You know how much I love what you're doing; we need more people like you if we're going to survive. That said, from my humble perspective, it appears that "they" are winning, and the only consolation we will be left with is reorganizing at the local community level, if we can. That will not be easy, but it will be essential for those few of us who survive the great reset.
Thank you for saying that, Joe, it means a lot to me.
I sure would like to know the actual numbers in my own county, for instance. There's no question in my mind that you're right. Every time I turn around I'm hearing about another death, and that's without calculating in the military ones.
I'm glad to not be in charge of how this transition happens. In a way, our strength is our downfall. People are so resilient that they'll put up with more and more and more ... until they finally break. You and I both know 'they' won't stop until that breaking point is reached. So one way or another, change is coming. Glad to know you're also seeing the community as the place to start.
That's funny, Jeff. I first heard Ellen over 20 yrs ago at a conference on 911 and the Deep State. She blew my mind when she explained how money worked. I thought, "No way! If this was true, everyone would know it and be up in arms!" And so the trajectory of my next 20 yrs was set.
She and I are in touch occasionally. Her co-founder of the Public Banking Institute, Marc Armstrong, was the editor of my book. I asked her to write a cover blurb and she said she didn't have time to read it but I could write it for her. What I wrote was that anyone who wanted to apply the principles of public banking to a decentralized model needed to read my book (or something like that). I think that was too far for her because she took back the offer.
Ellen is truly brilliant. With David Graeber, she's the primary foundation for my book, but my references to her don't come until the World on FIRE and Community Cash Cow sections, so you wouldn't have gotten there yet.
Thanks for responding, Candace, and for the kind compliment. Yes, there's so much that we can do if we're the ones issuing the currency instead of the private banks!
I'm glad you mentioned Buckminster Fuller. Here is my favorite quote of his:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
One of the best arguments for UBI, IMHO. But the very best argument, aside from human rights and dignity, is that the oligarchs of the so-called Great Reset will eventually offer us all something kinda shaped like UBI, but with plenty of strings attached. All the more reason to beat them to it with a real, unconditional UBI (or citizen's dividend) with NO strings attached, period. This can be done with either national currency and/or community currency of some sort. Goodbye oligarchy!
His other biggest prediction is that one day women would, and should, eventually rule the world. Perhaps the latter prediction is a prerequisite for the former?
So many interesting things to respond to, Ajax! Thanks for this Bucky Fuller quote, I hadn't heard it before. I think it corresponds to David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs, and his support for UBI along with student debt forgiveness.
It's one of the few points where I disagree with Graeber (and Fuller) but the beauty of computer modeling, especially if designed as a game, is that you can figure these things out before you do them.
As czar of your fiefdom (where do you live, Ajax?) let's estimate that your commonwealth bank is bringing in an average of $400 per person/ mo. in mortgage payments. Since you have student loan forgiveness, there's no debt payments coming in for that. So how are you going to distribute that dividend?
If students are going to get the same benefit of a four-year fully-paid tuition + living expenses college education away from home, you'd need to reserve a chunk for that in dollars, so other places would accept it. Maybe you have $300 /mo./person left. You give it out in UBI as dollars, so that people can use it for rent, mortgages, bills or purchases anyway they like. What amount will be left in local circulation by the end of the month and how many times will it change hands, creating goods and services, before it's sucked out? That's the measure of success for your plan.
If you give it out in carets with a 2:1 exchange rate to dollars, you can double your local impact. If you do subsidies that require the first exchange to be a local good or service, you can guarantee one round before it leaves town. If carets to dollars are taxed by half, but not at all (except SS) if spent as carets, you can distribute twice the carets for all dollars in your treasury. If student loans are capped at ^200/ mo. for ten years or twice the principle, whichever is less, you can add 5-10 hrs / mo. for every indebted grad to your labor/ feeding/ teaching pool.
Would the US dollar have a foreign trade value if it wasn't backed by militarism, US assets or US-made products? I think that's an answer we're going to find out in the not-distant future. So the hypothesis that we can survive without anyone doing real work is going to be put to the test, methinks.
You're very welcome, Tereza. I was thinking more along the lines of Ellen Brown and Rodger Malcolm Mitchell proposed at the national level in terms of UBI, and ditto for debt jubilee too.
At the local level, I suppose that it's a bit more nuanced, but to be honest I haven't thought about that as much as I should. But they already have a working model of UBI, the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Hi, Ajax. I know Ellen and my public banking model is based on her work, although I take it two steps further with credit creation and taxation that's different from dollars. I would suspect that Alaska's UBI is a distribution of gas sales? I think you're right that UBI is very likely to happen, brought to us by the Great Reset, as you say.
My argument against it, which I hope isn't patronizing, paternalistic or sadistic, is that money can't be a unit of trade if there's no trade behind it. UBI shows money for what it is--a unit of extraction, a share of the spoils of war, an empire chip. You can produce as much money as you want and hand it out to all the people of the empire because we produce nothing anyway. We do the bullshit jobs that are just a pretense of work. But the products we buy, the food we eat, and the maintenance of what we use is done by real people doing real work. If you give them UBI too, and make it truly universal, it stops buying anything. Well maybe some bug burgers grown in a fully automated lab.
