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I believe we have to question everything that is so deeply carved in our minds and behaviours as money. I often ask myself the question:'What benefit does money have?', and I can't come up with a good answer. Did we reach the limit of our money based economy and should we find something else, like a value based economy?
Of course I'm going to the edge, but look at it as a brainstorm where you investigate an idea, without incarcerating, or prejudgement. Let go of the accepted opinion and explore the possibilities of the creativeness that comes up when you look at the world as if you were a Martian.
How do you know you reached a limit?
You can't go on. There is no progress anymore. It doesn't work anymore, whatever you try.
Money was originally an instrument to simplify trade. It was easier to trade coins with an on consensus based value, then to trade your goods for other goods. If the baker needed fish, he needed to look for a fisherman who needed bread.
Money was a great instrument to simplify trade.
Today money is not conceived as an instrument anymore, but as a goal on itself. Money is associated with freedom, happiness and power. It has become an illusional digital number with no direct relationship to value, but it is accepted by everyone as something that holds great power. Power everyone wants to posses and were they are willing to do about anything for.
The limits of money are reached because it doesn't contribute value anymore, but it even restrains the creation of value, or destroys it all.
There are all kinds of patents that restrain valuable knowledge to be spreaded across the world to benefit humanity and nature. Money determines what is done in the world, while common sense is sidetracked.
The human genome is already patented for 20%. How long does it take before a doctor tells you: 'We cannot research this disease, because the fee we have to pay for use of the gene to research this disease is owned by … and is too expensive.'
What stopped us to invent sustainable and durable cars? Why do the products we buy break after a period of time? Can't they make something durable and sustainable that will last for a lifetime and would reduce the mountain of waste on our lands directly, or is it profitable not to do so?
Our market economy isn't based on value, or efficiency, but is focussed on profit, squandering and power.
Everybody has to keep buying in order for the profits to stay growing. We need to keep producing and there have to be found ways to make people buy stuff they do not need and that hold no value at all. The production costs always need to be lowered in order to let the profit even grow further. The working crowd always gets poorer, while the calculating crowd gets richer, leading ultimately to a world full of slaves and a small bunch of lazy calculating rulers.
H.G. Wells was prophetic in his Timemachine where he portrayed the future world populated with two races: the Eloy and the Morlocks. The upperworld beings and the underworld beings.
Common sense has to be eradicated because money is freedom, money is happiness, money is power. Irrationality and childish egocentricity are the breeding grounds for profit.
What happens in an economic crash?
Is value destroyed, or is value newly divided?
The only things that destroy value are wearing out, or destruction. Destruction can happen through natural causes, like fire, accidents, disasters, etc…,and calculated destruction like wars and other kinds of deliberate destruction.
An economic crisis often has material and immaterial destruction as result, but not as origin. An economic crisis is not a decrease of value.
The biggest values we know of are immaterial values. Our accumulated knowledge we grew and developed over centuries, is of a bigger value then the material value. The material value is however a basic necessity for our existence. The knowledge gives us the possibility to use the material more efficiently and increase the value of the material. You take some ground resources and you build a car.
Money has become the biggest problem for progress, because the promise of freedom, happiness and power, withholds us to develop further and create more value.
The sharing of knowledge can be punished by legal action, relief work gets curtailed in an ever growing bureaucracy where every syringe has its price and needs to be documented, while the value of life itself is still more devalued. There is no price on life (except of what is calculated by insurance agencies).
Capitalism gives completely wrong stimuli that lead to irrational behaviour, destruction of value (because a renewed building of things is profitable), devaluation of everything with value but not attached to a price, like life, air, nature, faith, religion, humanity, human connection, peace and love.
There are solutions for healing our system, started by humans many ages ago. We need to recognise the value we see all around us and don't sell it out to greed and insecurity, but acknowledge it as our basic building blocks with which we construct our lives and give them meaning. In the end the solution will present itself and the Earth will handle it. I just hope we get wise before it comes this far.
If something contains more value then material possessions and knowledge, it is wisdom, involvement and love. Let's invest in that.
Part II - Sollutions
The only reason why we still need money is that we are used to it, and that we are used to some kind of a reward system. We have the technology, the logistics and the resources for anyone on this planet to survive. We don't have to worry about survival of the fittest anymore.
The whole Darwin theory focuses on competition and on being the best, the most beautiful, the most successful Alpha male that can garner more female attention and propagate his genes to another generation. We have transcended Darwin. We don't need to fight and compete to survive anymore. The opposite is true - the fighting and competition is killing us slowly. We are used to thousands of years of fighting and competing so it is hard to get it out of our system.
Money has served its purpose as a tool for trade. Survival is not an issue anymore (or shouldn't be an issue anymore). The only thing money still gets used for is competition: to determine who is the ultimate Alpha male, the King of the world. This never-ending competition is ruining the world and everything we built and developed. Are we going to transcend our animal nature, or do we destroy everything and become the real Planet of the Apes?
If we want the money trading system intact, we need money with a steady value. Now the Federal Reserve Bank (a privately owned bank), and as far as I know all central banks print money out of nothing and lend it to the governments. Governments start with debts they can never repay. These governments need to pay interest on the debts by using tax money, while it is completely within their power to issue their own money debtfree.
Governments give billions of dollars to the central banks, and the only thing the central banks do is write a number in a computer, book it and collect the interest.
The moment money is created, there is a debt that can never be repaid. How would you pay for the interest on a million dollar if there was only a million dollar created? You have to create more money in order to pay the debt. That's called inflation. The money gets worth less because they keep creating more money. Every business calculates the interests on their debts in their prices, or get tax relief for it, but one way or the other, the consumer/taxpayer pays for the ever growing mountain of interest (even if you do not have a loan)
So what exactly am I getting at? I think raising awareness of the money illusion and creating a debt free money system could be a first step in the right direction for a stable economy. With a debt free system - where the peoples representatives issue the money - the world can be repaired and made sustainable. There is no pressure for growth, we only need to recover from the lifelong conditioning as consumers and become givers.
If we do not have to keep producing to make the profit and pay the debt, we can ease up and pick the fruits of our toils.
Here is a link to a documentary to inform you on the money system called The Money masters.
The best and most important history lesson you will ever get. Please use some free hours to watch this. It is worth it.
Part I http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8753934454816686947&q=money+masters&hl=en
Part II
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2665915773877500927&q=money+masters&hl=en
Another tool to get money reform on the agenda:
The Simultaneous Policy is a world wide political pressure tool to empower (and push) politicians to create laws simultaneous all over the world to prevent capital flight of multinationals and prevent competition between nations when they address problems that need worldwide addressing, like environment, poverty, money reform, education, etc…
For the Simultaneous Policy to be implemented they need enough people to adopt it. Adopting it doesn't cost you anything. You can read all about it here
They also wrote a book on money reform you can download for free.
If I step outside the realistic boundaries regarding money, I would say we need a change of perspective where we can reward people for their contributions not by giving them something impersonal as money, but by offering them our friendship and share our contributions with them. What's more valuable then that?
Quoting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
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