I’ve been on Daily Kos quite a while, but this is my first diary. More about that at the end. I want to proceed to the meat of this essay.
Are you, like me, becoming more and more frustrated and depressed each time—several times a day—you read or hear news items like these?
Ten million Americans may lose jobless benefits at year-end.
Budget cuts cause layoff of 30% of police force, while crime is rampant.
Government employees must take pay cut due to recession.
University to raise tuition by 50% to help balance budget.
Numbers of homeless families with children reach new high.
School board to lay off 25% of teachers due to budget constraints.
Unemployed family cannot afford child’s costly cancer treatment.
State warns of draconian cuts in next year’s budget.
Please follow me below the fold.
Does it seem that most of the world’s problems relate to money?
What happened to the money the recession-hit nations used to have?
Why is there not enough money in the world to meet everyone’s needs?
I long ago suspected that there was something defective about the world’s economic system. Why couldn’t the system be arranged so that everyone who wanted to work could do so, that everyone who needed college training could have it, that no one would have to starve, that people who were sick could receive treatment? After all, the world is full of people with unused, undeveloped talents who could be working for the betterment of humanity but cannot do so because of lack of money.
The blame, I thought, lies in our definition of money. What is money really, I asked, and now I have just written a book that tries to answer that question and from the answer recommends steps the world could take to vastly improve its economic system.
I am introducing my ideas here first as a thank-you for all the informative and inspiring thoughts my fine fellow Kossacks have freely offered up to educate me and motivate me to go forward with this project. Though I am not an economist—my field is psychology—you have given me the courage to write what could be derided as a naïve and crazy book about money, an idealistic vision of a utopian world that might be laughed down by trained economists, but if accepted and taken seriously might contain enough good sense to move world leaders into a peaceful and more prosperous life for everyone.
My book is titled Money as Information and modestly subtitled Freeing money from its conceptual bonds and saving humanity. It first asks What is Money? and notes that money is an invention of the human mind wikia.com. Economists do not deny that money is a mental concept, a social contract, and has no physical existence. But when money was first used by ancient peoples, it took the form of commodity money, an exchange of one physical commodity for another, as in a swap-meet. Then money evolved into representational money, or the use of coins that represented or substituted for physical commodities. Now we have fiat money, government-printed money that has no gold or other physical valuables backing it up.
A problem is that people still think of money as being backed up by a real physical thing, such as gold.
From the book:
As a consequence of this belief in a physical backing for money, they consciously or unconsciously conclude that there can be only a limited amount of money in the world, since there is a limit to the amount of physical backup that can exist in a finite world. The limit could increase in an occurrence such as a new discovery of gold, but the limit still remains finite.
And various erroneous conclusions flow out of this belief:
There is no cure for poverty—there will always be poor people—because an equal distribution of all the world’s money is impractical and even if it happened no one would possess enough money because the size of the world’s population is greater than the amount of physical backup.
There is also the conclusion that in order for an individual to become wealthier, some other person or persons must become poorer.
If one believes that the world’s money is limited, then a nation’s is also, and strict budgets must be drawn up for the use of that money. If more money is needed, it must be borrowed from other nations, but must be repaid later, putting further restrictions on the nation’s spending power.
But if money is a manmade creation, man can alter it to improve its usefulness.
Man needs to change the money system to humanize it.
When money is viewed as commodity money or representative money, a vast number of human transactions involved with or affected by money become dehumanized. If money is to be an element that smoothes and facilitates human interactions, it should not be based solely upon physical commodities. The exchange of commodities is only one example of human transactions, while ultimate human transactions are spiritual, psychological, behavioral, societal, non-physical, intellectual in nature. With a too-limited view of money we overlook and inhibit a vast number of essential human and societal interactions
And
When primitive man devised money, he was not cognizant of the many non-physical facets of human behavior that money would be affecting; in fact, many of them did not yet exist. There was no need to pay for education, for legal help, for psychotherapy, etc.
A logical analysis of the concept of money suggests that it is primarily an informational medium, and the information it conveys is that the bearer is authorized by the government to use it for any of the normal purposes that money is used.
Money needs to be based upon something, something other than the gold that was once its basis. I suggest basing it upon the totality of human needs within the population.
Since money would no longer be viewed as having physical limits, governments would be free to expand their budgets, within reason, and could grant all citizens a Guaranteed Minimum Income or Basic Income Guarantee Wikipedia.
In addition, federal taxation could be eliminated, as the government could freely create the newly defined money without requiring that citizens return some of it to fund government operations.
The concept of taxation is primitive and clearly outmoded. It dates from biblical times and was recorded in Egypt about 5000 years ago...
It does not make sense in the modern world that governments must take money from the people in order to perform tasks of governing. Besides the social stresses of citizens feeling robbed by the officials who should be looking out for their welfare, the government typically cannot collect enough tax money to adequately meet the needs of its people. Consequently, nations usually possess less-than-ideal infrastructure, social services, defense, and all the other large-scale services and physical needs that only governments can provide.
My proposals are not meant to appeal narrowly to any one political persuasion. The New Money could be the rising tide that lifts all boats. It would not change capitalism. The profit motive would not disappear. The poor would no longer be poor, and the rich could keep their money.
There are many other advantages and many other details, but this diary is becoming too long. I am wondering if my proposals will be deemed crazy and unworkable. I am looking forward to your feedback, and I will be around as much as possible to reply to your comments.
I want particularly to mention swellsman’s diary Math-Isnt-Real which shared my emphasis upon the artificial nature of money. Unfortunately, it didn’t attract many viewers, but some were very enthusiastic about it, which fact inspired me to push onward. Commenter Claude said of it:
This is one of the best diaries I have ever read here, and, baby, I have been reading stuff here for a long [bleep] time, longer than 99.5% of the registered members.
I have been here several years, and early on commented quite a bit, but then just read and read as much as I could, recommending and tipping. For the past two years I have been working on this small book, which is now an Amazon digital book and hopefully will be in a print version soon: www.tableofgold.com
Thank you for reading. I will diary more on this topic soon.
psyched