I get what you are saying, but I look at it like this. Not every job is a bullshit job in this country, even if the majority of them are. There will always be some degree of trade behind the currency as it is used, even if it indirect, regardless of how it is distributed, but if it were distributed via UBI (albeit not nearly enough to live large, of course), it will at least create a social floor for everyone below which no one can fall, period. It will reduce if not eliminate the economic coercion that the greater working class is subjected to, by increasing their bargaining power.
All currency regardless of anything or how it is created or what it is nominally tied to, is ultimately back by all of the goods and services of the economy. Again, regardless of anything. So why not partially skip the middleman and give some of every year's newly created money directly to We the People, with no strings attached? As long as only a small fraction of the total money created is done this way, the rest of it can be spent into existence by the government on actual goods and services, which will automatically back it overall.
They already have a UBI for the ultra-rich, and they call it Quantitative Easing, lol. Make it QE for We the People instead.
We already have numerous transfer programs with patronizing and paternalistic rules in place for the people that some get and some don't. Simply do away with the means testing, discrimination, and perverse incentives. And it would be UBI.
Alaska's citizen's dividend comes from Georgist style taxation of the use of oil resources, investing a portion of that, and then distributing the dividends to all state residents in equal amounts. Carbon taxation, land value taxation, and indeed any other similar taxes or royalties on natural resources can be used to create a UBI-style program as well. As a de facto tax on rent-seeking, it is a genius way to prevent a rentier class from even forming.
But thanks to Monetary Sovereignty, we don't even need to do that. We can literally just create the money.
It's analogous to when people have made the argument that Social Security is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, as there is no contemporaneous trade directly behind the intergenerational transfer either, accounting gimmicks to the contrary notwithstanding. But as we know, that argument is fallacious.
Interestingly, Rodger Mitchell prefers to call his idea of UBI "Social Security for all", analogous to single-payer healthcare being called "Medicare For All". Simply by lowering the age limit to zero.
1) For most of us, the answer would be largely the same people who currently feed us under the status quo, for largely the same reasons. (Even if/when some people quit their bullshit jobs, which as you say weren't even feeding anyone anyway.)
2) The Davos gang, aka WEF oligarchs, likely supports it for a number of reasons, some benign, some not so benign. The benign reasons include both damage control and the ultimate inevitability of UBI due to the Robot Apocalypse destroying jobs via automation. The not so benign ones involve, as I noted earlier, their intention for strings attached (i.e. power and control over us) and as cover to also impose brutal austerity (likely of the "ecological" variety) on us at the same time. We need to beat them to this with a REAL unconditional UBI *before* they do such a thing, and the clock is ticking....
3) Ideally there should also be a global UBI as well financed at least in part by a Tobin tax on currency exchange transactions, and perhaps other financial transactions taxes as well, but that is a topic for another discussion. Until then, there could be charities like the already existing GiveDirectly (Google it) modeled on UBI, that Americans can choose to give to for that purpose. And foreign aid from our government, currently a pittance with much room in the budget to grow it, could perhaps be modeled after UBI as well.
I can't speak for whoever happens to be in power implementing the program, but if I were in charge, the answer would at least be some flavor of "yes".
4) Unless the UBI amount is extremely high, it would probably not be radically different than the status quo in practice. Especially if some people quit or cut back on bullshit jobs as a result, or use the money to pay down debt. Money is fungible, after all. And nearly everyone would come out ahead on balance. Ellen Brown makes that point well in her article.
UBI may not be a perfect solution for everything, but on balance we will all be better off with it than without it. Everyone except the oligarchs, that is.
(I forgot to mention that Charles Eisenstein also supports UBI, by the way, in his book Sacred Economics.)
"UBI shows money for what it is--a unit of extraction, a share of the spoils of war, an empire chip. You can produce as much money as you want and hand it out to all the people of the empire because we produce nothing anyway."
I would actually argue that, to the extent that this is true, this is really a *feature* of UBI, not a bug. Peeling back the curtain to reveal the ugly truth and "little man behind the curtain" would not be a bad thing IMHO. Some would of course call such a thing apocalyptic, but that is true only in the original Greek meaning of the word, "lifting the veil". Or in Latin, "revelation".
Yet another way this would ultimately checkmate the oligarchy. They will NOT own us. And they will NOT be happy!
There was a time many years ago when I was skeptical of it as well. But after learning about Monetary Sovereignty and MMT and stuff like that, and losing much of the scarcity mindset, I concluded that the only remaining arguments against it were patronizing, paternalistic and/or sadistic, which means there are really no good arguments left against it IMHO.
As for the dollar's foreign trade value, I would argue that one can simply look at the value of the Canadian dollar or the currency any other Monetarily sovereign country for comparison.
I note what seems to be a contradiction in your system analysis. You describe a kindergarten where lots of kids make stuff, and only one kid has tokens for trade (or is allowed to create them). To me, you have just described the nationalized currency/banking system in place today in the US, where the government owns all rights to make money, and lets groups produce money essentially under licensing contract. Later then you say that it should then be illegal for any entity save government to create the money as a way to change. So I think there is a difference between how we are thinking of this.
