It's Time for Monetary Experimentation
(Please first read the previous post Tech and Philosophy Unite and share to tech people if you think it is important. Thanks!)
Bitcoin opened a "can of worms" from the perspective of the establishment money and banking world. There have been a few bold voices talking about different systems since the Keynesian scam began, but they have been successfully shut down. A tactic of the "thought censors" is to presume that the world can only have one money system or everything will collapse. One of the main goals of this newsletter is to counter that narrative and promote the idea that we need experimentation and testing of different economic theories, and crypto gives us the power to do so.
The era of top-down control is hopefully ending. It's looking like a new, bottom-up world may be arriving thanks to distributed ledger technology including blockchain. Bitcoin is amazing. Satoshi was/is a genius. Bitcoin maximalists are right about many things. The whole cypherpunk community has contributed to the biggest step away from the opaque frivolous debt global money deception since the period of real ideas that responded to its initial decades of failure.
But Bitcoin is not the end-all. The traditional principles of "a contract is money", Say’s law of markets, and equal access to ownership of the means of production are not advanced by the proof-of-work model. It has created some change in the demographics of wealth concentration, which has some advantages, but so far the techies are not doing much more for the world than the Wall Streeters. There are some exceptions like bringing decentralized property registries to the third world, but the overall "greed is good" mentality is still the primary driver. Per Dr. Norman Kurland, we know greed is a vice. It makes more sense to design an economic system around a virtue. Why not JUSTICE?!
Thinkers like Kurland, Louis Kelso, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Fr. William Ferree in the fifties and sixties gained some traction with advanced concepts like King's "higher synthesis... not found in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism". Please listen to the Just Third Way Podcast with Dr. Virgil Wood, who was Dr. King's Virginia coordinator. He ties King's "synthesis" in with the widespread ownership philosophy of Kelso. Per Dr. Wood, King was starting to understand Kelso but felt the world wasn't quite ready for his ideas. Perhaps he was right, but by the eighties Kurland and Kelso got ESOP employee ownership legislation passed.
That season of progress ended, and the concept of economic and social justice hit a wall. But so did the greenback movement, and even the gold standard folks. It's like the Keynes thing empowered controllers to stop any competition to it globally. The only change we hear about is moving more toward Modern Monetary Theory, which basically further multiplies the flaws of Keynes, throwing all private market control out and letting the central planners of government dictate everything. Free market money is not the problem; it is the opacity of the system, and monetizing government and frivolous debt. The key is to use social justice (often misused as a synonym for redistribution) to repair our institutions. It simply means coming together to improve things. That could be marching on Washington, or learning a programming language to help write the code of a new crypto-system that brings distributed ledger together with the concept of money that truly empowers.
Bitcoin has cracked a window in our house of walls that progress keeps hitting. It's like they've all been painted shut for a decade. You may have been in a house like that. No one opened any until that day when the A/C broke. Then suddenly discomfort had someone finding a large screwdriver or something to pry a window open. That's where we are now. Bukele in El Salvador cracked another by designating Bitcoin legal tender, a key rare act of disobedience to the IMF. People in these maximum-suffering places have seen the fake money cycles over and over, and are searching for ways to break out.
There is another cycle of insanity. Capitalism to boom, wealth disparity, bust, revolt, expropriation, socialism, collapse. It varies and has elements of money printing of course. We have to realize that Bitcoin is just playing into this same pattern. The variation will be that the next wealth disparity bust will be blamed on evil crypto. And there will be some validity to the argument. But it will result in twisted media narratives and fake social media accounts convincing us to go along with draconian crackdowns on crypto usage.
It's not our form of money we need to change, it's our philosophy of it. The likely clamp down on crypto can only succeed if we go along with it, just as we went along with Roosevelt confiscating gold bullion. We need an attitude of seeking experimentation regarding money and economics, and to fight against limiting what we try. We can build crypto systems that compete against each other. We can already do it by country, so why not get some techies together to create something that empowers the people of a struggling country? Not just with a trustless exchange system, auditable transaction record, and anti-fragile network; but with post-scarcity widespread ownership of productive capital.
Yes we have Ethereum smart contracts. But do we even have MMT? Maybe that will work somewhere. Probably not, but why not try it? Let's also encourage a gold standard somewhere. Human nature will likely show it to be hyper-wealth-concentrating, but finding that out will be a good thing. Let the greenback people show us how supremely powerful government can get. So what else can we try? Is there anyone out there saying they have a theory that involves sound money, empowers all through green technologies, ends the conflict and death spiral of socialism/capitalism, without taxing existing owners? Wouldn't that be something to test somewhere?
This newsletter promotes the ideas of cesj.org and suggests that they be tried by designing a crypto-system. But there are other sources of knowledge moving in the same direction. Professors Robert Ashford, Ralph Hall, and Nicholas Ashford published Broadening Capital Acquisition with the Earnings of Capital as a Means of Sustainable Growth and Environmental Sustainability. Dr. Robert Ashford teaches Binary Economics at Syracuse. There are also Just Third Way podcast interviews of him. The academic world is coming around. Justiceuniversity.org is being built to educate many. Another effort that needs volunteers.
Come into our world and help us break out of the house of walls as the discomfort rises. Learn about the importance of stepping out of the past savings mentality, and moving to future savings. Once you see the importance of this way of thinking, you will see the challenges to making it happen. We have our own debates and issues to figure out, so we need your help finding the best way to come together and build a system and also decide where to implement it. Start the journey. Go to paradime.org and enter your email address.