Do we need a Referendum For A New Democracy?

Are you concerned about the future of democracy? Do you feel democracy is under attack by extreme greed in countries around the world? Are you sick and tired of: living in fear, corporate greed, growing police state, government for the rich, working more but having less?

Can we use both elections and random selection (in the way we select government officials) to rid democracy of undue influence by extreme wealth and wealth-dominated mass media campaigns?

The world’s first democracy (Athenian democracy, 600 B.C.) used both elections and random selection. Even Aristotle (the cofounder of Western thought) promoted the use random selection as the best way to protect democracy. The idea of randomly selecting (after screening) juries remains from Athenian democracy, but not randomly selecting (after screening) government officials. Why is it used only for individual justice and not also for social justice? Who wins from that? …the extremely wealthy?

What is the best way to combine elections and random selection to protect democracy in today’s world? Can we use elections as the way to screen candidates, and random selection as the way to do the final selection? Who wins from that? …the people?

Over years of looking into these questions, it has become apparent that just about nobody understands money, least of all those who claim they do. This article is based on a more cogent understanding of currencies that you will find in any text with the exception of some of those mentioned here.

A lot of how it works depends on nobody looking to closely at it. You can show that it doesn’t work, the extraction of money rents creates the need for inflation to keep the system from seizing up. Otherwise we are embedded in a Monopoly game, and it ends with all the money in one player’s hands.

People have confused money with wealth. When the money is all in the hands of a few, should the rest of us just curl up and die? If the winners of this big Monopoly game are allowed to just sit on their big bank accounts and use it to prevent the wealth of the world from being accessed by the rest of us the whole system comes to a halt. When are we going to withdraw our participation from this stupid game.

Maybe if more of us had the courage to take this stand: http://noubel.com/vow/

You should know about the Meta-Currency Project too. This project is addressing the need to clear and exchange the new currencies and much much more. Currencies are for more than exchange, and are also part of rating and measuring a lot of things (think of grades and credits in schools, or Gold medals in sports).

1) Government has the power and motive to challenge it if it threatens their monopolies. (Helleiner 1999)
2) Money needs authoritative foundations- some socioeconomic basis.
The premise of e-money rests on two fallacies- economic value isn’t fixed like the volume a liter of fluid is, or length of a centimeter. Prices fluctuate in response to the fluctuations in the distribution of economic and social power. That’s why money of account needs to be the foundation of exchange and market value. Secondly, standardization of unit of account, needs to be established by an authority. Compare that to monetary unit of accounts which are abstract because the value is partially removed from the free market process.
3) It is only available within the network participants.

So I think the end of money is a nice ideal, but this prescription is based on the misunderstanding of our monetary system.
Here is a much better critique: http://books.google.com/books?id=umPZMkEqQMwC&lpg=PA77&ots=W-bdW48UtB&dq=%22in%20other%20words%2C%20LETS%20media%20are%20not%20stores%20of%20abstract%20value%20and%20means%20of%20unilateral%20settlement%20like%20full%20money%22&pg=PA76#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Thomas Greco

“Of all the institutions we live by, the most pervasive is money (see the book that this website is named after). Its power to affect our lives is often disturbing, yet most of us take its form for granted. Here I address what looks on the face of it …