And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. – Matthew 5:30

I do not need a list of defects to be offended by the current monetary system of the US; however, I shall mention a few fatal flaws that are likely to lead to collapse soon.

1.  Like all fiat money the United States dollar (USD) is not tied to any real wealth such as gold bullion, barrels of oil, or acres of fertile soil.  Its value depends upon what people will give for it.  Let us agree for the purposes of this argument only that the presence of United States military personnel in hundreds of foreign countries has nothing to do with the willingness of foreign nationals to accept it in payment for real goods.

2.  The quantity of money can be altered by the issuance of debt instruments by banks and others – especially the federal government; hence, we are always susceptible to monetary inflation, that is, inflation caused by a larger supply of money chasing the same or a smaller amount of real goods and services.

3. The rules according to which economic transactions are conducted so favor talented money managers that they are able to acquire a disproportionate portion of the money.

4. Etc.  (Items can be added to this list by edits and comments; but, for now, I would like, once again, to refer to Gail Tverberg’s list and paste it below.)

Primary problems

1.   Funds are not available to pay for fossil-fuel subsidies for renewable energy projects.

2.   Wages consistent with financial solvency and private profit are too low.

3.   Energy production companies, especially heavily front-loaded renewable energy production such as photovoltaic solar energy installations, need to borrow money that the credit system can no longer supply.

4.   There are insufficient financial returns to pay taxes desperately needed by governments.

Secondary problems

1.   Private profit from energy production is seen as inadequate by corporations.

2.  Rent cannot be paid for land used in energy production. This cost might be highest in bio-fuel operations, but it belongs to every process that harvests sunlight in real time.

3.   Insufficient funds are available to prevent pollution and mitigate its effects.  These costs are never paid unless mandated by law – if then.

4.  Energy production companies do not pay to prevent mineral depletion and degradation of soil or even try to nor do they pay fines for failure.

5.  Energy producers do not account for limitations in so-called free energy.  For example, there ought to be a cost premium charged to the process for using limited coastal or off-shore wind power sites.

Let us agree then to take the advice of the fictional Jesus.  I hope nobody thinks Matthew’s character didn’t have a single lucid moment.  It remains to discuss what sort of a monetary system we do need.

Good old Dave Kimble has offered to help me write the following in plain English, which I am trying to learn.  It deals with community currency because of the perceived benefits of decentralization.  What is needed now is a central (national) currency; but, the principal ideas in the following apply just as well if only they can be understood:

 Thomas L Wayburn, PhD

This is a draft – nay, a draft of a draft.  – Herman Melville, Moby Dick

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money, or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don’t have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?  – Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

One of the principal reasons for replacing the current national monetary system is that money is created by banks when they lend more than the sum total of the money deposited with them.  This money cannot be repaid unless the economy grows, that is, the total cash value of sales and purchases is greater this year than it was last year regardless of the quantity of real wealth such as food, clothing, housing, energy represented by each unit of currency.  The total amount of currency must increase continuously; and, each unit of currency can be divorced completely from physical wealth.  We wish to replace this currency, which represents only a number in a computer somewhere and not anything tangible with a currency based upon measurable quantities of real physical wealth.

If there were one physical quantity, such as emergy (with an M), that could be used to measure all physical wealth – in particular, all wealth necessary to sustain human life on this planet – we would do well to base our new currency upon it.  We cannot do this at the present time for two reasons: (i) the emergy values of many water, land, and human labor have not been established nor is there any on-going effort to establish them or even to determine how they should be established and (ii) temporarily the government will need to issue un-backed scrip with which to pay the workers to do the necessary work to transform the United States to sustainability.  The workers can use the scrip to purchase goods and services that formerly were paid for with United States dollars (USDs).  Hopefully, in time, the economy will be a net producer of real wealth and the new fiat currency will be redeemed with currency described below.  Clearly, among the necessary jobs will be the production of sufficient energy, food, and health care to sustain citizens who obey the new sustainability laws.

