#78 Self Financing of Labour & Cost Accounting

A real perception change takes place when one buys one's own job with one's own money, and gets paid in one's own money. The first thing to realize is that everyone who does this, places themselves into the position to proclaim that from henceforth, they can not be bought, that is, they determine their own wages based on the tasks asked. For the employer, the perception is that labour is paying him in advance to do a job for him. The balance is that of “good will” (intangible wealth) shared between the employer and labour; together, they make each other's eventual wealth possible. I hope everyone is following me, thus far. 

The employer is now faced with making the same decision about himself; his labour, his contribution, knowing full well that every Valun ultimately paid to labour (his included) is a liability against his balance sheet in his new Valun ledger. B member businesses are expected to maintain a positive balance on their Valun accounts at their local IE at all times, else they're bankrupt. What happens to a bankrupt? Their stuff usually gets seized and sold at auction for way below market prices; at a discount, to try and settle a debt. Can we prevent this from happening completely? Probably not. We'll have to devise our own methods of resolving such issues, should they arise. My guess is that we'd probably be wisest to be aware of public law on these points and counsel our members to avoid recourse to THEIR means of settlement.

But right here, we can emphatically say something about these situations. When a business can no longer function because it can no longer bring in enough money to pay its bills and run at a profit, it is dead. It isn't wealth anymore if it can no longer bring in income. It's just stuff. What can be done? Perhaps some fresh money can get the thing started again and it can become wealth again to whoever works for it. But sometimes not.

This is where we consider the emerging repurposing market. We have a bunch of defunct strip malls scattered across the country. What do we do with them? We offer to turn them into the next wave of innovation as workshop spaces and speciality shops where they can turn out smaller runs of high quality durable products, more than likely custom designed. Eventually, more exotic products could be made in these smaller shops too.

Rather than having them all mass produced under pressure in one massive plant and from thence transported all around the world, each place redundantly makes products that local people want. This marks the end of “one size fits all” and the re-emergence of micro-technical specialization from the consumer products level all the way through the heavy capital inventory products capable of doing heavy work or manufacturing; some of those vacant store spaces are pretty large.

We now have a consciousness that's building on the internet that we are all just scattered around on the surface of a ball spinning and gliding through space. Peer to peer networking brought about the internet. It can now also bring about a revolution in how we could be doing business with each other; becoming affiliates and getting paid to help each other sell products and services. Since the Valun is the Valun anywhere and everywhere all at once no matter how much of it is circulating, it becomes a de facto standard of value measurement. This allows trading partners in China and America to figure costs in one financial language. We don't want to leave anyone out, this applies to all countries around the world.

So you see, you could be free of bankers (and that sucking sound of usury) eventually, even if they still can use FORCE against you. As more is exposed (revealed) concerning their schemes (crimes) and how they manipulate governments like puppets, since they have turned every state they have ever conquered into a perpetual debt slave, more will turn away from them. Meanwhile, those who have better things to do with their lives will certainly want to know more about how our proposal helps them.

We remind you all, no one is helped by themselves in this world, the joke of complete self reliance should be clear by now. That's romanticism in the sense of fiction, that is. No, in order for us to get anywhere or do anything, we need each other. We need something that builds mutual trust among us, having money that we issued by our own labour, since that's exactly how by far and away most of it will eventually be issued.

Let's take another look at the issue. A labour contract between Ken (employer) and Mike (employee) runs for six months at V6 an hour ($16.62 as of 4/9/16) for a standard 40 hour week, etc. Let's say that's V5,000 ($13,850 as of 4/9/16). Now that amount will be paid to Ken's account, created by Mike's fiat, on or around Mike's first day of work stated on that contract. That amount in Ken's account (or more probably the account of his B member business) will be paid back to Mike on successive paydays that are also stipulated on the contract. This allows the IE personnel, who always have a copy of it, to know what they're supposed to do on certain dates.

Now, at the end of six months, Mike has earned and caused to be brought into existence V5,000 worth of purchasing power. Note something here please: Mike's fiat created/issued the money on the first day of work as stipulated on his contract with Ken. It became money on that date because Mike bought a job from Ken. Then on successive pay dates, Ken paid Mike back his loan at no interest, thus completing the money circuit right there because Mike accepted back money he paid for his job. From that point on, whatever value that represented that money has been factored into the economy of the system and is inflation neutral. One would expect a prosperous community to have more money in it than a poor one. That money would be busy doing work around the community rather than waiting to be paid from others paying back what was never created.

