Currency Started as Debt Tokens, and has returned to debt tokens. Under P-Constitutional reforms, the cycle will be complete. Although more technically they are shares in the state or economy, issued in print, coin, or digital record as currency, and functioning as debt tokens.
Familiar Analogy: you go to the amusement park. You buy tokens from the park. You redeem the tokens for rides and games. The owners of rides and games redeem tickets with the park owners. The purpose in this case is to ensure the park owners get their cut (tax, fee), because the incentive to skim (clip coins) is eliminated.
Reversing the familiar analogy: you buy from a merchant on credit, the state issues debt tokens (currency) to you. And you later pay the debt plus a fee using those tokens, and the state redistributes them. The present problem is that it’s not the state (you) collecting the fees for having borrowed from yourself. Instead, the state should largely exist by finance and credit that is largely privatized against the interests of the people.
- by Bill Joslin –
From what I understand currency evolved for debt tracking before it was used for trade. It served as an in-group tally of debts within small communities that distributed resources and only engaged in formal trade across groups). (Greaber’s Debt)
Oddly we’ve come full circle with currency created when debts are issued.
-by Paul Franklin –
Coinage, then, might have been an attempt to create professional armies to avoid paying them through plunder? Philanthropic.
Paper money, according to Ezra Pound, was ‘philanthropic’ invention of a Chinese Emperor in a drought, issued to the starving illiterate peasants that they might buy enough of the grain they grew from the Barons who kept it, and not die.
The barons redeem the paper for the promise of gold declared for their presentation before the Emperor.