Let people print their own money, says Guardian columnist
George Monbiot, author of A Manifesto for a New World Order and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, suggests that one way out of the economic slump is to let people print their own money.
In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange". The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.If the state can't save us, we need a licence to print our own money
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I'm for a Fallout style bottle capped based currency myself, and I am in no way involved with the beverage industry (though the amount of beer in my refrigerator might suggest otherwise).
I read the article. I am pretty sure that what he is advocating is towns issue a currency with built in inflation. If the money dumps off value over time, it encourages you to get rid of it. If inflation is what you want, we know pretty effectively how to do it. Zimbabwe has pioneered this. Anyone paid in Zimbabwe dollars who holds into it for a second longer than he has to is a soon to be much poorer. If the solution to the economic woes was simply inflation, we would just merrily print more money.
Further, you need to realize that a competing currency needs to compete with dollars. The very fact that a local dollar is only of value locally instantly devalues it compared to the internationally recognized dollar. Toss on top a scheme to make the local dollar commit suicide as advocated in the article, and it is devalued even more.
I am pretty sure that the current economic woes won't be solved by suicidal local dollars. The current economic woes has to do with the ability for companies ability to get loans and consumers being unable or unwilling to spend because of financial insecurity. Communities paying people in suicidal local dollars or bus tokens isn't going to fix either of those problems.
anything to beat the taxman.
Stocks and bonds are both that, money printed by a corporate entity. Like all money, its only worth what someone else will give you for it.
Wasn't there an Upright Citizens Brigade episode where Alan Greenspan was a UCB operative and was supposed to announce at a world wide economic summit that oak leaves were the new currency?
Yes, yes, we can all print our own money and everything will be great.
Except that there is no WAAAY I'd except your stack of thousand dollar bills for my computer/car/piano/rare art/whatever unless I knew you very well and knew that everyone else would except your thousand dollar bills for THEIR stuff, too.
That's why we have government-backed money now. Once we get over the trust issues THEN this will work.
I propse the use of food as currency. It's one of the only things in the world that truely has inherant value.
ok, I'm in. how can this work technically?
I'm a freelancer. I'd like to be able to offer hard up clients the chance to pay me half my hour/day rate in return for an amount of their time which I can redeem at a later date. Perhaps that amount of time varies from client to client, depending on how useful they are to me (a day with an accountant is worth at least two days of my time, but probably much less useful to another accountant unless they also sideline in back massages and baking).
I know of the Talents system in South Africa (http://www.ces.org.za/ ), but are there any other good open source web-based solutions for that 'canyon of pain' between favors for friends and invoices for clients?
I just did a little flashback to the money as debt video BB linked to a few weeks back. Anyway, I think anybody calling for monetary reform is on the right track though the devil's in the details.
It's cool to see Jaime Lerner mentioned. He was pretty creative with solving problems while he was the mayor of Curitiba. I believe he also employed sheep instead of lawn mowers for the city's parks and the sheep wool was sold to fund children programs.
I agree with NewWave, we should adopt a bottlecap currency. Those bottlecaps even have inherent value: you can make Bottlecap Mines with them!
Ithaca Hours is one of the most successful local currencies in the US. Local currencies are legal as long as they remain tied explicitly to the dollar and are taxed. Which, IMHO, makes them not as cool as they could be.
Actually, this is already in practice in some places, just on a smaller scale. I lived in Burlington, Vermont at one time and there was a practice of creating their own currency - LINK - and using it in part to pay for services, etc. A lot of people accepted it however it's tough for it to take off on a larger scale as it requires a lot of people to shift their perceptions and the masses... well... they hate shifting. However, I think it's a great idea.
The time of hobo nickels is at hand!
How is this different than what we do now? Aren't credit cards effectively printing money?
In Canada, we have "Canadian Tire Money", which is accepted at face value at all Canadian Tire stores across the country... and there are a lot of stores. As noted in the Wikipedia page referenced below, many small busineses accept this 'money' at par, if the business owner shops at CT him/herself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Tire_money
These notes start at 5 cents, and go to $2, so in order to make a large purchase, you typically need a wad of bills big enough to choke a horse.
