self-regulating markets
a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the University of Chicago of all places: basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ... but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc .. if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the regulations and the regulators, seems pretty clear that since the 80's, under the ethos of self-regulation, there has been a very strong tendency towards regulatory capture .. Michel ** Book: The Illusion of Free Markets. Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order. By Bernard E. Harcourt. Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2011* Description Allan Engler: "In The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, Harcourt holds that markets will be regulated by governments or by the rich on behalf of themselves. Few markets are actually unregulated. He goes on to make the case that markets directed by dominant players in their private interest result not in greater freedom but in heavier repression. Harcourt begins by examining the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock Exchange. These exchanges are widely viewed as epitomes of the free market, but they are actually self-regulated private monopolies protected by legislation. Their rules are made by member firms and policed by internal committees that determine the methods and time of trading as well as who may participate. As should be expected, the rules favor those who make them. ... It is no revelation to point out that when a few are allowed to make the rules, they will direct markets in their own interests. Nonetheless, in mainstream opinion it is now taken for granted that markets regulated by dominant players are preferable to government regulation. This was not always so. Before the rise of industrial capitalism, industries were self-regulated—by Guilds that were usually dominated by wealthy merchants. Seeing this, political thinkers from the Scholastics to the Enlightenment generally held that governments had a responsibility to intervene to curb speculation, price gouging, and hoarding, to keep the prices of necessities low, to police the quality of goods and services, and to maintain public hygiene. Mainstream economists now teach that support for free markets can be traced back to Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century and Jeremy Bentham in the early nineteenth. Harcourt notes that Smith and Bentham did view self-interest in the market as generally beneficial, but he points out both also wrote of circumstances in which government intervention was clearly required to curb the self-interested power of great merchants and masters. Harcourt also questions the prevailing view that the late nineteenth century was a time of laissez faire policies. While industrial production did expand dramatically, governments played critical roles in the accumulation of capitalist wealth. To expand their countries’ shares of global trade, governments organized and financed shipyards and railway construction. They spent lavishly on navies and armies and colonial wars. Each empire restricted access to captive markets through imperial preferences and tariff walls." ( http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/the-illusion-of-free-markets-punishment-an...) History of self-regulation by the rich Allan Engler: "the claim that control of markets should be left to the rich has an historical precedent. Harcourt draws our attention to France before the 1789 revolution and the Physiocrats—so called because they advocated rule by natural laws. Most economic histories now dismiss Physiocrats for having insisted that land alone is the source of exchange value. In France in their time, that was not so controversial: land still was the main source of great wealth. In their time, what distinguished the Physiocrats was the claim that private property and unregulated markets were in accord with laws of nature and that the role of government was to vigorously repress criminal acts against this natural order. Physiocrats held that absolute monarchy, by placing government in the hands of the largest landowners, was the natural form of government. Leading Physiocrats—Francois Quesnay, Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, and Le Mercier de la Riviere—were prominent in the Court of Louis XV. For them it was natural to oppose government restriction on profit-making. They likewise viewed it as natural to advocate repressive policing and onerous penalties for thieves, the idle, the disorderly and anyone else who could interfere with their natural order. Le Mercier, as governor of Martinique—then one of the wealthiest French slave colonies—gained notoriety for his heavy-handed policing which even plantation owners came to believe was provoking disorder among the slave population. Although slavery, landed aristocracies, and absolute monarchies have largely passed into history, the ideology of natural order, freedom for the rich and powerful, and repression for the dispossessed and disaffected still resonates with the very rich and their supporters. That is at the root of the current neo-conservative reaction. Beginning in the 1940s, University of Chicago economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, began campaigning to replace liberal-social democratic welfare state policies with old ruling class verities. By the 1970s, they had a powerful constituency: the super-rich. Long hostile to Keynesian policies, and frustrated that domestic profit-making opportunities were decreasing, the wealthy heirs of great family fortunes were smitten by arguments that economic rewards and decisions are best left to the very rich. By the early 1980s, the policies promoted by Chicago School economists and generously financed by corporations and the foundations of wealthy families were adopted by the newly elected conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S., and Brian Mulroney in Canada. By the late 1980s a Washington Consensus called for the deregulation of markets, cuts to the taxes paid by corporations and the wealthy, privatization of public utilities and cuts to social services. Although some of the advocates of unregulated markets call themselves libertarians, the widening disparities that followed anti-Keynesian policies were accompanied by more repressive state power. Freeing the rich to do as they choose in the markets they dominate, obviously allows them to appropriate more of total income. Among the masses, some may benefit from a trickle down. Of those who are left with less income and employment, some will find comfort in knowing that at least a few have gained more wealth than they can imagine. Others will go on strike, organize boycotts, or participate in unauthorized protests. A few will engage in petty criminality. In countries that have been impoverished, some may lash out with any weapons available. In response or in anticipation, the privileged will demand more aggressive policing, more onerous criminal sanctions and more punitive military actions abroad. Neo-conservatives view repressive violence as a required response to domestic and international criminality. Harcourt makes the case that crime rates are actually related to entitlements, employment opportunities, and income disparities." ( http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/the-illusion-of-free-markets-punishment-an...) Example of self-regulation Allan Engler: "Harcourt begins by examining the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock Exchange. These exchanges are widely viewed as epitomes of the free market, but they are actually self-regulated private monopolies protected by legislation. Their rules are made by member firms and policed by internal committees that determine the methods and time of trading as well as who may participate. As should be expected, the rules favor those who make them. The Chicago Board of Trade forbids outsiders from engaging in after-hours trading. However, the insiders who control the Board, when they agree among themselves, can modify the rules, giving themselves opportunities for exceptionally profitable trades. The Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock Exchange allow brokerage firms to restrict retail buyers (outsiders) from reselling for periods of thirty to ninety days. “But the same brokerage firms may allow large institutions to dump their stock in the after-market at any time.” In New York, “members of the stock exchange may get together and fix the commission rates on stock transactions of less than $500,000,” but they can “freely negotiate commissions for larger stock transactions”—which they dominate. In Chicago, when parties are in dispute, the Board’s Office of Investigation and Audits may investigate. Where its decisions are challenged, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission may get involved. If disputes are unresolved, the U.S. Attorney’s office can initiate civil or criminal actions. The point is that these “free markets” are minutely regulated, first by the dominant insiders and then by civil and criminal law." ( http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/06/the-illusion-of-free-markets-punishment-an...) -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
El 20/06/11 04:18, Michel Bauwens escribió:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ...
