Sunday, July 09, 2017
Curing abstraction
Answering the question asked in previous item.
How do you cure economic abstraction? I was making the point that MMT claims to cure abstraction by even worse abstraction, like curing crack addiction with flakka. Bitcoin is another reverse "cure", pulling economics even farther into the world of pure software. You need to cure abstraction by REDUCING abstraction, but you don't have to go all the way back to gold. In fact you SHOULDN'T go back to gold, because gold requires government approval and distribution.
You just need to keep the abstraction MINIMAL and LOCAL.
America discovered the cure ALL BY ITSELF, without government help, in 1933 when FDR closed the banks. As I've noted before, a system of SCRIP self-organized almost instantly.
Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling stuff. And it worked.
Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.
Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.
Still another was Fordist corporations. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS.
Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of populism.
Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. (How? I dunno. Needs exploring.)
When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.
Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling stuff. And it worked.
Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.
Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.
Still another was Fordist corporations. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS.
Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of populism.
Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. (How? I dunno. Needs exploring.)
When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.Labels: Natural law = Sharia law, Pluponents, Real World Math, scrip
¶ 9:22 AM
