go3v

advocating Governance based on Verification, Valor, and Virtue.

Democracy should not be managed to serve Wealth,
rather, wealth should be managed to serve democracy.





Humane Money 2


The following argument holds that money is as intrinsically human, and is as intrinsically inseparable from the individual, as are words; both money and words are simply means of communication. Consequently, just as individuals are the only sources of words, they are equally the only sources of money.

In this context, to save you time, you can toss this argument aside without further ado if you find any of the following assumptions invalid:

Now these assumptions, of course, are just that. Other assumptions of what constitutes a healthy human community may be entertained by others; it is certainly true that the creation of discriminatory class systems has been a very, if not universally, common characteristic of recorded human cultures and societies. Maybe you, too, like that sort of thing.

If not, read on.

To achieve maximized universal feelings of security, acceptance, and equality, the objective must be to structurally minimize the incentives and opportunities for power and freedom to be concentrated[1]. There is no thought here of rearranging who people are, or expecting them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Rather, by making a simple change in the economic structure, the intent is to provide the greatest possible equality of voice – and therefore equality of power and freedom – and to provide the greatest possible sense of security and belonging. This argument does not demand that you or anyone else be a better person, it does not prescribe any outcome other than what emerges from the most unweighted aggregation of every adult's voice. It holds that the sum of the parts has more legitimacy than any individual vision, no matter how disatrous the sum, or how stellar the vision.

Part 1: A Bit of the Past, A Bit of the Future

I argue that how money is understood shapes the structures to which society evolves.

It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, […], is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command. – Adam Smith

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Democracy without economic equality is no democracy at all; but economic equality without democracy is a mermaid tap dancing on the Moon. – Unknown

How money is understood and handled plays a central role in determining whether a society will move toward or away from universal human welfare. The following argues that money has been and continues to be misunderstood and mishandled in ways that entrench and reinforce an ongoing negative impact on human welfare. It argues that achieving a better understanding of what money is will move society toward the goal I (optimistically?) assume modern, well-intentioned thinkers also seek.

First, let's view the historical and current framework that creates and controls money. Or, viewed from a different angle, how the history of money has framed society.

Money Then

[summary]

Concerning the origins of the current commodity money economy[2] (as distinct from earlier, more localized demand-share, gift, and direct barter economies), money was initially represented by some locally agreed upon physical commodity: gold, goats, seashells, or whatever.[3] These representations served as a convenient physical way to track transaction obligations and made trading quantities of often unrelated goods and services among many relative strangers much easier.[4] Later, as trade became ever more complicated and use of the actual physical commodity representing money became ever more difficult, numbers in ledgers and physical substitutes such as coins or paper began to be used, but the substitutes were (usually) still supposed to represent some designated physical commodity – gold was an often popular standard. So these substitutes came to be used as representations of representations! The use of physical commodities or their representations lasted from ancient history until the 1970s.

After the 1970s[5] the international monetary system was nominally no longer connected to any physical commodity, but despite that transition, money is still generally felt to be a quasi-real, quasi-natural product somehow extracted from a physical universe. This feeling is only reinforced by the everyday use of cash, which remains a dominatingly popular, if rapidly declining, model of what money is. To this day, the almost automatic understanding of money is that it is somehow still inextricably tied to actual and tangible commodities because it is still a representation of, if not specifically gold, then at least some other market basket of services. That is, money tends to be seen as something that is a product of The Economy[6], quite disconnected from the individual human, and obtained only by wresting it from The Economy, from, as it seems, nature. The perception is that money exists, even if virtually, as a big, gated and guarded pile somewhere, and this is the natural and quite inevitable way it is, should be, and yes, in the end, must be.[7] In other words, the standard model of money was established no later than the neolithic era and has hardly changed since.

Money is also frequently conceived to be an outcome of the past, something that is somehow related to previous production carried over or converted into the present (the money-as-a-store-of-value concept), i.e., money is a consequence of what was done. Any lack of money (stored value) is felt to reflect the past failure of The Economy to function well enough, to convert straw into gold fast enough. Again, money as emerging from The Economy, just as clouds emerge from the sky.

