hadn’t.

“The curtain came down,” Grandma Dorothy would say, “but the spell never broke.” That was the line she always whispered at the end, like a warning passed through generations. “The Wizard’s power wasn’t in the machines or the smoke. It was in the believing. He didn’t need to fool everyone. He just needed us to doubt ourselves.”

By the time Dori—never “Dorothy” unless her mother was scolding—reached adulthood, she’d set those stories aside. She left Kansas for grad school. She earned her PhD in economics from a top Ivy League university. Her dissertation focused on monetary policy and post-crisis inflation dynamics. She wore dark blazers and quoted FOMC minutes with confidence. If anyone asked about her childhood stories, she’d laugh. “Just some old Kansas tales. You know—dust and dreams.”

Her mother, Dorothy Margaret Gale, had taken a different path. A sharp, no-nonsense economist who came of age during the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, Margaret was steeped in discipline, fear, and responsibility. She remembered the gas lines. She revered Paul Volcker. She believed in sacrifice. Fiscal restraint wasn’t just smart policy—it was moral. The government, like any household, had to live within its means. There was no such thing as a free lunch, and certainly no magic slippers.

At home, economics wasn’t debated—it was inherited. Margaret would sit Dori down after school and explain supply shocks and wage-price spirals the way other mothers read fairy tales. “This is how you stop inflation,” she’d say, pointing to a chart. “This is why deficits are dangerous. It’s about trust, honey. Once people stop trusting the dollar, it’s over.”

Dori respected her mother’s mind. She admired her clarity. But something always tugged at the edges of her understanding, like a seam slightly off-kilter. It wasn’t just Grandma’s stories—it was the way her mother seemed to speak in warnings, never possibilities. Always fear. Never hope.

One night, when Dori was sixteen, she came home from school and asked an innocent question: “Why can’t the government just spend more money on schools if it can print it?” Margaret froze. Not in anger, but in something more fragile—discomfort. She sat Dori down at the table and carefully explained monetary velocity, bond markets, and inflation risks. She drew a line between caution and catastrophe. She said, “Because we can’t just print money. That’s how countries fall apart.”

Dori nodded. She filed it away. But the question never really left her.

Years later, working at a policy think tank in Washington, Dori sat in on a private briefing with a central bank official. He explained how the government’s spending came first, and the bond issuance came later—as a “reserve drain.” He called it an operational necessity, not a funding requirement. It wasn’t in the textbooks. It wasn’t on the news. But it was routine.

And in that moment, something snapped. Something clicked. The spell—quiet, invisible, ever-present—flickered. She heard her grandmother’s whisper again: “The curtain came down, but the spell never broke.”

Three generations. One story. One illusion. Grandma Dorothy had seen behind the curtain. Her daughter had rebuilt it. And now, Dori was standing in front of it once more, wondering if this time, she had the courage to tear it down for good.

The Return to Oz

Washington wasn’t called Oz, of course. But it may as well have been.

The buildings shimmered in marble and glass. Behind every door: committees, agencies, institutions. Think tanks with emerald-colored logos. Conferences with embossed name badges and billion-dollar budgets to study billion-dollar deficits. But when Dori looked closer, she saw something else—something familiar. The economic models were pristine. The language was elegant. The assumptions were carved in stone. But none of it seemed to explain what she’d seen behind the curtain.

She watched lawmakers ask questions in public hearings that everyone in the room knew had answers—just not answers they were willing to say out loud. Questions like, “How will we pay for it?” And the usual replies came: we must borrow responsibly, we must not burden future generations, we must tighten our belts. And yet… in private briefings and internal memos, the same officials would explain how Treasury auctions actually work. How the Federal Reserve credits accounts with keystrokes. How the government, unlike households, can never run out of dollars—because it creates them.

Oz hadn’t changed. The Wizard had just updated the wardrobe. No longer a trembling old man with levers and smoke, he now appeared in a navy suit with a PhD and a PowerPoint deck. The smoke machine was gone, replaced by financial jargon, inflation targeting, and a thousand spreadsheet footnotes. But the illusion remained: the idea that the nation’s money was scarce, that public spending was dangerous, that we were always just one decimal point away from ruin.

