Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 38. (Read 288325 times)

I am describing how interest rates ARE the distortion your describing.  Hard money is unlike real assets because it can not decay, where as all man make things do, this creates an asymmetry between money and the things we trade for money. 

Ownership of the natural world IS an issue, nature is the ultimate source of all wealth so monopolization of it will indeed result in grotesque inequality.  But under a Hard money system it will result in grotesque inequality AND environmental destruction, where as under soft money you would just have inequality and due to the lack of interest payments inequality should be lessened.

Unfair ownership of land is not a monetary problem, people have 'owned' land in the meaningful sense of monopolizing resources since the dawn of time.  Eliminating money doesn't solve this problem.  Fortunately Gesell ALSO has a solution to the land problem.  Again I urge you to READ what I have been linking too.  Gesell realized the monopolization of land was similarities to the liquidity problem with money, both are examples of RENT SEEKING.  Both problems are corrected by making the assets 'soft', in the case of land this means property taxes that are equal to the rent value of the UNIMPROVED land, the resulting revenue then being equally distributed to all.  In essence ALL of us would own the Earth equally and rent it too each other as both land-lords and tenants.

Here is the relevant section https://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/part2/1.htm

The quality of the money is not the problem, it is the fact that money distorts reality and thus social and cultural values, to humanity's detriment. The planet has enough resources to provide for the entirety of humanity's needs, but this is not being done. Why not? Because an arbitrary and small group of individuals claim "ownership" over the vast majority of the earth and deny it to the rest of us because it is not "profitable". No monetary system will change that, and that is why it will be abolished, or it will abolish humanity.

Your continuing to equate the problems of HARD money with ALL possible forms of money, Hard money has been the norm through most of human history so this is an easy mistake to make.   But if Environmental preservation through economics is what you care about then you should be familiar with the concept of the Discount Rate http://www.iearesearch.com/papers/discounting.pdf

In a cost-benefit analysis this is the rate by which we value future benefits vs today's costs or benefits given up today.  A high rate means we are considering the future to be of low value the further in the future the less it's value, a low rate means we consider the future to be closer in value to the present.  So in any environmental preservation act we would want the discount rate used to be as LOW as possible.

The Private market uses the national interest rate AS the discount rate.  An owner of some environmental resource, say a forest will either cut the forest down or not based on interest rates because when interest rates exceed the sustainable value production of nature an individual will become wealthier by liquidating nature and earning interest on the money.  So if you want to preserve the environment you should want to see the lowest interest rate possible.

Straw-man much?  First I did not say interest is 'Banned' that is the Islamic Banking solution, it tries to block interest by directly regulating the financial marketplace, this will always fail, either the market will subvert the rules (Catholic ban on Usury) or you will grind the economy to a halt.  I'm describing money which by it's nature causes nominal interest rates to reach zero.  No additional intervention or interference in the financial market place is then required.  Second where on Earth do you get the notion that non-monetary assets can not be rented if interest rates are zero, do you seriously think this follows or are you just being cute?

The "Free Market" belongs in the same category as unicorns and leprechauns, and is similarly useful as a reference point in any purportedly serious discussion.

So, if we ban interest on borrowing money, can we also ban fees for renting cars, or ban rent for borrowing a place to live?



By the way, I finally forced myself to sit through the 2.5 hour Zeitgeist movie. All the science about brains and learning was ok, but then when those guys went into economics, omg were they making mistakes left and right. I was thinking

Survey the entirety of the earth's resources: $200 billion dollars
Build out infrastructure such as power and water to support globaly dispersed cities: $10 trillion dollars
Build the cities on top of the infrastructure, and add things like automatic transportation and manufacturing systems: $60 trillion dollars.
Lifing in a world where everything has already been paid for: Priceless.

And the company that will bring it to you, ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?

