Re: What prevents ampleness? (was: Re: [ox-en] Apple trees (aka capitalism) are bad. What about barter exchange?)
- From: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:27:13 +0700
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Stefan,
your usage of the money trickery concept is really tiring, so forgive me,
but for a few days I want to show you how it affects other people by doing
the same ,and I'll be inventing a few epithets ...
with that said, let's continue
Yet in an exchange based system you "may not eat if you do not work".
In fact this is the basic limitation set by the exchange system.
this is not necessarily a 'strong' feature of all exchange systems, but
rather of scarcity-based money; other methods allow you to create value
through your work, as long as it is acknowledged; or to create value by
creating credit in a trust community, such as the WIR method; in these
systems, you can play without money, and it is the real activity that
creates the 'money'
again don't confuse exchange systems in general, with markets, with
capitalism, in one big goo ..
so, here is a short explanation of the scarcity effects of the capitalist
money that you support, followed by a proposed alternative; finally some
useful distinctions at the end
*Bernard Lietaer on the artificial scarcity of the present money system*
"For a bank-debt-based fiat currency system to function at all, scarcity
must be artificially and systematically introduced and maintained." When a
bank extends a loan, the borrower must pay it back with interest, which he
competes with everyone else to procure from the limited amount of
still-to-be-created money. Governments and their central banks must exercise
careful control—through interest rates, margin reserve requirements, and,
most important in the present era, purchase or sale of government securities
on the open market—over the rate at which this new money is created, a
difficult balancing act between tightness, which creates more scarcity,
intensifies competition, and leads to bankruptcies, layoffs, concentration
of wealth, and economic recession, and looseness, which creates less
scarcity, higher inflation, and increased economic activity, but at the risk
of runaway inflation and complete currency collapse. In order to prevent the
latter eventuality, money must be kept scarce, consigning its users to
perpetual competition and perpetual insecurity. (
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/book/4-09-Interest_and_Self-Interest.html)
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
Because interest and fractional reserve banking force infinite growth:
Infinite growth is an impossibility on a finite planet. Dave Taylor argues
how the growth imperative is linked to the current monetary system.
"Two traditions are necessitating the money economy growing, namely
percentage payments for trading in money and en grosse, and the
justification of income to work done by individuals rather than work
actually needed. The second results in more individuals needing more work
and employers needing more money to pay for it, which is supplied as of now
by traders in money as credit at interest. But more money earned is spent by
more people, so there is no net increase to pay the interest, which must
therefore be paid for by more money supplied as credit, causing (except when
interrupted by catastrophe) exponential increases in the supply of credit
such as we are now seeing. What a philosophy of math!
Making the Flat-earth assumption that money is equivalent to the realities
it claims to value, a trivial way of shrinking the economy is simply to
shrink all the prices! But to prevent growth recurring it is actually the
trading and transportation economies which need to shrink, logically by
abolishing the percentage and piecework payment systems noted above, and
instead providing all (including bankers and traders) with interest free
loans for subsistence and justifiable investments as required, to be
recycled by retailers, repaid by a commensurate part of the necessary work
actually being done, and competitively motivated by prizes for good work
already done. The necessary local work of providing for the maintenance of
the community and its existing wealth can then take the place of expanding
large-scale factory production and transportation unnecessarily as a means
of sustaining the wealth of the community and improving its quality of
life." (Critical Realism mailing list)
The Solution to Monetary Scarcity?
Greg Martin explains the basic idea behind Monetary
Reform<http://p2pfoundation.net/Monetary_Reform>,
in particular the ideas of Silvio Gesell:
"Basically Gesell proposed a fundamental change to the way money works;
instead of collecting interest money should loose value or depreciate over
time. Someone who holds a depreciating currency will want to spend it while
it still has most of its value. This compulsion to spend will force money to
circulate, making it easier to earn money as well.