One day, Dori sat in the back of a fiscal responsibility summit, watching a panel of experts discuss “entitlement reform.” They used soft, sterile terms—“unsustainable trajectory,” “cost containment,” “intergenerational equity.” The room nodded. Graphs showed debt-to-GDP projections rising like monsters. But Dori kept thinking of something else: the housing complex down the street with broken elevators and mold on the walls; the waiting list for disability benefits stretching into next year; the mothers in her old neighborhood who worked two jobs and still couldn’t afford childcare.

She stood to ask a question. “If we can create money to stabilize banks and fight wars, why can’t we do the same to house the poor or transition to renewable energy?”

The panel smiled politely. One economist, older and well-published, replied: “We must maintain market confidence, Ms. Gale. Fiscal discipline is the foundation of prosperity.”

She sat back down, hearing the gears behind the curtain creak.

That night, Dori revisited her grandmother’s worn copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She’d brought it with her from Kansas, though she hadn’t touched it in years. She began reading—not as a child, but as an economist. And suddenly, everything was clearer than any macro model she'd ever been taught.

The yellow brick road was the gold standard—bright and rigid, leading nowhere. The silver slippers, erased in the movie, were bimetallism—a call for more inclusive monetary policy. The Scarecrow was the American farmer—dismissed as dumb, but full of earthy wisdom. The Tin Man was labor, dehumanized by industrial capitalism. The Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan—powerful in rhetoric but paralyzed by fear. And the Wizard? He was every official who had ever said, “We’d love to help, but the money’s just not there.”

Grandma hadn’t been exaggerating. She’d been remembering.

In the weeks that followed, Dori started giving quiet talks, mostly to students and activists. She spoke plainly. “The government is not a household,” she would say. “It spends money into existence, and it taxes to control inflation and validate the currency. Deficits are not signs of irresponsibility—they are signs of where the money went. If it went to billionaires, that’s not a fiscal problem. It’s a moral one.”

Some people looked confused. Some got angry. But some leaned forward—like they were hearing a story their grandmother once told them, and only now realizing it might be true.

Meanwhile, in the halls of power, the spell held strong. Headlines warned of runaway spending. Think tanks issued white papers about “debt ceilings” and “fiscal cliffs.” Politicians of every stripe insisted they cared about the people—but only within the limits of what was “affordable.”

And climate disasters continued. Storms came harder, faster. Infrastructure collapsed. Children suffered. But the same question always echoed through the press conferences: “How will we pay for it?”

Dori knew then that it wasn’t a question. It was a script. A spell. A beautifully crafted incantation, repeated not to seek truth—but to keep truth at bay.

So she began to write. A new kind of story. Not quite a fable, not quite a manifesto. A story about belief, illusion, and the courage to see beyond what you’ve been taught. She called it The Spell of Oz.

The Spell

The invitation came in the form of an embossed envelope delivered by courier. “Economic Policy Roundtable – Closed Session. Location: Emerald Reserve.” No return address. No RSVP instructions. Just a date, a time, and the unmistakable air of power wrapped in discretion.

Dori knew what it meant. She’d drawn attention. Her speeches, her papers, her interviews—none had gone viral, but they had made their way into the wrong inboxes. Or the right ones, depending on your perspective. Someone behind the curtain had noticed. And now, they wanted a conversation.

The Emerald Reserve was an ironic name, but fitting. Located a few blocks off Constitution Avenue, it was a sleek, green-glass complex that housed think tanks, advisory councils, and the kind of decision-makers who never ran for office but always got invited to testify. It wasn’t the official Fed or Treasury—those had their own stages. The Reserve was more… subterranean. A place where narratives were shaped before they ever reached the public.

The lobby was cold and spotless. A minimalist sculpture of a golden brick spiraled upward near the entrance. Security scanned her ID, and within minutes, Dori was guided into a private boardroom with too many screens and too few windows.

He was already there. The Wizard.