I need to explain “sustainability laws” and to show that enough workers will be available for essential occupations after the government furloughs workers who serve the market currently but produce nothing that we actually need to live.  In “Energy in a Natural Economy”, I analyzed the Bureau of Labor Statistics data from one of the last years in which the United States produced almost everything it consumed.  We should now try to establish a small list of fundamental economic entities in terms of which all economic goods and services can be evaluated.

Currently, provided we use Howard Odum’s concept of emergy to as great an extent as currently possible, we can evaluate every economic good or service in terms of land, water, energy, and time.   Therefore, we could design a new rational monetary system with four types of currency:

(1)    Emergy certificates that would pay for almost all economic goods and services in terms of energy properly weighted by transformities to account for the cost of conversion to a useful form

(2)    Water certificates to pay for fresh water as it is found in Nature – as opposed to desalinated sea water

(3)    Land certificates to pay a rent for all land use based upon ecological characteristics to be described later.  (Clearly, not all land has equal value.)

(4)    Certificates to pay for the time spent by workers at essential jobs.  The government may not issue these any faster than they are needed to pay workers; so, they are not fiat currency in the sense that the USD is.

The government needs to establish the conversion factors so that workers can pay for economic goods.  (And, I need to get some sleep so as to finish this post tomorrow.)

On the Perfectibility of a Monetary System

8 Comments on "We need a new monetary system"

Arthur on Sat, 6th Jul 2013 12:14 pm 



We do not need a really new financial system and fiat money is OK. What we need is an independent central bank with the obligation to keep inflation below 2%, that’s all. And we need a central bank, that serves the interests of the people and not a few anonymous bankers in Wallstreet or London. What we do need is a radical simplification of the existing system, a system that most people understand, with most ‘financial products’ forbidden. We need a credit system that provides for mortages, business loans, not a casino.

BillT on Sat, 6th Jul 2013 1:43 pm 



What we need is NO Central Banks at all and a return to a currency based on a resource that is limited to keep the banks in check. But that is not going to happen as the Rothschild family, etc. have been controlling the Central Banks, and therefore the money supply for centuries. When they are destroyed, THEN there might be a real currency. Until then, toilet paper is all we will ever have.

GregT on Sat, 6th Jul 2013 3:57 pm 



We need a system that does not demand infinite, exponential growth. As long as we have inflation, the system is expanding, and will eventually meet the limits of a finite environment. Just like it is right now.

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
Albert Einstein

TomWayburn on Thu, 13th Aug 2020 7:14 pm 



Special Characteristics [of a monetary system] Needed To Avoid Economic Collapse

Our crisis has a physical component and an imaginary component. The physical
component comes from limitations in the quantities of land, water,
consumable energy, and the environment itself. The ecological footprint of
the human race exceeds the carrying capacity of Earth. The imaginary
component is instability in the monetary system caused by excessive debt and
excessive monetary inequality. To ameliorate the physical crisis we must
eliminate the imaginary one. I do not mean that indebtedness, poverty, and
wealth are imaginary; but, rather, that we can eliminate all three with the
application of our imaginations without affecting the physical universe.
Stabilizing our population and reducing our ecological footprint will
ultimately have a desirable effect upon the universe.

Regardless of what the people want, the owners of the country want to retain
their positions of power, privilege, and wealth. Naturally, they despise the
idea of government control of the economy and the means of production;
however, when a crisis arises that they cannot handle, they readily accede
to crisis socialism to save them. During World War II, without adopting
socialism completely, they allowed rationing, wage and price control, and
management of vital industries by government employees even if they were
paid only one dollar per year. (It must be admitted that they were members of the usual ruling class.)

To respond appropriately to resource and environmental limits, we need to
establish crisis socialism. However, to eliminate debt, we need to repudiate
the US dollar; and, to eliminate inequality, we need to pay everyone the
same even if no work can be found for them to replace the inessential work
from which they were furloughed to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels
and our ecological footprint. After all, the requirement that every citizen
does useful work to get paid and the requirement that the pay should be
commensurate with the value of the work are completely imaginary. The idea
that everyone should be allowed to get as much money as he can is completely
wrong.

