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

What happened instead was a slow and gradual evolution of
payment and banking habits. This was accompanied by dramatic
changes in personal insights and collective crises such as the need to
finance wars, or the political reactions to the South Sea Bubble of the
1720s. Such a combination of more or less conscious choices by the
many and the few shaped a money system remarkably in tune with
the pre-Victorian English Zeitgeist, the priorities and mindset of an
island country poised to carve out its empire in the world.
Many aspects of the modern money system can be traced back to
the customs of medieval goldsmith money lending, or to Renaissance
banks from Tuscany and Lombardy. But several of these hallowed
traditions were dropped and replaced with brand new ones
whenever they did not fit with the Zeitgeisof pre-Victorian England.
For instance, charging interest on money -- which had been
prohibited on both moral and legal grounds for more than 20
centuries suddenly, became a normal and accepted practice.
While payment and banking- technologies (i.e., how we do things)
have continued to dramatically change and improve, the
fundamental objectives pursued by the system (i.e., why we do them)
seem not to have been seriously revisited since Victorian England.
From the perspective of the objectives pursued by the money system,
we are still living with what propelled us so effectively into and
through the Industrial Revolution.
Four key features still characterize our 'normal' money systems and
remain basically unquestioned: Money is typically geographically
attached to a (1) nation-state. It is (2) 'fiat' money, i.e. created out of
nothing, by (3) bank debt, against payment of (4) interest.
Perhaps this sounds obvious, even trivial, but the full implications
of each one of these features are much less clear. When we question