The ending was rather hilarious. As if the people standing around, doing nothing but protesting, would actually have bags of money to throw at the banks in protest

Now that I know what the Zeitgeist movement is proposing, according to Peter Joseph, the biggest and stupidest mistake it keeps making is by saying we need to set up some method to survey the planet and ask opinion pols of people, to figure out how what people make, and how to make it as efficiently as possible, without seeing that people vote for what they want with their money, and efficiency is driven by money, where companies that are the most efficient in their resource use are the ones with the lowest costs and highest profits. Gah.

Impaler, nothing in what you have said speaks to real human needs and the preservation of the environment on which we all depend and share. Moreover, money cannot possibly fix all problems as you suggest. Money will not purchase us a new planet, provide clean air or produce more food. Money cannot fix the problems that money creates. Money seeks to push balance to imbalance, order to chaos and life to death. As for your understanding of the Zeitgeist Movement and a resource based economy, you lack the most basic comprehension of our grasp of the problems we highlight and the potential solutions we propose.

When quoting you, I use an advanced lossless compression format.  Your post can be reconstructed from my summary with no loss of content.

Is there some special limit where liquidity becomes a privilege?  Does my jar of quarters earn a subsidy?  If so, where do I sign up for it?

Money is half of a transaction involving wealth.  One side has given up wealth and received an IOU.  In aggregate, the world is holding wealth claimable by that person and is making productive use of it.  This is why money gains value over time.

Oh, wait!  Inflation.  Money loses value over time, in the real world.  Shit, my jar of quarters is actually a cost, not a savings.

Damn.  Those evil capitalists must be really stupid if they've set up two ways to exploit the poor that tend to cancel each other out.

My Post is directed at LightRider and concerns His beliefs regarding the Zeitgeist movement and Venus Projects. 

Your question clearly shows do not comprehend what I am saying, a person holding money is receiving a subsidy of liquidity, they can monetize that subsidy by lending.  This is not a difficult concept, a subsidy can come in the form of a privilege and can then be rented out for a payment.  But Regardless of if a person keeps the subsidy in it's original form or sells it they are still receiving the benefit of the subsidy.  A person who is a borrower of money at interest is getting liquidity but paying for it, thus their is no subsidy to them.

As for the difference between Wealth and Money I am quite familiar with the difference and fail to see how it is remotely relevant to what I have said as I never said or implied that wealth and money are the same.  Your so called explanation is neither needed nor welcome as you will simply be cluttering the thread, I have debated much smarter Austrians then yourself who have the decency to actually quote me.

LOL.  You should really limit yourself to no more than one rock before posting.  People holding money get a subsidy?  Or is it people lending money?  And why do you continue to show no evidence of understanding the difference between money and wealth?  If I explain it to you for a tenth time, will it sink in?

LightRider:  I'm not going to defend Capitalism to you, it is a horribly brutal system.  But your Zeitgeist movement is hopelessly misguided in it's diagnosis of what the central flaw in Capitalism IS.  Zeitgeist argues that Fractional Reserve Banking is the means by which Capitalism exploits the working classes, but this is incorrect.  The central problem with Capitalism, indeed the CORE of Capitalism is INTEREST on Money.  Without Interest their would be no profit to even leverage (aka multiply) by fractional lending because the lender isn't able to enrich themselves through the interest, where as WITH interest but without Fractional Reserves the borrower is still going to be paying interest, their will just be less total borrowers and less borrowable funds because the lender must hold more capitol.  Now consider that the reduced amount of loanable funds in a Full reserve environment will raise interest rates considerably, such that the lenders may actually make just as much profit from interest, they will just make more from a smaller group of borrowers.  Thus we can see that Full Reserve lending rules do not solve the problem of interest, indeed the Zeitgeist movement is completely ignorant of where Interest comes from or how to stop it.

