A key idea: The greatest paradox of modern society is the failure of labor-saving technology to free human beings from work.
Agent Ezra Ho has done
an excellent job blogging about The Zeitgeist Movement. Their idea is to abolish money by effectively
ridding the world of scarcity, having resource-management done by AI as opposed to distributed self-interest. Seems impossible, but one can't say that they lack in boldness of vision. (The
Zeitgeist movies are excellent food for thought and you should watch them.) The question of whether we could advance technology to the point where the most unpleasant jobs require no human intervention and make the rest at least easy and pleasant enough that
someone wants to do them is an interesting one.
I've also recently been investigating the work of
Swarm USA, and their plan, Freedom's Vision. In their mind, the key is replacing the debt-backed system of money with one where the money supply is again directly controlled by governments. I haven't dug through all their policy recommendations yet, but they seem to provide more detail in their transition plan than most that suggest, for example, switching back to the gold standard.
The debt-backed nature of money is probably the biggest problem for the modern monetary system. The inflation caused by the continual need to pay off interest-bearing loans will decrease the value of money at an exponentially increasing rate unless demand also increases exponentially. Unfortunately, the same labor-saving machines that allow production to keep up with inflation also push wages lower, which prevents demand from keeping up with production. The only solution is to convince people to take out loans to pay for things they need, then convince them to take out loans to pay for things they don't need, then convince them to take out loans to pay off the old loans. When this reaches a tipping point and a bunch of people default all at once, that leaves the government scrambling to prop up the financial system and avoid a
deflationary crisis. But they can only do that by taking out more loans!
The biggest question is what money should be backed by, if not debt. Actually, the US Dollar is currently backed by a bit more than the fact that it's
created from debt. The fact that it's required to be accepted for payment of debt is worth something, even if you can't be sure there's more debt in existence than dollars. And the fact that US Dollars are required to pay US taxes is also a form of backing. That aside, the government could return to backing dollars with some sort of commodity, while gold is ever-popular, there may be better options.
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