The past, however, is no more real than the future – less in fact, for the future is reachable, but the past is not. Therefore, it is more sensible to conceptualize money as something that expresses the future, something that is realized in the present as a natural and inevitable expression of human potential, i.e., not of what was done, but of what will be done (the money-as-potential-wealth concept). More on this below.

In any case, whatever its form or origin, the ancients soon understood that the neolithic concept of money needed to be governed in some way in order to maintain some semblance of economic stability – history is rife with instances of too much such money and of too little. Therefore, whether money is thought to be a physical commodity or a virtual representation of one, a system of regulation was wanted to control both what is used as money and how much is in circulation.

So money came to be seen as a limited something found out in nature, a something that arises from the past, from what was done, and a something in need of regulation. This opened the door for money to be used as, and accepted as, a lever with which all those lazy humans can be pried into laboring for society's benefit (meaning, mostly, for the ambitions of bullies, status hunters, tricksters, and rent seekers (BSHTRS)). Such use has even come to be considered righteously appropriate. In practice, this lever is applied in such a way that if you want access to food, water, housing, social supports, or, ultimately, a BSHTRS membership card, you first have to work or cheat your way into getting some money[8]. Then, and only then, are you entitled to request that society provide services to ensure your survival. In other words, your membership in human society is entirely transactional. Quid pro quo is the controlling paradigm, but with the stipulation that you always provide your work first and only then do you get whatever you might get. And, as a (cough) beneficial corollary, first-the-work-then-the-money means you have to do some serious, back-stabbing competitive scrambling to stay ahead of all the others trying to get their hands into that limited and regulated, but gods-given, zero sum pile out in nature, wherever it is, whatever form it takes. In fact, it has become a moral imperative, and it's the righteously appropriate part you play, to aggressively join the scramble. Otherwise you fall into the lazy, parasitical, scumbag bum class. Getting a job, getting ahead of the other guy, working for a wage, a salary, or, best, a profit is seen as a social duty that is obligatory for every upright citizen. If you're not a member of the work-hard-for-the-money club, then you're a dirty unemployed good for nothing. And if that's what you are, maybe it's just as well to leave you under the bus. Heck, that's just be one less competitor trying keep me from getting what I want from the all too limited and all too hard to get at money pile!

But wait: unemployment – that state of doing nothing, making no contribution and being a no-good bum – is a myth! As implied above in the paragraph describing money as inevitably emerging from future human potential, we are all employed all the time – death is the only escape. We eat (stimulating food production), we drink (stimulating spirits production), we live under bridges (stimulating cardboard production and recycling), we talk (stimulating social interaction), some even watch TV (stimulating manufacturing and the arts), and we do a thousand other things that contribute to the warp and weft of human life. No one is ever unemployed. No one. Ever.

Back to the current model of money. Given that it has now become a totally virtual representation of some big pile somewhere, what does that mean as far as the mechanism by which it is governed? Even when money was still regarded as a fully physical commodity, some means of governing it was needed. And governments have more or less tried to govern money since money-based exchange became the norm. At the same time, our beloved BSHTRS realized that control over money means guaranteed rent and power. So even if not always entirely, but nevertheless often in close cahoots with formal governments, they soon found ways to create and control money even when there was no physical commodity in hand – in fact, no physical commodity made control easier – and the familiar system of usury and all its variants was created. The financial sector has now improved its implementation of usury to the point where the sector's role as the governor of money seems rarely to be seriously questioned.

In other words, money is now created – and controlled – by lenders, i.e., bankers and financiers. Their control has evolved – risen organically one might say - for so long that it now seems as natural as the weather. They have worked at times in collusion with and at times in conflict with formal governments, but have never been broadly or seriously challenged either by academia, the public sector, or by revolutionaries. Even the so-called communist experiments of the 20th century did not significantly challenge the bankers' terms nor the model of money as commodity. The first-the-work-then-the-money concept of economic moral righteousness remained, stronger than ever. And really, you might ask, how else can that mysterious, natural-but-nowhere pile be accessed and justly managed?

Thus, money is thought to be a zero sum game of natural, even if virtual, resource extraction. John Henry's mighty railroad track laying gets him part of the limited pile, and that means less remains for Jane Hennessy to grab by harvesting her fields of wheat. And Lazy Jim, he doesn't get any at all because he wasn't sly enough to get to the pile before John and Jane snatched it all up. That's how it is now and, as we tend to believe, so must it forever be.