Interesting book Michel, thanks for sharing. About the thesis: if all self-regulated markets benefit a few, then the thesis excludes the possibility of organizing self-organized commons-based markets? Following commons theories, collective action institutions are valid instruments to govern commons (as markets), so if self-regulation and autonomy leads to "injustice", self-regulated commons fall in a new tragedy? what do you think? Best, -- Franco Iacomella
The book indicates the imbrication of governments and corporations determining how markets 'really' function, and since markets are always embedded in societies and their institutions, self-regulating markets seem to me a contradiction, which changes the subject to 'what kind of regulation' and obviously, a state captured by private interests is not a good solution. Self-regulating market ideology means in practice, today, 'let greedy corporations regulate themselves amongst each other, without interference from other stakeholders and no consideration for the common good'. The direction to seek solace, is to take both a commons point of view, i.e. seeing markets embedded in the natural, human, and productive commons, and to take the point of view of multiple stakeholders. We need to find mechanisms so that various stakeholders, i.e. all those that are affected by a particular market, can set parameters within which the market can operate. Within these parameters, maximum freedom could still be given to the enterpreneurial entities operating in particular market. But these are still 'external' constraint. How do we make constraints 'internal'; my answer is increasingly, by reforming the 'format' of the corporation to mission-oriented enterprises, who by their very social charters are ethically and legally obligated to serve a certain commons or social good. To answer the tragegy of the commons itself. I indeed believe that commonses themselves are partially selfish, since they care about their own commons, not the global good; this means that there is still need for collective society and its institutions, which can similarly set parameters ... but in my view, that 'society', those institutions, are themselves constituted of the variety of commons and their commoners/citizens, not by a 'captured state'. On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 10:50 PM, Franco Iacomella <[email protected]>wrote:
El 20/06/11 04:18, Michel Bauwens escribió:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few
...
Interesting book Michel, thanks for sharing.
About the thesis: if all self-regulated markets benefit a few, then the thesis excludes the possibility of organizing self-organized commons-based markets?
Following commons theories, collective action institutions are valid instruments to govern commons (as markets), so if self-regulation and autonomy leads to "injustice", self-regulated commons fall in a new tragedy? what do you think?
Best,
-- Franco Iacomella
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the University of Chicago of all places:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ...
but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc ..
if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the regulations and the regulators,
Can you talk some more about what you mean exactly by "self-regulating"? How do I identify a "self-regulated" market? -- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis. 2011/6/20 Samuel Rose <[email protected]>
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the University of Chicago of all places:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ...
but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc ..
if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the regulations and the regulators,
Can you talk some more about what you mean exactly by "self-regulating"? How do I identify a "self-regulated" market?
-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
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On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
Thank you. It seems very fair to me to say that corporations are by virtue regulated by governments, and therefore cannot plausibly be viewed as "self-regulating". Each and every corporation has submitted it's existence to the government, and agreed to abide by the regulations of the government at least in reference to registering itself. What am I missing?
2011/6/20 Samuel Rose <[email protected]>
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> wrote:
a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the University of Chicago of all places:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ...
but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc ..
if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the regulations and the regulators,
Can you talk some more about what you mean exactly by "self-regulating"? How do I identify a "self-regulated" market?
-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
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This message and any attachments (the "message") are confidential, intended solely for the addressee(s), and may contain legally privileged information. Any unauthorised use or dissemination is prohibited. E-mails are susceptible to alteration. I shall not be liable for the message if altered, changed or falsified.
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
As far as the Law is concerned, the government has the right to regulate. It is the government's decision whether it does or not. So the free market is self-regulated only because the government allows it. 2011/6/20 Samuel Rose <[email protected]>
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:31 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
Thank you.
It seems very fair to me to say that corporations are by virtue regulated by governments, and therefore cannot plausibly be viewed as "self-regulating". Each and every corporation has submitted it's existence to the government, and agreed to abide by the regulations of the government at least in reference to registering itself. What am I missing?
2011/6/20 Samuel Rose <[email protected]>
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Michel Bauwens <
wrote:
a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the University of Chicago of all places:
basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ...
but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc ..
if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the regulations and the regulators,
Can you talk some more about what you mean exactly by "self-regulating"? How do I identify a "self-regulated" market?
-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
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This message and any attachments (the "message") are confidential, intended solely for the addressee(s), and may contain legally privileged information. Any unauthorised use or dissemination is prohibited. E-mails are susceptible to alteration. I shall not be liable for the message if altered, changed or falsified.
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
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-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Samuel Rose wrote:
It seems very fair to me to say that corporations are by virtue regulated by governments, and therefore cannot plausibly be viewed as "self-regulating". Each and every corporation has submitted it's existence to the government, and agreed to abide by the regulations of the government at least in reference to registering itself. What am I missing?
Governments are mostly unable to regulate corporations because those corporations are actually regulating governments through lobbying, bribery, blackmail and other subtle ways used to create or adjust laws.
Governments are mostly unable to regulate corporations because those corporations are actually regulating governments through lobbying, bribery, blackmail and other subtle ways used to create or adjust laws.
So you might say corporations 'regulate' themselves through government processes which they write or modify for their own purposes. But these kind of 'regulations' do not achieve what we, the people, really want because of a much more fundamental problem with those bodies. Corporations, in their current form, cannot do the "right thing" because they/we erroneously believe Profit to be the goal of production while somehow misplacing Product itself as the real end. This is caused by our choosing investors who expect to be paid Profit. This can be solved by choosing investors who expect to be paid Product. But the only investors able to accept Product as a return are the future Users of that Product. So we must organize Users to co-buy and co-own the Sources of Production for the purpose of receiving at-cost use-value. Corporations organized in this way will have no reason to work against we, the people, except when selling some of that Product to non-owners. For that we must write a Terms-of-Operation as a form of self-regulation to impose the constraint "Profit is Payer Investment" so that all Users incrementaly gain ownership in the Sources of the Products they need.