Of course, no one called him that. To the world, he was Dr. Charles Everett—former Fed governor, now special advisor to the Global Monetary Stability Board. White-haired, commanding, his voice carried the calm cadence of someone who had never needed to raise it. He smiled as she entered, gestured to the seat across from him, and said, “Ms. Gale. Or may I call you Dori?”

“Dori’s fine,” she said, settling into the chair.

“I’ve been following your work. Thought it was time we had a real conversation.”

She nodded. “I’ve been hoping for one.”

He tapped a screen. Charts bloomed in the air between them—deficit projections, bond yields, long-term entitlement outlays. “These are not fairy tales, Ms. Gale. These are real numbers. Real risks.”

She didn’t flinch. “I’m not disputing the numbers. I’m questioning the framing. You and I both know the federal government creates its own currency. It doesn’t need to ‘find’ money before it spends. It issues money, then taxes and borrows to manage the system.”

Everett smiled—thin, knowing. “You’re not wrong. Operationally. But economics is more than plumbing. It’s psychology. It’s belief. The illusion is necessary.”

Dori leaned forward. “Necessary for whom?”

He looked at her as though weighing whether to bother pretending. Then he exhaled slowly and said the quiet part out loud.

“Yes, Dorothy—we could afford to rebuild the towns, stabilize the climate, feed the hungry. But what would happen then? You might stop believing in me.”

Silence hung between them like fog. Dori felt her pulse slow. Not from fear—but clarity.

“So the lie,” she said, “is the point.”

He didn’t deny it. “The public needs boundaries. If people think there’s no limit, they’ll demand everything. Full employment. Universal health care. Clean energy. And they’ll expect it fast. They’ll want justice on a timeline.”

“And that’s unacceptable?”

“It’s unmanageable. Unpredictable. And—let’s be honest—destabilizing to certain interests.”

Dori shook her head. “You’re still the Wizard. But you’re not even hiding anymore. You’re just hoping we’re too afraid to look behind the curtain again.”

He smiled again, gently. “Are you afraid?”

She looked him in the eye. “Not anymore.”

He stood. “Then let’s see what happens.”

And that was it. No threats. No levers pulled. Just the end of the meeting—and the beginning of something else.

The Illusion Shattered

Dori left the Emerald Reserve and stepped into the fading light. The city looked the same. Cars honked. Phones buzzed. Reporters fretted over debt ceilings and inflation upticks. But for her, the illusion had fully shattered.

Not because she’d been told a secret. But because she’d confirmed the truth: the spell was deliberate. The economic myths—the “household budget” analogy, the moralizing over deficits, the doom forecasting—were not mistakes. They were tools. Carefully engineered and endlessly repeated. Not to explain the world—but to constrain what was politically imaginable within it.

The next day, Dori spoke at a university lecture hall filled with students, teachers, and reporters. She didn’t start with data. She started with a story.

“My grandmother once pulled back a curtain and saw a frightened man pretending to be a god. That man told her there were no wizards—just tricks, projections, and fear. But decades later, the world still obeys the myth. We still bow to economic wizards who claim we can’t afford to fix what’s broken.”

She paused, then added: “I met the Wizard yesterday. He knows the truth. They all do. But they believe in managing belief more than they believe in justice. It’s time to break the spell.”

The room erupted. Some in applause. Some in confusion. Some in anger. But the noise didn’t matter. What mattered was the shift. A curtain had stirred. And this time, it wasn’t a little girl pulling the rope—it was a woman who understood both the illusion and the machinery behind it.

Breaking the Spell

Dori didn’t return to Kansas often. But this time felt different. Not like a retreat, but a reckoning. Her mother was waiting on the porch, arms crossed, a glass of sweet tea sweating in the summer heat. She’d seen the speech, of course. Everyone had. It was clipped, analyzed, praised, and ridiculed. Some called it brave. Others called it dangerous. A few called it treasonous. The spell had cracked—but not without noise.

“So,” her mother said, setting the glass down. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself.”

Dori smiled. “Takes one Gale to break a storm, I guess.”

