and Need help with design of new currency to send to collectors and maybe accept at CreditFactors?
I hadn't given this a whole lot of thought, but I started looking for play money to print and at first I couldn't find anything bigger than $50s and I didn't want to have to print many pages to pay off my credit cards. Finally I found "Stelojs" and since they come in denominations up to 1000, that's more practical to send to my banks. It was funny when a Target collector called while I was searching and I told her I was just about to print some money for them.
But I'm serious about a "complementary" currency as it seems to be called.
While generally LOCAL, local doesn't do much for me as I buy almost everything except groceries and fuel on the web because I live in the desert and the nearest city is Las Vegas over 100 miles away.
It should be fairly easy to create an online only currency, the big issue being counterfeiting.
It didn't take long until a reader emailed me about the Liberty Dollars and http://www.libertydollar.org/. I had heard about Liberty Dollars after they were raided and I was aware of the lawsuit.
From http://www.libertydollar.org/:
Plus the Liberty Dollar is truly a valuable currency that will increase in value as the US dollar depreciates and the price of gold and silver goes up.
That's the problem with it. Currency needs to be created out of "thin air" like the dollar, the credito and other alternative currencies so that it is freely available and everyone can be prosperous.
I'm AGAINST having semi slaves mine gold so that we can have enough money to keep the economy going.
Anything tied to metals will feed the greed, cause speculation and the misery continues or even increases ...
Isn't it bad enough to have destroyed the cradle of civilization and many millions of lives for OIL?
Why add GOLD to have to go to war for?
The government should NOT have to invade other countries to sustain the economy.
The purpose of a complementary currency is to have an easy way to trade goods and services, NOT to create more filthy rich SPECULATORS or BANKERS.
If people want to speculate in metals, they can obviously do so.
FINANCIAL STABILITY - A CASE FOR COMPLEMENTARY CURRENCIES
This is an EXCELLENT paper on complementary currencies, written in 10/07.
On compound interest:
To show the impact on money in the long run, we may use the famous example of
Josephs’ cent invested at 5% interest in the year 0. In the year 2000 this cent would be worth over 500 billion balls of gold of the weight of the earth, at the price of gold in that year. Without the compounding of interest, the sum accumulated would have been 1,01 €. This shows that it is not interest that is the problem, but the compounding of interest.
And:
The ‘Fairness Misconception’ is based on the notion that everyone is treated equally in our monetary system. We all have to pay interest when borrowing money and receive interest for savings. However, when we take a closer look, there are indeed huge differences as to
who profits and who pays in this system. Comparing the average interest payments and income from interest in ten equal parts of 2.5 million households in Germany, we can show that 80% of the population pay almost twice as much as they receive, 10% receive slightly more than they pay, and the remaining 10% receive more than twice as much interest as they pay. This last amount is the share that the first 80% loses (Fig.2).
This illustrates one of the least understood reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - and that the economists’ notion that money is just a neutral measure for the economy is incorrect. In Germany, in the year 2004, about 1 billion euros were transferred every day from those who work for their money to those who can make their ‘money work for them’ (Creutz, 2004).But money never ‘works’. Only people and machines produce real value. Money can only be re-distributed from those who create that value to those who own money. In other words, we allow the operation of a hidden redistribution mechanism in our monetary system, which continually transfers money from the large majority to a small minority, creating a social polarization that undermines any democracy over time. An Argentinian banker, who had worked in the National Central Bank for 36 years, once remarked – in regard to this figure: “…and what use is equality before the law for us, without equality before the money?”
Even more to the point, President Obasonjo of Nigeria stated after the G8 summit in Okinawa in 2000: “All that we borrowed up to 1985 or 1986 was about $5 billion. So far we have paid back about $16 billion. Yet we’re being told that we still owe about $28 billion … because of foreign creditors’ interest rates. If you ask me what is the worst thing in the world, I will say it is compound interest.”
At that time, the developing world was spending thirteen dollars on debt repayment for every one dollar it received in foreign aid and grants (Lietaer, 2007)....
This is how the rich "help" the poor.
This is what I'd like to get AWAY from.
The Liberty Dollar was successful and supported by Ron Paul because it makes the rich richer.
My goal is NOT to be wealthy.
I don't want to live in poverty either, but I'd like to live among people with "real" values, such as sustainability and healthcare for all.
People who create and think and invent. There's so much more to life than money.