Isn't
it crazy to expect people, who can barely function past 65 years old
or before 18 years old, to be able to establish their own monetary
system, which of course requires their own economy to support it? (No
I don't mean THEIR economy) You can't build an economy in a person's
life span. It takes many generations. You keep hammering the same
point, Its not your money! Never was! I wonder why that is :(
Spongy Iris
Or
is it more crazy to continue to allow someone else to do for us what
we should have been doing for ourselves all along? What have we said
about money? That it's an accounting machine, with the
various circulating tokens as mere instances of what is recorded “on
the books.” Why have we said that pieces of paper with
denominations printed on it works better than anything else? Because
of Gresham's law reversed, which is a real law, which means that
Nature and FORCE has something to do with it, like the FORCE of
gravity which does not permit you to step off a cliff and walk in mid
air. Remember that as we move forward with this essay. The cheaper
the means of exchange, the easier it changes hands and eventually
drives everything else out of circulation as money tokens.
Due
to the inadequacies of our present education system, most people are
completely unaware of the actual situations surrounding the making of
a living. It's never taught in school. Neither is very much taught
about the common uses of money. Those things, in most places, one
finds out on one's own.
This
essay concerns the obvious. If it is of interest to you, perhaps
you'll be entertained. Maybe I'll not be all that entertaining, but
I promise you, everyone you've ever been entertained by – aside
from those among yourselves personally – that's right, through the
media, that constant source of interruption that schools prepare you
for, all those entertainers were of course PAID by someone, to keep
you entertained.
Those
paid entertainers were working to entertain you, while being paid by
someone else for doing so. The time spent by them was remunerated to
them in money. That money came from somewhere. Do you ever bother
to consider the source of the money you are paid with? You assume
it's yours too, I don't doubt. Your name on one of THEIR bank
accounts proves that, doesn't it?
For
many more obvious reasons, among the entertainers, I have to include
the vast array of musicians of all genres, as well, anyone connected
with the visual arts, any of the technicians connected with these
tremendous enterprises; they are all paid to do what they do and it
has a purpose. This represents a considerable swathe of wealth in
most modern societies.
In
the United States, a lot of it emanates from the state of California,
a place with roughly twice the area of Great Britain, half the people
and about the same sized economy. Great Britain of course has
perhaps a quarter of its economy emanating from London. The same
pattern is found in all major developed countries. Patterns of work
are generated by streams of money, flowing and directed to attain
certain goals, always to sell you something, whether it's a product,
service or just an idea.
What
are the implications? Of course, you know them. Just pay more
attention to them and – responsibly, I would say to each one of you
– decide when and where to pull away from THEM. Why? Because you
don't need THEM. Are they paying you to entertain you? No. You
pay for all kinds of services to allow THEM to intrude on your time
and space to entertain you. What's THEIR message? Figure it out.
Is it real? Is it fake? Especially if it's fake, you would perhaps
be more concerned to know.
We've
said that work is the time out of the rest of your life
that you spend being paid to do something. This takes all kinds
of forms and terms of barter, one's time and labor for what one
really needs and wants. Some are in money payments on specific
dates. Some are settled in deliveries of agricultural or industrial
products for which one is paid in money at a particular time. The
terms of barter settled by money are still barter, which never goes
away. Money performs the task of splitting the barter, so that a far
wider range of exchange is possible. But before charging forward,
let's briefly consider just how exactly much of humanity lives.
There
are people who live on the land and are totally dependent on what
they derive directly from the land, some actually live as hunter
gatherers and have indigenous societies that go back deep into time,
measured as we measure it. But these people do not measure time as
we measure it, not at all. They may know some of the annals of their
people, should there be any. These people may be some of the
luckiest on earth, as some have romanticized them. But among such
people, any who have been exposed to the modern world, its modern
conveniences they seek would invariably bring about the destruction
of their primitive societies.
Primitive
people, if they trade with others or not, settle matters within their
tribes, based on some rules involving barter. Someone gets something
for doing something or provides something for getting something else,
and so on. Nothing about their interactions has anything to do with
time as we know it. They neither measure it, nor have much in the
way of an interest in the use of numbers beyond counting the number
of their fingers and toes. They have plenty of interest in reading
natural signs. As we understand the skills of reading and writing,
they have no interest whatsoever.
