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From your mouth to God's ears. Aside from the Central Banking scam that controls most of the world I do have other issues with the money token systems. Particularly any system that still allows things such as usury and partial reserve "banking" scams. I personally find the idea of "money" making "money" as the most absurd of all constructs. The entire "financier" class are nothing but parasites who produce absolutely nothing but a fictional debt out of their fictional investment. Also, money tokens distort what is invested in exchanges. The tokens themselves represent not investment but rather advantage or leverage one has over others. For some obtaining tokens is rather devoid of any effort whatsoever while others can struggle greatly to obtain any tokens at all. When these two disparate individuals enter into exchange of "value" for "value" one receives far more than the other.
Anyway, anything other than the current world-wide system of Central Bank notes is an improvement for sure.
The current financial issues, particularly the highly leveraged, abstracted and opaque systems, (aka the casino) have created more harvesting/extraction than exchange. The parasite causes the host to crave what it needs. The parasite needs the host, however. There is no doubt it will eventually evolve, however, it is very unfortunate the large amount of suffering humanity experiences that are caused from such imbalances.
It's useful to consider the concepts of value, energy, representation, public and private. I find concepts and words often thrown around without any real thought of meaning and context. Our current debt-slavery scarcity model will be replaced by open, equitable and abundance based models. It is a natural model. It is inevitable. Central controlled debt-based scarcity models clearly are not based on natural models.
Open source has been very successful in many areas. It will only continue to grow. The internet itself is a great example of an open system.(though one might debate how open) Awareness is important, so is compassion, but solutions don't seem likely to come from govt/banks and those that benefit most from those constructs.
Thought provoking. I think the nexus of a solution is a combination of regular debt jubilee, the ability to use Alexander Sack concept of "Odious Debt" to sort of clean the slate, adopt the philosophical concept of Sir Clifford Douglas's Social Credit (the economic financial system should serve the people versus the people serving the system), and eventually going to non debt based financing like North Dakota 'State Bank'. If every state did so the banking cartel would be weakened tremendously.
I can appreciate your attempt to think outside the box. While it's nice to think everyone's labor unit in time worth is the same, a simple look at the island exercise ( X amount of people are stuck on a deserted island). If one person has knowledge of indigenous plants to the island which are edible and someone else knows nothing, whose time /labor unit is more valuable?
This could be an improvement, however, government is the heavy machinery that has supported and created the very problem we have now, so I don't see this as a real solution. Transparency and individual accountability would make the most difference I believe.
I'm a network with engineer with a couple of decades of experience, and I can fix a network problem in one-tenth the time a guy fresh from deVry can. How is my job "more pleasant" than his? More to the point, if it's a societal good to have networks that run, how are you going to make people like me spend the long nights reading up on network tech if there is no reward for doing so?
I'm interested, but if you're not going to lay out fixes to what seems to be obvious weaknesses, what's the point?
Your reward is that you don't have to dig ditches for exchanges with others. Your efficiency at what you do is what would make you more marketable than someone else who is less efficient than you.
The only way to "fix" the weaknesses is for people to eschew the belief that the life of one person is worth more than the life of another. The money token system is not representative of one's value but rather the leverage one can apply to someone else.
For example, say a person is "worth" a thousand dollars an hour in the free market because he found that he could leverage others to pay him that. Suppose he hires a person to say mow his lawn for an hour for ten dollars. If he is worth a thousand an hour, and the person he hired saves him an hour of his own time, has that person saved the "valuable" person 990 dollars? By what rationale, other than the belief in one's life being more valuable than another's, does the other 990 dollars not go to the mower? It is the belief of absolute superiority to another that justifies the "profit". Is his life worth 100 times more than the life of the mower? Or is it that he simply that he has found the ability to apply 100 times more leverage upon others? Or if you'd prefer, why is it wrong for an even exchange of investment of time between the two?
Please understand, I am just trying to look at the problems of the money token system. I understand that in the free market none of the above is wrong in any way. That is just the way that it works. People actively pursue ways in which to profit as much as possible, or to take advantage of others as much as possible, to profit from exchanges rather than to make even exchanges.
That is why I originally asked if mankind could EVER accept time as currency. I understand that people are not really ready, or enlightened enough perhaps to ever accept even exchanges.
