People are not sovereign when subservient to any monetary authority. Sovereign people, naturally, require their own sovereign money systems, which must serve the people, because the power of money is a sovereign power of the people.
In essence, this thing called “money” is actually walking around in any society embodied in the people themselves. It is “human energy” backed by Nature and the energy of the sun. For money is realised in the labour and ideas of people, and since these are the property of the people, any system of sovereign money belongs to the people who choose to use it.
“You” ARE the money.
In a sovereign money system, without the growth imperatives of interest-bearing debt and land speculation, the optimal “steady state” becomes possible, by design and evolution.
Sovereign people are free to use multiple forms of sovereign money. Access to diverse sovereign money systems enables as many exchanges of goods and services as possible. Economies thrive with the maximum liquidity of exchange. Freeing up the liquidity of exchange is healthy. Reducing the liquidity of exchange starves any economy.
Beneficial exchanges are a vital function of all living species and human societies. Therefore a sufficiency of sovereign money to enable healthy exchanges is a basic human right. Indeed, whenever a medium of exchange is corrupted and onerous, people intuitively find ways to create sovereign money.
Human freedom and well-being requires sovereign money, whether nationally issued, locally issued, or open source cryptocurrencies available to everyone.
Ultimately, the rationale for money is scarcity – the need to exchange productive energy for a human need, which reveals that a world of sufficiency is moneyless. In this light, sovereign money is merely an evolutionary step-change.
Sovereign money can be centralised or decentralised:
- Centralised issuance by a sovereign authority
- Decentralised issuance as cryptocurrencies
Centralised issuance by a sovereign authority
A sovereign nation's defining prerogative is the issuance of a sovereign money supply, never servicing debt or interest to a foreign power.
“One of the primary attributes of sovereignty is the monetary function.”
– Professor Irving Fisher, 1936
"Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government
and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of
the sovereignty of Parliament and of Democracy is idle and futile."
– William Lyon MacKenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 1934
– Professor Irving Fisher, 1936
"Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government
and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of
the sovereignty of Parliament and of Democracy is idle and futile."
– William Lyon MacKenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, 1934
A sovereign government issues sovereign money as a core public utility, to guarantee a fair and democratic money system, and a reliable trading environment.
The issuance of sovereign money must be limited, to maintain its utility. Limiting the money supply has been achieved in the past by using gold and silver as a Bimetallic standard. The world's gold and silver is naturally limited, and can be measured in terms of the “human energy” expended during its production, which is why gold and silver can represent money, including basic sovereign money. Even so, the Bimetallic standard can be corrupted.
Sovereign issuance, at a national or local level, is “life positive” because it provides an equitable utility to exchange the beneficial productive energy of the people.
Nationally, sovereign money could be kept “circulating” at a healthy “velocity” by regularly “priming” the system through the issuance of “liquidity” to every man and woman with a share in the national economy – in other words to every citizen “shareholder” of the de jure nation State.
This sovereign money could be issued as a basic dividend, or a “Universal Basic Income” in a regular and limited volume with reciprocal taxation for the common good to keep the total volume of money relatively stable. The citizen dividend would be sufficient to cover the basic costs of living. As such, “social welfare” would become obsolete. The “Chicago Plan Revisited” provides an analysis of a sovereign money system that could be implemented in this manner, although other forms of sovereign money would be required to avoid the risk of corruption by centralisation.
Sovereign money is not a “negative” system of bondage and scarcity, but a “positive” system of liberation, regeneration, and resilience. It is a “positive money” system.
Advocates for sovereign “Positive Money” are working to free the debt-enslaved populations of many countries. A new paradigm is inevitable, albeit the struggle to overcome deeply entrenched and corrupt power structures will continue to be devastating.
See Positive Money, International Monetary Reform, and The Chicago Plan Revisited.
Decentralised issuance as cryptocurrencies
The ultimate form of sovereign money is peer-to-peer, “trustless”, “permissionless”, “secure”, “true”, without any third-party, and it is available to people anywhere without censorship.Bitcoin, and all genuinely decentralised cryptocurrencies, run on a network of computers without any central authority. This decentralised network validates and logs peer-to-peer transactions on a distributed ledger commonly known as the “blockchain”.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) provides cryptographically secure transactions that are validated by consensus on an immutable distributed ledger, removing third-party risk, crime, delay, and expense.
This same technology enables the tokenisation of assets, bypassing traditional asset management, whereby assets are managed directly by the owner instead of through a third-party. Centralised exchanges and all their pitfalls are removed. Using DLT, the rightful holders of assets can execute trades peer-to-peer, reducing the risks and costs, and increasing the speed and security of trades.
Blockchain technology will reduce or entirely eliminate the need to trust a central power or authority, transforming the world by decentralising all economic activity.
Sovereign cryptocurrencies are open-source and mathematically limited. They are never created as an interest-bearing debt, subject in aggregate to the growth imperative of exponentially compounding interest. Instead, they allow the evolution of a healthy “steady state” economy.
DLT does not modify the existing paradigm of debt-money bondage and destruction - it transcends it, freeing Humanity from debt-bondage and tyranny.
This profoundly disruptive technology is bound to be controversial, and its markets will be volatile.
Cryptos empower the People, generate real free trade, and serve living economies.
See Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum.
