Thesis Number: #10 (Page 5 of 8)

First Steps

Our species has grown weary. The lust for life is suppressed by the consumption of narcotics or commercial products. We desire more leisure and kinder relationships, but these recede under the stress of working harder in ever harsher economic environments. Self-confidence can be re-instilled by effecting change with the first small steps towards liberty. All we need is the power of a vision to guide the direction of social evolution.

Many steps are already being taken. An example is the way some communities in the UK, Switzerland, Germany and the USA have supplemented national currencies with local forms of money (known as LETS – Local Exchange Trading Systems or Schemes). But these, and the grand plans for replacing national currencies, will not perform their revolutionary role if their adherents fail to concurrently work to re-design the structure of society. For national currencies are abusive and are based on a grand fraud.

The greatest part of “money” is a debt-based figment of bankers’ imaginations. And yet, taxpayers are held liable for the buying power of those currencies. Their ancestors did not consent to be the guarantors of the value of the dollar or sterling, and yet the citizens of Europe and the US are forced to indemnify banks (as in 2008). A new social contract must renegotiate the terms of such indemnities.

Transferring the right to create credit to a public agency is not sufficient. Money reformers fail to locate such advocacy in a holistic framework (Brown 2013; Jackson and Dyson 2013). The reality, “on the ground”, reveals what would happen if their plans for monetary reform were implemented. As the cost of credit declined, the net gains would be captured by current owners of land-based assets. Rents and land prices would rise to mop up the value of the benefit of the reform.

Complex societies need “money”, whose value needs to be certain. How might that value be maintained? Australian reformer Shann Turnbull suggests that a currency could be linked to a natural resource, such as electricity produced from local renewable energy sources (Turnbull 2012). Why confine the backing of money to the value of just one natural resource?

A responsible society, one that treated the rental income of all natural and social resources as public revenue, would enjoy an unmatchable reputation for integrity. Risks would be the lowest anywhere, and returns from working and investing in a tax-free regime would be high (Thesis #4). Confidence in the currency would be rock-solid, because it would be guaranteed by the best collateral of all – a nation’s rents (ask any banker). The cost of borrowing money would be very low, and the scope for creating new enterprises and funding culture-enriching services high.

The net effect: as the first steps were taken in shifting taxes off the working population, people would embark on the thousand and one experiments in new ways of living. The choice on how to redesign their lives would be theirs, in association with their fellow citizens.