[발췌] A Money System for the People─If We Want It

출처: P2P Foundation, 3 Feb 2017

지은이: Matthew Slater

자료: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-money-system-for-the-people-if-we-want-it/2017/02/03


※ 발췌:

Matthew Slater builds and implements open source software for social & complementary currencies. As a full nomad, he knows first hand many people and projects in his fields. In 2009 he co-founded with Tim Anderson the Swiss association Community Forge which freely hosts web sites for LETS and timebanks. He is also active in thinking and educating about money. In 2013 he co-created the 'trading floor game' with Sybille Saint Girons. In 2015 he co-authored the Money and Society MOOC with Professor Jem Bendell. In 2016 he co-authored the Credit Commons white paper with Tim Jenkin.

※ 발췌:

Money creation, like alchemy, is shrouded in ambiguous language and yields eternal wealth! For most of history these secrets have been used to empower sovereigns to spend money without the painful business of taxing or borrowing. Those foolish enough to try to grasp it with their rational minds are beffuddled by unexpected politics, propaganda and paradoxes. In modern times this power now resides almost absolutely with banks, who lend money which doesn’t exist, and reap the interest as if it did! Are the alchemic fumes making your head spin?

What if those proto-chemists were found to be not ‘making gold’ but merely charlatans ‘taking gold’? Some sovereigns managed money better than others, but now that power resides with private corporations. The language of ‘wealth creation’ masks the real intention which is extract money from society as fast as possible, to lock it up in tax havens, and to drive the masses, deprived of a medium of exchange, back to the bank to borrow more! The social conseqences are increasingly acknowledged (although not by banks) to include the rich-poor divide, short-termism, erosion of democracy, the military industrial complex and, via the growth imperative, climate change itself.

Users of money and financial services seem to have very little influence in the matter. However much we disapprove of banks, boycotting them (as I do) makes normal life impossible. Banks are part of our social DNA, that’s what Too Big To Fail means.

The problem is not that saving and lending are critical functions which only banks can do. Indeed the idea that money is some kind of stuff which we rent is merely a misleading metaphor. The problem is that only a bank can underwrite your IOU so that everyone else will accept it. If all the banks and bank accounts were taken down in some Mr Robot scenario, the only money left would be a tiny volume of notes and coins. We wouldn’t be able to pay each other and the economy would stop dead.

( ... ... )

So the essence of bypassing banks, at least to the extent that we don’t use money to pay interest and taxes, is understanding how IOUs work. In the Irish banking strikes of 1970s, the whole economy ran on IOUs in the form of cheques. Allegedly pub landlords took the role of judging creditworthiness. It wasn’t the most efficient system but it worked. Similarly in Greece before the Euro, it was common practice for strong local businesses to pay their bills by cheque, and for that cheque to circulate as money before returning to the business. Both of these are examples of interest free money creation, and taken to scale, they create stable economies (no more boom and bust) in which credit is always available.

So how could this be instituted today? ( ... ... )