Tricksters in Trouble

The confusion between real and symbolic value is ceasing to be a means for acquiring wealth and power. The trick does not work if everyone can make worthless tokens and pass them off as though they had real high face values. A generation ago, it was quite easy to detect counterfeit bank notes and punish forgers. Now just about anyone with computer-scanner-printer setup can fake notes that have fake real value as well as the government-banking combine can. A cheap-numerically controlled die-casting and - stamping machine could produce coins at a fraction of what it costs to make the official ones - possibly from cheap garbage-gobbler metals.

Fake bills and coins might be recognizable. But there is no way of knowing whether numbers in peoples' computerized accounts were lent into circulation by officially accredited banks or not. Prices are also numbers. People can exchange goods, rights or services, and balance their prices in accounts on their home computers as freely, often and legally as they want to. Over- and under-drafts left when prices have been balanced could be settled with bank notes or transfers of number money.

There are cleverer way of doing this. The members of a community that balances accounts can jointly own, or buy, a real property such as a farm or an apartment building. Each individual member owns a share of the total value of that property base - perhaps the fraction of its price he/she paid for it, or inherited. Over and under-drafts are settled by adjusting base fractions after accounts are balanced. A debtor is an individual community member who bought more than he/she sold; a creditor sold more than he/she bought. Debtor base shares are adjusted downwards, creditor shares upwards. Total over- and under-drafts are equal. Base shares are real value - the total price value of what each member got during an accounting period is thus exactly equal to what he/she gave. If the base is sold, each member gets a fraction of the proceeds of the sale corresponding to his or her share of it. If the base earns some aggregate income - rent from a building, sales of farm products - each member earns fractions of that income as dividends corresponding to his/her base share.

Some members of the community could also work to increase its aggregate income - for instance to maintain the building and collect rents, or as labourers on the farm. A part of that community's aggregate income is entirely distributed as dividends to shareholders, the other part as salaries to workers every time accounts are balanced. Workers, will initially also be shareholders. They get both salaries and dividends as worker-investors. Deciding which part of the aggregate income should go to shareholders, and which to workers, should be less bitter than traditional capital-labour bargaining. Workers as a group, and investors as a group, bargain with each other to determine which parts of the joint income each group will receive. The sum of the two parts add up to 1 - no bosses, banks or governments cream anything off aggregate incomes before they are distributed to individuals. Worker-investors bargain as they please. Dividends are share fractions of the investors' part. Workers bargain amongst themselves to decide what fraction of the workers part each of them will get. Such a fraction depends on hours worked, particular skills and training, the danger of their work, unhealthy conditions, overtime etc. Hours worked, and over-time, can be measured - clock-in out; other factors adjusted as more or less automatically as required.

Some investors might increase their community's incomes by lending it more base properties - equipment, tools, land, buildings. This would be done with the approval of other members of the community, and with the understanding that those investors get their properties back according to the conditions under which they were made available to it. Loaned properties, or real values with identical prices, will be returned in any case if the community breaks up. Until then, the community's aggregate income will increase due to the new base properties. This increase raises the investors' part only, and that raise is distributed only to those investors who contributed the community's increased income in proportion to their individual contributions to it. Similar considerations apply to workers who work more hours, acquire new skills, do more dangerous or dirty work. This increases the workers part of the aggregate income, and that increase is entirely distributed to those workers whose additional work raised that part in proportion to the value of that work. Bargaining for fair parts and shares of parts can be at regular intervals or under unusual circumstances. The distribution of salaries and dividends is fairer when accounts and balanced and distributed more frequently (#4.6).

Powers acquired by creating money out of nothing are now used to enforce the payment of taxes for public services. This arrangement does not work well. The non-payment of taxes becomes a sort of hide-and-seek game between public and private sectors of the economy. Tax avoidance (legal) and evasion (illegal) becomes a fine art. Those artists who are most admired are those who pay least for public services and profit most from them - and usually benefit from money creation and other scams as well. Real public services health, education, caring for the environment and real justice are starved for funds. Public servants - school teachers, nurses.. tend to be underpaid and public universities, hospitals, water supplies, transportation systems etc., privatized. A little bribery usually helps wealthy corporations acquire shares in them cheaply, raise their prices, and reduce their services soon after.

Many people realize that public services are vitally necessary, and would gladly contribute to them - if they could be certain their contributions were used competently and honestly. They would also want to be sure that others were paying their fair share. For this to happen, individuals must be free to contribute as much as they want of their total income to the public services of their choice, the economy must be transparent, and people must be free to combine against those whom they know do not contribute fairly. When accounts have been balanced by totalling each person's sales and purchases, under and over-drafts are cleared by adjusting shares. Then dividends and salaries are summed into individual accounts. Each person can decide what fraction of that sum he/she wants to contribute to external services of his/her choice (#4.7). The account balancing program(#4.8) can combine such contributions and credit totalled contributions to those organizations within the community that perform those services.