This is a common understanding of self-regulation, but really it's doublespeak. A system is self-regulating if and only if it possesses the capacity to control its state in entirety. I contend that, as an extension to Ashby's law, a system can only self-regulate if its regulatory overhead is zero. Ashby's law roughly states that only variety consumes variety, or, in order to control a system with a certain amount of variety, the control system must have at least as much variety. For system X to control system Y, V(X) >= V(Y). However, this reading is somewhat naïve, as the system X actually "spends" some of its variety on regulating system Y. We can call this the "regulatory overhead", and it is roughly equal to V(Y) in the trivial case: Unless the regulation of a system is the intent of the system, its purpose will be less well served by the regulation. So, it stands to reason that if a system X is self-regulating, then one of these will follow: - X's sole purpose is self-regulation (i.e., it's a trivial self-regulating system) - X does not manage to capture its entire variety, meaning that it is only partially self-regulating. - X's regulatory overhead is zero. What does it mean, when the regulatory overhead is zero, then? It means that either V(X) = 0, or, that all of the regulatory work produces beneficial byproducts. i.e., the system, by virtue of self-regulation, achieves other goals as well. Whether this is possible, I do not know. I have not yet seen a self-regulating system. The universe expands and cools, the human body whithers and dies. However, a town can be governed by a state, which can be governed by the laws of physics. There is sufficient variety in the Universe that it cools slowly - its velocity of deregulation is low. Self-regulating markets then either have accomplished zero regulatory overhead, or, they yield no nontrivial results (zero surprisal; 0 bits of information output), or, they are leaking variety, in the sense that they are not actually stable, but are deregulating at some rate. d(R(X))/dX > 0 Just thinking out loud... - Smári On 06/20/2011 07:31 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
2011/6/20 Samuel Rose <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 3:18 AM, Michel Bauwens <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > a recent book on the myth of free self-regulating markets, from the > University of Chicago of all places: > > basic thesis: self-regulation is always done for the benefit of the few ... > > but the larger question is: have their ever been, apart from illegal > markets, self-regulated markets? nearly all market activities are incredibly > embedded in institutional regulations, norms, etc .. > > if indeed self-regulated markets are few and far between, then the question > is more: what kind of regulations, and who produces and controls the > regulations and the regulators, >
Can you talk some more about what you mean exactly by "self-regulating"? How do I identify a "self-regulated" market?
-- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
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Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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-- Smári McCarthy - International Modern Media Institute [email protected] - +354 662 2701 - http://immi.is/ PGP: B221 6FD2 779A E5B5 9D79 743C D5DC 2A79 C2E4 AE92
2011/6/20 Smári McCarthy <[email protected]>:
This is a common understanding of self-regulation, but really it's doublespeak.
A system is self-regulating if and only if it possesses the capacity to control its state in entirety.
I contend that, as an extension to Ashby's law, a system can only self-regulate if its regulatory overhead is zero.
Ashby's law roughly states that only variety consumes variety, or, in order to control a system with a certain amount of variety, the control system must have at least as much variety. For system X to control system Y, V(X) >= V(Y).
However, this reading is somewhat naïve, as the system X actually "spends" some of its variety on regulating system Y. We can call this the "regulatory overhead", and it is roughly equal to V(Y) in the trivial case: Unless the regulation of a system is the intent of the system, its purpose will be less well served by the regulation.
So, it stands to reason that if a system X is self-regulating, then one of these will follow:
- X's sole purpose is self-regulation (i.e., it's a trivial self-regulating system) - X does not manage to capture its entire variety, meaning that it is only partially self-regulating. - X's regulatory overhead is zero.
What does it mean, when the regulatory overhead is zero, then?
It means that either V(X) = 0, or, that all of the regulatory work produces beneficial byproducts. i.e., the system, by virtue of self-regulation, achieves other goals as well.
Whether this is possible, I do not know.
I have not yet seen a self-regulating system. The universe expands and cools, the human body whithers and dies. However, a town can be governed by a state, which can be governed by the laws of physics. There is sufficient variety in the Universe that it cools slowly - its velocity of deregulation is low.
Self-regulating markets then either have accomplished zero regulatory overhead, or, they yield no nontrivial results (zero surprisal; 0 bits of information output), or, they are leaking variety, in the sense that they are not actually stable, but are deregulating at some rate.
d(R(X))/dX > 0
Just thinking out loud...
- Smári
I think you are right, Smári. There are no fully "self-regulating" systems. Even where corrupt organizations have imposed influence on governments, the activity itself exists in an environment that is in dynamic state. The dynamics may simply take longer to make themselves apparent. For instance: A popular business man establishes a perception that natural gas is the answer for the United States to impending oil shortages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Boone_Pickens#Natural_gas A company or companies may push the government to allow for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing to harvest natural gas from shale deposits. The company perhaps succeeds in influencing the government to de-regulate this type of activity. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/fracking-pollution-in-wat_n_803737.... However, the activity rapidly ends up affecting people not directly involved with either the regulating parts of the government, nor the corporations. Namely, the affected are the people who live where the Hydraulic fracturing is taking place. Their ground water (drinking water) becomes unusable. Now, the company and government may find themselves dealing with a set of factors that possibly were not foreseen, and are not easy to control, as people who live in the region become aware of what is happening and work to resist it in effective ways. http://adoptresistance.blogspot.com/2011/02/buffalo-bans-fracking-in-groundb... -- -- Sam Rose Hollymead Capital Partners, LLC Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 email: [email protected] http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://futureforwardinstitute.com http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan
On 6/20/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
The government still does regulate them, in a very real sense. The few large corporations wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for taxpayer subsidies, government-enforced regulatory cartels, and artificial property rights like IP. There are two kinds of government intervention: primary and secondary. Primary intervention is the basic structural privileges which maintain corporate power. Secondary intervention consists of ameliorative regulations which limit the abuse and mitigate the bad effects of the primary regulations What the right-wing variant of "free marketer" means by deregulation, in reality, is simply eliminating the secondary interventions while leaving the primary interventions intact. As Patrick suggests downthread, the state is the executive committee and the ruling class and corporations act through the state to regulate the economy. