Excellent question, Jason! It's on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607. I was just pricing a reprint that my local indie bookstore sells in their consignment program. With the printing cost increases, I'd be losing seven cents for every copy I sold. Or I could raise the price $4/ copy and go back to making around $3.50, but I also need to get the cover redone to reflect the new price. So Amazon is the short term answer.
I highly recommend it. Tons of food for thought, some superb quotes, unique, provocative viewpoints, deep economic analyses, the list goes on. It's a thinker's paradise and I'm only 100 pages into it. Despite my stack of books to read and a ton of things that must be completed before winter sets in, I can't quit grabbing bits of time to read it.
Awww... I thought you might need to squirrel my book away for the winter, knowing the projects where you were racing the rain and snow. What a kind review, Geoff! You're clearly demonstrating to Jason the other way to get my book, make enough perceptive comments that I can't help mailing you one of the remaining copies!
I read another 50 pages last night. You have obviously done tons of research and have a remarkable understanding of economics and an ability to explain it and make it interesting to someone like me who is bored beyond tears on such a key subject.
Your book is also useful to me for another reason which is that I have given up on the details long ago since the major events have pretty standard themes and reading it has summarized important details that I was not aware of. Your penetrating challenges at the ends of chapters are pure gold as well.
I kept thinking that Howard Zinn and Murray Rothbard could learn a few things from you and that I can't wait to discuss it with my grandkids, nieces,and nephews when they get a few more years on.
Yeah, I have a reading list that keeps growing, but how could I resist your work? When I got it I peeked at the table of contents, and got immediately hooked. Fascinating stuff and I like the way you dig into things and your ways of thinking.
I've thought about your dream a lot, Guy. Here's what I've come to--you can't go directly from a slave-backed economy to a gift economy. It just wouldn't work. Having global slaves who make all our products and food for us has made us incompetent, through no fault of our own. We don't have the skills or stamina to suddenly start producing, each on our own, everything we need. You need some system of reciprocity so that we can learn how to be productive. And those things that we can reproduce infinitely--like your writing and mine--should be the gifts. Supporting people around us through acts of reciprocal service earns our keep, while freeing our higher gifts from the need to make a living from them.
I agree and I wasn't talking about a gift economy. I think a 'gift' economy is likely unstable because, to me anyway, 'gifting' has a similar energy as 'thanking': coming from a place of hierarchy, albeit a subtle one.
Reciprocal comes closer to the idea, tied to taking responsibility and recognising strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and restrictions. It is interesting that the Zapotecs here still practice a reciprocal-responsible economic structure. Except for the devolution into selling goods to tourists, the communities use place-in-society as including the responsibility of maintaining the community. So, in a jury-selection-like system, with discrimination to respect inherent strengths and weakness such as physical strength and intellectual smarts, the requirements to run the community are assigned for set periods of time. Everyone is responsible and all participate to the best of their ability and are expected to grow into the new positions and with time the elders are wise with experience. I encountered this with the library system, as new librarians are assigned every few years in the many Zapotec communities and are instructed.
This comes very close to the story that Graeber described about the Inuit hunter who chastised the gringo for giving thanks for the food.
And as Graeber well articulated, 'bartering' hasn't existed as an organised economic method. It only comes up in ad-hoc encounters and often ends badly.
Oh that's beautiful! I thought you might have a different experience living in Oaxaca. When I have more time, I'll search my library for a slim book written about life with a Latin American tribe. They described something very similar, where people would save enough to be able to take their turn (voluntarily) at leadership, knowing they'd need to put on the feasts for communal projects. I'll look forward to reading about it if you do write up your experience.
The wrestling part is how big projects are accomplished. Dams or space ships. I think they are also possible. The challenge would be for the community to see the value in those kinds of things: dams maybe more credible than space races! And that would likely be a 'positive' thing. And, of course, pyramids were built here. The question open to me, is to what extent were they chosen and acted on by the society versus done by slavery. I'm not convinced that they were actually built by slavery. In part inference: the Zapotecs who built the pyramids here have no remnant of a slavery economic structure. Was that because they simply totally rejected it? Or because slavery wasn't their method? Fascinating questions, imo.
When I was thinking about this deeply, during my course writing days, I focused on how to make a schooling system work with this method while integrating it into the current monetary system. An interesting exercise. I was able to see it work in a kind of hybrid way.
