Wednesday 4 May 2011

Layman's New World Series - Money

For as long as any of us can remember, money has just been there. Once we're old enough, we need it to survive, and without it, well, life is difficult. Normal people like you and me have no choice about money, we must find a way to make it, so we can live, and have a family, and a good life. Most people do well enough, but in the end, a lot of it can seem very pointless. Saving money so you can spend it on being old, or passing it on. But there are  7 PROBLEMS WITH MONEY:
  1. Inflation - This is money made up out of nothing. Picture a chicken farmer scamming his customer by injecting water into the chicken before selling it. The chicken looks very big, but the moment you start to cook it, all the water cooks away, and you're left with half of what you thought you had. 
  2. Crime - Most crime is about money in one way or another. Thieves steal for money, con artists scam for money, companies cheat for money, politicians lie for money, the police go bad for money. Without money, many crimes will stop altogether.
  3. Sharing - We are taught in pre-school, primary school, and in most homes, to share. But this doesn't count for money. For money, we are taught to look after our own, we do share some of it if we are happy that we have more than enough, but even then, it's only a small part of what we have, because, after all, we must look after our own. Now, if there is a class of small children that are all fighting about a toy, the responsible teacher will take the toy away and teach the children how to share it so that everyone gets to have a turn without any fighting.
  4. Debt - The problem with debt is, someone has to make the original money, and as soon as it gets made, they lend it out. Now, when you have to pay back the interest, you have to go back to the maker and borrow more money to pay the debt, see how this is a problem? The moment you take the first cent, you're in debt for life. 
  5. Owning stuff - This is the hard one. We are taught ownership of things very early. We have our own toys, our own clothes, our own bed, our own room etc etc etc. The problem is, who said you own it? Your parents? So it belonged to them? Who sold it to them? Who said it belonged to them? The government? and before that? You see how, somewhere, someone had to decide that they now own something?
  6. Limitations - Not having money stops us from doing things we could or should be doing. We are stopped from starting businesses, studying at certain schools, taking up certain jobs or even just caring for our families. What if some starving kid in Africa, who dies before he's old enough to start school, would one day have cured cancer, or invented a teleportation device, or just been a nice person?
  7. Rich and Poor - If you are rich, you live in a very different world to that of the poor person, and if you are poor, you might have a difficult time managing a rich person's money, simply because you have not grown up knowing how. This isn't a rule, just a probability. It takes money to make money, so if you don't have any, you wont be getting any, any time soon. 
As long as there is money, there will be people that can cheat the system so that they have more than everyone else, and if they are clever enough, they can use it against others. Money gives power to politicians, criminals, corporations and anyone who wants to misuse it.

Now immediately I hear everyone say "Back to the Barter System, I'll trade what I can do for what I can get." But this wont work. Because the real problem isn't money. The real problem is that people think they own everything and have the right to buy and sell it. Which they don't. In fact buying and selling anything is very much like playing monopoly. In the end you might as well pack the board away and carry on with life, because the hotels, houses, properties, money and banks were all just a way of pretending to own things. The barter system wouldn't change that. People would still think they own whatever they've traded for. Which will eventually lead to one person owning more things than everyone else, so we would be back at square one.

This would then also mean that we could not go back to the gold standard, because this still holds ownership. The answer then is to get rid of ownership and not money. What if I can use all the money, but I never own any of it?

Here are some things you didn't know about money

1. There is about $45 Trillion in the world, excluding unmeasured resources. That's $ 45 000 000 000 000,00
2. About 20 % of that is interest. So that's nearly $ 10 000 000 000 000,00  not used for anything except making more money. 
3. Only 3% of that $45 Trillion is actual real money that people carry in their wallets and stash in jars. The rest is all stored on computers. So if anything happened tomorrow to the electricity, and the computers went down, the banks probably wouldn't be able to help you with getting your money back.

So what if we, the people of planet earth, pool all our money together and use it to make the planet free. Use the money to build:
1. Self-sustaining farms, so we don't have to pay for food
2. Self-sustaining energy systems, so we don't have to pay for electricity or petrol
3. State-of-the-art Hospitals, so the whole world can be healthy
4. Top quality homes, so that everyone has a roof over their head
5. Better Garbage and Waste Disposal, so that we don't kill the planet we're trying to live on.

Once we're done with these 5 steps, the only thing you need money for, is to keep track of everything. You would not even need cash, the card system banks use at the moment would work fine. Now if you don't like your job, and nobody else wants it, you can be replace with machines or the job can be removed if it's not needed.

There are many questions about how this new system will work, and they are not simple to answer here. But The 5 Step plan would cost approximately $30 trillion, which is obviously affordable. The only real restriction, is that everyone needs to keep working until the new systems are in place. After that, we're free.

Comments welcome :)

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