Everywhere
else, one must earn one's living by a means of barter involving
money. You put in your time, you accomplish your job, you get paid
according to the satisfaction of who's paying you, your ability to do
or to stand the work, etc. This is the time out of the rest of
your life for earning your living. The rest of your life, you
sleep, you eat, you take care of your personal needs and you're
entertained.
You
might be able to afford to buy a car, a boat, a house, a farm, some
land, some animals. In most cases, you won't have all the money to
buy it in cash, so you'll have to finance it; borrow / rent the rest
of the money you'll need to buy whatever it is.
You were never
taught in school to regard everything you own as an asset. You were
probably even scolded into thinking something like that considering
anything an asset was somehow reducing it to its value as mere things
in terms of money and that whole attitude has clouded your
perception. Some of you bought very overpriced products that you
thought were going to be assets to you, but they aren't.
Check
out the advertising and entertainment you've been exposed to, lately,
last month, last year, ten years ago, etc. You had to do this, else
you wouldn't be happy. Who said so? It was some combination of
things that all came from the entertainers. You see what I mean? In
fact, there are some things about you that you decided to emulate or
succeed in because of something you got from some entertainer, even
if it's as seemingly insignificant as the way you'd play a song,
because you heard someone else do it that way.
So
anyway, we all acquire assets and these improve, or supposedly
improve, our chances of success at one thing or another, always with
the intention of improving our standard of living. No primitive
human, no matter how happy or unhappy they are, would find any of
this to his liking. We all remember the film about the bushman who
found a coke bottle one day. He was never happier than when he threw
it over a cliff. Primitive people generally like the way things are,
as long as Nature cooperates.
But
we have to earn a living. There's just this little problem; there's
never enough money and most of it is never in the hands of the common
people. By THEIR own admission, THEY hold 97% of all the monetary
assets on earth, leaving the rest of us who care about trying to earn
a living, with the remaining 3%.
Most
of the stuff you hear or read anywhere of an economic nature presumes
that 1) you already have a lot of money and 2) you are willing to
surrender it for the purposes of gambling on the future prospects of
this or that chain of productive operation. Most of you don't have
any money, you never have and you never will. Increasingly, it will
be difficult for you to pay your bills, have decent living
conditions, do much of anything, all because there isn't sufficient
money for you to do them. You've relied all your lives on someone
else's money that you must have in order to support your life, your
food, water, electricity, heat, the roof over your head. And you
wonder why there are so many homeless people?
So along comes
E. C. Riegel and he says that only those without money may be allowed
to issue it, he comes up with a perfectly obvious and sensible idea
upon which to base the monetary unit, realizes that it would be
international in scope and stumbles over the fact that fiat (will)
has been stolen from us by all the illegitimate issuers of THEIR
money (which doesn't even belong to us).
So then, each of us
may have something we can willingly do for someone else and if it's
reasonable, a certain amount of Valuns would naturally start flowing
through all the local communities everywhere and build a parallel
economy that would outlast THEIRS. I'm letting everybody know that
THEY can't keep THEIR economic Titanic afloat much longer and with
much that's being revealed, well, it's only a matter of time.
What
are you going to do when there is no gold, no silver, none of THEIR
STOLEN fiat money floating around? This would happen if the value of
the asset base crashed and was not recoverable. Where again did all
that money go? Come on students! Those who said depreciation of
assets win the cigar. It's the death of all money and
incidentally it's also the reason why THEIR limited quantity
commodity theories of money are GARBAGE, and I'm being extremely
kind. That instantly rules out ALL cryptocurrencies, because they
are all based on this scarcity of the trading commodity concept. And
all one needs do to erase them is pull the plug. Bye bye now!
So
Trade Genius or not, and there are dozens of other investor services
out there, when the doors of the stock exchanges close because nobody
has any confidence in them anymore and all that money has
disintegrated, and deflation savagely sets in, no, there won't be any
gold or silver floating around, because it will be too valuable
compared with everything else. And what's the value of labor under
these situations? It falls through the floor. Massive unemployment
occurs, all because there is never enough money.
E.