Our proposal is a system which honours everyone as a source of value. No other proposed monetary system (and certainly not the one we suffer under now) ever does that. Using the Valun really would make human life more valuable. Notice we aren't claiming anything particularly “green” about our proposed money, but if that's the way the world wants to go, and it needs to, then that will happen far more readily if we have the money ourselves to bring it about. Understood?

The products and services for sale in Valuns don't change, their cost accounting is the same, except for labour, which is rendered cheaper to the business (not free but cheaper), since the money to pay for labour would not originate with the employer. This means that the only things employers have then to concern themselves with, are the costs of the materials required to run their business.

A lot of the materials for rebuilding “mom and pop” establishments, since that's what we intend on doing, we might as well say so right here and now, would come from anything that's repurposed and recycled, from the disintegration of the present system (oh yeah, it's going down, has done already in many places) and the rediscovery of the old and useful where it can be found in each local community. We fully expect to see before as yet unseen variety in all kinds of products and services which could be readily traded if we all used the same financial language around the country and around the world.

Hey, what would you really like to do? How could you talk your friends into doing it with you? How much money would you need? OK, better yet, how much would the community allow you to have? Why do I ask? Well, if the sky were the limit, you'd want to build maybe some gigantic plant that would produce, well I don't know, perhaps the most expensive widget in the world that few would even care to buy, like a war plane, or even something that would have so major a consequence for the community, that it would be deformed forever after, like a strip mine or fracking. You see, we can't and wont make the same mistakes THEY do.

So let's think smaller, four guys get together and decide to form a band. They're going to play music and arrange to play at concerts and festivals (which we predict will become more numerous and popular especially if they have nothing to do with them). The band posts their music free on the internet, because they loathe the whole music copyright establishment (intellectual property law and its direct ties to THEIR money) and anyway if people don't get a chance to hear for free what they play, their band wont build a following, which is really what they want. Well, somewhere along the line, these guys walk into their local IE (they're all A members) and form a business (open a B member account) with their band's name on it (a partnership). Now the proceeds from their concert tour go back into this account. They can then pay themselves down to the minimum, but the account has to retain a positive account balance, even if it's ... 1 cend.

By the way, tickets for these events might be whatever they are in their money plus whatever they'd require in Valuns at the gate. The dollars go to pay the band's taxes and anything else that must be paid in THEIR money, like contributing to the production of the blank or unstamped V-Checks with ads on the back.  Imagine themselves featured there, their band on the backs of the people's money!  They want the Valuns to use to live in their own communities. They might keep an account in one of THEIR banks just to pay taxes. We see a lot of small businesses doing this moving forward. Hey, maybe people would ask for fewer of THEIR dollars if they also got paid in Valuns.

We have elsewhere and always want to make mention of certain real economic laws. One is the diminishing returns to scale law, which really defines efficiency as optimum at usually far smaller units of production than are utilized today. Causing “the production problem” to cease, may be fine in a “one size fits all” world and “if you don't like it be damned,” but it can't last. You flout natural law only so long and then when Nature has its way, more damage is usually done. Offering this proposal says there can be and is another way that's open to all people everywhere, if they would only see it and spread the word. 

I wont complain that this site has so few views for being up so long, because the subject itself is not just difficult, it's repulsive!  The subject of money IS repulsive and has been rendered so, simply because money itself has become repulsive to the vast majority of people out there and they don't even know why. Something that should be at least of modest interest to more people is held with some degree of disgust or apology even when it is used to do beneficent things for others. People are unaware of its taint or from whence it gets it.

Well as we've said, others than we are better at this aspect of understanding our situation. We're suggesting that everyone is really subconsciously aware of the taint of THEIR money and we are of course repulsed by the idea of our government taking from us in taxes, so we think. But there's a lot more to this: the money we've always used is not ours, it's the government's loaned from a bank. The bankers stole our fiat over money when they monopolized our money (that happened over a period of hundreds of largely miserable centuries when life for the vast majority was “nasty, brutish and short” and where most had no money at all). Then they told us that fiat money was no good to fool us into believing it. Then they also convinced us that the government was ours when it clearly is not. We were willing to put up with everything as long as we could maintain some sort of modest existence year in and year out. 

