Monday, March 3, 2014

Money - How it should be created - and how it should be used 


John Courtneidge Drafted January 2014, posted 3 March 2014
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At my Facebook page, my friend, Andre commented:
"Interest free money is a big thing...as in the central bank of canada should not be charging interest on public money....which I why the national debt has ballooned....its really a false debt."

People might know that my latest twenty years of working for peace started with the Campaign for Interest-free Money, in co-operation with a number of friends.
That work lead to the Forum for Stable Currencies.

In those early years, there was a continual battle over the following, as in my reply to Andre:

I replied:

Yes! the two money questions - a) how it is created in the first place and, b) how it is then used are central to helping create happiness and sustainability. As far as 'how' is concerned, Andre is quite right! Money should be crated by the community as interest-free credit (*not*!! as interest-bearing debt). And by 'community', the most sensible level of community for that (through our experiences with local money like LETS and supra-national money like the Euro and the US Dollar) is 'the nation state' - when that entity is controlled, democratically, by 'the community of all Citizens, for the benefit of the commonweal'.

The second point (about how money should be used - until we abolish it altogether/all-together!) is that, the economic mechanisms *have* - for peace and sustainability - to work in ways that continually narrow 'the gap' between all people in all communities - both 'the national community of all Citizens' and 'the global, co-operative inter- community of all Citizens': it's a 'Spirit Level' thing!

Woo-hoo!

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