Build a New Model

ten universal principles of a community-based economy

Buckminster Fuller said “You can never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” This episode outlines ten universal principles of a new model, including the purpose of government, how to measure its success or failure, what community wealth really is, how to protect and proliferate it, the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and paying your debt to society backwards and forwards. I begin by talking about the spiritual and metaphysical obstacles that keep us from imagining a new model and how to remove them in your own psyche. Based on my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I end with the three powers that communities require in order to control their own labor: debt & tax & digital cash.

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ten universal principles of a community-based model

1. Economic is governance: Government is the brain that decides what should be done but economics is the heart that determines how by sending energy to whatever part of the body politic will make it happen.

2. The work of life is maintenance: feeding the soft, hungry body; maintaining the health of children and parents; maintaining the home and property; maintaining relationships with the family, friends and neighborhood; maintaining the health of the soil, water and air; maintaining the tools of the household and the infrastructure of the community.

3. Wealth (not money) equals security and control over your own lives.

4. Wealth, as defined by the UN, is the natural, physical and human capital. The natural capital is the land, soil, forest, water, minerals, air. The physical capital is what’s built—homes, buildings, infrastructure. The human capital is not the people but their skills, knowledge and creativity.

5. The purpose of society is to protect and proliferate the wealth of families and communities, increasing the security of each generation.

6. The mortgage represents the intergenerational transfer of wealth, incurring a debt to society—not a debt to bankers as it stands today.

7. This debt is owed both backwards and forwards—in gratitude to the generation that came before, and to be passed on in a better form to the next.

8. To be responsible to their members, communities need to be the default owner (with the exclusive right to issue credit) of the assets within their borders.

9. The success or failure of a government is the increase or decrease in the wealth of families, as measured by home ownership and small business ownership. This would make The Great Reset a 100% failure.

10. The amount of money in a community doesn’t increase the wealth. The movement of money, circulating widely and repeatedly within the community, increases the wealth.

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the three powers required by communities to control their own labor

1. Debt creation through mortgages on local properties.

2. Money creation of the credit to pay local taxes and debts.

3. Taxation of these locally issued credits.

In a future episode, I’ll go into the logistics of how this could be done in the US by using the Social Security Trust Fund to capitalize community-owned banks, by ensuring that only local governments can lend money they don’t have (thereby creating it), and by generating what I call community carets that recirculate in the community and proliferate the wealth!

In the meantime, here are two videos in preparation:

Adjacent Nation

In Russell Brand's intro to his interview with Krystal Ball, he talks about creating an Adjacent Nation with no mortgages, taxes or student debt. From my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, I describe my Regeneration Nation that turns debt and taxes into a system of community reciprocity. I reimagine money as the blood of the body politic, bringing energy to each part. Krystal compares the populism of Bernie Sanders to the 1930's agrarian movement. Using The Wizard of Oz, I show how they differ and what we can learn from those politically savvy farmers.

Be the Meanest Mom Ever … your kids will thank you (eventually)

Before anyone is qualified to write rules for self-governance, they should first raise kids who are an asset to the household and know how to clean a toilet. The only legitimate use of power is to give someone power over themselves. In this response to Russell Brand's interview of Philippa Perry, I ask if modeling works and whether parenting is harder than it should be, and then divulge the best tricks I learned from other moms when raising my daughters.