But is that really living? Is that really what any of us would like to be doing? Why don't we do anything different? Because we don't have the money. Weill why don't we have the money? E. C. Riegel observed what money is and what it does, with those observations we stand academic economics, the banking system, capitalism (and socialism, its evil twin sister), up against the wall of our current historical understanding and demand an end to lies, fraud and chianery; each living human being has value in and of themselves and from whence derives wealth capable of producing income for all. Therefore the money fiat is ours by right. Since that is so, not if or when or where, but since that is so, all THEIR money is fundamentally fraudulent whether it's digits on computers or has tokens made of precious metals or recycled cat poop, and it all has blood on it too.

Other natural laws apply to profit and business. Generally the newer and larger anything is, the more expensive it will be. Factors of natural rarity play into this as well. Businesses that perform needful personal services are probably unchanged since they came into socially fashionable existence many centuries ago. Their profit margins are generally generous enough to keep some people busy. Profit margins may be huge in the repurposing and recycling markets, because the material basis of product is generally the cheapest. People in used goods repurposing can perhaps achieve many hundreds if not thousands of percent profit for what they can do; finding something obscure and making it available and suitable to be sold ans a useful product.

Now imagine a self financing labour approach to some problems. We know that some environmental clean up nightmares will have to be dealt with or there's no future, it's really that simple. So what if everyone around the world got together and pledged whatever number of Valuns to any company or anyone capable of forever quieting and cleaning up Fukushima? We suggest there's probably a nanotech approach that would work. We don't even know if it can be done. Perhaps we are too late and living on the edge of the abyss and don't know it yet. But if it could be done, what would it take? Name your price in dollars and we'll raise it and pay it in Valuns. This would mean that everyone everywhere would need to organize and form IE's and support an IVES and begin using Valuns, etc.

It would mean that what we've now put off doing since 2011 or 2013 should be attempted again. Then the people of the earth would self-finance this mess out of our future. Then we can begin transforming the rest of the earth as well, since we will have the money to do it.

But before I leave off this subject, I've saved the heart of my message for last. It's a message to all the public employees out there who would want to be A members of our IE communities and earn Valuns. What does it take to join? Two A members you know recommend you and you can prove you belong where you live and you're in. We'll discuss the homeless problem in a forthcoming paper. This is for public employees for right now.

What you would do is to earn Valuns along with whatever you received in THEIR money. You determine what your likely added tax burden might be; you will be getting a raise, only it will be paid in Valuns. In order to do this, you'd have a labour contract directly with the community through your local IE (each and every IE is a B member of itself), since no government can at this point join any IE. Each contract cycle you'd purchase your raise from the IE. You'd pay/issue into existence to the IE the Valuns on the contract the first work day of the contract, bringing the Valuns into existence by your fiat, and they would be paid back to you on successive pay days as you fulfilled the requirements of your public job.

The first people we want to participate are local law enforcement, teachers, firemen and water and sewer maintenance personnel. You see where this is going. We also want to enlist any veterans and those on disabilities. When you are paid in your money and you intend on spending that money in your local community, or any local community that becomes part of the VEN, then they will become more responsive to our local concerns. Again, if our message is “come out of her, my people,” even public employees are in need of somewhere to come out into and many have or would have other business ideas they'd perhaps rather be doing.

I have a serious question: how would it affect average criminal behaviour if they realized that it paid to work for a living? What if they realized they didn't have to go to prison to have at least as nice a subsistence out of prison? A lot of things would automatically change, for the better with Valuns. Would political activism matter so much if you had plenty to do, plenty to eat and the future looked brighter? We still must deal with Fukushima. So please, spread this around so more know about it and think of the potential. Just don't take too much time because time may be running out.

David Burton
dpbmss@mail.com

Current Hypothetical Value of a Hypothetical Value Unit

[11 April, 2016: Reading your blog, I think use of the Valun would be a protest. Gandhi would probably approve. Rehab

Why protest anything? Do you really think it accomplishes anything? They will do what they want to do regardless of what anyone thinks.

Re: “fraudulent whether it's digits on computers or has tokens made of precious metals or recycled cat poop:” Clearly gold is worth more than recycled cat poop, but imagine a piece of gold that could buy everything someone else had? If someone gave them that one gold coin in exchange for something, as long as he held that coin and was indebted to the man who gave it to him in trade for everything he had, he would be a slave. Ethan

That's putting it mighty well, thank-you.] 

[14 April, 2016: Again, this is probably being dumb but I get how wealth makes income, but what about people who are paid for their work all in big lump sums like farmers, builders, etc. Their payment still represents income from wealth, right?   Ben, Iowa

Yes, you have it right, ANY income from wealth establishes wealth as a fact. We're going to get into all the ways that money is destroyed in a future paper.]