Depreciating currency is also a fairer type of currency. Usually the person
selling something is at a disadvantage to the person who has money. This is
because goods are perishable, they go out of fashion and out of date. Money
has none of these characteristics; it will be worth the same tomorrow as it
is today. For this reason the person with money can afford to wait until the
seller agrees to lower his prices. Depreciating currency places both buyer
and seller on an equal footing because they both possess something that
looses value over time. One does not have a bargaining advantage over the
other." (http://worgl.wiki.com/)
*Sylvio Gesell on `why money should rot'*
"Commodities in general, straw, petrol, guano and the rest can be safely
exchanged only when everyone is indifferent as to whether he possesses money
or goods, and that is possible only if money is afflicted with all the
defects inherent in our products. That is obvious. Our goods rot, decay,
break, rust, so only if money has equally disagreeable, loss-involving
properties can it effect exchange rapidly, securely and cheaply. For such
money can never, on any account, be preferred by anyone to goods. Only money
that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron,
evaporates like ether, is capable of standing the test as an instrument for
the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For such money is not
preferred to goods either by the purchaser or the seller. We then part with
our goods for money only because we need the money as a means of exchange,
not because we expect an advantage from possession of the money." (
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/book/7-02-The_Currency_of_Cooperation.html )
An echo of this from Keith Hart:
“Money is the problem, but it is also the solution. *We have to find ways of
organising markets as equal exchange and that means detaching the forms of
money from the capitalist institutions which currently define them. I
believe that, instead of taking money to be something scarce beyond our
control, we could begin to make it ourselves as a means of accounting for
those exchanges whose outcomes we wish to calculate*. Money would then
become multiple sources of personal credit, building on the technology which
has already given us plastic cards. The key to repersonalisation of the
economy is cheap information. Money was previously impersonal because
objects exchanged at distance needed to be detached from the parties
involved. Now growing amounts of information can be attached to transactions
involving people anywhere in the world. This provides the opportunity for us
to make circuits of exchange employing money forms which reflect our
individuality, so that money may be more meaningful to each of us as a means
of participating in the multiple associations we choose to enter. All of
this stands in stark contrast to state-made money in the 20th century, where
citizens belonged to one national economy whose currency was monopolised by
a political class claiming the authority of representation to manage its
volume, price and allocation." (http://www.thememorybank.co.uk/ )
Eric Harris-Braun distinguishes 3 forms of wealth:
*1. Tradable Wealth:*
Food, shelter, services, time, are all forms of tradable wealth. We are all
familiar with tradable wealth--it is the stuff we need and want, the
resources that we compete for. Things we can trade are the products or the
components of systems.
*2. Measurable Wealth:*
My health is non-tradable--I can't give it to you. I can give you my blood,
which may affect both of our health, but I can't give you my health itself.
It is a property of my body as a whole. However, you can measure my health
in lots of objective ways: the miles I run or the number of times I see a
doctor. Another thing that is non-tradable is the productive capacity of a
factory. I can sell you the products of the factory, or the factory itself,
but not its productive capacity. But you can measure its productivity by
comparing its output to the inputs it requires. Similarly the health of a
forest is non-tradable. Its diversity, resilience, etc. can, as with bodily
health and productive capacity, be affected and objectively measured, but it
can't be traded. Bodies, factories, and forests are all examples of systems.
Things we can measure but not trade are properties of systems as a whole.
*3. Acknowledgeable Wealth:*
Friendship, beauty, freedom, civility, culture, happiness, integrity,
reputation--these are all forms of acknowledgeable wealth. They are neither
tradable nor objectively measurable because their impact is only felt
subjectively. I can have friendships of different strengths--from an
acquaintance to a best buddy--and though I can tell the qualitative
difference between them, that difference is not measurable using any
external scale. Rather, it is a difference in quality of relationship
between one system (me) and two other systems (my acquaintance, and my
buddy). Similarly my professional reputation comes from my relationships
with my previous clients. As a potential client you can get a subjective
sense of my reputation by talking to my previous clients, but there is no
one objective standard to go by in making your choice. Those things that we
can acknowledge but cannot measure or trade are inter-systemic resonances."
(http://openmoney.info/sophia/index.html)
So, Money is a means to acknowledge wealth, but there are other ways than
money to generate such acknowledgements.
The Wealth Typology <http://p2pfoundation.net/Wealth_Typology> teaches us
that not all wealth can be measurable, and that not all measurable wealth is
tradeable. Only the latter is well suited for money.
For other types of wealth, we need to go beyond money:
Eric Harris-Braun on Why a Wealth Acknowledgement System is necessary
"When I barter a dozen of my eggs for a pound of your carrots, wealth
acknowledgment happens in the act of haggling: It's where we determined how
many eggs for how many carrots. When I pay you a coin for your carrots
instead (because you don't want my eggs), the coin itself is the
acknowledgment of the wealth transfer. The advantage is that the
wealth-acknowledgment token, the coin, is redeemable elsewhere in the
community. And when communities start using paper notes as
wealth-acknowledgment tokens instead of precious metal, the number of
transactions is no longer limited by the amount of metal available. When
communities invent wealth-acknowledgment tokens for investment, like stock
certificates sold by entrepreneurs, they further unlock the potential for
growth of wealth.
These examples show how the evolution of wealth-acknowledgment systems
prepares the ground for the growth of wealth. They also show how
wealth-acknowledgment systems are adopted by communities to reduce their
risk in making transactions. Bartering is not risky because the wealth is
immediately exchanged, but what if I don't need your carrots? Accepting a
token allows me to give without immediately getting wealth in return,
because I know I can use the token to get wealth later. Stocks and bonds
work similarly in higher-risk situations. Thus wealth-acknowledgment systems
evolve in a feedback spiral with social cohesion and trust. They require
some level of trust and cohesion to function, but they generate much greater
cohesion and trust, which allows new wealth-acknowledgment systems, and the
loop continues.
Grant-making, endowments, charitable trusts, and donations (what we call
philanthropy), are all efforts to increase measurable or acknowledgeable
wealth. Organizations that seek to increase measurable and acknowledgeable
wealth in communities almost always suffer from the lack of money. To
increase our ability to cultivate these levels of wealth, we need a
wealth-acknowledgment system that moves beyond money." (
http://openmoney.info/sophia/index.html)
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