This link has been bookmarked by 14 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Sep 2008, by Todd Suomela.
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05 May 10
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30 Oct 08
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04 Oct 08
Tarmo ToikkanenEconomy's as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted.
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Where localities had previously been free to mint their own currency based on the crops they had grown, now they were forced to borrow money from a central bank. This allowed the issuer of currency - the crown - to extract value from every transaction.
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any business wanting to borrow money for equipment or development had to pay back several times what they had borrowed. This meant bankruptcy was built into the currency system. If a business borrows $100,000, for example, they'll have to pay back $300,000 by the time the loan is due. Where does that money come from? Someone else who borrowed.
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Meanwhile, local currencies had the opposite bias of centralized currency. Local currencies lost value over time. They were really just receipts on the amount of grain that farmer had brought to the grain store. Since some of that grain was lost to rats or water, and since the grain store had to be paid, money devalued each year. This meant the money was biased towards being spent. That's why reinvestment in infrastructure as a percent of total revenue was so high in the late Middle Ages. It's why they built those cathedrals. They were local efforts, by people looking to invest their abundant wealth into real assets for their communities' future. (Cathedrals were built to attract pilgrims and tourism.)
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Since the purpose of the Renaissance innovations was to keep the currently wealthy wealthy, the currency was biased to favor those who had it - and could mete it out at high interest rates to those who needed it for their transactions.
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The speculative economy, rather than fueling the real economy, drags it down.
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They wanted to lend more money, but didn't have any more qualified borrowers. By changing bankruptcy laws, they meant to make it impossible for borrowers to cry uncle. (This was a 150-million-dollar lobbying effort by the credit industry, over the course of an entire decade.)
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Yes, corporations may lose the ability to keep us employed as the banking investment they depend on to operate dries up. But this corporate activity was always extractive in nature, getting (or, historically, forcing) people to buy mass-produced, and nationally distributed food and other goods that were once produced locally.
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The collapse of centrally controlled commerce and currency simply creates an opportunity for local commerce and currency to revive. For people to learn to work and live together on a human, local scale - as the original free market advocate, Adam Smith, actually suggested. Admittedly, this would be a painful transition for many - but it's better than maintaining dependence on a fiscal system designed from the start to turn people and communities into extractable corporate assets.
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Money can be just as open source as any other operating system. It used to be.
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29 Sep 08
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25 Sep 08
Todd SuomelaThe only way for banks - who run such an economy - to make more money is to lend more out. So they looked for more borrowers, as well as more places to park their cash. As a result, the things you and I depend on in the real world became investment vehicles. Homes, oil, resources...you name it. So the costs of all these things went up not because of any real laws of supply and demand, but because they had become new classes of investment.
economics gloom-and-doom localism money currency alternative
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24 Sep 08
C KInteresting article. But has an odd anti-business feel to it.. (Especially since I consider business and profit to be "good" things.) And this article even has a kind of Communist feel to it. But there's some interesting stuff in there though... if on
Economics Money Currency Fiat_Money Banking History Fractional_Reserve_Banking Business Government USA Federal_Reserve Canada Bank_of_Canada Gold Liberty_Dollar Free_Banking Usury Philosophy Religion Judaism Christianity Islam Torah Bible Koran Communism
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godemperorofhellEveryone seems to want to know about the economy these days, so we may as well go there. It's as great an example as any of a program that not only got out of control, but became so prevalent - so accepted - that we came to take it for granted. We think o
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Michel BauwensWhether or not we've had time to fully embrace the Craft/Maker/cyberpunk/Boing ethos, our ability to provide for ourselves and one another directly, locally, even socially instead of entirely through centralized commerce, will determine how well we can na
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23 Sep 08
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Christopher RiceFANTASTIC article on the origin of our economic system in the renaissance, how the past form of localization and currency will be the future (ref: LETS).
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ken .Douglas Rushkoff - finally, the glimmer of life beyond the state - "Money can be just as open source as any other operating system. It used to be" - with refs to - "check out the LETS system and other complementary currencies for how to make your own curr
change community economics finance history money opensource organisation value wealth
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