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01722: RE: [WDDM] Currency reform; Local currency

From: "Silbor" <silbor(at)strathmore.ac.ke>
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 10:54:56 +0300
Subject: RE: [WDDM] Currency reform; Local currency

Hello everybody!

Food for thought:

We had in Nanaimo, BC, Canada recently a presentation on an alternative
currency, Time Dollar (FCX), see http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/ by its

creator Francis Ayley (he would actually want to achieve something more than
a
local currency, his dream goal is a socially just replacement for the
current
money system). What made the biggest impression on me during his
presentation
was the claim that the nature of the money system has a big effect on our
behaviour: the conventional money system (with interest collected on loans)
forces people into competition, a local (i.e., interest-free,
inflation/deflation-free) money system is conducive to cooperation between
the
market participants!

I got this message via a friend. Congratulations on your effort. The world
is slowly waking up to the need of ridding itself of the Croesus
superstition, i.e. that money must have the function of store of value to be
money. Silvio Gesell (1862-1930) showed this not to be true.

You can find a lot on interesting reading following the links on his
site.
E.g., to a special issue of the Yes! magazine on money matters,
http://www.yesmagazine.org/default.asp?ID=93 , where my attention was caught

especially by this article: http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=883,
where one can find the sentence "The exponential growth of debt, in turn,
puts
pressure on the economy to also grow exponentially which, of course, in the
long run is impossible." The message of the article being that our current
money system makes no sense, that it only burdens most people with debt that

they will never be able to pay off, and that it is the cause of our
unsustainable use of natural resources.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I attach one that shows how it is
perfectly possible for an economy to grow exponentially, provided of course
that you destroy what you produce.

So if all this is true, the logical conclusion seems to be that if we
want
to achieve a just society (democracy), we have no chance to do so within the

current money system designed to benefit only a small segment of the
society,
isn't it so?

I have my doubts. If you read Lee Kwan Yew's Singapore: from Third World to
First, 1965-2000, you realise that the secret of development is a handful of
hand-picked men in the right places. People's choice tends to select the
scum of society and put it in power.

Shouldn't we (the DD promoters, WDDM, ...) then pay also some
(more, a lot of) attention to the reform of the money system???

We should indeed.

Mirek

P.S.: F. Ayley's FCX system is run as a private corporation (not even as a
cooperative of all the members). He explained that this is necessary in USA
if
he wants to be on a firm basis to face successfully the onslaught of big
banks
if his systems starts to be successful and widely used (see the history of
local currencies: how the banks killed first such very successful
alternative
system in Wörgl, Austria, 1932-33, and then many more in the USA during the
Depression: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_currency).
However, here in Canada people were not very enthusiastic about the idea
of
local currency being run as a private corporation, and experts claim that
the
reasons that led him to create a private corporation do not exist here, and
so
if we have a local currency system in Nanaimo, it will be the homegrown
LETS/openmoney system:

http://www.openmoney.org/
http://www.openmoney.org/letsplay/ (this is a play demonstrating the
system)
http://openmoney.editme.com/letsplay (this is another demo play)
http://openmoney.info
http://lets.net

The important point is that money ought to reproduce for a community what
the blood does for a living body. It is produced in the bone marrow, then
pumped by the heart to the last cell/tissue/organ, returned to the heart,
circulated for a while and then destroyed in the liver/kidney system. If an
organ needs more blood than another, it gets it, but it must spend it at
once. The question is: what institution ought to perform the functions of
bone marrow and heart?

Silvano Borruso


Attachment: Tucson Bone Yard.doc
Description: MS-Word document


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