THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

2020: The last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom retires.
How is this possible?
This scenario describes how the Information Revolution could
decisively shift power towards the corporate world, making the
nation-state concept irrelevant. Instead of changing internally to
adapt themselves to their expanded social role, corporations
reshaped the world to their own priorities. Corporate take-overs of
government functions can be a double- edged sword, depending on
the field, and the way the services are handled. For instance, nobody
regrets the government-owned telephone services in the countries
where that was the practice. Private corporations have been
supplying better and cheaper service than the government services
had supplied. Similarly, the appearance of private postal services,
such as Fedex or UPS, has improved quality and reliability of service.
In other areas, the outcome may be less obvious. When First Data
Resources built an engineering school for the University of Nebraska
at Omaha whose curriculum is specifically tailored to the needs of
that corporation, the slope becomes slippery. When high school
children receive their financial education from a credit card company,
and they learn that it is 'good financial practice' to have 20-30% of
one's income dedicated to reimbursing credit card debt, we have
gone over the edge.
Specialised corporate currencies like frequent flyer miles are
thinkable only because of cheap and ubiquitous computing power. It
is only a question of time before someone (American Express,
Microsoft, some newly formed cyber-entity, or a consortium of
corporations?) will issue a full corporate scrip, backed by its own
goods and services. Even Alan Greenspan says he 'envisages
proposals in the near future for issuers of electronic payment
obligations, such as stored-value cards or "digital cash" to set up