Si, y entendido. The ideas to write are piling up and when I do this odd writing daimon steps and and I diverts me! I'll let Dai (for Daimon) know this is top priority. I stopped at 5am after an all day/night set. I will publish my latest - not about economics - later today. (My new weekly deadline is for Tuesday mornings.)
I like your idea about the difference between domestic money and foreign money. Whether 50% is the right factor or not, the concept is really intriguing.
Thank you! And yes, each community would set their own factor. I live in two places, my childhood home in Appalachia where money moves too slow and all the youth leave, and my California home where money moves too fast and students inundate the town and want to stay. So my policies in each would be different. In Cumberland, I'd want to attract outside money to come in and help fix up homes and start local businesses. In Santa Cruz, I want to kick the students, tourists and developers out and let the university serve the people who live here. And have a 5-yr moratorium on 'immigration' from other places while each community has the resources to deal with the homeless who were born here or have family here.
I really like what Larken said when talking with James the other day.
"By its very nature all governments and authorities can add to society is imoral violence. It’s a prety easy thing to proove if you just pause to think about it.
Do you need a special badge or a politician or an office of authority to defend an inocent person from being attacked? No!
Do you need special permission and authority to help the poor? No!
The only thing you need authority for is permission to do something that everybody would say: "THAT’S BAD!!!" if you didn’t have that permission, which litterally means all the notion of authority does is to give some people permission to do evil stuff, and pretend it isn’t evil."
Yes! I wrote that quote down of his but didn't put it in the text version. I thought that was a really astute point also and in my notes I jotted "also religion."
12 months later ... just catching up on the backlog via your youtube playlist, and wanted to offer this ...
"One of the important central concepts in Ivan Ilyin's thinking is the definition of freedom. The word ‘freedom’ in the West has been butchered to the point where it now almost means the opposite of what it originally was meant to be. The word that we should use I think that would make better sense is ‘autonomy’ rather than freedom. In the West there's a tendency to believe that freedom refers to the ability to do whatever you want, that there is a lack of external restraint and so it comes down to being able to act arbitrarily, having no reason to act the way you do, because there can be no causality-[…] it's freedom to do whatever you want, and that's somehow a good thing.”
Matthew Raphael Johnson on discussing Ivan Ilyin (at 21:23):
• Russian Nationalist Philosopher - Ivan Ilyin - Matthew Raphael Johnson
Check this out, Julius, you inspired me to look at the etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/freedom. The word can only be defined in opposition: to slavery, to bondage, to obstruction, of constraints. Free derives from pri- which is to love, to take to wife, members of a clan, children of the same family. -dom is related to doom as a statute, judgment, jurisdiction.
In other words, freedom has no meaning without the context of slavery. A free woman is one you can't rape, which was the origin of the veil to mark a woman as someone's property. Women who wore a veil without being 'free'/owned could be stoned to death--unveiled women were free to take. As I've said before that free trade means free to rape.
Your free-nd who was loved and noble couldn't be treated like a slave, unlike the rest. It was a legal status that exempted certain people--and perhaps only nobles--from what was the norm, which was enforced servitude.
So those who talk about freedom are unconsciously reinforcing the status quo of slavery, and claiming an exception. Whoa. The trickery of word spelling continues.
Freedom? The question is, "Whose?" Unsurprisingly, it looks like the usurping maniacs are still at it. From the guys who brought us COVID mania…more gloom and doom that the usual suspects have the answers to. How thoughtful of them. Surprise, the answer is less sovereignty for us and more control for the .0001%
This article from the Breggin substack takes less than 30 seconds to read and has some points that are good to know, I think.
200 Medical Journals and the UN Call for New Global Health Emergency
The Elites of the World Return to Climate Crisis to Increase Their Stranglehold Over Us!
For superficial context, note I write as someone who is visibly non-white and does identify as "white" :)) I want to say for two reasons:
1) no one is responsible for the actions of another, whether genetically similar or descended from them, or cosmetically subjectively similar to them, or culturally similar to them. One does not inherit or transfer Karma, or to put it "Islamically" one is accountable as an individual to One authority only with no intermediary. As Khalil Gibran (who was Christian) put it
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
Correspondingly people are absolutely accountable for their choices and actions, commissions omissions and associations. And my friend told me, "having money even by birth is not shame, but not using it responsibly is very much a shame."
