I am a new subscriber
to the SC LIST.
Why did I subscribe
?
I have an idea, that may be
wrong, that SC
seeks rational change from
a nearly all bank-
loan based money system to a
system that
relies on debt-free money, spent
into circu-
lation -- rather than lent into
circulation -- to
the degree that may be required to prevent
poverty, pollution, economic
decline, stagnation,
stagflation, etc.,
etc.
(Neither PKT nor any other forum
I've joined
will support debt-free
money -- they all
wanted money to flow from
taxes, bond
sales, and coinage only.
So I see no way
for them to solve our problems
short of
interest rates (on government
bonds) that
stay very close to zero.)
The rational basis
for debtless money, as
I understand it, is to prevent a trail of debt
from hog-tying a monetary system of pro-
duction -- waitng for bankruptcy to untie it.
It seems to me that the notion
of spending
some money into circulation --
not lending
all of it into circulation -- would be easy to
sell
to voters, if advocates
for this kind of
money reform kept their slogans simple.
Ross Perot with very simple
slogans changed
the Democrats from tax and spend
democrats
to tax and spend-less democrats.
This change
has enabled Democrats to lose me
as a card-
carrying voter and otherwise
adopt a useless
Rubinomics that makes no sense
at all today.
But Ross' great slogans
let him do it. Ross
elected Bill C. twice. And
his legacy will elect
supply-side Republicans -- maybe
for the rest
of
the century.
One slogan that may serve
some debtless
money is the International
Labor Org.'s --
A Nation
Can Afford Anything
It Can
Produce .
Of course so short a slogan does
not logically
connect the production of homes
for every
family (especially homeless
families) to
Government Issue (GI)
money -- (created
without a
loan from someone with money or
by a bank that
legally lends money it creates
for credit worthy borrowers to
spend).
If a connection from debtless money to
a
guaranteed system of production
was based
on a law of nature --
which it's not -- any poor
country could build houses enough for all its
homeless. In our
experience we know poor
nations can connect their money
to inflation
-- but not to the abundance
we'd like to
promise.
Of course I believe in the ILO
slogan
and the connection -- but only
when its part
of system of production that is
rich in resources
and know-how and does in fact
build all the
houses (the way we built
lend-lease weapons
of war in the 40's) -- and then
cancels any debt
that might otherwise get
in its way.
I will quit now. To my mind
we need some
debtless, taxless, indexed fiat
money (DTIFM).
This goes a little beyond
debtless money --
and I'll talk of it in a future
posting. My wished-
for DTIFM can co-exist with --
-
banknotes,
-
taxes that do not penalize employment
and
investment
-
non-GI-indexed savings.
But to get what I think we need
we must first
make the case in very few words.
Until ordinary
voters hear us, our professional
opposition can
ignore us -- and they
will.
Most of them
make good old fashioned
money by doing that.
John Gelles