C. Riegel saw this and it is one reason why this blog exists. We
feel PASSIONATE about employment and work and desire to foster a
solid work ethic, because we WILL it! Understood? FIAT IS WILL and
without it we are all THEIR slaves!
Let's
again put this as mildly as we possibly can, ok? Most know the
famous jibe that opinions are like anal sphincters and everyone has
one. So you want the facts? There are some clowns out there who
similarly say that the ultimate value of any fiat currency is zero,
and they may be right, but always for the wrong reasons. Fiat? Fiat
currencies? It's WHOSE fiat that matters.
Yes,
the same mistake has been made over and over and over again, down
through time. The Chinese are said to have started it, others
followed. WHAT DID THEY ALL HAVE IN COMMON? Come on students!
That's right, they were all issued by either a government or a
bank. That's the right answer.
So
we say squarely to the clowns, it's not our fiat, stupid, it's THEIRS
that's illegitimate and THEIRS always fails because non producers
issue it. There are a few complementary currencies that are
still around that are based on some form of barter valuation and yes
they are all fiat currencies. They are PRIVATE fiat currencies and
in order to issue any, you have to be a member that has something to
sell to the community of others that use that currency.
We
understand that most of us can't just walk away from THEM and THEIR
money, because we are carrying mountains of debt. You know what will
eventually happen with all unsecured debt? It will default. That
will cause the Ponzi like structure of THEIR financial system to
collapse, and since THEIRS never separates clearing transactions from
lending money, when THEIRS fails, it takes everyone's wealth with it.
There won't be any money after that, because it was lost in the
depreciation (fall in prices) of the assets it purchased, which can
no longer be sold for even a fraction of their original prices.
Now
hyperinflation. That's when there is so much money floating around
that prices of everything rise until it costs you a month's rent to
buy a hamburger. Long before that, your money has become toilet
paper. Think a Weimar meltdown isn't possible in any number of
countries? All it usually takes to bring down a government is a
sufficient rise in food prices. How do the governments usually cope
with this situation? They hand out more money for no work. They
appropriate expenditures over taxes for their friends. They just
give money away without ever expecting any to return, because they
as issuers are illegitimate to begin with, they produce nothing
anyone wants to buy.
As
we have further stated, grifters and grafters are usually behind all
of this corruption and that's what this is. Think hyperinflation
wont happen? You have been living through it in every advanced and
developing country. It's just been going on in slow motion due to
the tremendous amount of used stuff that's a break on rising prices.
Hyperinflation has already run its course in various countries, like
Zimbabwe and Venezuela. The weather too, all about whatever is
behind it? Who knows?
So
this is a strenuous time and it will require strenuous and precision
efforts; always work smart not hard. Has anyone seen that
series on the Russian fellow who built his own log cabin, etc.? He
worked smart as well as hard. It seemed every action was precisely
timed and thought out. His tools were in tip top condition too. He
used physical leverage a lot, etc. Above all, he had the right
attitude about his work and wasn't being paid for it, though his
videos I'm sure are paying him a little and he claims he has a
regular job. Entertainment again. What's the message? See
America? Do as this Russian guy is doing. And maybe more of us
might do so, because we want to distance ourselves from THEM and
THEIR entertainments.
What's the difference in doing something
for money and doing it for nothing? For one thing, a level of
expectation is usually part of a paid situation. The employer has
certain requirements and expectations that must be met or the
situation doesn't last too long. There's usually some sort of fit or
chemistry involved as well. One usually has to be socially liked or
accepted by the other people one works with or for. Having to
earn a living makes it far more important to be able to go outside
your own personal focus and actually interact with other people.
What do the entertainers promote? The stay at home by yourself meme
is catching on and it's got some definite downsides.
School
never taught us anything about basic attitudes we would need to
succeed, because maybe they didn't even know what these were or ever
considered them important. As a bare minimum, education would have
enabled us to acquire the abilities to read and write in at least
our mother tongue and to count things using numbers. Reading,
writing and arithmetic (hope you never had Common Core) are still the
basic skills required in the modern world. If you still don't have
them and aren't living among hunter gatherers, these would be the
very first skills to acquire as soon as possible.