2) The prospect of false guilt, and ascribing some group guilt is dangerous and exploitable, so that decent people can be ruined and bad actors receive material benefits. Here is Artin Salimi making great videos about various things - I don't think he agrees with all of whom or what he presents or their language, e.g. the Aleister Crowley "white religion" comments but he makes person think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vedbcwOHbUA
Thanks Tereza. And your "Talmud Tricks" video is a great work - in the proper sense of the word. G_d loves courage which is honesty which is love IMO :)
(the "Talmud Tricks" video I refer to above discusses Zionist narratives - I like it because sometimes we have to give voice to the voiceless when we would rather the voiceless would have the capacity to speak for themselves, speak [sic]. Sorry can't edit my earlier post.
Agreed on no one being responsible for the actions of another, shaqer. Did my essay indicate otherwise? I would also say that no one can judge the character of another although we can judge the action as constructive or destructive.
I used to love that Khalil Gibran quote when I was young ... as a parent, I got less enthusiastic. In my draft of this article, I wrote about the four human rights we're born with: sovereignty over body and mind, and belonging to a mother and a community. But belonging to means belonging with. As I say about houses, you don't own it, it owns you. I think we've come full circle from when parents were authoritarian over children to where kids are the bosses and masters in families, or Machiavellian midgets, as I've referred to mine ;-) The first way in which a system of reciprocity needs to be modeled is in the family.
Besides which, I share superficial attributes with people who are/were gratuitous cannibals, torturers, rapists, thieves, liars of all genders. I almost certainly descend from persons like that at some point. This is "scientific" and true. But I don't answer for them unless I am somehow accessory and perpetrator, and neither does anyone else. Conversely nor can I take credit for anything I think is good, either, unless maybe I knew them personally.
Hmmm. What if others in your community don't like your ideas? Who chooses what system to follow? My take on anarchy is that it is the absence of rulers. I don't even subscribe to the notion of 'community' or 'society'. I just want a world full of sovereign individuals with no one having any expectation of anyone else. There should be no land ownership - no one can possibly own land, it's the most absurd notion that so few people question. I don't have a problem with people building a structure to live in and protect themselves from predators (human or animal) and I don't have a problem with them leaving it to their offspring.
I'm sick of rules and I don't believe anyone has the right to judge others, ever. I literally don't care what others think of me and my actions & they have no right whatsoever to judge them or tell me what to do. If someone harms someone I care about, then I have the right to deal with that person appropriately - I don't want or need a court.
That is freedom. That is how we are meant to live harmoniously on this planet.
All good questions, Claire. And that's the point of this period in time when there's nothing we can do except imagine. If Clairadonia would have no rules, wouldn't might make right? Everyone would 'own' the place they occupy but they couldn't buy or sell. Would you continue to use imperial currencies issued by banks, or have nothing but direct trade?
I'm in complete agreement that no one has the right to judge others. That's my first cornerstone, that all people are inherently good. But I would, in Terezania, judge some behaviors as better than others, and try to design my system to encourage them.
Specifically the behaviors I'd like to foster are food production, taking care of each other including children and the elderly, teaching and learning, and making our houses more functional and beautiful.
The behaviors I'd like my system to discourage is taking advantage of others, trying to get something for nothing, hoarding as much as you can, and using power to control others.
Oh and I apply measurable criteria to whose system gets used, modeled through an online game. You win by how many times carets change hands in the community before they get cashed out. The more exchanges, the more goods and services are being provided locally, the higher your sovereignty index.
Hi Tereza ... where can I purchase your book?
Excellent question, Jason! It's on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607. I was just pricing a reprint that my local indie bookstore sells in their consignment program. With the printing cost increases, I'd be losing seven cents for every copy I sold. Or I could raise the price $4/ copy and go back to making around $3.50, but I also need to get the cover redone to reflect the new price. So Amazon is the short term answer.
My thanks Tereza.
PS:- get the cover redone and raise the price
I highly recommend it. Tons of food for thought, some superb quotes, unique, provocative viewpoints, deep economic analyses, the list goes on. It's a thinker's paradise and I'm only 100 pages into it. Despite my stack of books to read and a ton of things that must be completed before winter sets in, I can't quit grabbing bits of time to read it.
