The Economy Of The Promised Land
One reason why we have a few money lenders and landlords running the whole world, with the rest of us toiling as serfs to pay their monthly dues to them, is because we have no real inkling of how we would live without them.
And the difference is so enormous, that one shies away from speaking of it, for fear of being condemned as a foolish Utopian.
But here are a few characteristics of a Usury free society with a liberated Commons and current technological levels.
– A man would work a maximum of 15 weeks per year to provide for his wife and children.
– Self Employment and Small Business would be the norm. Wages would be for the young and the simple.
– Men and women would see stress levels decline dramatically. They would spend far more time with each other, their children, their families, and their friends.
– By far most people would live a very comfortable middle class existence. There would still be a few rich people, but they would be much less rich, and not able to dominate society because of their wealth.
– Building would see costs decline by 80 to 90% (!). An architectural revival and boom of uncanny proportions can be expected.
– Every man and his family would have access to decent land and living and working space at very low cost. By far most people would own some land, but vast landholdings would no longer exist, because there would be no renting.
– Food production would be heavily decentralized, and many families would grow at least some food themselves. Food quality would improve incredibly.
– Poverty would be out of the question. There would still be differences in class, but they would be more about genetics and education and not about wealth. But there would be no disenfranchized underclass, and only the most problematic people would be unable to join the general well being. The barbarization of the poor would end, and a great emancipation of those now oppressed by Usury and wage slavery will result.
– There would be no Big Pharma (owned by the Banks) to war on Natural Health. Combined with low stress and excellent nutrition, health, both physical an psychological, and longevity would grow substantially. Substance abuse would decline.
– There would be no Trillions for the Plutocrats to fund all these problems aimed at distracting us and centralizing power. No Migration, no Climate Change, no Bankers orchestrating many and enormous wars. There would be no funding for endless fake news, bogus ‘science’, devious ideologies aimed at dividing people.
– Families and local communities will have plenty of funding for their own needs, though.
– General corruption levels would decline immensely.
– Urbanization would decline and the country side would be repopulated, as abundant money would revive local economies, and there would be no Plutocratic land holdings keeping people out.
– There would be still inequality, but based on merit, and added value, not on property. Hard work and achievement would be rewarded. Wealth inequality levels would be far lower, though. What is more, money will no longer be the main driver of status. Aristocracy will be based on service. On spiritual and intellectual excellence, not on the acquisition of treasure.
– The State could decline very seriously in scope and impact, returning to its basic jobs of providing a basic legal system and defense, not endless nannying and other massive overreaches. Although this remains an important issue in itself. National Socialism, for instance, created a massive totalitarian State supposedly to ‘fight unearned income’ and ‘provide for the citizenry’. But the real aim and focus of economic decentralization is to promote autonomy and economic independence for the common man. This is the core issue. When this goal is achieved, nobody will need a big State to depend on.
– And there is of course Lietaer’s question: ‘What would the Cathedrals of the 21’st Century look like?’. With interest-free lending, major, very long term investments become viable again. It took European cities a century to build a cathedral, back in the days of the Usury-free Catholic economy. What would people build today, if they had a hundred years to create it?
This is what is at stake, and this is what they have stolen from us. This is how we would live, without Usury, without the landowners, without the speculators. Without the parasites who add nothing, and have everything. Without their silly ‘making money with money’ schemes, which have no other purpose than exploiting the toil of the masses, aka Capitalism.
Note that for all this no ideology is needed. Just the acceptance of reality: that money does not grow automatically in a bank account, and that only labor creates wealth.
That we all need a fair deal.
A man produces easily enough for at least five people to live well. This is the reality. We have the duty to ourselves to claim this production for ourselves, and our loved ones.
To say No to Slavery, and Yes to what basically amounts to the Promised Land.
Reblogged this on tomaz2015.
Anthony,
Great! Good way to possibly get at least some people to do a little original thinking. Will definitely send this to my little rant list and also print it out for local consumption.
Tony B.
Super Tony, Great hearing from you!
the deficit is the biggest threat..
Which deficit? Everybody is deep in the red.
Hi, I arrived here via Makows’ site. This is a nice dream Anthony. Unfortunately, there are currently guns pointed at the citizenry in every country (especially the West) on Earth to soundly ensure your proposal does not realize in any of them. Those guns are extremely well paid by the power structure and will not give that up. They hold a simple dual loyalty; equally to those who sign their cheques and to themselves as a group. The needs of the citizenry is merely an annoyance as the milk cow who requires attention twice daily. Payments to enforcers must come directly from citizenry, not through taxes. Only then will things remotely open up to the possibility of the universal improvements you suggest. Is there sense in only suggesting what could be rather than the way, or obstacles in the way, to get there?
Of course, I understand your line of thinking. And I do agree on a practical level: there will be war.
But it’s not really necessary. Theoretically things could clear quite quickly, and not even with the ‘awakening of the masses’ (which will never happen), but if a few hundred dedicated people world wide devote themselves to the development and implementation of high end interest-free currencies.
Thanks for your great post Anthony, you write clearer than most people! You amaze me each time how concise you phrase the problem and how the solution should look.
Although you might not like it, there are already literally “a few hundred dedicated people world wide [who] devote themselves to the development and implementation of high end interest-free currencies”: cryptocurrencies. And they are making great progress.
I’m hugely grateful for all the people working away out there Hugo! i know quite a few of them (a great many more not, of course)!
I don’t like cops, but they have never threatened me when working on my blog here, or on my currencies.