In some
societies, conformity to particular standards of dress, sociability
and composure are required, else one easily becomes dismissed as an
antisocial or deviant. THEY have social services to take care of
those people, so they are rarely seen. In the worst cases, THEY have
prisons where those who won't follow the conformity can be taken out
of regular contact with others. The proposed social credit systems
are intended to accompany all usage of THEIR cryptocurrency, when or
if it appears (all others will simply be devalued or turned off so
you wont be able to get to them and since they were ephemeral to
begin with, too damn bad if you spent too much of THEIR stolen fiat
currency on any of them). As we have always said, it's THEIR
internet and when it goes off, bye bye.
The basis of this
conformity stems from the same source as the entertainment. Just sit
back, relax and enjoy, pay and consume. You can't afford it? You
want it bad now too, don't you? You can't live without it, right?
How much more would you be willing to pay over time to have it right
now? Wait. Do you have a job? Are your prospects good for keeping
your job or even getting a promotion? How much more time and energy
are you willing to exert in future to have that whatever right now?
And THEY just love the idea of you living way above your
means, even if THEY never do, because even when THEY (come on,
usually synonymous with the top 5%) have all the money in the world,
THEY still require servants (slaves) to help THEM do the most basic
chores.
Consumerism was born the minute someone could finance
something they couldn't afford to buy. The rest, always involving
some form of entertainment, was punctuated by interruptions for
commercial advertising to get you into that craving for something to
make you happy when nothing around you is doing the job.
You
need to start asking some serious questions that might put you at
risk of becoming an antisocial or deviant. Who are you? What are
you? What about yourself is really your choice? How would you
choose, from what you honestly know about yourself, to change about
yourself to become more the person you want to become? How does an
audience, a market for your skills enter into all of this? What
style of life would you prefer to become accustomed and how much is
that likely to cost you in time, effort (your energy) and
money?
This blog has never advocated anything as ridiculous
and foolish as political revolutions or activism intended to overturn
the existing structures. Never! What obvious foolishness! We have
plenty of history to prove that all of these efforts, some ongoing
even today, were always intended to benefit THEM, never the people at
or near the bottom. Most of these would be leaders refer to the
people as “the masses” the better to depersonalize them for later
elimination when THEIR masterful social schemes don't work out, when
enough people wake up to realize they have been cheated once again.
E. C. Riegel would never have advocated anything of the kind.
Riegel
recognized that economies to scale require effort to build and set
up, that they can't always spring into action to take up the slack
that THEIR economies have eliminated as they became “too big to
fail.” By the way in the process of merger and acquisition, wealth
was actually destroyed because streams of income were eliminated for
more regular folks. The hubris behind many of THEIR acts of defiance
of Nature runs centuries deep.
Do you know what hubris is?
HEW-bris. Hubris = excessive pride or self-confidence, lacking
the basis for either genuine pride or confidence, frequently
associated with arrogance, conceit, conceitedness,
haughtiness, pride, vanity, self-importance, self-conceit,
pomposity, superciliousness, feeling of superiority,
imperiousness; hauteur; in informal usage, uppitiness,
big-headedness and also by direct inference, NARCISSISM. The biggest
ploy of THEIR entertainers is to equate your happiness with some very
profitable form of mass narcissism. And of course narcissists
attract predators, more of THEIR legions.
By any likely
comparison, E. C. Riegel was a very humble man, merely asserting the
obvious and wishing to bring it to our attention. You will (fiat)
have to consider the best wishes for your fellow men as you pursue
your own attainments and happiness. The rugged individualist,
another of THEIR favorite memes, will not help you long term. So
this isn't about you just becoming someone you'd be proud of, it's
about being involved with other people, based on something real, the
exchanges of time, labor, services and products.
Obviously the
entertainment we have been exposed to has left certain impressions on
us that THEY intended to use to further THEIR goal, to take over the
world. In that scheme, perhaps you count as a consumer of economic
product, perhaps you are used as part of some public policy effort,
to make some politician or political party seem more intelligent,
enlightened or compassionate, when none of this is the true objective
and to whatever extent you personally are involved, it has nothing to
do with you.
When
it comes to earning a living, what most of us require is knowledge of
what other people want or need doing and whether or not we might be
qualified to do what is required and of course for the price offered.
The proposal is built around a new institution we call an exchange.
