I just watched a video of an event in Amsterdam where the well-known Libertarian Stefan Molyneux spoke. Let me link it for your edification.
Immediately after the event his Google+, Gmail and Youtube were deleted, as a result of complain vandalism. In other words, what he said caused a counter reaction. Now I am not usually overly enthusiastic about Peter and his Libertarian ideas, but in this video he makes a pretty much spectacular point against the power of unbridled governance. This particular line of reasoning I really like.
Let me speculate onward from where Peter takes me. Let’s assume I was dictatress of the world and I could impose whims on the world, reset the world to a previous state and then impose other whims, purely as a scientific experiment. No doubt as a tyrant I would unleash untold havoc and misery.
Lets assume I would dictate to the world that every human being would from now on become the monetary standard. Lets assume that money itself would emerge as per registered citizen and that the basis of the world’s economy and value exchange traffic would be people, and not “gold” or “fiat power” or “bitcoin algorithms” or “pax plutonica”, or “debt paper” or anything like that. The idea is simple – when a human is recognized as a citizen hen or she is given money. No questions asked. All governance would emerge from this point onwards, governments or banks would be barred from arbitrarily generating money and everyone would have to somehow cater to people’s whims to get anything done – wage a war? people would have to give government money to do so.
In fact we could start with this tomorrow. We can generate a web site or domain where everyone can register and when you register and prove you as a human exist and you prove your birth a clock starts ticking charting a certain amount of value. How much value we would not be able to ascertain, but through that web site people would be free to bestow any of that spontaneously emerging personhood coins to other people as they would please in exchange for service, favor, goods or anything. It should not be possible to spend future coins you haven’t received yet in this system, so nobody can be bound to surrender money they haven’t accrued yet.
If HumanCoin would be accepted as a valid medium of exchange, then we’d have to decide on absolute mechanisms of verification and certainty that any specific person registered in this system would still be alive. Coins would be bequeathed per year and verification would have to occur, say, every birthday. Coins could be counter in {unique personhood identifier] seconds, minutes, hours and years.
What would trading in Euro, Dollars do us any good in such a system? HumanCoin would be a verifiably scarce commodity. Governments would demand taxes for designated services, and people might very well say no – and governments would have little means to force people to arbitrarily fork over taxes. There would have to be very strong democratic consensus for any project – specifically wars. There would also be a highly stabilizing effect – states would get more money of they’d be able to ascertain and evidence the existence of their constituents with certainty.
I’d like to invite everyone to discuss this. What would be injust about such a system? Rich people would still have property rights over natural resources and goods and industries and would still (want) get paid in minutes, hours and days. Each coin would contain unique identifiers for the human for which it was issued and at what times, date of birth, etc.
It would in effect be – full economic democracy.