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Hey, dont shoot the messenger. I agree about the role of the state but as I have said in another email, the state poses as a necessity if there is no other alternative that could productively express the opinions of many. What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market. I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else. Have you found what is revolutionary in this model? The person who is in debt will always be able to pay back his debt since he can always make chairs, ie the risk taken by the one giving the loan is only that of the possibility that something happens to Paul or that Paul doesnt want to give back the money. In the current economy, another risk factor is that Paul cant pay back, ie cant find a job. The second revolutionary thing is that your money express in a precise way the possible products you can buy. In the current economy, you might have lots of money but the products that exist define what you can buy with them, money themselves cant guarantee you that in the future the products you like will continue to exist. So current money is a promise , a loan that might not be able to be fulfilled. This new currency holds in itself more information. I am sure that right now, you might be saying that this will never work for 2 reasons. First, the quality of someone's product is what makes it tradeable and valuable. Since the one that owns units of this currency has to find people to sell them this currency, He needs precise information about its tradeability. Solution: This is what I am doing with my semantic trust metric, an attack-resistant personalized source of information. Secondly and most importantly, there should be a way to route currencies into currencies that are eatable, lol, i mean usefull. That was the biggest problem that required the use of gold in the old days and fiat money nowdays. Solution: The proliferation of Social networks made me think whether it is possible to digitize the economic graph. If for example there were some million unemployed people that went into a internet site and put what products they want and what their skills are, could there be an algorithm that would create cycles of economic flow, ie exchange of goods, in such a way that the algorithm would abide by the individualistic interests if its peers? I think there is such an algorithm and it can predict prices and flows of goods. I have found such an algorithm. That solves the routing problem. Now, imagine that an engineer would be able to put a new invention , means of production into the algorithm and the algorithm would be able to compute how much profit people gain. What this means is that this way there is no risk of investment apart from the possibility that something more awesome happens in the future.(Jack Black's words that mean a better mean of production) What has been omitted till now are 2 things. What is the relation of workers and their product? Workers own their product, that means that they themselves trade it with other products in contrast to what is happening now. Who owns the means of production? How are investements done? Those are under development. I have to look at them from the graph theoretic point of view. I have found solutions. I am trying to find the best one. Patrick andersons solutions seems close to one of them. It is important to note that those 2 last statements are the ones that differentiate this system from the current one. It is those last statements that require a 'state' to force them, or a control system that would minimize the set of outcomes as Ashby might say. I think that an organization with the help of cryptography could create such a state or control system to enforce those rules of play. It is also an open problem how the current laws could be used to enforce those rules. I intend to write a 'paper' about this after I finish creating the semantic trust metric. http://opensociety.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page 2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
On 6/20/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
The government still does regulate them, in a very real sense. The few large corporations wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for taxpayer subsidies, government-enforced regulatory cartels, and artificial property rights like IP.
There are two kinds of government intervention: primary and secondary. Primary intervention is the basic structural privileges which maintain corporate power. Secondary intervention consists of ameliorative regulations which limit the abuse and mitigate the bad effects of the primary regulations
What the right-wing variant of "free marketer" means by deregulation, in reality, is simply eliminating the secondary interventions while leaving the primary interventions intact.
As Patrick suggests downthread, the state is the executive committee and the ruling class and corporations act through the state to regulate the economy.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Dear Apostolis, thanks for the update, when you feel you have sufficiently progressed, don't hesitate to ask Sepp to cover your initiative for the p2p blog, Michel On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:23 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
Hey, dont shoot the messenger.
I agree about the role of the state but as I have said in another email, the state poses as a necessity if there is no other alternative that could productively express the opinions of many.
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
Have you found what is revolutionary in this model?
The person who is in debt will always be able to pay back his debt since he can always make chairs, ie the risk taken by the one giving the loan is only that of the possibility that something happens to Paul or that Paul doesnt want to give back the money.
In the current economy, another risk factor is that Paul cant pay back, ie cant find a job.
The second revolutionary thing is that your money express in a precise way the possible products you can buy. In the current economy, you might have lots of money but the products that exist define what you can buy with them, money themselves cant guarantee you that in the future the products you like will continue to exist. So current money is a promise , a loan that might not be able to be fulfilled.
This new currency holds in itself more information.
I am sure that right now, you might be saying that this will never work for 2 reasons.
First, the quality of someone's product is what makes it tradeable and valuable. Since the one that owns units of this currency has to find people to sell them this currency, He needs precise information about its tradeability. Solution: This is what I am doing with my semantic trust metric, an attack-resistant personalized source of information.
Secondly and most importantly, there should be a way to route currencies into currencies that are eatable, lol, i mean usefull. That was the biggest problem that required the use of gold in the old days and fiat money nowdays. Solution: The proliferation of Social networks made me think whether it is possible to digitize the economic graph. If for example there were some million unemployed people that went into a internet site and put what products they want and what their skills are, could there be an algorithm that would create cycles of economic flow, ie exchange of goods, in such a way that the algorithm would abide by the individualistic interests if its peers?
I think there is such an algorithm and it can predict prices and flows of goods. I have found such an algorithm. That solves the routing problem.
Now, imagine that an engineer would be able to put a new invention , means of production into the algorithm and the algorithm would be able to compute how much profit people gain. What this means is that this way there is no risk of investment apart from the possibility that something more awesome happens in the future.(Jack Black's words that mean a better mean of production)
What has been omitted till now are 2 things.
What is the relation of workers and their product? Workers own their product, that means that they themselves trade it with other products in contrast to what is happening now.
Who owns the means of production? How are investements done? Those are under development. I have to look at them from the graph theoretic point of view. I have found solutions. I am trying to find the best one. Patrick andersons solutions seems close to one of them.
It is important to note that those 2 last statements are the ones that differentiate this system from the current one.
It is those last statements that require a 'state' to force them, or a control system that would minimize the set of outcomes as Ashby might say. I think that an organization with the help of cryptography could create such a state or control system to enforce those rules of play. It is also an open problem how the current laws could be used to enforce those rules.
I intend to write a 'paper' about this after I finish creating the semantic trust metric.
http://opensociety.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
On 6/20/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
The government still does regulate them, in a very real sense. The few large corporations wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for taxpayer subsidies, government-enforced regulatory cartels, and artificial property rights like IP.
There are two kinds of government intervention: primary and secondary. Primary intervention is the basic structural privileges which maintain corporate power. Secondary intervention consists of ameliorative regulations which limit the abuse and mitigate the bad effects of the primary regulations
What the right-wing variant of "free marketer" means by deregulation, in reality, is simply eliminating the secondary interventions while leaving the primary interventions intact.
