Honest Money

Honest Money By Feizal Mansoor © December, 2008. Nikang Press. All Rights Reserved although permission is granted for free circulation or publishing unchanged.

At a time when the Central Bank administered global financial system flounders on its iniquities it is important to understand its fundamental flaw: it is unable to distribute its goods and services to willing consumers. The shops are full of goods, but no one has the money to buy them. We are a technological society in infancy still searching for methods of equitable distribution. It maybe we find the answers we seek in the ancient past through all that remains of the last Golden Age: maybe after the winter solstice 2012,it will all be moot anyway. Whether we are sliding down Hubbert’s Peak, whether thorium is truly a source of renewable nuclear energy, whether the Indians should be held at the breach, these are all questions that need time to be answered. The good thing is that in a temporal world that is about all we have. We need energy in order to make the gears of machinery spin but automation continues to make workers redundant. An economic system that requires more and more people to do less and less work makes a virtue out of slavery and a crime out of leisure. It is also nonsensical in the extreme. Every crisis of humanitarian aid usually involves massive quantities of goods and services being delivered “in time” to “avert” “unthinkable consequences”. The societies from where these goods and services issue are not going to be short of them, so they were always available, those societies that require them as aid have been impoverished to the point where they can only get them when they are dieing. At some point somewhere, some one at some level, like

Madeline Albright, is talking about an “acceptable” number of deaths. Don’t even talk to me about tsunamis in a country that has almsgiving as a way of life and coconut and other fruit trees from coast to hinterland. Oh no! We must burn our million-year-old fossil fuel to take our fossil fuel plastic encased water from the breach to the other side of the island. Makes me good to feel good about myself, I’ve done my bit, and confirmed, Oh My God! How lucky am I? So I better play my part in the scam or else I might end up like that. Thankfully I did not screw up in my last life, to “deserve” it. There but for the grace... In to such hapless sentiment has causation devolved. Up to about five hundred years ago we understood on our little island that ours was a shared inheritance, a common responsibility to leave the earth little disturbed by our passing. We lived in a culture of hurtlessness and cyclical renewal. We found commonality in the ways of others and welcomed all wisdom to the deep recesses of our caves and labyrinths beckoning from Sri Pada to mariners of yore, from days out at sea, in the yantra of Lord Skanda. In mahasamatta your responsibility to your village, kith and clan outweighed any other because in fulfilling this obligation lay your own understanding of yourself. As a friend put it recently man is a social animal, seeing in each other, ourselves. Mudiyanse Tennekoon said we were all dreamers but that this current dreaming was not his. He told me of a time when in Lanka the King embodied mahasamatta and by his example set the standard for the kingdom. Each according to his share according to his contribution: the great

consensus being that one lived in dhamma knowing that the people and the land would be safe. The Prophet told us to tie our camel and when in doubt follow his example, and the Annointed One said Only through Him. One eternal wisdom from Maya to Veda, from Ur to Plato’s Atlantis. Do what you say you will do (contract) and use reasonable means to do it (tort). With more than just that promise in mind a simple perusal of the evidence makes it plain we have been conned in to believing in a planet of insufficient resources when it is obvious there is plenty for everyone. But there is a brighter light to shine, a light of unremitting humanity, that talks not only in ancient tongues but in the example of the Schweizers, the Avneries, the Zinns, the Bolivars, the Freires, the Gandhis, the Lincolns. It talks in the silent tongues of trees that gather their daily allotment of cosmic energy and pass on carbon to plants in the shade through microbial action between roots. Our societal cohesion is an integral of how much work we get done for the effort, and when we understand that as a species we have always been doing more and more with less and less, we come to the implausibility of Malthusian and Ehrlician theory of planetary insufficiency. In fact we live in poverty amid plenty in an artificial market controlled by credit masquerading as money that belies the real work and energy spent in producing a good or service. Money has only one societal function of necessity and that is as legal tender: currency. All other functions of money issue from the speculative nature of its modern creation. Working backwards from

retail credit demand as represented by the cash and securities lodged to meet reserve requirements, the task of a Central Bank is create just too much money supply in order to keep the economy stimulated but not inflationary. It is a guess, an immensely informed one, but nevertheless a guess as to which sectors of the economy will develop unless it is to a plan and that would be a conspiracy and we don’t believe in those do we? In the Internet Age a simple device can readily account for our work as we do it and remove the guesswork from fiscal policy. Once we fundamentally understand and build in to our production systems the relative costs of different forms of energy it will be easily seen that to burn millions of years of carbon sequestering in a few scant minutes when readily assimilable energy forms are daily available is foolhardy in the extreme. Buckminster Fuller suggested a time-energy accounting system of kilowatt hours, watt hours and watt seconds of work. Pointing out that when all the cosmic-energy processing as rain, wind and gravitational pressure is added to processing time and paid for at domestic household electricity rates it costs nature millions of dollars to make a single gallon of petroleum. Mr Fuller says in Critical Path: “To say “I didn’t know that” doesn’t alter the inexorable energy accounting of eternally regenerative, 100 percent efficient-ergo 100 percent concerned- physical energy Universe. “We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their … jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars’ worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth producing jobs. It