In addition, it is in fact illegal in the US to try and make your own currency money (physical tokens), as some folks in the 90's and early 2000's found to their detriment as I recall. Crypto got around that, surprisingly enough. In the physical realm the government takes a really dim view of anyone creating alternate currencies, and I suspect as their abilities in the digital realm expand they might crack down there as well.
So the question is what makes a token, or other useful small item or digital record keeping device used in trade, money? I think we might have different answers to that question, and it is an important one to understanding.
I take a wider view of money as any easily tradable, liquid asset, which would include crypto or the like in some cases, and cigarettes if you are in prison. At the same time, I would also understand it as "the currency, hard or digital, that the government will accept for the payment of taxes". That second one is important, because it defines a specific use case that excludes things like foreign exchange.
In the first, wider view, I would say I don't want the government having a monopoly on that, precisely because I think people will migrate to whatever token is reliable and a monopoly only encourages the monopolist to stop being reliable. When it comes to the second version, well, the government already is the sole legal producer of that kind of money, and works through the banks to get that cash out into the world. To me, the solution to the problem is to move away from the narrow view and towards the wider view, with the government accepting taxes in some non-monetary commodity (nominally gold perhaps, allowing payments in various currencies at the going exchange rate) or having a stable government currency in fixed amounts that only the government transacts in. This is possibly a tricky system to move back to since the creation of the modern tax code, but it is basically how older systems functioned, and hell, they didn't even have calculators.
Shorter version: So long as you have a single currency requirement, a single money people are required to transact in, whomever controls it will have a lot of capacity to cause problems. Specifically they will always be able to inflate it and capture gains that way. Government owning it doesn't solve that, it just puts the money in the hands of the people that make the rules.
Likewise with the issue of property ownership. It's too deep of a rabbit hole for a comment (or two or three essays) but the current US tax system only makes sense under the presumption that the governments (federal, state and local jointly) own all the land. Not the people whose name is on the deed, and not the banks who own the mortgage, but the governments who tax the land, effectively charging rent for you to use it. (Not to mention drastically limiting HOW you can use it even if you are the nominal owner.)
That the state and banks are essentially the same being is relevant here as in the money case. The problem is that the more the state gets involved with anything, the more the relevant interests take control of the state. The people, the multitude of citizens, does not retain control of the government, rather the government becomes one with the very interests the multitude of citizens wanted protection from.
Of course, as your recommended systems approach federalism, I generally agree!
Hello Dr H, and thanks for reading my post! I think it might be useful to read my reply to Jeff below because 20 yrs ago, I used to think the same way you did--of course gov'ts created the money. That just isn't true. As Ellen Brown has said, the Fed is as much a part of the Federal Gov't as is Fed Ex. They don't even have the ability to audit, much less control it. It's a cartel of private bankers. If you look at a dollar bill, it says Federal Reserve Note, not Treasury Bill. The Federal Gov't, as has been confirmed by the Supreme Court, is authorized to produce nothing but coins, no bills, no credit.
The Constitution also took the right to issue bills of credit away from the States, as was its purpose if you look at my post on the Constitutional Convention Coup. So I agree with you that centralization of money-creation under a national gov't (not a federal one) is just wrapping it up in a big bow to hand to whoever takes it from them.
I certainly don't expect you to change what you've believed all your life on my say-so. It took a lot of research for me to come to terms with it. I cover it in some chapters of my book but the seminal and most accessible work on it is the afore-mentioned Ellen Brown's Web of Debt. I taught a community class on it that can be found here: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/. It's on my UniverseCity website ;-)
Interesting, kiers. In one of my episodes on propaganda, Rule #4 is that the best defense is a good offense--always accuse the other side of doing what you're really doing. The US has bragged about how we have ethnically targeted bioweapons, something that particularly worried Russia with all the labs Ukraine had on its border. It's also worried China.
I don't know exactly what I think about China but I'm going to do an episode on it in the near future. Jeff Brown has sent me his books on it and is going to interview me when he's finished mine. So I'll get back with more on that when I've done more research.
YES! another rule of propaganda, is ONE MESSAGE AT A TIME. So we have our new fear vector for the next 20 years...(which is not to make light of the threat....make no mistake the threat is REAL). But they'll play those chords on the piano "bum bum bummmm" evey few weeks, with different political "faces" (this time James Crow toadied up), different vectos (monkey, flu, covid-__insert_strain_name_here, etc) like they did "War on Terr". Its very hard dealing with exortionists this evil........
Agreed but I don't see the World As We've Known It (WAWKI) lasting the winter, much less 20 years. Whatever is coming next is coming soon to a theatre near you.
LOL. well Late January Northern EU = zero gas condition (None in storage. only shipping: a little math never mentioned on MSM: Nordstream 1 supplied 27 Bn Cubic Meters per year. Just for your readers edification:.....by comparison, a Q-Max LNG carrier only carries 266,000 cu meters of nat gas equivalent! You need ~280 Q-Max TANKER DELIVERIES A DAY, including sundays, for THE YEAR, just to equal nordstream 1. And nordstream 1 ain't even EUs entire gas demand for the year! )
watch for the state dept boys' homework/work product/solution to be "finished" by then.....
