Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
Oh, sure -- exploitation did not come into being with the invention of money.  Yeah I agree.

And, yeah, the US fiat money system is not the only money system.  Worker's money will have issues, but they will not be the same issues.  

As for worker's money, actually what Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen are doing in The Politics of Money, the book I reviewed, is playing with the "social credit" ideas of Clifford Hugh Douglas, so yeah there is a line of authorship for these ideas.  

The main idea of worker's money as I see it will be to invest the power of seigniorage locally, in the hands of democratic communities of workers.  That way you don't have toploaded economies, which are one of the main economic problems of our time (especially here in the US).  And the folks possessed of seigniorage are the ones doing the work.  Since under any money system someone has to have seigniorage, you have to be careful in choosing that person or group.

Douglas, as I understand him, suggested two types of credit: the "consumer's credit," which would grant everyone a fair standard of living, and the "producer's credit," which would compensate business producers for start-up costs and otherwise make up for the general prohibition on business avarice in what would be a democratically-regulated economy.

A democratically-regulated economy would be the best way of tackling global warming, i argue, because in such an economy everyone would be responsible, individually and collectively, for the problem, rather than throwing up their hands and saying "what can one person do?"

"Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world" -- John Lennon

by Cassiodorus on Tue Apr 22nd, 2008 at 11:59:05 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Others have rated this comment as follows:

Display:

Occasional Series