A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Action Resources The vested interests opposing these reforms may seem overwhelming. But ordinary people far outnumber them. We need to get these proposals into the minds of our new coalition, other governments and negotiators for the next UN Summit in Cancun Mexico, 29 th November to 10 th December, 2010 and beyond. Be part of a mass global movement to lobby and participate in Demonstrations: Use Stop Climate Change Chaos Coalition, New Economics Foundation (nef), Christian Aid, Greenpeace, Operation Noah, Oxfam and the World Development Movement. Further reading - Heinberg, R, 2007, Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines 130
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Chapter 10 - New Money - money, debt, taxation, the commons, land value tax and citizens income March 2009 I am indebted to James Robertson whose writings on the subject of money are a clear and invaluable resource, especially his “National and International Financial Architecture: Two Proposals, Memorandum” and his “G20 Agenda for April must include Monetary Reform - A Crash Campaign”, available on his website. I also much appreciate Tony Vickers’ and Roy Langston’s help in creating the section on Land Value Tax (LVT). The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. J K Galbraith We need a different way of creating money. Money created by debt is at the root of the current crisis. Yet it is the least understood, least discussed, least questioned aspect of the economic system. The establishment have frozen minds on this subject. Vested interests benefit whilst the rest of us continue to think it incomprehensible, the domain of experts. We leave it to them. It is not incomprehensible. The monetary system cannot continue to be the domain of experts! This chapter describes proposals that would release sustainable enterprise, encourage personal responsibility, instead of dependency, and create fairness. I intend to share with you the best proposals I know for reform, make them completely accessible and dispose of the idea that it is a subject for experts. A world was deeply in debt got more indebted, unnecessarily as I shall argue, in its efforts to solve a crisis created by debt. “Surprisingly few politicians, public officials, economists, sociologists, political scientists and other professionals have been interested in money as a system that might be made to work better as a whole. Perhaps it is even more surprising that few campaigners for good causes - social justice, ending poverty, dealing with climate change, a more peaceful and fairer international order, human rights and so on - seem to realise that the money system is a prime cause of the ills they oppose. The development of the money system over the years has been piecemeal - and largely in response to powerful interests - and this means that it is now not only incoherent and incomprehensible to most of the world’s people, but also systematically perverse. It fails to make wealthier and more powerful people and organisations and nations pay for what they take from the common wealth, and it taxes the value of the rewards that less powerful people get from contributing to it. The reason is simple. The main interest of the goldsmiths and bankers and government servants who in the past evolved the monetary, banking and financial system, and the main interest of those who manage it today, has been to make money for their customers, shareholders and other associates, and for themselves and their own organisations. There has never been anyone whose role has been to ensure that the monetary and financial system would work efficiently and fairly for all its users - that is not the purpose of the system. The arrival of the Information Age should make it possible to work out a better way for the money system to evolve, so that it can be managed with the aim of making it perform efficiently and fairly the functions we require of it. In the context of sustainable development, the challenge for policy-makers is to make sure that the money system evolves as an accounting (or scoring) system that will operate to serve common interests, and the interests of all its users.” James Robertson, The Future of Money - If we want a better game of economic life we’ll have to change the scoring system. 131
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