Awww... I thought you might need to squirrel my book away for the winter, knowing the projects where you were racing the rain and snow. What a kind review, Geoff! You're clearly demonstrating to Jason the other way to get my book, make enough perceptive comments that I can't help mailing you one of the remaining copies!
I read another 50 pages last night. You have obviously done tons of research and have a remarkable understanding of economics and an ability to explain it and make it interesting to someone like me who is bored beyond tears on such a key subject.
Your book is also useful to me for another reason which is that I have given up on the details long ago since the major events have pretty standard themes and reading it has summarized important details that I was not aware of. Your penetrating challenges at the ends of chapters are pure gold as well.
I kept thinking that Howard Zinn and Murray Rothbard could learn a few things from you and that I can't wait to discuss it with my grandkids, nieces,and nephews when they get a few more years on.
Yeah, I have a reading list that keeps growing, but how could I resist your work? When I got it I peeked at the table of contents, and got immediately hooked. Fascinating stuff and I like the way you dig into things and your ways of thinking.
Way to go!
Ah to dream!
In my dream, and which I taught for a while, money actually disappears.
Thank you.
I've thought about your dream a lot, Guy. Here's what I've come to--you can't go directly from a slave-backed economy to a gift economy. It just wouldn't work. Having global slaves who make all our products and food for us has made us incompetent, through no fault of our own. We don't have the skills or stamina to suddenly start producing, each on our own, everything we need. You need some system of reciprocity so that we can learn how to be productive. And those things that we can reproduce infinitely--like your writing and mine--should be the gifts. Supporting people around us through acts of reciprocal service earns our keep, while freeing our higher gifts from the need to make a living from them.
I agree and I wasn't talking about a gift economy. I think a 'gift' economy is likely unstable because, to me anyway, 'gifting' has a similar energy as 'thanking': coming from a place of hierarchy, albeit a subtle one.
Reciprocal comes closer to the idea, tied to taking responsibility and recognising strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and restrictions. It is interesting that the Zapotecs here still practice a reciprocal-responsible economic structure. Except for the devolution into selling goods to tourists, the communities use place-in-society as including the responsibility of maintaining the community. So, in a jury-selection-like system, with discrimination to respect inherent strengths and weakness such as physical strength and intellectual smarts, the requirements to run the community are assigned for set periods of time. Everyone is responsible and all participate to the best of their ability and are expected to grow into the new positions and with time the elders are wise with experience. I encountered this with the library system, as new librarians are assigned every few years in the many Zapotec communities and are instructed.
This comes very close to the story that Graeber described about the Inuit hunter who chastised the gringo for giving thanks for the food.
And as Graeber well articulated, 'bartering' hasn't existed as an organised economic method. It only comes up in ad-hoc encounters and often ends badly.
I may write my idea out more fully one day.
Oh that's beautiful! I thought you might have a different experience living in Oaxaca. When I have more time, I'll search my library for a slim book written about life with a Latin American tribe. They described something very similar, where people would save enough to be able to take their turn (voluntarily) at leadership, knowing they'd need to put on the feasts for communal projects. I'll look forward to reading about it if you do write up your experience.
The wrestling part is how big projects are accomplished. Dams or space ships. I think they are also possible. The challenge would be for the community to see the value in those kinds of things: dams maybe more credible than space races! And that would likely be a 'positive' thing. And, of course, pyramids were built here. The question open to me, is to what extent were they chosen and acted on by the society versus done by slavery. I'm not convinced that they were actually built by slavery. In part inference: the Zapotecs who built the pyramids here have no remnant of a slavery economic structure. Was that because they simply totally rejected it? Or because slavery wasn't their method? Fascinating questions, imo.
When I was thinking about this deeply, during my course writing days, I focused on how to make a schooling system work with this method while integrating it into the current monetary system. An interesting exercise. I was able to see it work in a kind of hybrid way.
Gracias.
"I may write my idea out more fully one day."
Let me know when you do. And please make it snappy! ; )
LoL! Hola, Geoff. Gracias para tu entusiamo!
Si, y entendido. The ideas to write are piling up and when I do this odd writing daimon steps and and I diverts me! I'll let Dai (for Daimon) know this is top priority. I stopped at 5am after an all day/night set. I will publish my latest - not about economics - later today. (My new weekly deadline is for Tuesday mornings.)