Addendum

I've outlined above the current stone age model of money in a way that might be taken to mean it is somehow substantially different from gift, demand-sharing, and direct barter. This should not at all be so understood. In fact, the current model of money is still really just good old barter, just performed through the medium of a third, readily accepted commodity that everybody wants because it's so easy to barter with. Monkeys? Pretty hard to trade, not many people want 'em. Money? Yeah, I'll take some. Much easier to buy a Monet with money than with monkeys. But so long as money is misconceived as an extrinsic commodity instead of an intrinsic right, money is just a slicker, faster form of barter. And a surrender to the BSHTRS.

OK, enough long-windedness about all that. Let's move on.

The Usual Alternatives

[summary]
The above seems to raise some questions: What should the conceptual basis for money be? How is it to be understood? Are we content with the current model of money as is? Do we believe it to be ideal? What do we want from our economy? What is the mechanism(s) by which money is properly created to optimize the social compact?

That there is some discontent about the current commodity money system seems pretty obvious. Angry fingers are pointed sometimes at governments, sometimes at financiers, and sometimes at both, accusing them of manipulating money to the detriment of the common man. One or another group of elites, or all elites together, are marked as amoral rent seekers intent only on selfish gain. In fact, these very pages are such an exercise in finger pointing - as perhaps you've noticed.

A still proposed solution is to go back to a money system fully bound to a physical commodity - usually gold - or to a virtual equivalent such as some cryptocurrencies. Advocates believe this will eliminate the manipulation of money and consequently sort out the value of all services because golden crypto is ultimately limited and can't just be created out of nothing. It will automatically have a 'real' value proportional to how much there actually is and how productive The Economy is.

Another solution argues that we should abandon money altogether. Instead we should go back to the demand-share, gift, and direct barter type economies. With no money generating corruption, neighborly folks will act neighborly, and an amiable and consensual exchange of services will be the result.

Yet another solution is a system in which people volunteer their time, and as they do so they build up an account of social credit. With that credit, they can solicit other volunteers to do other work for them. Who works for whom, when, and doing what, is handled on a personal basis through some sort of social brokerage. Generally, this is a if-I-scratch-your-back, then-you'll-scratch-mine concept.

None of these models addresses well – or at all – how the lazy, parasitical, scumbag bum is to be dealt with, nor do they consider how public services are to be produced. The bums are avoided and the role of government is forgotten or viewed pretty much askance. That government – even the worst of government – provides vital, life‑saving services is too often ignored. And dreams that an open market, through some invisible hand if only allowed its full, free realization, will step in to reform the bums and provide the public services are just that – dreams.

As usual, each of these models treats money as either a physical thing or an equivalent nowhere pile. In them, money – the transactional medium – is mined through cleverness, hard-scrabble pursuits, and induced labor. Ultimately, they demand that hard working pioneer men and women forge ahead through waist deep snow, uphill both ways, to honestly earn a little daily bread. The meme of first-the-work-then-the-money remains. In each case, the details of conventional monetary management systems are being played with, but the basic concept of money has not been much changed. In the end, money, and thus the right to get food, shelter, and social services, remains something that – either through normative hard work or low down connivance – must be extracted from The Economy, from some real or imaginary, but always somehow guarded and restricted, pile. And bums and freeloaders – those who are perceived as somehow getting small amounts of money without working – are despised for not carrying their own weight.

The Goal

[summary]
So what is the purpose of an economic system, anyway, and what are the implications for the monetary system that facilitates it? One definition of purpose that appeared online read, 'Economic Systems aim to achieve what the consensus is to achieve optimal outcomes.'

On the whole, though, the purpose of economies seems to get little attention, so it is sometimes good to state, as above, what seems to be so very obvious. But wait – is it so obvious?

There is an economic model continuum. At one end, 'an economy, as far as possible, is to provide for everyone equally and to provide to everyone the fulfillment of their of needs'. We might call this the peace, love, and happiness version. At the other end we find, 'an economy is for making me, and me alone, rich and powerful' (yes, of course, 'rich and powerful' is a redundancy). Maybe this should be called the 'tooth and claw cage fight' version. The above online quote doesn't specify that one or the other end is the consensus optimum, but there can be at least some presumption that peace, love, and happiness is nearer the mark.

