Paul, You were the one who said you supported Dieterich's "equivalence economy" where equal quantities of labour should exchange for each other, isn't that so?
As regards an egalitarian credit economy, it is basically a further development of money economy but transcending it. Without dressing this up into Marxist verbosity, I suppose I could discuss a few aspects of the concept. It occurred to me once when I was a student. The basic idea is that people build up credits during their lifetime but they can also lose credits. They can access resources with the credits they've built up, and if they don't have the credits, they can't access the resources. I guess the main difference from a cash economy is that you cannot use your own credits purely to obtain more credits, you cannot use somebody else's credits, and ordinarily you cannot transfer your credits to somebody else. There's just a computer record which details your credit position at every phase of your life, it's quite transparent. Let's say you committed a serious crime, well, you would lose a lot of your credits. In prison you would have to earn enough credits to live outside of prison again. You would get some credits allocated to you, as a standard procedure, merely for being alive, but to obtain other credits you would have to put in extra effort. Normally the society would guarantee individuals credits for a minimum living standard, but for everything else they would need to make personal effort, unless they were demonstrably sick, disabled etc. The exact system of allocating credit is obviously not "cast in stone" but reasonably flexible - experience might show that a bit more credit is due here, or a bit less credit is due there, or that we need a new category of credit tokens. There would always remain some conflicts about some areas of credit allocation. So really the government of the system would keep adjusting the system depending on how people were voting or behaving. The credit allocation system need not apply to all resources; some resources could be left to be traded freely, if that is more practical or fairer etc., or if any kind of relevant norm is absent etc., or some other allocating method could be better applied. The egalitarian credit economy combines social requirements with individual choice, and it is reasonably "meritocratic". It is also a reasonably supple system, since rewards for effort can be scaled upwards or downwards within egalitarian limits, to encourage people to go into certain activities or go out of certain activities. For every age group there is a minimum and a maximum amount of credit you can potentially have. In addition, some activities can be brought into the system or excluded from the system according to what seems to work best. For almost every field of human activity, it is possible to decide which part should be included in credit economy, and which part should be left alone, or follow some other allocation principle. And you can work out standard norms for allocating credit in each field of human activity within the scope of credit economy. Once a credit standard has been designed it can be voted on, and implemented until such time that a change seems warranted. For some activities, standards would be fairly constant, for others the standard would change quite rapidly across time. This kind of "planned economy" doesn't merely feature integrated digital price accounts, labour accounts and product-unit/asset-unit accounts which tell society exactly how resources are being used. It also features "digital people accounts" built up across your lifetime, accessible to yourself and people you authorize to have access to it for practical purposes. You know exactly what your standing in society is at any time, and you can easily find out how to change it. The drawback of the system I guess is that you sacrifice the ability or freedom to do certain things with money which you do have in a cash economy, because in an egalitarian credit economy you cannot utilize your credits for certain activities, and ordinarily you cannot trade your credits with others. Certain circuits of trade are not possible. But I suppose the advantage of the system is that you can stop worrying about gaining the basics of human existence, and concentrate on achieving things in life, with very clear signals about how you are doing, at every phase in your life. You don't have a "mysticism or mystique of suffering to achieve something". The aim of the egalitarian credit economy is not to say that money is intrinsically evil or that people shouldn't have their freedoms, but rather that the contract between individuals and society takes precedence over many other sorts of contract you can have. The purpose is to re-align the patterns of competition and cooperation, so that they fit better with how people really are, how they want to develop, and with what is known to be good for them. Abusive and anti-social forms of trade which money makes possible are simply eliminated, because you simply cannot use your credits for those sorts of activities. You might still be able to trade or barter some kinds of stuff, but only within certain limits. In some areas of life there would still be a private sector, in other areas there would not be. The credit economy preserves many of the features or flexibility of cash economy, but in some respects you can do less with you credits than with money, and in other respects you can do more with your credits than with money. Well that's a thumbnail sketch of it anyway. J. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