As Patrick suggests downthread, the state is the executive committee and the ruling class and corporations act through the state to regulate the economy.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
Hey, dont shoot the messenger.
I agree about the role of the state but as I have said in another email, the state poses as a necessity if there is no other alternative that could productively express the opinions of many.
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
Hi, just my two cents (hehe): Many Social Economy workers exchange work hours, and even form a "Time Bank", where they exchange them for other people's hours/services. I can look for read material if you're interested. PS: Hi! I'm subscribed since a few months but for some reason my email reception was disabled. -- Salud! Nicolás Reynolds, xmpp:[email protected] omb:http://identi.ca/fauno OTR: C0CB1F0F 01DB5E18 2D634C2A A4626858 E7C7C3A2 http://parabolagnulinux.org http://endefensadelsl.org
hi nicolas, do you still have a problem with the list, if so, perhaps franco, your compatriot, can help .. Michel On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 8:53 PM, Nicolás Reynolds <[email protected]>wrote:
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
Hey, dont shoot the messenger.
I agree about the role of the state but as I have said in another email, the state poses as a necessity if there is no other alternative that could productively express the opinions of many.
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
Hi, just my two cents (hehe): Many Social Economy workers exchange work hours, and even form a "Time Bank", where they exchange them for other people's hours/services.
I can look for read material if you're interested.
PS: Hi! I'm subscribed since a few months but for some reason my email reception was disabled.
-- Salud! Nicolás Reynolds, xmpp:[email protected] omb:http://identi.ca/fauno
OTR: C0CB1F0F 01DB5E18 2D634C2A A4626858 E7C7C3A2
http://parabolagnulinux.org http://endefensadelsl.org
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
I just checked wikipedia for Time banks. i already new about the concept but I dont know much. Similarities: Both projects allow the creation of money out of nowhere. Differences: This project takes the selfishness of people as the most important factor. That doesnt mean that People are selfish, only that it treats them as if they were. That means that people have to repay back their debt or there are consequences. There are fluctuations on the prices.(there is no such thing as one hour for one hour) That is what the trust metric is all about, an effort to evaluate others work, and that is a very important task if we are to use others work as currency. My system takes as granted the right someone has to work or not to work, to trade or not to trade. Those 2 rights allow a person to take advantage of people that have a dire need for a product. On the other hand, my system gives every person the same capabilities in their persuit of happiness, ie the only reason for someone to have more money is that he is better skilled. Money doesnt create more opportunities to some. But since I dont know much about time banks, I might be wrong. You can enlighten me for the merits of Time banks. 2011/6/21 Nicolás Reynolds <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
Hey, dont shoot the messenger.
I agree about the role of the state but as I have said in another email, the state poses as a necessity if there is no other alternative that could productively express the opinions of many.
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
Hi, just my two cents (hehe): Many Social Economy workers exchange work hours, and even form a "Time Bank", where they exchange them for other people's hours/services.
I can look for read material if you're interested.
PS: Hi! I'm subscribed since a few months but for some reason my email reception was disabled.
-- Salud! Nicolás Reynolds, xmpp:[email protected] omb:http://identi.ca/fauno
OTR: C0CB1F0F 01DB5E18 2D634C2A A4626858 E7C7C3A2
http://parabolagnulinux.org http://endefensadelsl.org
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange. But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working. Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system? Why do we need to see the global network? Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer. We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future. It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information. 2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ... he's in cc, Michel On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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Dear Apostolis, Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book. Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful. A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency. Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from *exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms. Thomas Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
> What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
>> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system. Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things. We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work. John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now. John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation. Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time. Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him. Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael. As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want. How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different. *The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. * So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money. Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results. Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt. As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future. What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work. Best regards... 2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
** Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from *exchange *. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank. If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from *exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money:http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views:http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website:http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery:http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
> What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
>> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot. Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.. I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work. I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide. This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed. The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer. So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles. Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally. 2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
** It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from * exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house?
Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Thom as addressed those concerns as well, Apostolis. Thom is a big believer in building city-regional economies. A big Jane Jacobs man, as he should be! Because of his interest in regional economics he has been able to systematically connect-the-dots between the Mondragon and Emilian-Romagnan experiences and that of the Swiss WIR prototype. He and I have both written about this stuff for over two decades now....I'm just too gosh darn lazy to publish. ; Another body of work you should find useful is that of Chris Cook and his Open Capital concept:http://www.opencapital.net. Regards Alan -----Original Message----- From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 2:26 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot. Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.. I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work. I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide. This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed. The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer. So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles. Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally. 2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank. If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote: I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system. Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things. We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work. John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now. John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation. Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time. Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him. Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael. As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want. How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different. The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money. Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results. Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt. As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future. What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work. Best regards... 2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> Dear Apostolis, Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book. Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful. A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency. Savings and investment, or finance is a separate function from exchange. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms. Thomas Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote: Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ... he's in cc, Michel On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote: What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working. Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system? Why do we need to see the global network? Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer. We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future. It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information. 2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]> El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange. But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc. >> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else. That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Alan, anything in your files that you could publish in a non-lazy way with us? On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:56 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
Thom as addressed those concerns as well, Apostolis.
Thom is a big believer in building city-regional economies. A big Jane Jacobs man, as he should be! Because of his interest in regional economics he has been able to systematically connect-the-dots between the Mondragon and Emilian-Romagnan experiences and that of the Swiss WIR prototype.
He and I have both written about this stuff for over two decades now....I'm just too gosh darn lazy to publish. ;
Another body of work you should find useful is that of Chris Cook and his Open Capital concept:http://www.opencapital.net.
Regards Alan
-----Original Message----- From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 2:26 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot.
Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received..
I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work.
I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide.
This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed.
The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer.
So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles.
Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally.
2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
** It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com <http://www.reinventingmoney.com/> Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from * exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com <http://www.reinventingmoney.com/> Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the > very > old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as > currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant > that > Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for > them. > This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange > for > something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to > exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing listhttp://www.p2pfoundation.nethttps://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/lis...
