Moral Philosophy on Money.

Kia-ora

Somebody who puts it much better than I can.
Alistair McIntyre on money.
“MacIntyre maintains, however, that the system must be understood in terms of its vices—in particular debt. The owners and managers of capital always want to keep wages and other costs as low as possible. “But, insofar as they succeed, they create a recurrent problem for themselves. For workers are also consumers and capitalism requires consumers with the purchasing power to buy its products. So there is tension between the need to keep wages low and the need to keep consumption high.” Capitalism has solved this dilemma, MacIntyre says, by bringing future consumption into the present by dramatic extensions of credit.
This expansion of credit, he goes on, has been accompanied by a distribution of risk that exposed to ruin millions of people who were unaware of their exposure. So when capitalism once again overextended itself, massive credit was transformed into even more massive debt, “into loss of jobs and loss of wages, into bankruptcies of firms and foreclosures of homes, into one sort of ruin for Ireland, another for Iceland, and a third for California and Illinois.” Not only does capitalism impose the costs of growth or lack of it on those least able to bear them, but much of that debt is unjust. And the “engineers of this debt,” who had already benefited disproportionately, “have been allowed to exempt themselves from the consequences of their delinquent actions.” The imposition of unjust debt is a symptom of the “moral condition of the economic system of advanced modernity, and is in its most basic forms an expression of the vices of intemperateness, and injustice, and imprudence.”

When it comes to the money-men, MacIntyre applies his metaphysical approach with unrelenting rigour. There are skills, he argues, like being a good burglar, that are inimical to the virtues. Those engaged in finance—particularly money trading—are, in MacIntyre’s view, like good burglars. Teaching ethics to traders is as pointless as reading Aristotle to your dog. The better the trader, the more morally despicable.

Solutions. Discussing money.

Kia-ora

Currency does not have to be based on anything. 98% of money now is fiat currency issued by private banks.
Its issue is too important to be left to banks instead of being under democratic control.
There are well known problems with resource based currencies and no real reason why a currency should be resource based to be credible.
All currency is a token of labour productivity, present or future.
The trillions of US$ debt at present exceeds any possible future US productivity many times.
For a sustainable economy we need to return to the idea of money as a medium of exchange, not as a commodity which can be magically increased in a computer unsupported by work.
The central bank should be the only issuer of money and the whole concept of interest and charges on the economy by the financial sector needs to be revisited.
Their share of GDP has grown rapidly since the withdrawal of restrictions on them since the 70′s (80′s in NZ) without any corresponding benefits to society as a whole.
Instead we are all supposed to have austerity imposed on us to pay their gambling losses.

The madness continues.

Kia-ora

Meanwhile, as the neo-liberal circus carries on, China is spending as much of their US dollars as possible in buying concrete assets and resources before the $US becomes as valueless as blankets and beads.

New Zealand continues to invest pension and other funds in $US investments (Money market gambling)..
Without the productive capacity and income within NZ to support pensioners and other investors in future it does not matter how much is saved. Re-introducing money into an economy which does not have the capacity to absorb it simply inflates that money to the degree the goods and services are not available.

The money would be better invested now in NZ  in infrastructure, education (For useful jobs such as the trades and engineering) and sustainable energy efficient production to ensure our kids have a future. And so the can keep us in old age.

That is if the US$ has not inflated to be almost valueless because there are already more dollars floating around than can ever be redeemed by future US productivity.

More solutions. The First Light Passive Solar House.

Kia-ora

First Light. House

Designed by Kiwi's for a US competition.



The Kiwi bach as an energy saving dwelling.

The end gme in Britain.

Kia-ora

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26743.htm

"This is not to say Parliamentary politics is meaningless. They have one meaning now: the replacement of democracy by a business plan for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope, every child born".

"Where Britain goes, We will follow".