I've also heard the couplers to use LNG aren't the same as they've been using. And wasn't Merkel going to spend billions to dredge the harbor to accommodate them, which was rejected when she was voted out? It's a very scary thing. I commented on another thread and Frances Leader (who is subscribed here), replied with this which I highly recommend:
My 2 cents; Russia's Midnight hour is close at hand and it's not gonna be pretty!
the US/Nato will full-court press in the war now for these 3 months forward like *nothing*(!) seen before. at least as i see it, there has to be settlement by End Jan due to the energy crisis,
[b/c like the "Clausewitz Triangle" shows (pedantic...i know, bear with me, this term "IS a thing" lol), "the people" are one of the 3 key constituents in the war effort (besides gov and military),] and it's HIGHLY doubtful the EU people will be "Happy" without heat/fuel for Feb March on indefinitely forward from there and will definitely waver in the war effort..... US knows this too foremost. So "The Peace" has to come on a well known date, before that date...oh boy...it will be MAXIMAL Degradation of what's left of the Russian force. All that area they "have" in E Ukraine will be mercilessly leveled, even if it means losing civilization in Eastern Ukraine, till the Russians are eliminated. And then "the peace" with a neutered Putin a diminished PUtin, he will ask for no war crime charges etc etc, west will ask for rebuilding Gas supplies on their terms etc etc.....all the administrative stuff....
just read Frances' post. The footage on US MSM news of the bridge explosion was an edited mishmash...(1) showing a section of bridge with raised hump, (2) then showing a flat low rise bridge (like a causeway) with a full section of bridge dropped into the water. It is most likely, the explosives were planted on and underneath the bridge structure and truck theory was just distraction...the "reporting" is garbage. Not even noting the locations nor map visual nothing. utter retarded garbage and the MSM talking heads make millions of $$$. utter useless people.
Thanks for reading my post, Alanna! I'm thinking that you mean the Henry George model, is that right? I have a somewhat different approach that taxes land use by whether it's regenerative and leaves the asset (and people) better than before, sustainable, extractive or predatory. I use eminent domain to take back local assets for the community but since profits that leave the community are taxed by half, outsiders may be motivated to sell. Local monopolies are also discouraged by taxing at 50% any income over the set maximum.
Yes Henry George but he simply rediscovered a perennial wisdom teaching on land tenure and tax, traced back thousands of years and used in societies that were harmonic and balanced. Much of land use approaches you mention can properly be dealt with via zoning laws. Land value tax is a way to give incentives to local jobs and businesses while deterring land hoarding and speculation in general. Many benefits. Here is free pdf of my Radical Middle Award winning book The Earth Belongs to Everyone: https://theiu.org/books/
Numbers of us are working for both land value tax and public banks, the two pair well together in addressing both the land and the money problem and their entanglement.
Ah yes, I remember noticing when you joined that you'd written a book on this and were a twice Congressional candidate on the Democrat and Green parties. Very impressive Alanna! And I'm honored that you're here.
But you do understand that you're asking me to abandon my work of the last 20 years, without you understanding more than a 20-min segment of it? What I'm doing includes public banks but goes beyond them into a local mortgage-backed currency with its own taxation, exchange rate and trade policies.
What I would be thrilled to do, beyond thrilled, is to engage in a process of defining our purpose, our principles, and how we would measure success under our system. To start, I define my purpose as: Enable communities to take responsibility for themselves in food, healthcare, trade, economics, education, energy and communications.
In this episode, I define ten principles, with which you may or may not agree:
And my measure of success is how many times money can circulate within the community, increasing production and exchange, before it's cashed out for an imperial currency.
What do you say? I'd be happy to do an episode around it. We definitely need a better understanding of various solutions in the context of asking the same question.
Great article overall. I would say that you, Ellen Brown, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, the American Monetary Institute, and the late Margrit Kennedy all have good ideas for monetary reform overall. I think the very best would be some combination of all of these.
You know how much I love what you're doing; we need more people like you if we're going to survive. That said, from my humble perspective, it appears that "they" are winning, and the only consolation we will be left with is reorganizing at the local community level, if we can. That will not be easy, but it will be essential for those few of us who survive the great reset.
Thank you for saying that, Joe, it means a lot to me.
I sure would like to know the actual numbers in my own county, for instance. There's no question in my mind that you're right. Every time I turn around I'm hearing about another death, and that's without calculating in the military ones.
I'm glad to not be in charge of how this transition happens. In a way, our strength is our downfall. People are so resilient that they'll put up with more and more and more ... until they finally break. You and I both know 'they' won't stop until that breaking point is reached. So one way or another, change is coming. Glad to know you're also seeing the community as the place to start.
For the community bank, you should contact Ellen Brown, a public bank expert. If you don't have her email, I can send it.
That's funny, Jeff. I first heard Ellen over 20 yrs ago at a conference on 911 and the Deep State. She blew my mind when she explained how money worked. I thought, "No way! If this was true, everyone would know it and be up in arms!" And so the trajectory of my next 20 yrs was set.