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
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Groan....maybe....alright! Deal! I'm still trying to find that utopian "CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy" stuff I wrote up about the RLDS Church and 'zionic community development.' It ought to be worth a few g'faws! Regards Alan -----Original Message----- From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 5:08 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets Alan, anything in your files that you could publish in a non-lazy way with us? On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:56 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: Thom as addressed those concerns as well, Apostolis. Thom is a big believer in building city-regional economies. A big Jane Jacobs man, as he should be! Because of his interest in regional economics he has been able to systematically connect-the-dots between the Mondragon and Emilian-Romagnan experiences and that of the Swiss WIR prototype. He and I have both written about this stuff for over two decades now....I'm just too gosh darn lazy to publish. ; Another body of work you should find useful is that of Chris Cook and his Open Capital concept:http://www.opencapital.net. Regards Alan -----Original Message----- From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 2:26 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot. Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.. I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work. I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide. This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed. The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer. So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles. Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally. 2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank. If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote: I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system. Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things. We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work. John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now. John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation. Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time. Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him. Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael. As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want. How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different. The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money. Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results. Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt. As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future. What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work. Best regards... 2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> Dear Apostolis, Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book. Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful. A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency. Savings and investment, or finance is a separate function from exchange. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms. Thomas Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote: Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ... he's in cc, Michel On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote: What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working. Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system? Why do we need to see the global network? Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer. We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future. It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information. 2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]> El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange. But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the very old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant that Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for them. This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange for something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
please do, we love that 'eso' stuff .. Michel On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 12:36 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:
Groan....maybe....alright! Deal!
I'm still trying to find that utopian "CenterPlace Regional Development Strategy" stuff I wrote up about the RLDS Church and 'zionic community development.' It ought to be worth a few g'faws!
Regards Alan
-----Original Message----- From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 5:08 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets
Alan,
anything in your files that you could publish in a non-lazy way with us? On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 6:56 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
Thom as addressed those concerns as well, Apostolis.
Thom is a big believer in building city-regional economies. A big Jane Jacobs man, as he should be! Because of his interest in regional economics he has been able to systematically connect-the-dots between the Mondragon and Emilian-Romagnan experiences and that of the Swiss WIR prototype.
He and I have both written about this stuff for over two decades now....I'm just too gosh darn lazy to publish. ;
Another body of work you should find useful is that of Chris Cook and his Open Capital concept:http://www.opencapital.net.
Regards Alan
-----Original Message----- From: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 2:26 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot.
Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received..
I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work.
I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide.
This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed.
The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer.
So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles.
Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally.
2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
** It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com <http://www.reinventingmoney.com/> Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from * exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com <http://www.reinventingmoney.com/> Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
> What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
>> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
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--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
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Yes, everyone is both a producer and a consumer. Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer." You can call the seller a lender and the buyer a borrower, if you like. The seller has in a way "loaned' real value to the buyer/borrower. The WIR required that lines of credit be secured by the pledge of collateral. That provides surety of contract. You say, "When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.." Good luck selling that idea. As a borrower you want me to advance real value to you and find you a job besides? What is YOUR responsibility? It's up to you to provide something that community values and wants to buy. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/23/2011 2:26 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot.
Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received..
I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work.
I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide.
This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed.
The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer.
So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles.
Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally.
2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money:http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views:http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website:http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery:http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from *exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money:http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views:http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website:http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery:http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
> What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
>> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
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-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Yes People are producers and consumers. In every system, people produce and consume... What is done though is that those actions are done in different times, so this is not what i am saying. What happens right now is that someone gives value to someone and hopes in an naive way that the other will find a way to repay him. The other person can only guarantee of his capabilities and that he is willing to work. He cannot guarantee that others will like or have money to buy his products. There are many reasons why others wont buy products from him, reasons that are outside of his reach. So when the market doesnt help him make money, he is to blame. No, I totally disagree. Lets see how other systems try to work with this problem. Banks try to find what assets he has, if he has a job. They try to predict the risk of the loan. Businesses only care to sell products. They are not interested in understanding whether there is a way for cosumers to make money. If the business and their customers was a closed system, what businesses do is sell products to their customers without knowing that their customers will be able to provide value to the workers of the business so as that the cycle of flow continue. People should understand the concept that for them to be able to work or sell their products, others will need to work or sell their products. Secondly, If we are to make a system that is rigid and is not prone in creating debts that cannot be payed back, we should create contracts between people that are based on concrete information and promises that they can hold. So this is the difference between the 2 systems. With my system, the promise is that he will work if asked. With all other systems(except barter) the promise is that he WILL work. The one contract will always be fulfilled since the promises are concrete . The established ways loans are done let the contracts contain the risk of the market in themselves. They force the borrower to make promises that he cant keep and thus contracts are prone to the failures of the market. With my system, it doesnt mean that people dont care to create value for the community. On the contrary, People will not be able to be given value(products) if it is not certain that they can provide something in return. This way bad transactions are stopped from the beginning. But it also gives incentive to people to buy products so that they sell their products. It creates economic activity so as to sustain or create more economic activity. The dichotomy of a person into a seller and a producer is wrong. Each contract of my system is a small closed circle in itself. What happens when more contracts come, the closed circle becomes bigger and bigger. All contracts will be rigid, never to fail. The general idea is this: It is not the fault of the small businesses or of all those unemployed that they cannot keep up to their responsibilies if they tried to find work, sell their products but failed. I hope we all understand that people are unemployed because of reasons that are not in their reach.(at least most of them) ... When I have time, I will make an example how a new investment changes the flow of a whole circle(for example) and why the idea of having only workers or consumers as investors is inadequate. (Being an investor is different from the person that controls the way things are produced) 2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
** Yes, everyone is both a producer and a consumer. Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer."
You can call the seller a lender and the buyer a borrower, if you like. The seller has in a way "loaned' real value to the buyer/borrower. The WIR required that lines of credit be secured by the pledge of collateral. That provides surety of contract.
You say, "When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.."
Good luck selling that idea. As a borrower you want me to advance real value to you and find you a job besides? What is YOUR responsibility? It's up to you to provide something that community values and wants to buy.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/23/2011 2:26 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot.
Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received..
I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work.
I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide.
This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed.
The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer.
So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles.
Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally.