There is an inherent and fundamental problem with profit that leads to a constant consolidation of all wealth towards those who apply the most leverage and a constant inability of those with less leverage to maintain a standard of living. And those with more leverage continually increase their leverage, while those with less leverage continually lose more leverage. In a system of unequal exchanges their can only be one trend. That trend is a continually shrinking elite that continually has a growing access to everything it desires and a continually growing class of everyone else that has a shrinking access to anything at all.
Your reward is that you don't have to dig ditches for exchanges with others. Your efficiency at what you do is what would make you more marketable than someone else who is less efficient than you.
More marketable? Not sure I follow. If time is the unit of exchange, how does the market award higher efficiency?
Quote:
The only way to "fix" the weaknesses is for people to eschew the belief that the life of one person is worth more than the life of another. The money token system is not representative of one's value but rather the leverage one can apply to someone else.
For example, say a person is "worth" a thousand dollars an hour in the free market because he found that he could leverage others to pay him that. Suppose he hires a person to say mow his lawn for an hour for ten dollars. If he is worth a thousand an hour, and the person he hired saves him an hour of his own time, has that person saved the "valuable" person 990 dollars? By what rationale, other than the belief in one's life being more valuable than another's, does the other 990 dollars not go to the mower? It is the belief of absolute superiority to another that justifies the "profit". Is his life worth 100 times more than the life of the mower? Or is it that he simply that he has found the ability to apply 100 times more leverage upon others? Or if you'd prefer, why is it wrong for an even exchange of investment of time between the two?
You're picking extreme examples, but let's roll with it.
Let's say an expert has to invest 10,000 hours to become an expert - that's not much off, actually. If at the end of that, he still only gets one hour of lawn-mowing time out of applying his expertise for one hour, how is that investment rewarded? He is out 10,000 hours that he can never, ever hope to recoup. And so he'd be much better off mowing his own lawn all along and not building a skill set in the first place.
That is why I originally asked if mankind could EVER accept time as currency. I understand that people are not really ready, or enlightened enough perhaps to ever accept even exchanges.It is not an even exchange. Insisting it is makes the guy who invested years in building skill sets poorer than the guy who mows his lawn.
Quote:
There is an inherent and fundamental problem with profit that leads to a constant consolidation of all wealth towards those who apply the most leverage and a constant inability of those with less leverage to maintain a standard of living.
If we don't reward specialists somehow, we don't have a society. And no, they're not going to work for the "pleasure" of working.
More marketable? Not sure I follow. If time is the unit of exchange, how does the market award higher efficiency?
People will hire an expert who is more efficient than someone who is not. Why pay someone two hours when another can do it in one. It is parallel to looking for the "cheapest" provider. If you are inefficient, no one will hire you in a time currency system.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dane_in_LA
You're picking extreme examples, but let's roll with it.
Let's say an expert has to invest 10,000 hours to become an expert - that's not much off, actually. If at the end of that, he still only gets one hour of lawn-mowing time out of applying his expertise for one hour, how is that investment rewarded? He is out 10,000 hours that he can never, ever hope to recoup. And so he'd be much better off mowing his own lawn all along and not building a skill set in the first place.
If we figure about 90,000 hours worked in a normal work life. (40 hours * 52 weeks * 45 years) that is only a difference of about 11% investment versus a person who does not need to invest anything in training for their profession. So if a minimum wage job needing no training makes say 10 dollars an hour, that person who will have invested a whole extra 11% more time for training to be an expert in their job could earn just over 11 dollars an hour and be properly "rewarded" for their extra investment of time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dane_in_LA
If we don't reward specialists somehow, we don't have a society. And no, they're not going to work for the "pleasure" of working.
If you really want to haggle for the extra dollar an hour over minimum wage for the massive investment for training, which is by your numbers about 11% more than someone who needs no training to do their job, fine. I won't quibble with that.
More marketable? Not sure I follow. If time is the unit of exchange, how does the market award higher efficiency?
You're picking extreme examples, but let's roll with it.
Let's say an expert has to invest 10,000 hours to become an expert - that's not much off, actually. If at the end of that, he still only gets one hour of lawn-mowing time out of applying his expertise for one hour, how is that investment rewarded? He is out 10,000 hours that he can never, ever hope to recoup. And so he'd be much better off mowing his own lawn all along and not building a skill set in the first place.
That is why I originally asked if mankind could EVER accept time as currency. I understand that people are not really ready, or enlightened enough perhaps to ever accept even exchanges.It is not an even exchange. Insisting it is makes the guy who invested years in building skill sets poorer than the guy who mows his lawn.
