Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Ian Anderr Ingenieur's avatar

I am going to point out a barrier to these changes that is ignored by everyone.

Our economic system is based on a commodity that does not exist in the real universe: our money, the way we create, define, and use it.

Every commodity in our universe obeys the laws of thermodynamics in precisely the way our money doesn't. This is partly accidental, and partly (in the past century) design. The evolution of money over 5000 years, predated the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics by about 4500 years. We create money as debt with interest, define it by the way we use it and use it as though it can break the laws.

Nothing can do that.

So we break everything else.

Because "growth" is built into the definition of our money. Did you never wonder why inflation has to always exist? Why it has to always balance around some positive number? Why a steady state economy is such an anathema to our economists? I'm not the first to point this out. Frederick Soddy pointed it out a century ago, but not being an economist, was ignored. Margrit Kennedy pointed it out 2 decades ago, but not being an economist, was ignored.

I expect to be ignored as well, but I have done something they did not do. I set down the details of the changes to our economic system that have to be part of any social change in the definition of our money.

The neoliberals complain mightily that it is about destroying capitalism. It turns out that they are correct, but the capitalism they worship is merely roadkill along the way to the actual goal of the process.

http://firstmakeitwork.org/2023/09/16/making-money-real/

Expand full comment

No posts