Money is funny stuff. I think of it as one of the universal abstractions like “time” and “energy” or “power.” They all mean the same thing; they are just different ways of looking at it.
Now that the world’s financial structure has fallen apart, no one quite knows what to do. What do you do when a sovereign state goes broke, like Greece or the United States? And what is the role of Banks and Bankers? Who owns the money, anyway?
I have been under the opinion that the entire world needs a makeover in every sense. Like a great many others, I have realized that there can be no growth or movement forward in any significant way until the political unity of the entire world is settled.
That, in a nutshell, is the defining problem of our time. Whether or not human life, or any life at all, manages to survive the next hundred years will depend upon the way the people of the earth come to deal with this present crisis.
But that it is all One Ball of Wax is the first lesson; there is no point trying to patch up one hole here and stop another leak over there – the political problems facing the union of the planet are inextricably related to the economic problem, or the way in which the universal abstraction of Money will be applied to facilitate trade and prosperity.
This is such a huge problem and the objections against all of the solutions are legion, but I simply present it as self-evident that the planet we live on must evolve towards a political unity, or there is no hope for the survival of life. I spend no time debating the point; I just wish to lay out a vision of a way in which a new arrangement could work.
The entire jungle of currencies in the world, and the complex web of financial entanglements linking them represent, in the most primary fashion, a description of the moving power of a living system. It is much like a schematic diagram of an electrically powered system. “Follow the Money.”
I have considered the problem of the Source of Authority, and I have come to my own, perhaps surprising, idea of vesting that authority in a School, whose members would finally select the one to exercise the final authority. I have written about these ideas quite a bit for many years, but the function of this position has always confused and frightened people. It always seems to make them think that I want to endow some new Emperor with infinite power to lord it over the rest of us; when, in fact, of course, it is entirely the reverse: the whole necessity of a final Judge is to relieve us of the constant efforts, at every turn, of every man to get the most for himself (and the same goes for quite a few women, too). All the final judge will do will be to try to regulate the system as judiciously as possible to avoid all such excess and abuse.
But there is another very important aspect of this new world government: Money. One of the main roles of the Government would be to regulate the economy so that it functions with maximum efficiency, completely avoiding all such problems as are now overwhelming our current crop of world bankers, with their sovereign defaults upsetting a whole house of cards.
So, we start by issuing a new currency, which would replace all others currently in use. We call it the mammon, and we establish its value somewhere in the familiar range of the dollar, pound, franc, or euro. The Seat of Government would have the privilege and responsibility of printing and distributing this currency in such supply as would most effectively encourage efficiency in the market-place. That same Seat of Government would also levy a tax, based upon the ownership of land, and this tax would be paid in mammons. So this Seat of Government would actually be a World Bank, which would regulate the system of financial transactions worldwide.
The first step would be to calculate the value of the initial account each person (or corporation) would start out with. It would be the responsibility of this Bank and Government to determine and regulate these values.
That is the easy part. The harder part would be to liquidate the financial affairs of current governments. Essentially, each Sovereign State would be financially liquidated, and its value (or its debt) would be shared among the citizens of that State. This will not be easy! Next, as a consequence of that last effort, some people, from indebted countries like the United States, may end up with serious levels of debt. This is simply inefficient mathematically; it makes more sense to just give everyone else more money so that the poorest people end up with Nothing, which is a great deal better than being in debt. If everyone’s account were simultaneously raised by the amount of the largest debt, nothing would be changed in terms of the relationships between the accounts; we would simply have raised the line, so that we do not have to deal with negative accounts mathematically.
Yes, this Universal Account would also amount to a Universal Number! Everyone’s worst fears would be realized: yes, there would be a New World Order, with a New Currency, a New Bank, a New Court, and a new King, and everyone will have a Number. Is this a vision of sheep lined up for slaughter, or is it a vision of the Golden Age, in which everyone lives happily ever after? Gone will be the rampaging bandits from the face of the earth, looting and pillaging as they go. In place would be a very simple system.
Anyone on earth who lacks the wherewithal to provide food, shelter, or health care could simply check into one of the Free Farms set up for this purpose, and their basic needs would be met. Everyone else would be free to work at any other occupation that they expect will provide them a better lifestyle than available at the Farm.
The Government could simply print up all the money it needs for this or any other purpose, since there will probably be a continuing need for more money going into circulation. Taxation on land would be the other alternative to printing money, depending upon the relative merits of each choice. There is no reason at all why there should be any problem with the Government simply printing up all of the money it needs to spend. Any time there ends up being too much money in circulation, the Government would simply reel it back in through taxation. In this way, a happy balance could be maintained, and life goes on.
A careful investigation into the consequences of such a system will reveal that it would be very, very efficient. For example, in the present system of taxation, a very large percentage of the total tax received is spent in preparing and calculating taxes, producing and distributing tax forms, auditing rogue corporations, collecting the tax, and hiring tax lawyers who attempt to minimize the tax owed by their clients. Under the system I envision, all taxes would simply be levied on the ownership of land. Once this were set up, the entire collection of taxes, world-wide, could be accomplished in a moment, in which everyone’s calculated tax would simply be deducted from their account automatically, by computer programs.
In the absence of wars or natural disasters, there is no reason why there could not be a continuing and rapidly increasing level of prosperity for everyone.