Canadian Tire POS Terminals (cash registers) all have two drawers, one for real money and one for CT money. Can you imagine trying to balance all that at the end of the shift?
coop
Print it on hemp and back it with cannabis. And give me the address of your community ;)
There's nothing stopping you from creating your own medium of exchange, as long as you pay taxes on the value of your activity.
You can trade pigs for pencils, freelance writing services for bottle caps, baby food for pieces of paper with pictures of dead people on it.
You just have to pay taxes, in the currency that the government understands, on your activity.
"Using the latest SmartGrid technology, a P2P Web browser, and P2P renewable energy production to enable a new model of the economy that is designed to supersede yet co-exist with the current model and that helps society transition to sustainable abundance, away from today's scarcity enforcing economics."
Here: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Energy_Economy
Also here: http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/p2p-social-currency-money-20/
Marc
* Denationalization of Money by Friedrich A. Hayek
* complimentary currency
* currency competition
* electronic money c.f. Chapter 12 in Kevin Kelly's Out of Control
* financial cryptography, c.f. DigiCash by David Chaum
* Free banking
* The PayPal Wars by Eric M. Jackson
* e-gold, and the 2007 indictment
* Executive Order 6102
#7: Doug Stanhope suggested a system based on Cheeseburgers and blowjobs.
legalizing pot would have an effect on the economy and on the use of pot as a currency.
A solution in search of a problem. The one thing governments do well is print money. Even the government of Zimbabwe can handle it with aplomb. And they can't do anything else.
@18: the WHOLE point of private currency is NOT having to pay tax. When the official government economy feels the invisible hand of the market place they will adjust to to provide a system where people WANT to pay taxes. Remember, the government is just another closely held private company that seeks maximum profit while providing minimum product. Competition is healthy.
Previously:
* BoingBoing: Print Your Own Money
How about a dual currency system. One that everyone recieves on a fixed rate and can only be spent on utilities, groceries, rent, education etc. And another that you get for actual labour that can be used to buy decoratives, media, technology (basically the non-necessities)
but the real estate and grocery businesses would obviously be able to convert their necessity money for labour money
Utter lunacy. Frankly the only reason to read the Guardian is the unintentional humour in the articles. In this one in particular, I like how the author keeps saying "Now, I'm no expert, but..." - the Homer Simpson approach.
Has anyone point out that - at least for those of us rich enough to be online - a virtual currency would be relatively easy to manage?
The claim has been made for second life but I recall someone pointing out their terms and conditions don't really back the currency.
Also, when someone uses their own units instead of actual money it's usually a rort.
When Monbiot mentions company scrip in coal mines, I thought:
"Saint Peter don't ya call me cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store"
I think the late, great Douglas Adams saw the problem with this (from the Hitchiker's Guide BBC TV version):
MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT:
Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course all become immensely rich.
FORD:
No really? Really?
CROWD MEMBERS:
Yes, very good move…
MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT:
But, we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability. Which means that I gather the current going rate has something like three major deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut. So, um, in order to obviate this problem and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on an extensive defoliation campaign, and um, burn down all the forests. I think that’s a sensible move don’t you?
This worked great in the U.S. in the late 19th century, especially in the western expansion.
Oh wait, no, bank failures happened pretty regularly, bankrupting farmers and bankers alike.
The banking system has to be large enough to absorb small investment failures. The current recession happened because the banking industry was not big enough to absorb the losses in the housing speculation collapse.
The other alternative is to skip banking entirely, but that doesn't work so well for new investment.
Inflation doesn't depend on the amount of currency. It depends on the ratio of currency to backing.
The dollar is backed by the fact that, if we don't pay taxes in them, the government might take our stuff.
These currencies can be backed with anything, including specific goods and services.
The leaves were not backed with anything; that's why they suffered so much inflation.
#22 Takuan reminds me of the old stoner saying, "Weed can help you get through times of no money better than money will ever help you get through times with no weed."
Cannabis currency sounds like a good alternative in these uncertain times. Money may not grow on trees, but cannabis currency can definitely grow like a weed.
