We are in a global crisis of money growth. The reasons for this have been analysed over and over again by various commentators. The central reason is that we have an exponential growth monetary paradigm based on debt. Money in our current economic world is not pegged to a reserve of scarce assets (which used to be gold for the dollar until the 1970s) and this allows central banks (private of governmental) to issue the money along arbitrary needs.
We have seen how this inflates the currencies explosively, and in any period of shrinkage this causes systemic problems. In any economic downturns the debt based system is faced with increased incidence of default (or bankrupcy) and since fiat money is ‘pegged’ to debtors, this essentially crashes the monetary system. To see how utterly silly the current monetary paradigm operates, have a casual glance over the following sources:
The problem is that Fiat money is done without any moral constraint. Issuers of Fiat are under no compelling restraint to issue more money, either legally (printing the money) or illegally (by corrupting the political system, by speculation or by monetary system manipulation). This places a corrupt power on these people not dissimilar to self-destructive addiction-spiral of a typical heroin junky. Bankers who can create money arbitrarily will eventually crash any such fiat currency. The alternative isn’t good either – once a currency is pegged to a scarce resource the end result will be a small group of rich people eventually ending up hoarding all these resources; you can see that in any typical monopoly game where one person wins (by owning everything) and everyone else loses (by being in debt to the single winner).
It should be clear to anyone and everyone that in this year of our Lady, 2012, we have come to the end of the fiat monetary system, and effectively at the end of the current geopolitical grande drama. This system has effectively collapsed or is in the slow rumbling pre-collapse stages. We’ll see this collapse become painfully self-evident in the next few months, and I’d be surprised if it hasn’t become painfully evident in a few years.
Do we need hand-held money?
I think we need a system simplifying private barter for goods and services. I know some people don’t agree with me on this, and it is a difficult question. The alternative to a monetary slash capitalist slash free market system invariably turns out to be “a system by human dictate”, and that doesn’t seem to work to well. In effect we oscilate back and forth between a “total free market” (which turns out to always be bad in the end, as you end up with the very rich owning everything) and a dictate economy (which turns out to be bad as well, and produced more or less the same results). I’d go as far as speculate that the emergence of democracy acted as a mechanism intended to defend against any form of centralized affluence and power (i.e. tyranny of whatever kind) and we can now clearly see democratic entitlements world-wide be deconstructed favouring some kind of social-darwinian neo-liberal Singapore-analogue paradigm.
How to eliminate excess money?
Rewarding both predation and vulnerability
The system we now have fulminates the victim/victim mentality. The world we now inhabit entails nothing short of a sadomasochistic socio-economic system where
those who govern demand punishment, austerity and discipline from their victims while extravagantly demonstrating the measure of their success (and success in general) through the mainstream media, and are free to dictate how society is to become, whereas their victims must publicly demonstrate weakness, dependence, abject shame and showcase just how much they failed morally and financially.
This is quintessentially a sadomasochist spectacle. In the past of human history any such a public spectacle of victory ended with the cursory extermination or full enslavement of the vanquished (and this was a slower form of extermination). Only rarely did religious systems put a halt on such escalation and institute tempering societal mechanisms such as “jubilee” but that is comparatively rare. Right now there is a “diminishing return” kind of jubilee going on, and that is the alms given to the very poor in the form of welfare. Even that doesn’t stop the winners of the game to methodically demand more submission – because they sincerely believe winning isn’t enough – the conquered must perish.
Revolution or Revaluation?
The problem of those lazy bums who didn’t work a day in their lives and are having a party at everyone else’s expense.