In other words, assuming you cannot know the outcomes for you and your loved ones in advance, à la Rawls, would you choose to take your family into a structure of cut-throat competition in which one psychopathic thug always enslaves and brutalizes everyone else, or into a happy mutuality in which everyone supports everyone else?

As stated at the beginning, I assume the consensus response would lean heavily toward mutuality, despite what seems to be a human love of social hierarchy, braggadocio, the loudest voice in the room, great men, fabulous summer palaces, absurd gowns, and enhanced status through association – not to mention the general dismissal of humility.

Anyone leaning strongly toward the tooth and claw cage fight end of the continuum probably doesn't need to read further, but for the rest of us, with our economic goal set to best level of mutuality and best level of self‑realization, we have to consider a model for money that will best facilitate achieving those ends.

One of the first considerations is to remember that money is not what anyone needs. What we need is access to the things that keep us alive and then, if possible, to things that make life worth living. And the things that make life worth living are usually assumed to align with some sort of Maslow-like concept of a hierarchy of needs. It does seem intuitive that it is only after an individual feels confident that their most fundamental needs are assured, that they can then pursue interests that might be characterized as 'mind‑expanding', 'spiritual', or 'socially responsible'. Indeed, there is a body of research indicating that a person's ability to think and to respond well economically, socially, or personally is dramatically affected by whether or not their most fundamental needs are assuredly being met. So what people do need is a way to gain access to the whole community's productive capacity and thus gain access to their fundamental needs. In other words, what people need is a way to easily talk to each other economically. Money, in short, is that way of talking; it is, in fact, nothing more than a handy communication tool. And its only worth is its worth as a handy and effective tool.

Thus, with the welfare of every member of the community deemed to be important, we have to consider how this tool can best be designed to promote human dignity and welfare. Is it actually best, as now modeled, when it's a limited private good (i.e., treated and valued as a limited, zero-sum commodity, effectively discrete from human beings and society) or, alternatively, is it best when it's an unlimited public good (i.e., treated and valued as a societal tool for the societal good, the use of which by one does not diminish the available use by another)? Although there is a millennia long tradition of treating money as a private good – and that model has had a certain, if twisted, functionality – that does not mean that money is best treated that way – unless you lean toward the BSHTRS concentration of power, tooth and claw cage fight end of the continuum.

A Few Details

[summary]
Though perhaps a bit lacking otherwise, the online economic purpose one-liner above does contain an indirect suggestion of the discussed meta-function of money, i.e., that it's a means of communication. Money is how we talk to each other economically. It is a language of its own that we use to send messages throughout society. These messages state and aggregate each and every individual's choices of services – something that would be practicably impossible using words alone. Slightly less directly, it communicates who your friends are, what policies you want implemented, and, of course, what your relative status is.

As should now be clear, money is best described as merely a convenient social interaction tool, a facilitator of mutuality, and, most comprehensively, as a medium of communication. Just as a writer might describe the written word as an entirely human communication tool consisting of symbols used to facilitate the flow of emotional and intellectual information, an economist might describe money in very much the same terms: an entirely human communication tool consisting of symbols used to facilitate the flow of economic information.[9]

Now, keeping in mind the close similarities between words and money – even though they effect communication in different areas of human society, just as mathematics, music, and the graphic arts effect communication in yet others – consider the concept of limiting speech only to those who have first put in their 40 hours on the job; consider a regimen of first-the-work-then-the-words; negotiations between employer and employee to determine exactly how many words an employee would be allowed each week; laws ensuring equal words for equal work; borrowing words when needed and then having to give more words back to pay for the lender's opportunity cost; the number of words available for use determined by private or semi-private word-hording institutions and by economic and political elites; and a world in which words held and used by someone else means they aren't available for you to use - until you've first put in your time to earn them. Absurd? Outrageous? Or just a great new opportunity for the BSHTRS?

