This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License LETS: The Economic System of Giving The Problem of Money As Sholom Aleichem, Jewish fiction writer and humourist, once wrote: "Money is round and rolls away." The conventional dollar economy is in many ways a creation of the Industrial Revolution, and has never been properly re-interpreted in the light of the changing world-view of the Information Revolution. The flaws in the current economy are becoming more and more obvious. Money was invented to get around the biggest flaw of barter, the previous method of trade, which was that you couldn't always find someone who wanted what you had to offer in exchange for what you wanted from them. Money has solved that problem, but it has introduced new ones, principal among which is that it has become a limited resource in its own right. In a monetary economy, you no longer have to worry about having something worth trading; everyone takes cash. But if you don't have any money, no-one will trade with you. Thus we have the problems of social welfare (redistributing wealth so that poor people have some money to keep themselves alive), easy credit, fast-money entrepreneurs, credit squeezes, interest rates, inflation, and all the other problems that stem directly from the idea that money is a limited resource and we can charge more money for the use of it. We even have games like forex trading where people play with numbers for a while and then agree who has "made" money and who has "lost" it. | |
|
