Ralph spends the entire hour with the indefatigable, Hazel Henderson, the founder of the group, Ethical Markets, whose mission is to advocate for ways to measure prosperity and promoting economic models that emphasize not cut-throat competition and fear of scarcity but are based on principals of cooperation and sharing in our abundance.
5 Comments
omg
THANK YOU RALPH!
wlll be Sharing this
with Glee. keep
’em Comin’!
“… there are far more transactions completely outside the monetized market system. If they ever monetized it, that would be multi-trillions of dollars.”
corporations get wind of this Idea
they’ll have their fingers in the pie
& bean counters on every corner.
Cheers to Hazel’s characterization of economists’ thinking as ‘Magical.’
The ‘financial’ view of money is based on the false assumption that the beginning step of the process is the creation of the unit of acCount by some magical mystical monetary unit creator as items of “value” the same as any other good or service that the people may manifest and that it is these units themselves that are moving along within the economic interactivity of the populace ‘providing the grease to the economic wheels.’ The assumption is that the acquisition of the units in one’s acCount are actually real things unto themselves and that it is these things that are themselves the things ‘of value’ within the economic interactivity as opposed to the real goods and services!
It is all completely bogus, as one can see the same transactional ledger in a TimeBank or Mutual Credit System wherein all of the activities occur and all of the right parties are given ‘credit’ for that which the community has valued, and not one of those giving credit to the service provider would have ever needed to have had a single unit “in their account.”
Former President of the FR Bank in Minnesota, Kocherlakota, proves the current definitions (and follow on assumptions about money) to be “vacuous” and asserts that the function of money is as a unit of measure/bookkeeping.
In Kocherlakota’s words:
“My argument demonstrates the vacuity of the three standard explanations of the role of fiat money in an economy: money acts as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account….The traditional explanations for the presence of money in an economy are more descriptive of its functions than explanatory. The true explanation for money’s presence is that money is a record-keeping device.”
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/qr/qr2231.pdf (pages 2-3)
And if money is record keeping then the units themselves on the ledger sheets cannot themselves BE items of value. They are the abstract representation of the genuine goods and services of value in interactions between people.
And if money is a record keeping device whose units are used after the fact to do the recording then it clearly does not make sense that its units must pre-exist that which they will be used to record or that they must be pre-created by some magical mystical monetary unit creator, be that government or bank.
This whole ‘financial’ view of money narrative is part of the greater BS of pre-created monetary units that are supposed to embody “value” all by themselves and yet have some magical power to represent the value in all the other goods and services and to do so by moving along within the economy before they return to the source. Of course, the source was from a bank which ‘created’ the units as items of value that are claimed as the property of the banker. But how is it that some magical power belongs to banks to be able to create – Poof! – items of “value” though they are mere digits on a screen or numbers on a ledger sheet!? I guess it depends on whose screen or on whose piece of paper they are first written down!!
Terrific interview! Thank you for Ms Henderson on the show!
CALL CORPORATIONS WHAT THEY ARE, PARASITES; DO NOT CUTIFIE OR USE EUPHEMISMS.
END THE SHITSTEM OF GREED CENTRIC PARASITIC CANCER “CAPITALISM”.
WE DO NOT NEED “REPRESENTATION”, WE ARE COMPETENT ADULTS AND CAN DECIDE & VOTE FOR OURSELVES ON ANYTHING IN ALL WAYS ALWAYS; REFERENDUMS VIA INTERNET VOTING = TRUE DEMOCRACY.
END THE SHITSTEM, DO NOT PARTICIPATE OR CONDONE IT.