I like your idea about the difference between domestic money and foreign money. Whether 50% is the right factor or not, the concept is really intriguing.
Thank you! And yes, each community would set their own factor. I live in two places, my childhood home in Appalachia where money moves too slow and all the youth leave, and my California home where money moves too fast and students inundate the town and want to stay. So my policies in each would be different. In Cumberland, I'd want to attract outside money to come in and help fix up homes and start local businesses. In Santa Cruz, I want to kick the students, tourists and developers out and let the university serve the people who live here. And have a 5-yr moratorium on 'immigration' from other places while each community has the resources to deal with the homeless who were born here or have family here.
I really like what Larken said when talking with James the other day.
"By its very nature all governments and authorities can add to society is imoral violence. It’s a prety easy thing to proove if you just pause to think about it.
Do you need a special badge or a politician or an office of authority to defend an inocent person from being attacked? No!
Do you need special permission and authority to help the poor? No!
The only thing you need authority for is permission to do something that everybody would say: "THAT’S BAD!!!" if you didn’t have that permission, which litterally means all the notion of authority does is to give some people permission to do evil stuff, and pretend it isn’t evil."
- Larken Rose -
Yes! I wrote that quote down of his but didn't put it in the text version. I thought that was a really astute point also and in my notes I jotted "also religion."
....., and I have been following James Corbett since before Obama was selected.
Way ahead of me! I only discovered him in the last year or so.
12 months later ... just catching up on the backlog via your youtube playlist, and wanted to offer this ...
"One of the important central concepts in Ivan Ilyin's thinking is the definition of freedom. The word ‘freedom’ in the West has been butchered to the point where it now almost means the opposite of what it originally was meant to be. The word that we should use I think that would make better sense is ‘autonomy’ rather than freedom. In the West there's a tendency to believe that freedom refers to the ability to do whatever you want, that there is a lack of external restraint and so it comes down to being able to act arbitrarily, having no reason to act the way you do, because there can be no causality-[…] it's freedom to do whatever you want, and that's somehow a good thing.”
Matthew Raphael Johnson on discussing Ivan Ilyin (at 21:23):
• Russian Nationalist Philosopher - Ivan Ilyin - Matthew Raphael Johnson
https://odysee.com/@InvincibleOrthodoxy:3/russian-nationalist-philosopher-ivan:c
Check this out, Julius, you inspired me to look at the etymology: https://www.etymonline.com/word/freedom. The word can only be defined in opposition: to slavery, to bondage, to obstruction, of constraints. Free derives from pri- which is to love, to take to wife, members of a clan, children of the same family. -dom is related to doom as a statute, judgment, jurisdiction.
In other words, freedom has no meaning without the context of slavery. A free woman is one you can't rape, which was the origin of the veil to mark a woman as someone's property. Women who wore a veil without being 'free'/owned could be stoned to death--unveiled women were free to take. As I've said before that free trade means free to rape.
Your free-nd who was loved and noble couldn't be treated like a slave, unlike the rest. It was a legal status that exempted certain people--and perhaps only nobles--from what was the norm, which was enforced servitude.
So those who talk about freedom are unconsciously reinforcing the status quo of slavery, and claiming an exception. Whoa. The trickery of word spelling continues.
Freedom? The question is, "Whose?" Unsurprisingly, it looks like the usurping maniacs are still at it. From the guys who brought us COVID mania…more gloom and doom that the usual suspects have the answers to. How thoughtful of them. Surprise, the answer is less sovereignty for us and more control for the .0001%
This article from the Breggin substack takes less than 30 seconds to read and has some points that are good to know, I think.
200 Medical Journals and the UN Call for New Global Health Emergency
The Elites of the World Return to Climate Crisis to Increase Their Stranglehold Over Us!
https://gingerbreggin.substack.com/p/200-medical-journals-and-the-un-call
Read the original (~1200 words, < 60 seconds) here.:
Joint action is essential for planetary and human health
https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj.p2355
https://www.bmj.com/content/bmj/383/bmj.p2355.full.pdf
System change... by any and all means possible... and a must.
Currently we are living under a Dictatorship by the Jewish Occult...
It is basically a neo feudalistic Aristocracy designed to make things worse the harder you work.
Inevitably without a revolution there will be no change.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/israel-israel-uber-alles
By the was... Totally agree... it is all down to education...