doesn’t take a computer to tell that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. “History’s political and economic power structures have always fearfully abhorred “idle people” as potential troublemakers. Yet nature never abhors seemingly idle trees, grass, snails, coral reefs, and clouds in the sky.” The fundamental notion that corporations have a legal identity to make money is as absurd as claiming they can eat or defecate, or even have a will to. Corporations make tvs and sofas, grow genetically modified food, for humans not for abstract legal concepts and any wealth that is created can only come from the value the consumer of the product is willing to exchange for it. Which itself can only be meaningfully derived from how efficiently it was produced. The crucial point to grasp here is that economic value is strictly an accounting of work done at a price the market sets. While governments may create their own form of “legal tender” citizens are not bound to use only that to exchange goods and services between themselves. If I wanted to exchange my house for your car, and you are willing, no one can stop us. It is necessary to build commonwealth because it is only commonwealth that is not taxed. Without entering in to the niceties of representative democracies, it is important to understand that in acquiescing to income tax we are looking at the problem of social services and infrastructure from the wrong side. The only reason anyone pays income tax is because if they do not they will go to jail. In application it does not seem so far from the village bully who

promised to protect you from the other bullies if you made it worth his while, the implication being of course that the most protection you required was from him. So it is in our communities, the higher standard of living we can provide to the greater number without resorting to monopoly technologies, letting consumers make their energy choices through a time-energy value system (higher cost) and the more efficient our societies become as a matter of common inheritance, the closer we come to an ideal that is technologically possible and environmentally imperative. An Internet based mutual credit accounting system can build the common wealth of a community by creating an independent means of exchanging goods and services efficiently. The mechanism for the institution of mutual credit is a magnetic card or online account that people use to register transactions taking place between them. The purchaser swipes his/her card and registers a cash, credit or kind transaction. If the vendor extends credit, the purchaser must be in good standing for the value purchased. The actual amount of debit and credit in any account will be known only to the parties concerned, the system will only record: 1. 2. 3. 4.

A transaction occurred The particular type of economic activity The value agreed by the transacting parties Both parties are satisfied with the outcome.

Economic value is derived from the inverse of the energy cost of a good or service. The local server tallies the transaction and collates the economic activity of the community by Parity Purchasing Value (PPV), its Energy Delivered Value (EDV), and its nominal value in government issued currency.

PPV is the per capita costs necessary to survive for a day in that community. This will be established by assessing the minimum needed for adequate food, clothing, shelter, transportation and education in formal currency. EDV prorates the cost of delivering goods and services across the economy from the amount and type of energy consumed by the community. The actual unit of economic value is derived from the PPV and the EDV. Comparing communities regionally, nationally and globally in terms of PPV, EDV and currency will establish an equitable means of exchanging our goods and services directly between ourselves and help us to build a Sustainable economy based on open Systems, royalty patents and mahasamatta, underlying the formal MilitaryIndustrial one. A Tobin tax on each transaction will pay for the upkeep of the server and any excess will be put in a community chest to build and maintain infrastructure. But the Reserve Account of Earth Inc., in to which every generation has contributed its built infrastructure, knowledge and resources is wealth beyond measure. As concerned shareholders in Earth, Inc., we can distribute more of our accumulated profits of yesteryear in the tangible goods and services of the here and now. You do not have to build the same road twice. In nature things are where we find them. When we find water in our oil we remove it, we do not condemn the oil in moral terms. As far as the oil goes our concern is how the water removal process will affect its essential character. We will want to know this information

not only for the use we can make of the oil but simply because we want to know as much as we can about it. In this is the profound lie of modern slavery: idle minds are the devil’s workshop. If humanity has any claim on a destiny it is one it will forge for itself. And it is evident that the prime focus of our technology should be on mitigating the worst effects of the next ice age. Must needs demand that we concentrate on converting our daily allotment of cosmic energy, our daily income if you will, and preserving our stores, our reserves. Once we use the rate of flow of energy as value system it will become obvious that in terms of our daily allotment of cosmic energy, of which we currently use less than 1%, we are billions of billionaires. The energy spent on extracting our minerals from the earth maybe recycled for generations by recapturing the minerals in traps in the exhaust process for re-use time and time again, just as we have mined all the tin we will ever need. The point is that as societies the criteria by which we evaluate ourselves must at some point be in terms of how little of the planet’s energy reserves we use to provide the higher level of living for the greater number. This would even seem to be a systemic responsibility crucial to our function in the multiverse.