The fiat currency-based monetary system generated tens to hundred of trillions of ‘contrived’ money – money of which it can not be argued it is backed by anything. This money is now dormant in funds or other systems, and anyone of many who owns these funds who first decides to spend this ‘arbitrary money’ will inflate everything on the world – oil, real estate, energy, food, goods, minerals, consumer goods, anything. That dormant money is indistinguishable circulating money so there is a seductive quality start spending it, sooner rather than later.
Conversely the value of humans – workers and consumers – is decreasing rapidly as production capacity gets automated or more leans towards slave labour in third world countries. Just an example – If a corporation can have fish trawled in Canadian seas by Chinese vessels, by Chinese slave labour fishermen shipped to China, cleaned and then frozen, sent back to Canada and sold in Canadian supermarkets, there clearly is very little discernible value to either Canadian or Chinese workers, relative to international shipping, refrigeration and products in the supermarket. In such a service/product saturated world end-user/client/voter/civilian interests become an after thought or a rounding error.
The risk is not merely that the corporate sector secedes from the rest of humanity and starts producing a category of products based on a new exclusive corporate monetary system – the risk is that major elements of the human species will be unable to claim a share of this value chain, and at some stage be left excluded from a range critical products and services. This we are increasingly witnessing around us. The end point of such a trajectory will be the most inhuman world we can envision.
We can no longer tolerate the shrill deluded cries of libertarians, neoconservatives, neoliberals, randians, and other “nexual predators”. These are in effect acting as corporate enablers and may be on the way to be tomorrows collaborators. The era to argue that ambition and hard work served as an ideologically sound blank check guarantee for success and happiness lies far in the past. We are entering the era of monetary/technological stratification and feudalization, and with accelerating technological change this process risks being itself becoming eminently irreversible.
We need to back value with something that’s actually worth something. I propose backing international monetary value by a mix of actual people, things such as an educated people, assets such as permanent sources of energy and verifiable sources of constituent satisfaction. These things are in themselves far scarcer and far less subject to elite hoarding than any precious metal. The current geopolitical current is towards disentangling democracy from actual meaning; let’s shift the tide back and introduce meaning and values in to democracy and bring a sense of fundamental worth in to the empowerment of all people.
Let the tide of progress lift up people, rather than drown them.
There is no doubt – the clock ticks on wrong. That things are wrong is now self-evident. Just in what way they are wrong and on how to fix it is still open to debate, but once that becomes self-evident too, there will be people expediently or hastily declared guilty hanging from lamp posts in the streets. This spectacle is becoming uglier every day, and any foot dragging will only aggravate the eventual escalation.
Ask yourself – what is the world we want and I tell you; base an economic value system on falsifiable key precursors of that world. (i.e. basing our curreht economic paradigm on a lot of people being in debt was a real bad idea to begin with!)
My expectation is that an ideal world for 95% of humans will include new sources of energy, as soon as possible. As soon we we learn that money has been a fiction, and the sooner we educate ourselves that energy is value, the earlier we can start fixing this mess.