Of course we exchange our goods, services and time among our members
and these are measured in Valuns instead of THEIR money. Meeting
other real people through local exchanges is something THEY have
tried to make uninteresting to the vast majority. Would it have been
better had we said we were going to establish a network of private
clubs? That's what this proposal looks like, but we'd prefer calling
them exchanges.
How
does one meet or associate with people anymore? On what basis? The
local exchange focuses this key human need for cooperation and
interaction to achieve both for ourselves individually and as
communities, what we each might want. Of course any core product
involved with the basics of life; food, clothing, eventually lodging,
housing, capital goods (machines, vehicles, etc.) is already going to
be there operating in THEIR system. Many operators are aware of the
problems with THEIR money and will want to seek a hedge against the
failure of THEIR money, etc.
How do we connect then? Assume
the internet is down or no more. Even if it's up, it's time to move
in the opposite direction. All the way back to hunter gatherer
societies, as are currently springing up even in advanced countries,
because there's not enough money where it is most needed? No, back
to what we have always spoken about, the size of each enterprise
always operating within its own scale; production, customers,
revenue, finding that place where further growth would result in
diminishing returns to scale, a fundamental law of Nature itself
which THEIR economies always defy to OUR peril.
We
did mention Herbert Stein's law, “trends that can't continue, will
stop.” If a company expands at the wrong time, they may be doomed.
If they expand at the right time and then fail to scale back when
the trend fades, they are likely doomed. There are structural
changes in technology and custom that can also doom various kinds of
businesses. Whole areas of consumer products that used to be sold as
“this is what you need to make you happy or at least more
satisfied,” are long gone out of business because the trend could
not go on, so it stopped. Some things once stopped can never be
restarted. Once automobiles became more feasible, horses and buggies
were never coming back, etc.
The
connection with each other as members of the proposed local exchanges
are 1) by dropping by the exchanges on a regular basis to check out
all the offers for jobs that our members would be offering and 2) by
seeing advertising on the backs of our money, letting us know who
will take it in exchange for goods and services we actually want or
need to buy.
In order to ensure the vast majority of
humanity from THEIR fully intended genocide or obsolescence, we must
make it our deliberate business to care a little bit more for each
other and less about our own narcissistic preoccupations, many of
which if we look more carefully at them, will reveal themselves to be
foisted upon us by THEIR entertainers.
Many discussions over
the years about this proposal have convinced me how few people
actually understand their situation in life, how to make it better
for themselves or avoid making it worse. We are often propelled
through life on the expectations of others, but more often the ideas
we have about our own aspirations come directly and indirectly from
THEIR entertainers. And we PAY for THEM to entertain us on top of
it! But there is often truth in observed irony.
As
for building economies that take several lifetimes, we have all lived
through situations where economies were created overnight by THEM, -
remember the dot com bubble? - only to be smashed to bits (pun
partially intended), when THEY had made enough money on THEIR money
without work. That's THEIR goal.
Meanwhile, we need to band
together, figure out who we are, where we are, what we can do, what
we can't or won't do, etc. and it's best to begin with already
existing businesses that have been going on for a long time already
that serve as models. We know the difference between wholesale and
retail. We know that the difference has to do with efficiencies to
scale. We are also aware of many structural changes that make and
break industries. We are aware of THEIR gadgetry, all intended to
make human effort seem more worthless. What happens when a job is
always paid in money issued by the employee not the employer? What
happens when nobody buys what THEY are selling and instead buys
locally from people they know and trust? What happens when the trust
of those in distant places falls away so much that THEIR long term
trends can't go on? Those trends top out and fall or just stop in
mid stride as has happened dozens of times when some technology got
too far ahead of actual usefulness or other hazards were discovered
that rendered the technology useless.
Don't
for any instant be fooled by the so called power of any technology.
These are tinker toys of adolescent narcissists who usually have very
little use for anyone but themselves. Having been occupied in the
computer technologies most of my life, I've run into quite a few of
them. I suppose that when a computer program of their choice finally
says “I don't need you anymore,” perhaps they'll have sense
enough to pull the plug and for good measure purge the program, so it
can't be spread further. Remember, the choice to be whatever you
want to become is bounded by your attitudes and your information
before you ever set out to acquire any skills.
All
the best,
David
Burton
dpbmss@mail.com