TomWayburn on Thu, 13th Aug 2020 7:39 pm 



More on Fresh Water, Land, Energy, and Time

Fresh Water

We may assign fresh water an emergy value equal to the emergy of desalinated sea water, which, if anything, is too high for Earth as a garden.

Land

We may assume, then, that every economic actor* in a community has been assigned a portion of contiguous land of equal value excluding the most desirable locations of all – normally coast lines, river banks, the best scenic outlooks, and the best locations for intensive energy collection, which will be retained by the community as part of the commons. In many cases, this common land will be made available to economic enterprises owned in equal shares by their own workers according to the maxim that every worker should own his own tools – or, as stated in the ancient Hebrew rabbinical writings, a carpenter without tools is not a carpenter. No person may control land upon which he does not live or labor. The land upon which men and women labor is held in common by all of the workers who labor upon that simply-connected (not disjoint) piece of land. If we wish to place an emergy value on the land, we might consider the emergy of the sunlight that falls on the land per unit of time. The fact that this value grows without bound is the principal reason that no one can own land: The purchase price would be infinity!

* Dependent children are not economic actors.

Emergy

Energy* is the most important fundamental economic quantity. It should be the basis of every currency. It is the life’s blood of every economy. Howard T. Odum is famous for the following words:

Real wealth is food, fuel, water, wood for houses, fiber for clothes, raw minerals, electricity, information, …

· A country is wealthy that has more of this real stuff used per person.

· Money is only paid to people and is not proportional to real wealth.

· Prices and costs are inverse to real wealth.

· When resources are abundant, standard of living is high, but prices low.

· When resources are scarce, prices are high, more money goes to bring resources, a few people get rich, but the net contribution to prosperity is small.

· Real wealth is mostly the work of nature and has to be evaluated with a scientific … measure, emergy.

Therefore, to place a value on an economic good or service, the first quantity to be assigned is the emergy (with an M) or embodied energy. I have completely reworked Odum’s great concept.**

** In this essay, and in the rest of my writing, the term energy refers always to either Gibbs availability or Helmholtz availability depending upon context. Please see http://www.dematerialism.net/Chapter%202.html#_Definitions This is not a frivolous personal definition. To go about referring to “energy consumption” is barbarous and technically wrong!

** See http://dematerialism.net/emergyunit.pdf

Time

The only time a person has is the time of his life. Clearly, every person’s life is equally valuable to himself. Until a thousand years have passed after an individual has died, there is no valid way to evaluate his contribution to the community. Therefore, every person’s time must be assigned the same value, namely, one hour per hour since time is fundamental and cannot be evaluated in terms of anything else, least of all money.

But, it is said, “Some people spend many years in engineering school, medical school, apprenticed to a tailor, etc. preparing to render useful services to the community. Clearly, the time of such people’s life when they render such services to the community must be compensated at a higher rate than the time of unskilled laborers with no preparation.” This is the wrong way to think about work, study, and service. If people are not happy working, studying, or serving, they should be doing something else and, for the sake of the community, saving the emergy cost of what they had been doing. We ought to be delighted to allow them to spend on themselves (as opposed to “spending on the work, study, or service”) the same quantities of emergy, land, fresh water, and the labor of others as we all do – provided we replace only ourselves or no one.

TomWayburn on Thu, 13th Aug 2020 7:52 pm 



The details of an ideal post-Peak-Oil society are speculative and, in the non-Popperian sense, utopian. More like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, which is as close to nowhere spelled backward as Butler was willing to go. This “ideal” is about as reactionary as we can tolerate. Anything more like what we see today is hopeless. Consider Oscar Wilde’s remarks (making allowance for the non-existence of the soul and the extreme length of evolutionary time.

It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite impractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is impractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development. — Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

TomWayburn on Thu, 13th Aug 2020 8:02 pm 



The broken link should be https://www.dematerialism.net/onemergy.pdf

or

https://www.dematerialism.
net/onemergy.html

Tom Wayburn on Tue, 25th Aug 2020 6:16 pm 



For emergy I hope I have clean copies at:

https://dematerialism.net.emergyunit.htm

and

https://eroei.net/onemergy.html

and

https://independent.academia.edu/TomWayburn/