[From someone's old Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=129518630489338 ]
Non-Exploitative Economics: Economic Rights, Economic Justice
For more than 300 years, economic decency, sanity and justice has been within our reach, yet we have failed to take it. This is an attempt to outline some of why our economic world is so unjust and so unsustainable, and to then show that we have some extraordinarily powerful tools at our disposal to change it. I will outline how we can make up for our past and finally create the vibrant and exciting human story that only an organization of the 99% can achieve.
The issues we face are fundamentally economic and nothing is more important in economics than money. It should be unsurprising, then, that we find the most powerful possibilities by looking at money itself. For more than 300 years, nations have lived with the existence of purely symbolic money. As a means of exchange, then, nothing more than ink printed on paper, or digits in a computer system, has served to facilitate the complex range of transactions required by modern societies. Many of you will already know that symbolic money is vulnerable and must be protected by a society, but is it worth protecting? The emergence of symbolic money, as a technological advance, is something that was and remains almost entirely missed by the vast majority of the world’s people. Quite simply, symbolic money offered humanity some extraordinarily powerful options which we are yet to grasp. By our own ignorance, we have allowed those who have understood and have seized that power, to wield that power over us. So let’s shed our ignorance and stand on an equal footing with the powerful, lest we remain ignorant and vulnerable to their abuses.
The most important thing we can say about today’s economics is that it’s fundamentally imperialistic/exploitative, operating by extracting vast amounts of wealth from those who produce/earn it, transferring it up the socio-economic pyramid towards an undeserving minority. Capitalism is already a dangerous animal, for it is an imperialistic economic system, being a system which allows the wealthy to earn wealth on wealth (I can assure you that kings and queens, the aristocracy and the propertied classes would advance no alternatives, so, unless you’re part of that 1%, I suggest you listen up). For every penny earned on wealth alone, that penny is being offered up by those who produce the value it is traded for. We must be vigilant, then, to ensure that we offer up our wealth only in faithful exchange and in a manner which conforms to basic justice. We certainly have the tools to achieve that, but if we find ourselves incapable of change, we’ll earn for ourselves continuing or worsening servitude to what appears to be an emerging global economic dictatorship. It’s about time we understood that we have the tools to stand up against the illusion of authority crafted by the controllers of money, when money has, for so long, been used to silence us and secure our impotent obedience.
Whilst we have long lived under economic structures which are designed to create and deliver upwards great wealth, the last 300 years has seen an amplification in this process, as the world’s economies have steadily been subsumed/conquered and laid under a system of (purely symbolic) ‘credit’ money (debt). The single outrage which defines human life on Earth today is the fact that all money has been privatized and is issued into existence as interest bearing debt to western financial interests. So all money is debt and bears its weight upon the world’s people. Although banking could be a legitimate business (and that’s very much what we can help to achieve here), private money powers are not doing the same job a publicly accountable authority would do. Today, banks will only create/release money into the economy as debt and only when it is profitable for them to do so. The vast majority of humanity suffers want (as much as 85% of all people know no comfort, only a struggle for survival) because most people have no way of making their existence profitable to western financial interests. Sadly, today’s banks are very much the outstretched fingers of the aristocracy and are the houses through which humanity’s indebtedness has been fashioned and exploited. In the wrong hands, the power to create and issue money has been the most powerful tool by which to conquer, to enslave and to harvest the productivity of working people that was ever conceived of; indeed, until we fix this aspect of our economics, money will continue to have a more profound and devastating impact on the world than any other weapon of war. Imagine, if you will, what kind of people are behind this operation. Whilst the developed nations of the world were better equipped to bear the weight of this draining systemic debt and usury than poorer nations, it is now becoming increasingly clear, even to westerners, that systemic debt and usury (which creates the conditions for its own exacerbation), is no basis for an economy/society.
Let’s look at some numbers. Whilst countless souls can thank the western imperial money system for the destitution and death that marks their existence on Earth, the comparatively privileged western worker is harvested for 80-90% or more of their earned wealth, with only those few, largely sub-standard public services given in return. Western workers will pay some 60-75% or more of their incomes in taxes alone, much of which can be traced back to the interest on borrowed money (don’t forget to add up all the taxes. Multiple sources for tax data on Google). On the money they do have left over, western workers are subject to near lifelong debt and unnecessary interest farming (to understand how banks create money, see ‘Modern Money Mechanics’ by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.) In addition, it has been estimated that around 50% of the cost of everything working people buy can be traced back to the interest on borrowed money (The Green Party, UK). Further still, we should add inflation; a difficult phenomenon to understand, but something which may be caused by the usury culture, monopolists’ price setting behavior, or the expansion of the money supply for parasitic money manipulations rather than investment in the productive economy.