She and I are in touch occasionally. Her co-founder of the Public Banking Institute, Marc Armstrong, was the editor of my book. I asked her to write a cover blurb and she said she didn't have time to read it but I could write it for her. What I wrote was that anyone who wanted to apply the principles of public banking to a decentralized model needed to read my book (or something like that). I think that was too far for her because she took back the offer.
Ellen is truly brilliant. With David Graeber, she's the primary foundation for my book, but my references to her don't come until the World on FIRE and Community Cash Cow sections, so you wouldn't have gotten there yet.
These are great models! Micro-loans were way more beneficial than the big banks and people managed to set them up on their own, so there is hope.
Thanks for responding, Candace, and for the kind compliment. Yes, there's so much that we can do if we're the ones issuing the currency instead of the private banks!
I'm glad you mentioned Buckminster Fuller. Here is my favorite quote of his:
"We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."
One of the best arguments for UBI, IMHO. But the very best argument, aside from human rights and dignity, is that the oligarchs of the so-called Great Reset will eventually offer us all something kinda shaped like UBI, but with plenty of strings attached. All the more reason to beat them to it with a real, unconditional UBI (or citizen's dividend) with NO strings attached, period. This can be done with either national currency and/or community currency of some sort. Goodbye oligarchy!
His other biggest prediction is that one day women would, and should, eventually rule the world. Perhaps the latter prediction is a prerequisite for the former?
So many interesting things to respond to, Ajax! Thanks for this Bucky Fuller quote, I hadn't heard it before. I think it corresponds to David Graeber's book, Bullshit Jobs, and his support for UBI along with student debt forgiveness.
It's one of the few points where I disagree with Graeber (and Fuller) but the beauty of computer modeling, especially if designed as a game, is that you can figure these things out before you do them.
As czar of your fiefdom (where do you live, Ajax?) let's estimate that your commonwealth bank is bringing in an average of $400 per person/ mo. in mortgage payments. Since you have student loan forgiveness, there's no debt payments coming in for that. So how are you going to distribute that dividend?
If students are going to get the same benefit of a four-year fully-paid tuition + living expenses college education away from home, you'd need to reserve a chunk for that in dollars, so other places would accept it. Maybe you have $300 /mo./person left. You give it out in UBI as dollars, so that people can use it for rent, mortgages, bills or purchases anyway they like. What amount will be left in local circulation by the end of the month and how many times will it change hands, creating goods and services, before it's sucked out? That's the measure of success for your plan.
If you give it out in carets with a 2:1 exchange rate to dollars, you can double your local impact. If you do subsidies that require the first exchange to be a local good or service, you can guarantee one round before it leaves town. If carets to dollars are taxed by half, but not at all (except SS) if spent as carets, you can distribute twice the carets for all dollars in your treasury. If student loans are capped at ^200/ mo. for ten years or twice the principle, whichever is less, you can add 5-10 hrs / mo. for every indebted grad to your labor/ feeding/ teaching pool.
Would the US dollar have a foreign trade value if it wasn't backed by militarism, US assets or US-made products? I think that's an answer we're going to find out in the not-distant future. So the hypothesis that we can survive without anyone doing real work is going to be put to the test, methinks.
Thanks for the thinking impetus!
You're very welcome, Tereza. I was thinking more along the lines of Ellen Brown and Rodger Malcolm Mitchell proposed at the national level in terms of UBI, and ditto for debt jubilee too.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/10/04/how-fund-universal-basic-income-without-increasing-taxes-or-inflation
At the local level, I suppose that it's a bit more nuanced, but to be honest I haven't thought about that as much as I should. But they already have a working model of UBI, the Alaska Permanent Fund.
Hi, Ajax. I know Ellen and my public banking model is based on her work, although I take it two steps further with credit creation and taxation that's different from dollars. I would suspect that Alaska's UBI is a distribution of gas sales? I think you're right that UBI is very likely to happen, brought to us by the Great Reset, as you say.
My argument against it, which I hope isn't patronizing, paternalistic or sadistic, is that money can't be a unit of trade if there's no trade behind it. UBI shows money for what it is--a unit of extraction, a share of the spoils of war, an empire chip. You can produce as much money as you want and hand it out to all the people of the empire because we produce nothing anyway. We do the bullshit jobs that are just a pretense of work. But the products we buy, the food we eat, and the maintenance of what we use is done by real people doing real work. If you give them UBI too, and make it truly universal, it stops buying anything. Well maybe some bug burgers grown in a fully automated lab.
Thanks again for your insights.
I get what you are saying, but I look at it like this. Not every job is a bullshit job in this country, even if the majority of them are. There will always be some degree of trade behind the currency as it is used, even if it indirect, regardless of how it is distributed, but if it were distributed via UBI (albeit not nearly enough to live large, of course), it will at least create a social floor for everyone below which no one can fall, period. It will reduce if not eliminate the economic coercion that the greater working class is subjected to, by increasing their bargaining power.