2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from * exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the > very > old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as > currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant > that > Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for > them. > This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange > for > something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to > exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
Excellent point, Thom. However.... Just imagine one of the WIRBank members happened to be a labour union, a PEO or some other kind of workers' association and that a sizeable proportion or perhaps all of WIR members employed members of this union/PEO/association. Doesn't this mean that labour would have the opportunity to issue the working capital credit that would form their own Swiss WIR denominated incomes? Regards Alan -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Greco <[email protected]> To: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 7:38 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets Yes, everyone is both a producer and a consumer. Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer." You can call the seller a lender and the buyer a borrower, if you like. The seller has in a way "loaned' real value to the buyer/borrower. The WIR required that lines of credit be secured by the pledge of collateral. That provides surety of contract. You say, "When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.." Good luck selling that idea. As a borrower you want me to advance real value to you and find you a job besides? What is YOUR responsibility? It's up to you to provide something that community values and wants to buy. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/23/2011 2:26 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote: Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot. Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.. I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work. I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide. This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed. The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer. So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles. Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally. 2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank. If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings. Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote: I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system. Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things. We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work. John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now. John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation. Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time. Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him. Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael. As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want. How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different. The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money. Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results. Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt. As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future. What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work. Best regards... 2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]> Dear Apostolis, Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book. Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful. A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency. Savings and investment, or finance is a separate function from exchange. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms. Thomas Thomas H. Greco, Jr. [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop. On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote: Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ... he's in cc, Michel On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote: What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working. Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system? Why do we need to see the global network? Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer. We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future. It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information. 2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]> El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you > what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange. But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc. >> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the >> very >> old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as >> currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant >> that >> Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for >> them. >> This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange >> for >> something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to >> exchange Paul's chairs with something else. That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis -- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
One small example. We have john and Donald in an island. John wants a boat and he can grow tomatoes. Donald loves tomatoes and he can do a lot of things but he cant make a boat. They know each others skills. If John gives Donald tomatoes, Donald is obliged to do everything in his power to give back value to john. John gives Donald tomatoes and then expects from Donald to fulfill the needs of the community, ie to make a boat. John knew that Donald cant make a boat. whose fault is it? 2011/6/23 <[email protected]>
Excellent point, Thom. However....
Just imagine one of the WIRBank members happened to be a labour union, a PEO or some other kind of workers' association and that a sizeable proportion or perhaps all of WIR members employed members of this union/PEO/association. Doesn't this mean that labour would have the opportunity to issue the working capital credit that would form their own Swiss WIR denominated incomes?
Regards Alan
-----Original Message----- From: Thomas Greco <[email protected]> To: Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> Cc: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Jun 23, 2011 7:38 am Subject: Re: [P2P-F] self-regulating markets
Yes, everyone is both a producer and a consumer. Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer."
You can call the seller a lender and the buyer a borrower, if you like. The seller has in a way "loaned' real value to the buyer/borrower. The WIR required that lines of credit be secured by the pledge of collateral. That provides surety of contract.
You say, "When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received.."
Good luck selling that idea. As a borrower you want me to advance real value to you and find you a job besides? What is YOUR responsibility? It's up to you to provide something that community values and wants to buy.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/23/2011 2:26 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
Yes , I was just confused because of my english and because it is a broad definition that is not mentioned a lot.
Yes the fact that we use our money is very important. One important thing that could be used in Lets and is used in my system is this: When someone is given a loan, the own that gives the loan, product(money) should have the responsibility to get the other a job to give his debt back, if he doesnt find a job for him, then he loses the credit he received..
I recently read a bit about the WIR bank and how he was given assets, real money to allow a balance to go negative. Then Kevin very well said that negative balances can be backed by future work.
I go even further and say that the borrower can only give back the debt when others employ him or buy his products. The borrower can only give the promise that when asked about one of his product, he will give it to repay his debt. The market is not controlled by him and he is not responsible. The lender should be the one to lose his credit, since the borrower told him to ask him of a product and he will provide.
This is very important if we are to have flow of products in the economy. Someone will buy a product if someone else buys his product. The fact that in a transaction we differentiate the buyer from the seller is fundamentally flawed.
The buyer is also a seller. The employee is also the employer.
So we could change the LETS system to give an incentive to people to form circles.
Let me now guess that the absence of such a system is the reason why LETS communities prefer to be isolated, to keep their credits locally.
2011/6/23 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
It's not all that complicated. Yes, LETS is a form of mutual credit clearing. Credit clearing simply allows us to use "our" money (that we create in the process of buying/selling) instead of "their" money, which must be borrowed from a bank or earned from someone else who borrowed it from a bank.
If I do some work for you, we must agree upon a price. Your account is debited and my account is credited for the same amount. I can then use my credits to buy whatever I want, at an agreed price, from someone else in the system. You must eventually provide value to someone in order to bring your balance back to zero. If you default, the collective membership bears the burden of that instead of me personally suffering the loss. The system must have sufficient revenues to cover such losses as well as its operating expenses. I've explained all of this many times in my writings.
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/22/2011 4:33 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I tried to find information about mutual credit clearing Unions. I couldnt find much, so I guess that the name itself explains it. I suppose that LETS is such a system.
Let me make an example so as to see if we are talking about the same method of exchange and to clarify things.
We have John, Michael and all the others. John is making furniture. In fact he has 5 different kind of furniture that he is making. Michael is a software engineer, he is paid by the hour and has expertise in a number of programming languages and frameworks. Both of them had done previous work and they have a reputation that distinguishes them from other of the same work.
John decided that he wants to have a site advertising his furniture so he goes to Michael and tells him to make him a site. Michael and John make a contract. Michael through the (system)site knows at which proportionality has john currency, ie furnitute been exchanged with other currencies, products even if that exchange is indirect. The system transforms to him through past transactions or future contracts the currency of furniture into the products he wants. This way Michael has an exact understanding of the pleasure he recieves at a specific time vs the work he will have to do now.
John on the other hand understands the amount of 'happiness he will receive' , ie the product. There is no need for such a transformation.
Both now have enough information to start trading, decide the amount of work each one will be obliged to do and at what time.
Lets just say now that Michael now has a contract with John that allows him to ask for a specific number of furniture of a specific design till a specific date. That means that after this date John has no obligation to make these furniture. He has no debt and he is free to abandon his workshop, retire. Till that date Michael has to find work for John so as to transform his currency into another he likes. The system told him that most likely he will transform it into the products he likes but it is up to him.
