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

and imagination, launched or completed a million times every
second, is the engine of our civilization ...For the objects of human
desire are limitless, or rather limited only by the imagination, which
amounts to the same thing.
Money shifts and power shifts
Money is, therefore, much more than a technical issue. Whenever a
currency is accepted within a community, it makes an implicit
statement about power in that community. So when priests or
priestesses were in power, temples issued money. When kings
dominated, Aristotle attributed to them personally the 'Sovereign
right to issue currency'. In the Industrial Age nation-states became
the paragon of power, so national currencies automatically became
dominant.
Now that power is starting to shift away from the nation-states, it
should not come as a surprise that new non-national currencies are
emerging. Some people still assume that there is only one kind of
money possible in the modem world - the familiar national currency,
in the form of bills and coins.
The first magician's trick concerning money is to make us believe
that we need the magician's help to create money. This is definitely
not the case, unless we choose to take sleight of hand for reality.
Different kinds of money have co-existed in the past, and do so now
as well.
Frequent-flyer miles or Internet money are just early examples of
corporate scrip that we should expect during an Information Age.
Other examples will be given in the next chapter.
Before we explore these new, less familiar currencies, we need a
firm basis from which to compare them with the key characteristics