Speech - communication - is considered an inherent and fundamental human right in any modern society that is not inclined toward the BSHTRS end of the economic model continuum. To limit an individual's responsible and honest use of speech to first-the-work-then-the-words, to limit their right to communicate social information at will, is – rightly, I would argue – a fundamental and unforgivable transgression. Therefore, in just the same fashion, money, a form of communication, is a fundamental and inherent human right, and to limit an individual's responsible and honest use of that form of communication to first-the-work-then-the-money, to artificially restrict their right to communicate economic information, is – rightly, I would argue – a fundamental and unforgivable transgression.

But, you might say, money really is different from speech so we have to treat it differently. Yet speech is different from mathematics, from music, and from the graphic arts as well. All are forms of human communication and communication must be viewed as a whole. Any attempt to proscribe the responsible and honest use of any medium of communication to a first-the-work-then-the-use is just an attempt to enable domination by BSHTRS.

Money, then, as a means of communication, makes the complexities of reaching economic consensus less intractable because it improves economic communication. Clearly, if the conception of money is handled thoughtfully, with an eye toward fostering responsible and honest use, money could help achieve something like a genuine economic consensus instead of a wobbly facade of consensus. And achieve it in a keep-it-satisfyingly-simple, self-regulating way. Is this just wild-eyed dreaming? Perhaps. But it might still be worth a little effort to see what could be invented if we put our minds to it.

So given we have firmly established that the proper concept of money is nothing other than a word-like tool, an intrinsically and inherently human means of communication, a symbolic representation that facilitates human economic exchanges just as words facilitate human emotional and intellectual exchanges, we need to detail how it should function.

First, money – keeping the above Smith quote in mind – correlates to human time, just as speech correlates to human thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Thus, the original source of money can only be in human time. Even in the primitive context of limited real commodities, like gold or beans, or a limited unreal commodity like a cryptocurrency, it's only through the expenditure of human time that it becomes available to the human part of the community. If no one mined gold, there would be no gold. If no one gathered beans, there would be no beans. If no one modeled, programmed, mined, or otherwise worked up cryptocurrencies, there would be no cryptocurrencies. Even in gift, demand-share, and direct barter economies, if no one used time to produce and then exchange something, there would be no value exchanged. Even the totally isolated hermit – the last lonely human on Earth – can only make exchanges with the greater community of the environment through the expenditure of time. Human time, then, is the basis for all economic (i.e., human ecological) interactions, and therefore is the basis for all human economic communication; without time, there is, and can be, no interaction. Consequently, what money so conveniently symbolizes is nothing other than human time, just as speech symbolizes nothing other than human thought. Money is merely a technique that makes exchanges of time more comprehensible across large numbers of people, just as the written word is a technique for making exchanges of other kinds of information more comprehensible across large numbers of people.

It seems natural to expect that the process of life is to put in your time, then get your food (first-the-work-then-the-money) – isn't that just how nature works? Isn't it inevitable that you have to get up off your lazy butt, go out, and wrest a living from cruel, bloody, tooth-and-claw Mother Nature? Isn't it a real man's duty to join the tribe's hunters, confront the mastodon and get gored on the beast's tusk before being allowed to eat a well earned share of the animal's liver? Whether as a then hunter, or a now AI robotics engineer, isn't it only through the manly act of first putting in your time that you have any right to afterwards claim your meat?

Well, in the day of the nomadic hunter the only way to exchange your time was to get up and go out with the other hunters to do your bit for the tribe. The only way to offer your time to the greater human good was to physically input your time in the field, screaming as the mastodon's tusk is driven through your gut – and thus the beginnings of the persistent expectation of first-the-work-then-the-money.

Today, though, we have sophisticated record keeping capabilities and we can communicate with people around the globe. In other words, we are no longer limited to being physically present to exchange our time. We can now do so through the power of symbolic communication, in just the same way that we no longer need to be in the same room to exchange thoughts. Using the power of symbols, we no longer have to follow the primitive hunter-model – unless we want power addicted BSHTRS to utilize that model as the lash and shackles that keep all us slaves in line. Instead, we can now effectively exchange our time symbolically. So if I sit at home uselessly pecking at a keyboard, I can (and will) still provide my time, communicated through the medium of money, to the community as a whole. I will do so to acquire the means of my survival and in doing so will communicate my time to others so they can use it in the productive activities of their choice. My time is valuelessly my own – until I offer it to someone else by demanding whatever productive activity they have chosen to pursue and I have chosen to demand. And by communicating demand by transferring my time, I support other individuals and the community as a whole.

