Re: [ox-en] Re: Open Money?
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 00:23:21 +0100
Hi Benja, Michael, all!
2 weeks (19 days) ago Michael Linton wrote:
On January 20, 2002 03:46 pm, B. Fallenstein wrote:
.........................I'm understanding the
open money people as saying that albeit accepted community money may be
more or less limited, it will not be *scarce* to most and most of the
time, because if you generally "behave well" on the system, nobody will
have a problem if in some situations you 'generate' a little more money
than usual (going further 'in debt'). Thus if you "behave well," you
will always have enough money, even in situations where in today's
society you'd be out of luck.
Actually I can't see where the difference to today is - or may be a
capitalism functioning better.
"it will not be *scarce* to most and most of the time" means it is
scarce sometimes to some people. This translates easily to "most have
enough money most of the time to supply their want".
"If you behave well" translates easily to "if you have a good job",
because...
Yes, that's the kernel - your word in your community is your money
...in the end it's not the word which is my money but my performance.
I mean I can make a lot of words - if nobody trusts them, they are
void.
In essence this results in the same system as we have. The ones who
have a high performance - or more exactly: can convince others they
have one - have a lot of words / money, while people who in the eyes
of others perform badly for one or another reason are as bad off as
they are today. They simply don't have the possibility to generate
more useful money just as Ernie has no possibility to generate more
useful money to pay a programmer because of the very same reason: The
money won't be accepted / the words won't be trusted.
Of course LETS escape this problem usually by transforming the
not-yet-traded human activities like private cooking, singing, massage
and so on into jobs. So LETS fill the few remaining pores of human
societies which are not yet subject to trade. (Actually I wait for a
day, where a child has to pay for being raised...) Sure they need to
because they are designed to suit the have-nots [*], which have no
"official" work force / performance to sell anymore. Frankly I don't
see this as desirable. Let alone the ones who are not as performant as
I am...
[* Which they actually do to some degree. Actually I'm very much in
favor of anything which supports people to have a better life.
However, I think LETS and open money may only fill some niches the
official exchange system already has left because they're
uninteresting. To me they are mainly a sign of the decline of
capitalism and IMHO it's not by chance that LETS are particularly
successful in UK which seems to me the country in Europe which is
pretty advanced in the decline from a highly industrialized country
to a neo-liberal hell.]
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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