All currency regardless of anything or how it is created or what it is nominally tied to, is ultimately back by all of the goods and services of the economy. Again, regardless of anything. So why not partially skip the middleman and give some of every year's newly created money directly to We the People, with no strings attached? As long as only a small fraction of the total money created is done this way, the rest of it can be spent into existence by the government on actual goods and services, which will automatically back it overall.
They already have a UBI for the ultra-rich, and they call it Quantitative Easing, lol. Make it QE for We the People instead.
We already have numerous transfer programs with patronizing and paternalistic rules in place for the people that some get and some don't. Simply do away with the means testing, discrimination, and perverse incentives. And it would be UBI.
Alaska's citizen's dividend comes from Georgist style taxation of the use of oil resources, investing a portion of that, and then distributing the dividends to all state residents in equal amounts. Carbon taxation, land value taxation, and indeed any other similar taxes or royalties on natural resources can be used to create a UBI-style program as well. As a de facto tax on rent-seeking, it is a genius way to prevent a rentier class from even forming.
But thanks to Monetary Sovereignty, we don't even need to do that. We can literally just create the money.
It's analogous to when people have made the argument that Social Security is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme, as there is no contemporaneous trade directly behind the intergenerational transfer either, accounting gimmicks to the contrary notwithstanding. But as we know, that argument is fallacious.
Interestingly, Rodger Mitchell prefers to call his idea of UBI "Social Security for all", analogous to single-payer healthcare being called "Medicare For All". Simply by lowering the age limit to zero.
Hmmm.... so let me ask a few questions:
1. Who will feed you? And why?
2. Why does Davos support UBI? (as we agree they do)
3. Will people in Africa be given UBI that enables them to buy products from the US?
4. Since we bid against each other for housing, why wouldn't this increase the level of debt by $24K/ yr (with two incomes) for the same house?
1) For most of us, the answer would be largely the same people who currently feed us under the status quo, for largely the same reasons. (Even if/when some people quit their bullshit jobs, which as you say weren't even feeding anyone anyway.)
2) The Davos gang, aka WEF oligarchs, likely supports it for a number of reasons, some benign, some not so benign. The benign reasons include both damage control and the ultimate inevitability of UBI due to the Robot Apocalypse destroying jobs via automation. The not so benign ones involve, as I noted earlier, their intention for strings attached (i.e. power and control over us) and as cover to also impose brutal austerity (likely of the "ecological" variety) on us at the same time. We need to beat them to this with a REAL unconditional UBI *before* they do such a thing, and the clock is ticking....
3) Ideally there should also be a global UBI as well financed at least in part by a Tobin tax on currency exchange transactions, and perhaps other financial transactions taxes as well, but that is a topic for another discussion. Until then, there could be charities like the already existing GiveDirectly (Google it) modeled on UBI, that Americans can choose to give to for that purpose. And foreign aid from our government, currently a pittance with much room in the budget to grow it, could perhaps be modeled after UBI as well.
I can't speak for whoever happens to be in power implementing the program, but if I were in charge, the answer would at least be some flavor of "yes".
4) Unless the UBI amount is extremely high, it would probably not be radically different than the status quo in practice. Especially if some people quit or cut back on bullshit jobs as a result, or use the money to pay down debt. Money is fungible, after all. And nearly everyone would come out ahead on balance. Ellen Brown makes that point well in her article.
UBI may not be a perfect solution for everything, but on balance we will all be better off with it than without it. Everyone except the oligarchs, that is.
(I forgot to mention that Charles Eisenstein also supports UBI, by the way, in his book Sacred Economics.)
"UBI shows money for what it is--a unit of extraction, a share of the spoils of war, an empire chip. You can produce as much money as you want and hand it out to all the people of the empire because we produce nothing anyway."
I would actually argue that, to the extent that this is true, this is really a *feature* of UBI, not a bug. Peeling back the curtain to reveal the ugly truth and "little man behind the curtain" would not be a bad thing IMHO. Some would of course call such a thing apocalyptic, but that is true only in the original Greek meaning of the word, "lifting the veil". Or in Latin, "revelation".
Yet another way this would ultimately checkmate the oligarchy. They will NOT own us. And they will NOT be happy!
I forgot to mention, I put a lengthy Q and A on my own blog a while ago about UBI:
http://truespiritofamericaparty.blogspot.com/p/why-ubi.html
There was a time many years ago when I was skeptical of it as well. But after learning about Monetary Sovereignty and MMT and stuff like that, and losing much of the scarcity mindset, I concluded that the only remaining arguments against it were patronizing, paternalistic and/or sadistic, which means there are really no good arguments left against it IMHO.
Thanks again :)
Thanks Ajax. I read all the links, including your funny Q & A. I appreciate your enthusiasm!
You're very welcome, Tereza. I'm glad you enjoyed it :)
Also see Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's plan as well:
https://mythfighter.com/2017/02/06/ten-steps-to-prosperity-step-3-monthly-bonuses-for-all/
As for the dollar's foreign trade value, I would argue that one can simply look at the value of the Canadian dollar or the currency any other Monetarily sovereign country for comparison.