Just as I, because of the magic of the written word, no longer have to stand in front of you boring you with a long rant about money while you think about lunch, now, because of the magic of money, I no longer have to troop out into the woods looking for a ride on a mastodon's tusk. Money, properly conceived and implemented, allows me to achieve wholesome economic communication with you symbolically, even if you don't understand a word I say.

So, if you are still with me, money is an inherent human right, just as is speech, and the proper order for understanding the money-work equation is opposite to what the BSHTRS have promoted since before the day commodity money was invented: in reality, it is first-the-money-then-the-work. Simply by being alive, each individual has money because they have time, just as each has words because they have thoughts, and it is merely a matter of using the money (or the words) to communicate with others. Anything else, any model that demands the performance of work before the granting of rights, is just another iteration of slavery – thus its popularity with the BSHTRS.

And since both speech and money are means of communication, it is incumbent on society to codify both, when used responsibly and honestly, as inherent human rights. What better way for society to express its commitment to and support of each and every individual human? This is absolutely fundamental to any society that aspires to the peace, love, and happiness end of the continuum.

A Few Details More

[summary]
The use of money, just like the use of speech or any other means of communication, needs to be regulated. (Yes, speech is regulated. It always has been and always will be; otherwise, it's either unintelligible noise useless for communication or it's toxically weaponized to gain and exert power.) The form of regulation must match the purpose of, and be adapted to the medium, so the regulation of money must be, of course, appropriately different from the regulation of speech even though they are both forms of communication. Yet there are similarities, too.

With speech, a civilized society does not consider it correct to allow one voice to completely dominate the conversation either by shouting louder than anyone else, or by effectively gagging all other voices. The concept of 'free' speech has at its core the trust and understanding that all voices can, and will, be heard very nearly equally and to good effect. True, some voices may come to the fore now and then, but not in any attempt to suppress, one way or another, all other voices, but only as part of an occasional cresendo that will, in time, subside as a new cresendo rises.

Likewise, so must it be with money – at least if it is not to be used as a tool for the benefit of BSHTRS. The music metaphor may at first seem not quite so apropos, but it actually fits quite well: a civilized society does not consider it correct to allow one economic voice to completely dominate the economy.

But let's briefly revert here to economics 101 and talk about the production possibility frontier. This is an often graphical representation of the human economy's capacity to produce services under the inherent limitation that there is only so much time available to be productive. Thus if we decide to spend time raising potatoes, that reduces the amount of time available for producing antibiotics. Consequently, all economic decisions are trade-offs between producing this basket of services versus that basket of services.

This means that each time I demand a piece of bubble gum, for example, I reduce society's capacity to produce nuclear power plants. The effect is slight. However, each time a nuclear power plant is demanded, the effect on bubble gum production is relatively massive. And not only on bubble gum. The more a particular thing is demanded, the much much more resulting effect there is on the whole range of productive capacity as resources are adjusted to accomodate the demand. This results in a type of multiplier effect that moves through the economy – a demand here leads to a demand there, which in turn leads to a demand elsewhere, which leads to yet another demand, and so on. In short, placing a demand results in an exponential expansion of related demands. When compared to one stick of bubble gum, satisfying the demand for one nuclear power plant obviously has an exponentially huge impact on shaping what is, or is not, produced, in what quantities, and when.[10] This exponential effect applies, of course, to what the market internalizes. It must therefore also apply to what the the market externalizes. Externalities, being external, can only be guestimated with varying degrees of uncertainty, but their increase, despite any uncertainties, is very certainly exponential.

This multiplier effect of demand, then, cannot be ignored, for it means that the impact of choosing one thing over another is not linear as demand for it increases, but exponential.