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/-to-deliberately-harm-and-hurt-humanity
For superficial context, note I write as someone who is visibly non-white and does identify as "white" :)) I want to say for two reasons:
1) no one is responsible for the actions of another, whether genetically similar or descended from them, or cosmetically subjectively similar to them, or culturally similar to them. One does not inherit or transfer Karma, or to put it "Islamically" one is accountable as an individual to One authority only with no intermediary. As Khalil Gibran (who was Christian) put it
"Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you."
Correspondingly people are absolutely accountable for their choices and actions, commissions omissions and associations. And my friend told me, "having money even by birth is not shame, but not using it responsibly is very much a shame."
2) The prospect of false guilt, and ascribing some group guilt is dangerous and exploitable, so that decent people can be ruined and bad actors receive material benefits. Here is Artin Salimi making great videos about various things - I don't think he agrees with all of whom or what he presents or their language, e.g. the Aleister Crowley "white religion" comments but he makes person think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vedbcwOHbUA
Thanks Tereza. And your "Talmud Tricks" video is a great work - in the proper sense of the word. G_d loves courage which is honesty which is love IMO :)
(the "Talmud Tricks" video I refer to above discusses Zionist narratives - I like it because sometimes we have to give voice to the voiceless when we would rather the voiceless would have the capacity to speak for themselves, speak [sic]. Sorry can't edit my earlier post.
Agreed on no one being responsible for the actions of another, shaqer. Did my essay indicate otherwise? I would also say that no one can judge the character of another although we can judge the action as constructive or destructive.
I used to love that Khalil Gibran quote when I was young ... as a parent, I got less enthusiastic. In my draft of this article, I wrote about the four human rights we're born with: sovereignty over body and mind, and belonging to a mother and a community. But belonging to means belonging with. As I say about houses, you don't own it, it owns you. I think we've come full circle from when parents were authoritarian over children to where kids are the bosses and masters in families, or Machiavellian midgets, as I've referred to mine ;-) The first way in which a system of reciprocity needs to be modeled is in the family.
I'll check out the video!
Oh no Tereza, your essay didn't indicate otherwise at all! I was excited to see it (the essay), hence the comment! thank you.
Besides which, I share superficial attributes with people who are/were gratuitous cannibals, torturers, rapists, thieves, liars of all genders. I almost certainly descend from persons like that at some point. This is "scientific" and true. But I don't answer for them unless I am somehow accessory and perpetrator, and neither does anyone else. Conversely nor can I take credit for anything I think is good, either, unless maybe I knew them personally.
Agreed, shaqur. Sorry I think I'm missing how this relates to the video/ essay.
Hmmm. What if others in your community don't like your ideas? Who chooses what system to follow? My take on anarchy is that it is the absence of rulers. I don't even subscribe to the notion of 'community' or 'society'. I just want a world full of sovereign individuals with no one having any expectation of anyone else. There should be no land ownership - no one can possibly own land, it's the most absurd notion that so few people question. I don't have a problem with people building a structure to live in and protect themselves from predators (human or animal) and I don't have a problem with them leaving it to their offspring.
I'm sick of rules and I don't believe anyone has the right to judge others, ever. I literally don't care what others think of me and my actions & they have no right whatsoever to judge them or tell me what to do. If someone harms someone I care about, then I have the right to deal with that person appropriately - I don't want or need a court.
That is freedom. That is how we are meant to live harmoniously on this planet.
All good questions, Claire. And that's the point of this period in time when there's nothing we can do except imagine. If Clairadonia would have no rules, wouldn't might make right? Everyone would 'own' the place they occupy but they couldn't buy or sell. Would you continue to use imperial currencies issued by banks, or have nothing but direct trade?
I'm in complete agreement that no one has the right to judge others. That's my first cornerstone, that all people are inherently good. But I would, in Terezania, judge some behaviors as better than others, and try to design my system to encourage them.
Specifically the behaviors I'd like to foster are food production, taking care of each other including children and the elderly, teaching and learning, and making our houses more functional and beautiful.
The behaviors I'd like my system to discourage is taking advantage of others, trying to get something for nothing, hoarding as much as you can, and using power to control others.
Oh and I apply measurable criteria to whose system gets used, modeled through an online game. You win by how many times carets change hands in the community before they get cashed out. The more exchanges, the more goods and services are being provided locally, the higher your sovereignty index.