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. A transaction occurred
2. The particular type of economic activity
3. The value agreed by the transacting parties
4. 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 Military-
Industrial 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.