Social money - grassroots alternative for finance and banking
15.4.2009 klo 12:22 | Yhteiskunta In English
If i wouldn't have any financial worries of my own and could use my time for any cause i choose to, it would be this. Money is a funny thing when you start to think about it, but basically it boils down to solving this puzzle - farmer wants fishes, fisher want wood and woodcutter wanted grains - in a way that every one gets what they desire in a fair amount against their own labor.
One way to solve the problem is to use some common good that everyone appreciates, like seashells, as the medium of exchange. Later precious metals, like silver and gold, became the most common goods used for this purpose, but silver and gold were heavy to carry around so people deposited their gold to goldsmiths (which became bankers) and started using the paper receipts of the deposit as the new money instead of the cumbersome metals.
Naturally, the bankers became greedy and started making more of this new money than they actually had gold in their deposits and once people finally found out they demanded their gold back, which, of course, the banker didn't have enough of. People became angry, but had already gotten used to the easy use of paper money, so the governments emerged to regulate it. But bankers had already amassed enough wealth to practically buy the governments, so they too became corrupt and made a pact with the bankers to keep an appearance of public control through central banks, but to leave the actual right of creating new money to private banks.
And so we enter the modern world of madness, where governments supposedly create their own money, but at the same time are deeply in debt. To whom, one might ask? Indeed, there have been many different monetary systems through out the ages, but there's one thing that seems to be common to almost all of them: as the time passes they alway end up becoming corrupt and controlled by the ruling class to suck up the wealth form the working class.
With internet, there is potential for many changes, and money is no exception. Because there is another way to solve the original puzzle: When farmer wants fish, instead of using seashells he could give IOUs to the fisher, whom then could later use those IOUs to get grains from the farmer or use the farmers IOU to trade with friends of the farmer (whom accept those IOUs).
There are many problems in system like this, like the impracticality of carrying many different peoples IOUs, counterfeiting, and trading between people who are not friends or don't have IOUs of a common friend. But all of these problems can be overcome by digitalizing the system. And because of the "six degrees of separation", anyone in the world could trade with any other person, as long as a link of trusted friends can be found between them.
This would, for the first time in the history, give people the possibility of truly creating their own money and freeing them from the parasites we call finance industry. Of course with this opportunity, would also become responsibility of choosing whose money to trust. But if you chose to accept someones IOUs who wasn't able to pay them back, that would only be your loss, and wouldn't combine into a systemic failure of the whole system, as has happened in the current financial crisis, where governments and banks are frantically creating more money to patch up the original problem of creating too much money.
How exactly would this "social money" work, will be the subject of my next post.
Moi! Täällä Englannissa on muutamia mielenkiintoisia paikallisia rahajärjestelmiä. Suurin on tämä: http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/totnespound/home
Myös tänne Lontooseen ollaan lanseeraamassa omaa (etsi "Brixton pound"). Sattumalta pari työkolleegaa on siinä mukana.
Nämä ovat myös sikäli mielenkiintoisia, että ideologinen lähtökohta on erilainen kuin tyypillisillä monetary reform-tyypeillä, koska kyse on enemmänkin paikallisen talouden auttamisesta sekä talouskasvun kyseenalaistamisesta.
Moikka! Joo, onhan noita paikallisia rahajärjestelmiä ollut kaikenlaisia. Tuo Totnes näyttisi vain vaihtavan punnat paikalliseen rahayksikköön, eli käytännössä rajoittaa kaupankäyntiä paikalliselle tasolle.
Toinen mielenkiintoinen rahakokeilu on ollut työtunteihin sidottu raha (http://hourmoney.org/), minkä ongelma on tietysti siinä, että usein toisten työtunteja pidetään arvokkaampina kun toisen työtunteja (esim. aloitteleva koodaaja vs. kokenut koodaaja).
Yllä kuvatulla järjestelmällä (jonka tarkemman jatkotekstin voisin itseasiassa nyt julkaista) olisi se hyvä puoli, että sen rahan (=IOU:t) voisi sitoa mihin tahansa ulkopuoliseen mittaan. Eurot/dollarit/punnat olisi tietysti luonteva vaihtoehto, koska ihmiset tuntevat niiden arvon, mutta arvon voisi päästää myös "kellumaan", ja hyvällä tuurilla löytyisi uusi arvo jostain perinteisten rahayksikköjen välimaastosta. Ja mikäli tämä johtaisi kaikkien maiden yhteiseen valuuttaan, poistaisi se samalla erimaiden väliset rahanvaihtoon liittyvät kauppaongelmat (ja mahdollisuudet eri rahojen arvolla keinotteluun). Noh, ainahan sitä saa uneksia. :)