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Money should be a common resource, available to all.

Would you mind expanding on that? I'm not being critical, just interested ... because of course the entire history of money is about it being scarce and available only at the price of great difficulty and suffering, unless of course you belonged to a select class that controlled certain things.

So how, in practice, does money become a 'common resource'? Do we not also have to contend with erroneous folk ideas about money in that process? One of those ideas being that money should be scarce, because otherwise people will never put their noses to the grindstone and things will not get done ... an idea which, on the face of it, is consonant with everyday experience (how much work would you do if you actually had the money you needed already?)

Again, I do not put this forward as an objection, but you can see that the idea has a lot going against it in terms of people's actual experience of money.

by wing26 on Thu Jan 24th, 2008 at 08:57:48 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I'd love to expand on that, but a full expansion would need a set of diaries, not just one or two.

Money is really just story-telling, and the scarcity is artificial. We're not really talking about money so much as access to education and opportunities to express originality and innovation.

Money buys trinkets, but the most important things it buys are the power to define narratives.

It turns out that you don't necessarily need money to change narratives. Having it helps, but canny use of pressure points and alternative or new media can be influential too.

It's also possible to imagine ways in which investment, funding and 'work' are restructured to lock out predatory speculation, so that people keep more of their productivity. This can be done without breaking any of the existing institutions - by locking money into other more participatory alternative institutions, a start can be made on starving the predators into irrelevance.

(I'd say more but I'm hoping to spend the year doing something to put these ideas into practice, and I'd rather not talk about details for now until I see how that works out.)

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Jan 24th, 2008 at 09:11:18 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Access to money/credit/capital is the basis of economic self-determination.

We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Feb 1st, 2008 at 05:12:32 AM EST
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