If we don't reward specialists somehow, we don't have a society. And no, they're not going to work for the "pleasure" of working.
Time as a unit of account aside.
One basic function of a currency is to acquire basic needs and other stuff. If one has these, one would have no need for the type of rewards you describe. The idea that people contribute doing what they can and what they enjoy/desire is great reward. Better performance does not require monetary reward. Higher efficiency as a goal means more time to do something else.
Our current system of stick and carrot actually disincentivizes innovation. Ideas for example are only pursued based on funding, they are also dolled out and retired with the bottom line in mind at all times. Some innovations are not introduced to the public at all. Just consider the 6000 approx classified patents. Different systems of exchange would require an examination of values and beliefs.
So essentially one is pursuing the rewards because one needs stuff or stuff done, but at a certain point beyond that it is more about emotions/psychology. Behaviors and thoughts behind them are taught and learned. Everyone is influenced by their environment.
This could be an improvement, however, government is the heavy machinery that has supported and created the very problem we have now, so I don't see this as a real solution. Transparency and individual accountability would make the most difference I believe.
This is one reason I find CD such a delight to wander the halls of conversations...
If only we could make this a national educational dialogue during the regular election cycle, instead of listening to the 'owned sock clown puppets' in pseudo staged debates / rallies et al.
Oh, give it a rest. Time spent bartering is time lost perfecting skill sets. I don't want the surgeon spend his time trying to swap chickens or whatever for an oil change for his car, I want him to focus on his surgery skills. Having an accepted exchange medium is efficient. The surgeon can operate on the chicken farmer and use the compensation directly to have his oil changed. Easy.
I really don't know where to begin with this mindset. It's so defeatist.
A bartering/freed market would be fertile ground for voluntary associations. Ones that would be much more efficient than the exchange of arbitrary minerals or paper in a heavily rigged and regulated system.
Again, I just don't understand the apathetic mindset of the status quo. Without the State or the unscrutinized institutions already in place people will never...
A. Come up with their own solutions to their own problems.
B. Accept trying new things because it's "scary" due to unfamiliarity.
Your surgeon, freed from involuntary regulation and bureaucracy, will be able to spend all the time in the world perfecting his/her craft. I have no doubt in my mind entrepreneurial exchange associations would not only form but they'd love to do business with a person who had such a specialized occupation.
This sort of gets into what irspow has been talking about: assigning value for others and their work as well as everyone always looking for a deal that not only benefits them but simultaneously screws others.
We get to this point because we assign money value then set up systems to trade/steal it that provide no earthly service or benefit to anyone.
It is becoming clear that a time currency is mainly "stupid" or "unworkable" because there is no way to leverage unequal exchanges, or in other words, to generate "profit" above what is actually invested. As I have shown earlier, an "expert" who has spent a tremendous amount of time to perfect his craft, really over their work life has only invested an extra 10% of time or so. However, in our system of leverage and unequal exchanges that person now finds nothing absurd about receiving 1000% increase over someone without training. And of course all of the parasites, the financier class, and the high leverage "specialists" would be totally lost without their scams of profit off of zero or minimal extra investment on their part.
It really is a matter of enlightenment. The belief in equal exchanges of investment is seen as utterly foreign and wrong in a society based on aggression and leverage.
Again, the fatal foundational flaw of economics of profit, usury, fiat, and leverage is plain as day when not wearing blinders...
"There is an inherent and fundamental problem with profit that leads to a constant consolidation of all wealth towards those who apply the most leverage and a constant inability of those with less leverage to maintain a standard of living. And those with more leverage continually increase their leverage, while those with less leverage continually lose more leverage. In a system of unequal exchanges their can only be one trend. That trend is a continually shrinking elite that continually has a growing access to everything it desires and a continually growing class of everyone else that has a shrinking access to anything at all."
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Aside from the Central Banking scam that controls most of the world I do have other issues with the money token systems. Particularly any system that still allows things such as usury and partial reserve "banking" scams. I personally find the idea of "money" making "money" as the most absurd of all constructs. The entire "financier" class are nothing but parasites who produce absolutely nothing but a fictional debt out of their fictional investment. Also, money tokens distort what is invested in exchanges. The tokens themselves represent not investment but rather advantage or leverage one has over others. For some obtaining tokens is rather devoid of any effort whatsoever while others can struggle greatly to obtain any tokens at all. When these two disparate individuals enter into exchange of "value" for "value" one receives far more than the other.