We cannot let this global horror show continue and the growing movement of truth-seekers and Occupiers (and all those who support them) suggests that people are increasingly ready for change. If we were to decide upon a different foundation for our economies/societies, what might we choose? Well, the historical imbalance between a minority of wealthy people and the rest of humanity who are dependent/vulnerable/exploitable, is likely to be unavoidable to some extent, but what is not unavoidable is the peoples’ continuing subservience to powers that are unjust, predatory, parasitic and unserving to the point that they are undermining of the economy/society and our ability to live peacefully with others.
The alternative to privately issued and controlled money has long been argued to be full public/governmental control of money and banking. This article outlines the as yet unrecognized power of a third way, where the power to create, issue and control money is not left in the hands of concentrated private powers or concentrated State powers, but is taken up by all people. In effect, we can democratize the ‘money power’ and create a new, rights-based foundation for our economies. Money can come into existence not as debt to private banking interests, but on the back of inalienable rights to the money you can repay, interest free, for items of need like a home. Think about that; we have the power to say ‘no’ to the usurer/exploiter, who prints money into existence and then lives lavishly on our interest payments, and secure for ourselves the basic components of life unburdened. Other qualifying items of need might include education, healthcare, small and community businesses, transport etc. You decide. Wherever a society draws the line, an essentially protected zone is created, beyond which life and commerce can carry on according to rules that you lay down; will that be some form of capitalism, something more commensurate with common ownership or a meeting of the two? Either way, through economic rights, we can offer the world’s people and our societies/economies protection from the madness that is human economic relations.
I hope you can see that economic rights are not about free lunches, as what is borrowed is paid back. Indeed, the whole thrust of Non-Exploitative economics, or Economic Rights, is to reduce those community-draining free lunches our societies routinely offer up to the already vastly wealthy. By ending exploitation, we might be able to realize and enjoy our own and the economy’s capacity for full productivity. Today, not only is the debt that binds you to your desk predatory and parasitic, it is highly economically inefficient, for anything that binds you and forces you to compromise on your fullest potential runs counter to economic efficiency. Many of you will recognize that as a free-market argument, only this time, made for the benefit of working people. Of the 80-90+% of incomes currently harvested from working people, we will only need to pay that amount required to furnish us with a government and legitimate public goods/services. What will that cost, 30% of incomes? If you go from enjoying 10-20% of your income to enjoying 70% of it, that equates to a 3-7 fold increase in your real wealth. With this profound redress in the balance of economic power (and stride towards decency and justice in the world), working families can begin to shape their world according to their values. How would you use your economic power to shape your world once it has been returned to you? My experience suggests that people will invest in community enterprises and endeavors such as local permaculture and recreational/developmental activities for the young.
Understanding symbolic, social constructed money (the form it exists in today) grants us new possibilities about how we might live our lives; all of a sudden it really becomes a requirement that it be imbued with rights. In theory, there’s no incompatibility between economic rights and money backed by commodities such as gold, so don’t assume that economic rights are somehow opposed to ‘sound money’, but it appears to me that it would be far harder to implement and would, of course, rule out the noble initiative of allowing governments to spend debt- and interest-free money into the economy on valuable public projects like schools, hospitals, recycling/clean energy technologies etc. When we think deeply about money, the only thing we can really settle on is the idea that, as a tool, it should be employed for the greatest amount of good it can be employed for. Money spent freely into the economy by a publicly accountable authority, therefore, should be a very positive thing, but it is tempered by the fact that corrupt governments have used or abused this power for near limitless corruption, including waging aggressive wars of acquisition. When it comes to keeping governmental powers in line, I believe economic rights has yet one more powerful thing to offer; that is, if populations are enjoying interest-free loans for things like homes, parents and teachers will be teaching children precisely why. The power to create and issue money will therefore go from being the closely guarded secret used to drain working people and power the empire, to being the most important lessons we have in school. Economic rights will not only produce economically empowered families/communities, but also economically literate populations.