I note what seems to be a contradiction in your system analysis. You describe a kindergarten where lots of kids make stuff, and only one kid has tokens for trade (or is allowed to create them). To me, you have just described the nationalized currency/banking system in place today in the US, where the government owns all rights to make money, and lets groups produce money essentially under licensing contract. Later then you say that it should then be illegal for any entity save government to create the money as a way to change. So I think there is a difference between how we are thinking of this.
In addition, it is in fact illegal in the US to try and make your own currency money (physical tokens), as some folks in the 90's and early 2000's found to their detriment as I recall. Crypto got around that, surprisingly enough. In the physical realm the government takes a really dim view of anyone creating alternate currencies, and I suspect as their abilities in the digital realm expand they might crack down there as well.
So the question is what makes a token, or other useful small item or digital record keeping device used in trade, money? I think we might have different answers to that question, and it is an important one to understanding.
I take a wider view of money as any easily tradable, liquid asset, which would include crypto or the like in some cases, and cigarettes if you are in prison. At the same time, I would also understand it as "the currency, hard or digital, that the government will accept for the payment of taxes". That second one is important, because it defines a specific use case that excludes things like foreign exchange.
In the first, wider view, I would say I don't want the government having a monopoly on that, precisely because I think people will migrate to whatever token is reliable and a monopoly only encourages the monopolist to stop being reliable. When it comes to the second version, well, the government already is the sole legal producer of that kind of money, and works through the banks to get that cash out into the world. To me, the solution to the problem is to move away from the narrow view and towards the wider view, with the government accepting taxes in some non-monetary commodity (nominally gold perhaps, allowing payments in various currencies at the going exchange rate) or having a stable government currency in fixed amounts that only the government transacts in. This is possibly a tricky system to move back to since the creation of the modern tax code, but it is basically how older systems functioned, and hell, they didn't even have calculators.
Shorter version: So long as you have a single currency requirement, a single money people are required to transact in, whomever controls it will have a lot of capacity to cause problems. Specifically they will always be able to inflate it and capture gains that way. Government owning it doesn't solve that, it just puts the money in the hands of the people that make the rules.
Likewise with the issue of property ownership. It's too deep of a rabbit hole for a comment (or two or three essays) but the current US tax system only makes sense under the presumption that the governments (federal, state and local jointly) own all the land. Not the people whose name is on the deed, and not the banks who own the mortgage, but the governments who tax the land, effectively charging rent for you to use it. (Not to mention drastically limiting HOW you can use it even if you are the nominal owner.)
That the state and banks are essentially the same being is relevant here as in the money case. The problem is that the more the state gets involved with anything, the more the relevant interests take control of the state. The people, the multitude of citizens, does not retain control of the government, rather the government becomes one with the very interests the multitude of citizens wanted protection from.
Of course, as your recommended systems approach federalism, I generally agree!
Hello Dr H, and thanks for reading my post! I think it might be useful to read my reply to Jeff below because 20 yrs ago, I used to think the same way you did--of course gov'ts created the money. That just isn't true. As Ellen Brown has said, the Fed is as much a part of the Federal Gov't as is Fed Ex. They don't even have the ability to audit, much less control it. It's a cartel of private bankers. If you look at a dollar bill, it says Federal Reserve Note, not Treasury Bill. The Federal Gov't, as has been confirmed by the Supreme Court, is authorized to produce nothing but coins, no bills, no credit.
The Constitution also took the right to issue bills of credit away from the States, as was its purpose if you look at my post on the Constitutional Convention Coup. So I agree with you that centralization of money-creation under a national gov't (not a federal one) is just wrapping it up in a big bow to hand to whoever takes it from them.
I certainly don't expect you to change what you've believed all your life on my say-so. It took a lot of research for me to come to terms with it. I cover it in some chapters of my book but the seminal and most accessible work on it is the afore-mentioned Ellen Brown's Web of Debt. I taught a community class on it that can be found here: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/. It's on my UniverseCity website ;-)
I believe that local community currencies can legally exist. Take a look at Ithaca, for example.
DNC Congressman Jason Crow now telling Americans to be scared:
https://youtu.be/EAykdDwBi7o
Interesting, kiers. In one of my episodes on propaganda, Rule #4 is that the best defense is a good offense--always accuse the other side of doing what you're really doing. The US has bragged about how we have ethnically targeted bioweapons, something that particularly worried Russia with all the labs Ukraine had on its border. It's also worried China.
I don't know exactly what I think about China but I'm going to do an episode on it in the near future. Jeff Brown has sent me his books on it and is going to interview me when he's finished mine. So I'll get back with more on that when I've done more research.
YES! another rule of propaganda, is ONE MESSAGE AT A TIME. So we have our new fear vector for the next 20 years...(which is not to make light of the threat....make no mistake the threat is REAL). But they'll play those chords on the piano "bum bum bummmm" evey few weeks, with different political "faces" (this time James Crow toadied up), different vectos (monkey, flu, covid-__insert_strain_name_here, etc) like they did "War on Terr". Its very hard dealing with exortionists this evil........
Agreed but I don't see the World As We've Known It (WAWKI) lasting the winter, much less 20 years. Whatever is coming next is coming soon to a theatre near you.
