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(also known as Community currency or Local currency or Barter, Script etc.)
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"We deserve to own what we labour to create." John Locke |
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Like the citizens of the town of Pisa and their tower, we’ve set our economy up on the faulty foundation of a public monetary system. Not only our economy but our democratic system has been skewed as a result. We did this by misunderstanding money. We came to think of money as a valuable object or entity in and of itself and, as a result of the complexities sprouting from this misapprehension decided to surrender its management to government. We weren’t able to perceive that money is simply a way of accounting for and facilitating the interchange of our private, personal productive energy. Most certainly private property is the keystone of a democratic system so by surrendering control of money—essentially our own productive energy—we’ve constructed a profoundly socialistic system and then masked this misalignment behind the label ‘democratic’.
Pick up any book on the subject of money and you will find hardly any mention of what money is. We think we already know what money is but we do not and our ignorance has cost us dearly. This work will discuss the subject of money carefully from its roots in order to reveal not only the promise held out by private systems but also how misunderstanding money has led us by degrees into economic chaos and away from democracy.
Do not misinterpret this work to be an anti-government or anti-banking or anti-big business tirade. The problem is in us; it is my misunderstanding and your misunderstanding. We are all governors; we are all bankers and businessmen. We will not waste time stewing in the frustration of the “us-them” trap. As individuals, we are the root of all organizations and thus we have the power to alter them where we come to perceive the need for alteration. Our business here is to recognize dysfunction and seek remedy so all may gain. A democratic system is one of sovereignty of the individual and the subject of money is where we’ve unintentionally surrendered this sovereignty but also, by transformation though understanding, it may be reclaimed.
There is no better testament to the truths here detailed than the daily convulsions our public monetary system suffers from as committees such as the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve attempt to manipulate it like wizards from behind curtains, money by its very nature can only ever be properly managed privately at its source which is you and I and all individuals—the source of wealth.
What Money appears to be
We’ve predicated a monetary system upon the principal that money as an object valuable in and of itself; something precious and scarce that we earn from customers or employers who have managed to garner a supply to draw from. Our public system has given government a monopoly on creation of this money-material and restructured once private banks into its public money distribution and gate-keeping system. We sympathize when these organizations experience trouble because we’ve been trained to believe that the economy is akin to a wayward weather system in which this money-material flows around in some sort of atmospheric international market currents—sometimes calm but more naturally stormy with unwieldy rhythms that even experts can but helplessly watch with fingers crossed.
The fundamental misunderstandings
Surrender of control
We’ve surrendered personal control of money even though in this age of specialization we need it in supply almost as constantly as we need air for breathing. The narrower the focus of what we produce individually the more expansive is our need to trade for goods and services that we require to live. To employ a medium of exchange is necessary but we’ve set up a monetary system with ourselves, the very producers of wealth, in the role of supplicants to government through the banking system. Essentially we must lease the medium in order to transact in the marketplace our everyday, personal private exchanges of the value we produce. To resign the control of money, the utility of exchange, to bureaus, agencies and committees is not less absurd than consigning our breathing to a lung machine of which the responsible staff is never capable of more than haphazard control.
Belief that the instrument itself is valuable
If we believe that the money instrument in its various forms is valuable itself than it is printers and computer programs that are the source of wealth. The soft ground of this error leans us further askew with the expectation that government can, with our good in mind, not only control but actually provide valuables by printing fresh bonds, bills and logging electronic bank credits.
That money, an accounting system of value determined by exchange, can be controlled by government is the great misconception. The realization that sound money can only be privately issued—that is by you and I—as a product of exchange within our communities is the antidote. With the application of private systems s new age for our economy and for our democratic system will dawn. To the degree money is issued privately the unnatural, invasive growth of government must stop and we will find it shrinking back to the role it was originally conceived to take and to only the services it can efficiently perform.
What Money Is
Take a dollar and a 20 dollar bill into your hands and inspect them. It’s obvious that, other than the shapes of the printed images, they are equivalent. Is there anything valuable contained here? Could this $20 dollar bill be more valuable than this $1 dollar bill? It’s obvious that what is valuable resides elsewhere; these notes can only be some sort of a floating accounting system of value. What is valuable? What is value and where does it reside? How does this accounting instrument express value?
Valuables
What is valuable, economically speaking, always has been those goods and services that we produce which satisfy our needs. What is the source of this value? It is individual productive energy that wells up inside of us each day. It is ours, personally, ours as privately as are our bodies. Every day we apply some degree of our energy toward the production of what’s valuable and, remembering that the population of one side of the earth is producing while the other side recuperates, we see that goods and services are constantly welling up from the earth’s surface through us as organically as the harvest of fruit trees or tomato plants. Individuals, wielding the earth resources at their command, are the source and font of what’s valuable. The productive energy that flows out of us every day is the root of economic wealth. What’s valuable has never originated in gold mines, banks, company payrolls or government treasuries.
It’s time to shake off economic science’s misconception of scarcity. Scarcity of a particular resource has never proven scarcity in general, for, depletion of a desired resource always leads to exploration and discovery of a new, often superior way of satisfying the need. When unrestrained by static concepts, a portion of our productivity naturally flows to creative solutions in proportion to the severity of problems. The psychology of man is governed by his concepts so a concept of limitation creates limits but a concept that no true limitation exists opens new vistas of possibility. Exhausted resources are inevitably replaced by new and better suited methods of satisfying needs. The narrow concept of a static, solitary earth alone in cold space can be abandoned. Within our Solar System this planet is one of a family of interactive dynamic chakra-planets all flooded with constantly fresh matter-energy of a divine electric heart-sun and that same energy, stepped down to our range of receptivity—productive energy—is inexhaustibly flowing through us. We are fonts of productivity and thus fonts of wealth.
Value
What is valuable are those goods and services flowing from our productive energy which are focused on our needs. To ‘evaluate’ is the mental process of comparing one thing with another to determine degree of desirability. To evaluate is by nature a subjective assessment in the moment. We determine the value of things by comparing them one with another or by comparing the same thing at different moments. The operation of the law of supply and demand in conjunction with the variability of human desire assures that the degree of value a commodity contains can never be captured and fixed. What we do in trading is determine relative value; a mathematical process of dividing or multiplying depending on whether the commodity is of greater or lesser desire than some criterion of value.
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