Humane Money 5

Part 4: A Few Potential Consequences

Assuming broad acceptance:

• As the adoption of this concept increases linearly, there will be a more than linear increase in economic democracy and, therefore, democracy in general.

• With effective, positive public acknowledgment that all humans intrinsically have money and are intrinsically valuable, that no one is ever unemployed or non-contributing, that money is not merely the guaranteed affirmation of human value, but a reflection of each individual's living time and their natural right to communicate economically, the heretofore poor will feel they are fully empowered members of the human community.

• Regional political-economic disparities will be minimized worldwide.

• With everyone who establishes a HMA account freed from slavery, people will be able to do what they wish, rather than what they are obligated to do. This means that productive activity will soon much more reflect what people really want, and much less what BSHTRS want people to want.

• With everyone who establishes a HMA account freed from slavery, they will all go fishin' and nobody will do a lick of work – no, wait! Aren't we always told that people want jobs, that their self-respect, identity, and dignity demand being able to work, that standing up and making a contribution to society is critical to self-realization? So which is it? Are humans a bunch of lazy-ass bums, or do they seek and enjoy meaningful work in the community? The experiments with guaranteed basic income seem to indicate the latter inclination predominates.

• With only actual and living humans invested with money, and with exponential fees compensating the community for exponential externality impacts, the functioning of cooperative production will have to be substantially reworked. Instead of vulture venture capitalists, financiers, banks, fund managers, et al, dominating investment decisions (i.e., the current model of controlling the productive capacity of the economy) an alternative, community oriented entrepreneur will arise and variants of crowd funding will be in the forefront. This will also likely lead to much more opportunity for local development of productive capacity as people in, e.g., Rhode Island will be much more inclined to invest in the local business they know and not in a business in Brazil or China or Mozambique or Texas that is much more difficult to know. Likewise, folks in Mozambique will tend to invest locally and eschew dealing with those risky and puzzling Russians, Americans, or Chinese.

• With an exponential externality fee, everyone will just start bartering to avoid horrible government taxation. Instead of trading Hours, people will trade eggs and shoes and lumber and gold and – monkeys! We'll be right back where we started! Maybe - but if so, the BSHTRS have nothing to fear.

• With production following much more closely people's actual wants, and becoming much more local and small scale, production of some especially complicated products might fall by the wayside – flat screen TVs, computers, spaceships, nuclear power plants, national electric grids, aircraft carriers, MRI scanning machines, and much much much more all come readily to mind. Cooperation across tens of thousands or even millions of people might not be practicable without the crack of the scarcity whip on their backs. At least, that's what the BSHTRS will all argue, just as they always have when there's been talk of freeing the slaves; the slaves, they insist, are just children after all - they couldn't possibly survive without their masters guiding them.

• With freedom from slavery, there is the possibility that too few will engage in the production of even basic services – there could be (worse) food, medicine, clothing, and housing shortages. The mechanisms for tracking HMA accounts will be unsustainable. Children will not be taught to read and write. We'll collapse into savagery and flint chipping while watching over our shoulders for sabertooth tigers.

  While vaguely possible, this seems very implausible. People, empirically, do want to be productive, do want a sophisticated technological kit, and do enjoy cooperative teamwork. The real question is whether they want it as free individuals working as a team or as slaves being manipulated by BSHTRS.

• With freedom from slavery, there is the possibility that the economy will simply become too uncoordinated since it will no longer be under the control of wise men at the top of society. This fear reflects the sad lack of trust in democracy, which has never been very high anywhere, at any time. Once again we'd collapse into savagery and flint chipping while watching over our shoulders for sabertooth tigers.

  Again, vaguely possible, but, again, people do want to be productive. The question remains not if people are capable of productive activity, but if community oriented entrepreneurs can replace wise men at the top of society. The answer yes is at least as plausible as the argument that people are children unable to take care of themselves.

  And, regarding these last two potentials, let's not forget: If an open market characterized by a level playing field peopled by players on an equal footing cannot satisfy a community need, then that need automatically becomes a public responsibility. A well-crafted and true democracy can be trusted to always step in to ensure the production of any service necessary for the community's well-being.

  Furthermore, people will still seek ways to distinguish themselves from the crowd. The entrepreneurial spirit will ever be with us so long as we remain humans.

• The BSHTRS see some writing on the wall that they don't like and mobilize to subvert the correlation of human time to money and/or prohibit it. Any state moving to do so directly or indirectly will, of course, lose its account and all accumulated Hours its account held. Nevertheless, it will still take a steadfast community to keep such BSHTRS action in check – and it seems certain that BSHTRS will rapidly surface to undermine the principles of humane money.

• The HMA will fail from within due to the difficulty of getting large numbers of people to accept large numbers of innovations simultaneously and/or due to the all too natural inclination of people to seek subservience to, or wanting to be, or actually being, BSHTRS. Such a collapse will itself indicate, once again, that people do not really care for or about each other or the greater community, nor really care about being free from enslavement.

• Governments - both formal and indirect - will be absolutely constrained in their ability to game budgets and print money. Instead of public and private sector BSHTRS attempting to manage the ups and downs of the economy, the ups and downs will be controlled by individual account holder participation in the economy and voter approval of a powerful HMA. Altogether, this means trusting democracy and, therefore, the rabble. So, does all that necessarily lead to watching our backs for sabertooth tigers? Or to a self-regulating, negative feedback, monetary homeostasis?

• The BSHTRS see some writing on the wall they don't like and create another - or another thousand - imitation systems that, using smoke and mirrors, are made to appear sooo much better, give sooo much more choice, and distract with soooo many more songs and dances. Yes, this consequence is very likely and would effectively thwart achieving human equality, once again demonstrating the all too common human desire for power, the all too common rejection of democracy. Once again, the BSHTRS get what they want. This is why the ideal is for the HMA to be set up as a fully independent agency under the auspices (but not control) of a legitimate branch of Earth government. The more fundamental the authorizing government, the more likely it is that a humane money system will succeed.

• Fraud, wife-beating, discrimination, carelessness, egotism, theft, murder, stigmatization, hatred, dysfunctional relationships, feelings of oppression and persecution, gluttony, pettiness, pride, playing at king-of-the-mountain, and all the other crimes humanity is heir to will continue. The cultural norms of abuse and scarcity-thinking will take generations to soften. But acknowledging and positively affirming that all humans are always employed and always intrinsically valued members of society through the institution of a just and guaranteed humane money system may, over time, act as a much needed softener.