LOL. well Late January Northern EU = zero gas condition (None in storage. only shipping: a little math never mentioned on MSM: Nordstream 1 supplied 27 Bn Cubic Meters per year. Just for your readers edification:.....by comparison, a Q-Max LNG carrier only carries 266,000 cu meters of nat gas equivalent! You need ~280 Q-Max TANKER DELIVERIES A DAY, including sundays, for THE YEAR, just to equal nordstream 1. And nordstream 1 ain't even EUs entire gas demand for the year! )
watch for the state dept boys' homework/work product/solution to be "finished" by then.....
I've also heard the couplers to use LNG aren't the same as they've been using. And wasn't Merkel going to spend billions to dredge the harbor to accommodate them, which was rejected when she was voted out? It's a very scary thing. I commented on another thread and Frances Leader (who is subscribed here), replied with this which I highly recommend:
Read what Pepe Escobar is saying now: Terror on Crimea Bridge Forces Russia to Unleash Shock & Awe: The regime in Kiev & THOSE SUPPORTING IT are now considered legitimate targets. https://francesleader.substack.com/p/terror-on-crimea-bridge-forces-russia
Oh sh**! Even the LNG needs a retrofit?
My 2 cents; Russia's Midnight hour is close at hand and it's not gonna be pretty!
the US/Nato will full-court press in the war now for these 3 months forward like *nothing*(!) seen before. at least as i see it, there has to be settlement by End Jan due to the energy crisis,
[b/c like the "Clausewitz Triangle" shows (pedantic...i know, bear with me, this term "IS a thing" lol), "the people" are one of the 3 key constituents in the war effort (besides gov and military),] and it's HIGHLY doubtful the EU people will be "Happy" without heat/fuel for Feb March on indefinitely forward from there and will definitely waver in the war effort..... US knows this too foremost. So "The Peace" has to come on a well known date, before that date...oh boy...it will be MAXIMAL Degradation of what's left of the Russian force. All that area they "have" in E Ukraine will be mercilessly leveled, even if it means losing civilization in Eastern Ukraine, till the Russians are eliminated. And then "the peace" with a neutered Putin a diminished PUtin, he will ask for no war crime charges etc etc, west will ask for rebuilding Gas supplies on their terms etc etc.....all the administrative stuff....
Do you not agree? Curious!
just read Frances' post. The footage on US MSM news of the bridge explosion was an edited mishmash...(1) showing a section of bridge with raised hump, (2) then showing a flat low rise bridge (like a causeway) with a full section of bridge dropped into the water. It is most likely, the explosives were planted on and underneath the bridge structure and truck theory was just distraction...the "reporting" is garbage. Not even noting the locations nor map visual nothing. utter retarded garbage and the MSM talking heads make millions of $$$. utter useless people.
Teresa - Excellent!!! Except you left out commons rent based /land value tax form of tax. Call me! 717-357-7617 or alannahartzok@gmail.com
Thanks for reading my post, Alanna! I'm thinking that you mean the Henry George model, is that right? I have a somewhat different approach that taxes land use by whether it's regenerative and leaves the asset (and people) better than before, sustainable, extractive or predatory. I use eminent domain to take back local assets for the community but since profits that leave the community are taxed by half, outsiders may be motivated to sell. Local monopolies are also discouraged by taxing at 50% any income over the set maximum.
Yes Henry George but he simply rediscovered a perennial wisdom teaching on land tenure and tax, traced back thousands of years and used in societies that were harmonic and balanced. Much of land use approaches you mention can properly be dealt with via zoning laws. Land value tax is a way to give incentives to local jobs and businesses while deterring land hoarding and speculation in general. Many benefits. Here is free pdf of my Radical Middle Award winning book The Earth Belongs to Everyone: https://theiu.org/books/
Numbers of us are working for both land value tax and public banks, the two pair well together in addressing both the land and the money problem and their entanglement.
Ah yes, I remember noticing when you joined that you'd written a book on this and were a twice Congressional candidate on the Democrat and Green parties. Very impressive Alanna! And I'm honored that you're here.
But you do understand that you're asking me to abandon my work of the last 20 years, without you understanding more than a 20-min segment of it? What I'm doing includes public banks but goes beyond them into a local mortgage-backed currency with its own taxation, exchange rate and trade policies.
What I would be thrilled to do, beyond thrilled, is to engage in a process of defining our purpose, our principles, and how we would measure success under our system. To start, I define my purpose as: Enable communities to take responsibility for themselves in food, healthcare, trade, economics, education, energy and communications.
In this episode, I define ten principles, with which you may or may not agree:
https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/build-a-new-model
And my measure of success is how many times money can circulate within the community, increasing production and exchange, before it's cashed out for an imperial currency.
What do you say? I'd be happy to do an episode around it. We definitely need a better understanding of various solutions in the context of asking the same question.
Great article overall. I would say that you, Ellen Brown, Rodger Malcolm Mitchell, the American Monetary Institute, and the late Margrit Kennedy all have good ideas for monetary reform overall. I think the very best would be some combination of all of these.