Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Cupcakes for Currency




For Self Determination We Need Free Currencies!

Competing regional currency - Berkshares
Anthony Migchels
Activist Post

We can all agree on one thing: our money is at the heart of economic problems. It is issued at interest by private banks and inflated and deflated and nowadays stagflated at will. It finances those it owns or wants to own and starves the rest. It has literally financed and bought the world as we know it today.

Everything we want, socially equitable relations, ecological sustainability, room for personal development, etc, will have to be financed and today's money will not, and frankly, cannot do it.

We are not going to finance the Kingdom of God, or the New Age, or the Aquarius era, or whatever with interest. We are not going to hand over 50% of our labor's efforts in building this new era to some vampire class pushing computer buttons while monopolizing wealth.

Whoever runs this world is not important. They rule it because they own and control our money, and we allow them to own it by putting our money in his banks and not demanding alternatives.

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So let's take our money out of these banks and support or build our own private currencies, operated for the common good.

Like in Germany, where dozens of regional currencieshave sprung up in the last decade. Or like the WIR in Switserland, active for more than 80 years and turning over the equivalent of 2 billion CHF per year and 1 billion outstanding credit. Or in the US the Berkshares, or even the Liberty Dollar.

On the internet there is Bitcoin, but also the currencies of on-line games and applications likeSecond Life.

Because of increased economic awareness, great momentum is leading how to create low cost, fundamentally fair, high-powered working capital for local, national and international communities. Providing reliable services, easy means of payment, low cost credit, convertibility to other units, run by highly capable people in small organizations.

Both the theorists of Gold and interest free currencies agree that the current system must go and each suggests competition between currencies in a free market.  So what are we waiting for?

There are wonderful rewards out there for people willing to develop and run these systems. Business opportunities, but also the satisfaction of doing something profoundly worthwhile. So many wonderful and inspired people are out there who want to work to express themselves while making a living. That is what labor should be all about.
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If not money but labor was the scarce factor of production, everything would be different. People will no longer be forced to prostitute themselves for cash. They will be able to be productive in a way that is suitable to them and their passions.

Whatever our differences are, one pressing need we all have is for better money. There is no need to beg the system to provide it. The system was created to exploit and create monopolies. We cannot reform something so fundamentally opposite of free and fair. We must look for new ways. These ways are becoming available.

By providing capital alternatives, we can stop pleading and start leading.  A great many people will never care to understand the ways of the world, but they will always recognize a better deal. Self-determination can never be achieved without genuine choices and competition.

It's time to put alternative monetary options on the table and let the market choose.

full article...

Anthony Migchels is an Interest-Free Currency activist and founder of the Gelre, the first Regional Currency in the Netherlands. You can read all of his articles on his blog Real Currencies.

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