Let us imagine a meta-community of many account-balancing communities (#4.6, #4.7, #5.3). Each community has certain members, and its own set of base properties, to perform certain services. The aggregate income of a given community is the sum of the combined contributions of all the other communities. They are all better served, and every member of each community earns more salaries and dividends, if each community improves the value of the services it offers the others. The members of any subset community can work, and own base shares, in any others - hence earn salaries and dividends there. Any member of any community can own a portfolio of shares in many bases and set rates at which he/she is willing to buy shares if he/she is a creditor when accounts are balanced, or sell shares if he/she is in debt. Such base share re-allocation can be done automatically with a stock-market algorithm when accounts are balanced.

A happier, healthier, juster, better educated and protected society that lives in more beautiful surroundings has more real value. As the quality of life there increases, so do the values of base components owned by members its subset communities and those of their work, creativity, organisation.. hence of their dividends and salaries. This arrangement for providing public services requires no intrinsic value money. There is no way of creating or counterfeiting money in it, other than hacking into computer files or programs. There is thus no enforced taxation, top down patriarchal power structuring, Big Daddies Commanding and Killing, Big Brothers watching, wiretapping, reading thoughts, controlling minds and managing opinions. Symbolic money counter-flows the real goods, rights or services provided. It is all cleared to zero, price for price, every time accounts are balanced. There can be no inflation in such an economy.

As the quality of life increases within such communities, people external to Tesla might want to live in them. The prices of services and properties there can be higher than they would be elsewhere. This also raises the values of bases, salaries and dividends within them. People outside them will be able to buy into them, for instance, by working for, or investing in them to acquire shares. They then earn salaries and dividends in it. The communities' base shares, and other goods, rights or services, might be bought with external paper and credit money. This is supposed to have intrinsic value, and it devalues with inflation. It can thus be treated as a rotting commodity within an IE and exchanged for goods, rights or services with real values outside it rapidly.

An IE suffers from none of the pathologies of intrinsic value money economies. No intrinsic value money can be created inside it. It does not suffer from the rift between cheats and cheated. None of its members energies' are wasted on internal conflict and protection racketeering. It is extremely coherent and can organise to protect itself very well from all possible dangers - corporate cheating, government-cartel bullying... environmental destruction. It has no inflation because real values are always exchanged immediately for other real values of equal price - there is no gap between giving and getting where fake real value can be smuggled into the system.

It is proposed that an IE's invariant unit measure of value be called the 'valar'. A valar has no more real value than the word 'water' quenches real thirst. It is simply an accounting symbol as words are communication symbols. Accounts are always balanced completely in an IE. No money with supposed intrinsic value gets stuck between the sales of jointly created real value, and the real value contributed to those sales by many individual people. All real properties are owned by real living people in the IE; none are owned unshared by corporations, companies, churches, and other fictitious entities. Such entities are symbolic accounting and organisational tools in the IE. They cannot, as such, have any legal rights within it. An IE is thus quite similar to the co-operative interaction between the organs within our own bodies and the cells within those organs. All of its members benefit if some function better, and all suffer if some are harmed they are incapacitated. As this is realized, cheating makes less sense.

It has been known almost since intrinsic value money was invented that it confers excessive powers on some people and robs others of their freedoms. Aristotle wrote that lending money at interest was unfair - this was known to the Babylonians thousands of years earlier. Attempts were made throughout history to live without it. In the 1920s and 30s people who wanted to live peacefully, simply, spiritually in contemplative communion with God - or sensually in communion with nature - tried to set up simple price-accounting shared property based communities similar to that described. One of them coined the term valar for its internal unit measure of value. Their leaders were hauled up in court for inciting tax evasion. If they tried to sell their farm- or handicraft products, they were underbid or harassed for unhygienic or non-standard produce. The cartel was concerned that such honest exchanging and sharing systems might spread. It needed the government to collect taxes to pay for its cannon, and to recruit young men as their fodder. Those little communities succumbed to the powers of the system they had sought to evade. It will not last much longer.

Capitalism is incompatible with computers. In the longer run, there will be no way managers of existing credit money systems will be able to prevent people from using their home computers to balance accounts, distribute joint incomes to individual people and to contribute to whatever causes they please. Being the only one to create intrinsic value money at low cost and high face value requires one or more supporting monopolies - if only to have the means to eliminate counterfeiters. Oil worked quite well for about a century. But it causes global warming. Many people are also realizing that we could always have had all the useful energy we needed at almost no cost, without any pollution or global warming and with distilled water as a byproduct. The money-makers thus need other monopolies - badly. Food and water seem to be good candidates - so efforts are underway to destroy some food supplies and to control others. Small successes were also achieved in cornering water supplies. The truly massive production of distilled water, food, fuel and fertilizers from the ocean will leave such scummy little scams in tatters. If the tricksters go on with their old trickery much longer, the top-heavy monster with a head of gold and feet of nothing will tumble down on them. The rest of the world should not regress into chaos when this happens.