I really love your economic ideas. I sure bet you see capitalism as the despicable enslaving Rothschild and Rockefeller economic. What we badly need is Mutualism, a.k.a. Free Market Anti-Capitalism. Have you heard of heard of that great French anarchist philosopher Pierre Joseph Proudhon? Nice to meet you sir
I’m indeed a huge admirer of Proudhon. He understood everything.
What would be a good reading list? I’ve started with Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, which could have been written today instead of 125 years ago. But this was just randomly picked, so suggestions are welcome.
One specific thing I’d like to learn more about is the history of property. As in, it is my understanding that the philosophers that ‘invented’ property saw ownership of property only as valid as long as there is enough property left to ‘own’ by others (thereby maintaining the freedom of others to own). Any idea who claimed this? Locke? Nowadays everything is owned by someone, so this would mean that we violated the conditions set by those early philosophers.
There are so many great books, Proudhon is great, Astle’s book is a classic (the Babylonian Woe), Lietaer’s the future of money is a great primer on interest-free economics and currency design. Creutz’ the Money Syndrome, Kitson’s books.
Thank you Anthony, much appreciated.
Hugo, You are starting on the right foot with Petr Kropotkin, who’s Mutual-Aid, a Factor of Evolution is the excellent source on collaboration among all animals & humans. Kropotkin spent many decades as a Russian geographer travelling & living among ‘indigenous’ (Latin ‘self-generating’) peoples as well as drawing on the Slavic & Celtic indigenous ‘economy’ (Greek ‘oikos’ = ‘home’ + ‘namein’ = ‘care-&-nurture’). Kropotkin gives report about the amount of work performed by his indigenous hosts which match & reduce Migchel’s estimations by a lot.
‘Property’ (L proprius “one’s own, special”) must be understood always as having collective as well as individual attributes. All humanity’s Indigenous ancestors organized economy ‘fractally’ (‘building-block’ or ‘multiplier’ where the ‘part-contains-the-whole’). The worldwide indigenous String-shell’ time-based equivalency accounting/value systems integrated functions of Capital (L ‘cap’ = ‘head’ aka ‘collective-intelligence’ or ‘ownership’), Currency (flow), Condolence (social-security), Collegial mentored-apprentice educational Credit, time-math Communication, professional Costume & other value functions. The economy was centred in the ~100 person Multihome-Dwelling-Complex so collective Domestic-labour was fully accounted for as industrial & commercial labours. So unlike present-day false monetary-capitalism all our ancestors developed progressive ownership of the means of production & decisional in their specialized Production-Society-Guilds.
Living in ~100 person Multihomes economic units, there was a privacy in the family or individual dwelling-unit in such as Longhouse-apartment, Pueblo-townhouse or Kanata-village. One can not have ‘community’ (L ‘com’ = ‘together’) without privacy (individual-sovereignty), but ‘proximity’ is as well an important factor facilitating intergenerational, intimate, female-male, critical-mass, economies-of-scale in relationship. https://sites.google.com/site/indigenecommunity/relational-economy
BTW, my real name is actually Robert Smith.
We have a dual system in society. A “political” structure as we well know with elections, the Judiciary, legislature, executive etc. We also have a “social” structure to which everyone belongs, though not necessarily the same one (christians, jews, hindus, muslims, atheists, satanists etc) all have their own heirarchy and structure but this resource is barely utelised. If the political structure where to be dissolved, it would not result in chaos, but stability as the social infrastructure will adopt its rightful place, as i explain at the end of my book, “living in a world without taxes”. We do not have to reinvent the wheel, but it does have to be pulled out from cold storage and put back to its rightful use.
Hello
This is a great post and encapsulates what would be the best living scenario for mankind and of course womankind. How do we start to make this a reality though when most of us don’t own land and can’t afford to buy any ?
All the best The daydreamer
Creating high end interest-free currencies that facilitate exchange between working people/entrepreneurs, taking out the middle man (the bankers and speculators).
Long time, no post, Anthony. Good to see you back at it.
Seems to me that the Nat Soc had a very similar idea that would have worked had the rest of the world not protected Big jew Money.
Anthony Migchels, RE: “One reason why we have a few money lenders and landlords running the whole world, with the rest of us toiling as serfs to pay their monthly dues to them, is because we have no real inkling of how we would live without them.”
The Economy of the Promised Land is a wonderful statement about where humanity needs to get to. I like your balanced analysis between work & meeting our needs. One of the best ways of understanding how to get there is to know where humanity has been & where we are now.
HUMANITY’s ONCE WORLDWIDE INDIGENOUS SYSTEM
Studying all humanity’s worldwide ‘Indigenous’ (Latin ‘self-generating’) heritage we learn about a worldwide system of: 1) ‘String-shell’ time-based equivalency accounting tools, 2) universal progressive ownership in the Production-Society-Guilds, 3) Graphic character language writing-systems, 4) ~100 person Mulithome-Dwelling-Complexes (eg. Longhouse-apartment, Pueblo-townhouse & Kanata-village),5) 3-dimensional Polyculture Orchards & a host of other common ‘fractal’ (‘multiplier, building-blocks where the part-contains-the-whole’) practices. Humanity would be living today with these & other fundamentals of human social & ecological balance, if it were not for the advent of 2-D linear hierarchal ‘exogenous’ (L ‘other-generated’) colonialism & ‘agriculture’ (L ‘ager’ = ‘field’) some 7000 years ago in Babylon.
Back to the future,
Douglas Jack President Sustainable-Development-Association http://sdassoc.ca & coordinator Indigene-Community http://www.indigenecommunity.info