So far, then, we now understand that money is a means of symbolic economic communication. In addition, it is also very much a political means of communication[11] and its use always constitutes a vote. If I buy some bubble gum I'm voting for policies that enable bubble gum to be produced, if I visit a drug dealer, I'm voting for policies that enable drug dealers to ply their trade, if I buy a solar panel (rather than shares in a power corporation going nuclear), I'm voting for policies that support a whole array of scientific research and advanced manufacturing. If I invest in a politician, I'm voting for one or more net returns. The cage-fighting BSHTRS realized millennia ago that using just a little more money yields a much, much larger vote on what policies get implemented, and they have ever since enthusiastically exploited that tool to their advantage. Once again, we see that a demand here or there has an exponential effect on the economy and there is an absolute need to ensure good and necessary safeguards in order to produce equality of voice and a pleasing policy choir.

So What About the Government?

[summary]
The point of government is to manage the use of power. Given the peace, love, and happiness goal and assuming equality is the best route to that goal, then it's role is to distribute power as nearly equally as possible, whether viewed from the political, economic, or enviromental perspective. Anything else is catering to the BSHTRS. Consequently, since the concentration of money manifests as the concentration of power and of voice, government’s job is to ensure that money is regulated, as is speech, for the benefit and welfare of all members of the community and not primarily for the BSHTRS; in short then, to fulfill its job, government must be based on structures that minimize the opportunities for single voices to dominate the choir. In the end, this boils down to ensuring that the burden (and benefits) of the externalities imposed on the community by human activity are distributed as evenly as possible, and the externalities that single voices always impose are duly paid for.

Given human history, some will argue that formal government will always be poorly structured and incompetent to satisfy its job description; so has it always been, so will it always be is the thinking. Thus a return to a gift, demand-share, direct barter, or some other unregulated market type economy would result, some hope, in a mellow anarchistic harmony that no formal, post agricultural government can achieve. Yet, like money and words, formal government is a tool of communication, a necessary one that facilitates relationships among large numbers of strangers. No complex society has ever functioned without some form of codified formal government because that tool of communication is a prerequisite for a complex society to survive. There is no reason to think that complex societies and formal government are in any way severable. In this context, consider that government services cannot be provided by the private sector without the private sector itself then becoming government. Also not to be forgotten, government services can only be provided through the input of human time. So for a modern, complex society, government is necessary, inevitable, beneficial, desirable, and, yes, costly. And despite any past failures, there is no reason to assume the impossibility of better future success.

The important thing to keep front and center here is that every demand for a service, every economic transaction, imposes externalities on the community, some obvious, some utterly obscure. And the more a single voice demands, the much much more are the externalities imposed. Thus formal government (good, bad, or indifferent, regardless of how structured) is critically important, because government is the sole agency that compensates for the imposition of externalities.

Fine. How does that relate to humane money? As already described, externalities rise exponentially with demand. Therefore, since government is the sole agency that compensates for externalities, it is clear that a humane money system must impose an exponential fee on economic transactions. Such fees would have the added benefit of tending to moderate excessive demand by any one singer or small group of singers attempting to dominate the choir. To set up a money system that does not impose an exponential fee on transactions defeats the humaneness of the system and, really, benefits only the BSHTRS.

Summing up

So if you are still with me, in Money Then, I reviewed how the usual concept of money evolved around the sense that it is something that must be extracted from the non-human world. In The Usual Alternatives, I noted the discontent with how the economic and money system now works, as well as some commonly proposed alternatives. Then, with The Goal, I placed the welfare of each and every human as the primary goal of a humane society. Next, in A Few Details, I corrected the common false concept of money to properly define it as a means of communication, an inherent aspect of every human, just as is speech, and made it clear that any system of first-the-work-then-the-money is a slave system. In A Few Details More, I argued that speech and money, as means of communication and inherent human rights, must be appropriately regulated to prevent unintelligible noise and/or weaponization - control of neither speech nor money can be handed over to the loudest, strongest, or richest (the three being roughly one and the same) without dehumanizing and broadly exploiting all others. Further, I noted that the decision to produce one thing over another imposes exponential impacts and externalities on the community. Finally, in What About Government?, I defined the role of government as that of harmonization. I pointed out that government is another form of communication, necessary among large numbers of strangers, and is properly used to ensure that general welfare takes precedence over BSHTRS welfare. I noted that government is the only agent that compensates for externalities, which rise exponentially with demand, and that government services are provided only through the input of human time. I therefore stated that the government must require exponentially rising fees on economic transactions in order to provide its proper services to the community and to promote harmonization and equality of voice.