Capitol means money and Capitalism is a system in which you can make money from money alone.  The reason we can do this is that money is LIQUID and HARD.  Liquid means that it can be converted to any other asset with ease, and HARD means that as a token (in the past a non rusting metal) it can be held without nominal loss indefinably unlike any real good which decays with time.  Liquidity has a value, it is like a Joker up your sleeve, it can become anything, fix any unforeseen problem, take advantage of any unforeseen opportunity, we are always on the cusp of the unforeseen future so this wild-card nature of Money is a value over-time that the holder of a Hard money is reaping by just holding money.  It is an unearned subsidy to everyone who holds money, a subsidy that the public in it's willingness to use anything as money and not use inefficient Barter is providing, but the benefit is privatized in that it accrues to holders of money alone.  When a money holder sells the liquidity of money we call this Interest and it is an unearned transfer of wealth from the public to private hands.  The solution is to make money SOFT in direct proportion to it's liquidity, this sterilizes the money of it's unearned profit and returns the public liquidity to all users of money rather then just it's holders.

Marx was completely ignorant of the interest problem and instead blamed Free-Markets and Private Property and lead the political left on a hundred year wild-goose-chase trying to destroy these two institutions.  Fortunately we in the West only got the milder Socialist institutions that Marx advocated like Universal Public Education and Elderly Pensions which have been unparallelled successes, but where ever Free-Markets have been replaced by central planning their has been devastation.  And the Venus project is just central planning with a techno-makeover.

The correct solution is an economy that is still a Free-market but without the evil of interest payments (aka Capitalism) that insidiously suck up the wealth of the working class.  This is the 'Natural' economic order that Silvio Gesell advocates, an economy which is anti-Capitalist AND anti-Communist, a true third way that rejects the evils in each of the two Titanic ideologies of the 20th Century.  The Great tragedy of the 20th Century is that everyone things of these two ideologies as the only options and that they are monolithic.  Capitalism has convinced everyone that one must have Interest on Money in order to have Markets in which individuals choose what and how much to produce and what to sell it for, but their is no link what so ever.  And Communist has convinced us that we must have the elimination of private property to end exploitation of the working class, again this is a false dichotomy.

I urge you to read Gesell's works they are 100 years old but still relevant.  https://www.community-exchange.org/docs/Gesell/en/neo/

https://medium.com/quinn-norton/f3db7e13e6e3

You have to also understand that this is happening worldwide. It's not just traded in US dollars.

What you are really seeing is the birth of the first international, decentralized currency. Right now it's a little baby learning to walk.

I've recently woke up to the idea of god being replaced by bitcoin or money

Fixed that for you.
Of course,  you can now try to argue how your rbe will produce all the technological artefacts it needs to sustain itself. But you won't because an rbe can't.
And what about the (nesseary) birthcontrol? Do you go for the chinese model or do you think of something more creative like work accidents to keep your population in check? It's funny how you never hear rbe people say "Well, we've got this wonderfull idea, but we need 70% off you to die off to make it work".

And what will happen when you have all these rbe cities but the ones with the most vital resources stops sharing?

RBE doesn't solve anything, it just changes to something different which is much much harder to balance, if it can be kept balanced at all.
Saying that the computer will fix everything is just bullshit because we would need to program it first and we can't because we don't know how. It's magical thinking.
Saying that people will just share their resources is also bullshit, they won't. Your RBE is without a chance to become booted in this society yet it is the only place it can be booted from.

It  is  a  failed  idea.

I bet I can guess what this plan is short on, and needs, to be completed! 

What if instead of thinking of money as an idea - basically a mass delusion where we think there is value in something that doesn't actually have value - you think of money as a contract of an IOU, given to you by the whole world in return for giving something to the world. I give the world an hour of my labor, and thus make the world better off. In return, the world gives me an IOU that I am able to call back to get something else. And the more I contribute to the world, the more IOUs the world gives me. Does that change the magic idea any?

TWO hours now, instead of one and a half!? No thank you!

Can we at least get a summary? Or is it more lists of how the government fucked everyone over, and calling it capitalism because the government isn't full-on communist?

Because the way capitalists businesses make profits is by using guns to threaten people and take their money and resources. Profits have nothing to do with actually working to earn people's money.

I have a better system, where everyone has $10 million dollars, and can buy everything they might ever need. That way no one will ever need to work or starve, because everyone will be rich.
What do you think?