[P2P-F] is ending the fed a bad idea?

Wed Oct 26 03:20:47 CEST 2011

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Michel Bauwens
<michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
> I would love to publish a debate about this position:
>
> see:
> http://www.alternet.org/story/152810/four_things_occupy_wall_street_should_know_about_the_federal_reserve?
>

This is not so much a left-wing argument as a managerialist-liberal
one.  There seem to be a lot of people who assume that the only
alternatives out there are vanilla-flavored managerial liberalism and
"right wing."  And anyone who makes decentralist noises or has
problems with large institutions or bureaucracy is a "right-winger."
It's the left-wing counterpart of the talk radio idiot who hears a
Paulista talking about non-intervention and thinks it's a "librull."

And it makes some utterly unsupported assumptions -- for example, that
everyone calling for the abolition of the Fed is a right-winger or a
hard-currency goldbug.

In fact the anti-Fed movement is a house with many mansions, all over
the political spectrum.  I'm a left-winger more friendly to Greco's
barter currencies than to the gold standard, but I'm all for
abolishing the Fed.

It's certainly true, as Blumgart says, that central banks control the
money supply.  But the Fed is a bank-owned cartel that controls the
money supply by lending it into existence at interest.  Even if I
believed in the need for a central government control of the money
supply, it would make just as much sense to meet the need for more
currency by spending it into existence along the lines of Lincoln's
Greenback policy, or depositing it into existence in people's checking
accounts as the Social Credit people want to do.

I'd like to see something with Bitcoin's decentralized, encrypted p2p
architecture, but organized on the principles of Greco's mutual
credit-clearing network, as a subplatform of Freenet, that could be
adopted on a scalable basis by the people in any locality who wanted
to organize a local currency under cover of a darknet.  But to the
extent that such systems advance credit by allowing members to run
negative balances, they fall afoul of bank licensing laws.  We need to
eliminate the state's money monopoly and let a thousand flowers bloom.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Desktop Regulatory State:  The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered
Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html