That was Free Wheeling Franklin.
http://chromatism.net/current/images/freewheelinfranklin.jpg
es, franklin said it, but fat freddy's cat LIVED it! http://www.kardworx.com/abblist/freak.gif and hemp was once used as currency in the early u.s.! geo washington said a person was "unpatriotic" if they didn't grow hemp on every spare acre! I'D buy that for a dolla!
See Paul di Filippo's "Spondulix", for sandwich based currency.
"During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens."
Bullshit. I call shenanigans. I'd like to see this backed up with some documentation of the businesses that were using seashells for money.
Don't know about the Great Depression, but the Algonquins used Wampum seashells to make ornamental belts, jewelry and tapestries. The different colors and sizes of shells denoted denominations of "wealth" and were used as a kind of accounting ledger. Europeans mistakenly assumed that the Indians used wampum as a form of currency, but it was much more complex than that, as wampum represented value and wampum trade denoted much more than just a medium of exchange. It was, in fact, a form of story telling.
I went to the WOMAD festival last year (it was awesome BTW) and they did a clever thing with beer cups:
Something like 75% of the litter at a the festival was made up of discarded beer cups so every beer you bought had a 5p surcharge for "rental" of the cup. Take them back to the bar and get your money back (or money off your next drink!).
Of course, who can be bothered to take your cup back with all the music going on? Children! It was great, finish your beer and an enterprising child would happily relieve you of your empty cup, add it to their stack and move on. No litter, no having to find a bin to put your empties in and, no doubt a burgeoning underground economy in paper cups.
This is precisely what the Tlaloc in Mexico D. F. (Mexico City), Totnes in England, Ithaca NY,,and Humboldt County California are already doing. 1930s stamp scrip is good but these existing community currencies are even better.
Shir D. Jones
postgraduate student on Shared Monetary Governance
blog http://shirad.livejournal.com/profile
Just make it legal to use gold without all the unconscionable "precious metals taxes" that they levy. That's what I love about gun shows... guns, gold, and jewelry are as good as cash. :-)
* FeliCa
* Sony PaSoRi
* Octopus card (Hong Kong)
Check out Ripple. It's a distributed currency system based on trust networks established between individuals. Basically, you issue 'credit' to people you trust through the system, and these networks of trust relationships allow transaction paths between untrusted parties via trusted intermediaries.
What's so cool about this system is that it's backed by trust rather than the threat of force.
Eventually you run out of a banking system big enough to absorb the systematic failure of the bubble bursting. (Falsely attributed as inherent to capitalism, this was the crux of the argument Marx made about "capitalism will eat itself".)
We faced this back in the early 1990s with "contagion", and the flood of money printed to offset that is a significant part of what built up into an even larger crisis this time around. Now they're pumping even more money into it as a "global crisis" where GDP of G8 nations are not sufficient to absorb the shocks. The next time around in this boom-bust cycle there likely won't be enough real wealth in the world to prevent the entire house of cards from crashing down worldwide.
The problem, as always, is that central banking makes money and credit artificially cheap, leading to malinvestment, leading to a corrective crash -- which induces central bankers to make money and credit even cheaper. (It really is like the "harmonic amplification effect" from that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
Competitive currencies solve this problem by giving buyers a frame of reference to provide more information about the relative values of capital and the means of exchange.
i.e. "coupons" or "food stamps". The problem with creating rigidity in exchange systems is that it reduces the amount of information (i.e. price signals) available to buyers and sellers.The reason we have this economic crisis is because of a lack of information due to inflationary pressures (caused by central banking) and malinvestment due to the non-neutrality of money.
Consumers need more information to correct for the mistakes, not less.
Jct: Best of all, peg your local currency to the Time Standard of Money (how many dollars/hour child labor) and Hours earned locally can be intertraded with other timebanks globally!
In 1999, I paid for 39/40 nights in Europe with an IOU for a night back in Canada worth 5 Hours.
U.N. Millennium Declaration UNILETS Resolution C6 to governments is for a time-based currency to restructure the global financial architecture.
See my banking systems engineering analysis at http://youtube.com/kingofthepaupers with an index of articles at http://johnturmel.com/kotp.htm