Let us say that someone likes the furniture of john and wants to trade. At this time he can trade directly with John or with Michael.
As you can see if John decides to abandon his obligations the one to be harmed will be Michael. This system doesnt have an abstract sense of money. It tries to transform the currencies into currencies that we want.
How much value do 500 dollars mean to you? 500 dollars have different value per person depending on the things they can buy with them. After a period of time you will still have 500 dollars but the things you can buy are different because the prices change. Not only that, the person or node that has the money plays an important role on the value of money. Big corporations buy stock with a lower price than smaller ones. Their value of money is different.
*The topology of the graph plays an important role in the transformation of money into goods. *
So Dollars or any kind of such a currency, like gold, doesnt contain within it the pleasure, happiness we will receive with those money.
Now If someone were to give us how happy he would be if he were in a specific situation( number of products, amount of work), if everyone did that, I could take all those people and organize them in such a way, automatically creating circles of flows, automatically finding the prices and amount of products that are to be traded. If I am given enough information, I could even tell an engineer how his invention will change the flow of products and prices. I havent made the insertion of data user friendly yet, but I think that It takes all parameters into account and the price is determined in such a way so as that the individual maximizes his gain. You must also understand that noone can cheat. If someone says something different from what he wants , he will get worse results.
Savings equal the amount of money on negative balances. There are methods to stop people from not paying and this should be enforced globally. If someone has a flow of products every day, if he doesnt want to pay old debts, he could be dropped out of the system, not be able to buy new things. Other people could also insure someones debt.
As old debts are transformed into new debts by making new contracts, savings change position from one person to another as debt changes hands. You can undestand that those who will have debt will be the ones that are thought as the most productive and usefull in the future. Another method for savings allocation is proportionality of your savings to the goods you will want in the future.
What I am saying here IS experimental. What is sure though is the fact that it requires a lot of information to make it work.
Best regards...
2011/6/22 Thomas Greco <[email protected]>
Dear Apostolis,
Below are the links to my websites, and the title of my latest book.
Clearing circles have been operating successfully for many years. It is an old idea. Now, the challenge is to optimize the procedures and protocols and take it to scale, then network local exchanges together to provide an means of payment that is locally controlled but globally useful.
A debit balance in a credit clearing exchange can be looked at as a loan. It is a draft upon a line of credit that is extended by the collective membership. In a clearing system some accounts must be allowed to be negative. The total of negative balances (or positive balances) can be looked at as the supply of internal currency.
Savings and investment, or *finance *is a separate function from * exchange*. Yes, they are related, but require different mechanisms.
Thomas
Thomas H. Greco, [email protected] Mobile phone (USA): 520-820-0575 Beyond Money: http://beyondmoney.net Tom's News and Views: http://tomazgreco.wordpress.com Archive Website: http://www.Reinventingmoney.com Photo gallery: http://picasaweb.google.com/tomazhg Skype/Twitter name: tomazgreco My latest book, "The End of Money and the Future of Civilization" can be ordered from Chelsea Green Publishing, Amazon.com, or your local bookshop.
On 06/21/2011 7:35 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
Thomas has written a few books and is in touch with many local credit commons initiatives ...
he's in cc,
Michel
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 3:38 AM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis < [email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
Why do we need to see the global network?
Well, in order to be able to make investments. New investments about a specific product can have indirect consequences to the whole network. We may then have to compute what percentage of the investment will have to be paid by each peer.
We need to know about the global network in order to decide to which persons we can store our savings and the ability of those currencies to be transfered into goods that we will want in the future.
It is important to think of each peer as a producer, a seller, an investor. Investors need information.
2011/6/21 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>
El 21/06/11 04:23, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis dijo:
What I am about to say needs testing and more thinking but let me tell you what I have done so far to create an alternative to the free market.
We're probably using the term "free market" in a different sense. The market can refer simply to the cash nexus, or the arena of commodity production for monetized exchange.
But it can also be used, by market anarchist like me, to describe the entire spectrum of voluntary transactions and relationships -- including cooperatives, gift economies, communal property, informal barter, mutual aid, etc.
> I have created a new class of currencies that are very similar to the > very > old currencies. What if each person used the creation of his work as > currency. When someone owns 5 paul's chairs for example , It is meant > that > Paul will have to give him those 5 chairs in the future if he asks for > them. > This is then some kind of loan. Someone gives something now in exchange > for > something in the future. If he doesnt need the chairs, he might have to > exchange Paul's chairs with something else.
That sounds a lot like Tom Greco's mutual credit clearing networks, which I'm a big fan of. Every member runs a balance that looks a lot like the balance in a checking account. When you sell a good or service to a member your balance goes up, and when you purchase same it goes down. And the system allows people to run negative balances, so long as the negative balance is limited to some value relative to their average monthly sales and the account continues to be active and turn over. So "money" is essentially backed by the goods being traded; rather than being a store of value from past production, it is simply a unit of account for denominating trade of present-for-present or present-for-future production. Nobody has to have a store of money from past production in order to trade, so there's no problem of economic stagnation for want of liquidity ("there's not enough money in circulation"). People create money by trading.
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
--
Sincerely yours,
Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing listhttp://www.p2pfoundation.nethttps://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/lis...
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-- Sincerely yours, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis
On 6/21/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
It's been a while since I've read his work, but there numerous such systems in operation. As for whether or how many of them are in digital form, I'm not sure. He's got several books available for free online at reinventingmoney.com -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
I'm sure Apostolis knows all the material we have collated at http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Money On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Kevin Carson < [email protected]> wrote:
On 6/21/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
What you say was exactly the idea with which I started working.
Where is more info about it? Has Thomas created such a clearing house? Most importantly, has he found an algorithm to create trading circles? has he studied the macroeconomy of such a system?
It's been a while since I've read his work, but there numerous such systems in operation. As for whether or how many of them are in digital form, I'm not sure. He's got several books available for free online at reinventingmoney.com
-- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
_______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
-- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
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Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis -
Franco Iacomella -
Kevin Carson -
Michel Bauwens -
Nicolás Reynolds -
Patrick Anderson -
Samuel Rose -
Smári McCarthy -
Thomas Greco