Margaret didn’t laugh. She just nodded toward the chair across from her. Dori sat, the old porch creaking beneath her. The same porch where her grandmother once told bedtime stories about illusions and lions and flying monkeys. The same place her mother used to explain bond markets and velocity equations on napkins during dinner.

“I watched the whole thing,” Margaret said after a long pause. “Twice.”

Dori waited.

“You were wrong about some of the inflation mechanics,” Margaret added, “but…” Her voice trailed off. She looked away. “But I think you were right about the fear.”

That landed heavier than any applause Dori had received in Washington.

“I used to tell myself I was protecting you,” Margaret continued. “Teaching you discipline. Guarding you from magical thinking. But maybe I was just… passing along my own fear. My own training.”

Dori reached for her mother’s hand. “You were surviving a system built on scarcity myths. I get it. But we don’t have time for fear anymore.”

Her other nodded, tears in her eyes she didn’t bother to hide. “Your grandmother used to say that the Wizard didn’t lose his power when he was exposed. He lost it when the people stopped pretending he still had it.”

“That’s the real spell,” Dori whispered. “The pretending.”

That night, Dori stayed in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by the books and posters of a girl who once believed the world was smaller than it is. But now, the horizon had widened. She had seen the machinery behind the myths. She had spoken the truth out loud. And most importantly, she had learned that the truth alone was not enough—the spell would not break itself.

Back in Washington, the reactions grew louder. Op-eds attacked her credibility. Congress called for hearings. Central bankers issued carefully worded rebukes. But something else was happening too—something harder to track in headlines.

Local organizers started quoting her lectures. Unions held teach-ins on public finance. City councils proposed full-employment job guarantees, backed not by fear of deficits, but by the knowledge that the resources were there—the only question was will. A few mayors even invoked her grandmother’s name, calling for “Oz-free budgets.” The spell, once broken, had begun to unravel. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But enough.

One morning, Dori was asked to speak at a massive rally in Chicago. Tens of thousands gathered—not just economists or activists, but teachers, nurses, construction workers, students. She stood at the podium, looking out over the crowd, and felt something deeper than excitement. She felt gravity. The weight of history turning—gently, but clearly.

“My grandmother pulled back the curtain,” she said. “My mother taught me the numbers. I was trained to fear, but I chose to remember. I remembered that the economy is not a force of nature—it’s a story we tell ourselves. And if we can rewrite that story, we can rebuild everything.”

Cheers echoed. Not as a wave of noise, but as an agreement — we see it too.

She continued: “The next time someone tells you we can’t afford clean water, or universal health care, or a livable planet—ask them: ‘Do we lack the money, or do we lack the courage?’ Because the spell was never about arithmetic. It was about obedience.”

After the rally, a young girl approached her. No more than nine. Straw-colored hair, ruby shoes. She held out a folded piece of paper. It was a drawing—three women: one old, one middle-aged, one young, all walking a yellow brick road that crumbled behind them as they moved forward.

“I drew you,” the girl said. “And your mom. And your grandma.”

Dori smiled. “Thank you. That’s exactly how it feels.”

“Is the Wizard gone now?” the girl asked.

Dori bent down to her level. “Not yet. But he’s out of hiding. And that’s the beginning of the end.”

The girl nodded. “My teacher says money is just numbers on a screen.”

Dori grinned. “She’s a smart teacher.”

They stood there a moment longer, under a sky that still held its storms, but now—maybe—also held the promise of rain that fell on fertile ground.

The spell wasn’t fully broken. But it was cracking. And in the widening fractures, truth poured in like light.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com

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Article Recap

"The Return to the Land of Oz" reimagines a beloved American tale to expose a deeper truth: our economic limits are not monetary, but psychological. Through three generations of women—each shaped by a different understanding of money—the story shows how myths about deficits and scarcity persist across time. In breaking the spell, the youngest Dorothy dares to name the illusion for what it is: a story designed to constrain compassion. And now, perhaps, we’re ready to believe something better.

#ModernMonetaryTheory #DeficitMyth #EconomicJustice #WizardOfOz #GovernmentSpending #MoneyTruth #OzReturns #FiscalPolicy #EndTheSpell #EconomicAllegory