Presenting “panoply”, a p2p-inspired economic proposal
Excerpted from a much longer original, which also engages the reader with a set of questions. To my mind, Mohamad Tarifi is making a lot of good sense, here below.
Mohamad Tarifi:
“In Panoply, money is in direct correspondence to scarce natural resources. Public policy determines the amount of scarce natural wealth available for private and public expenditure. This is the amount of land, energy, and material resources we are willing to put to use in the short term, while keeping in mind long term sustainability goals. This is converted to money issued by the government. Public policy additionally determines taxation levels designed to limit the hoarding of natural resources. For instance, citizens would not pay tax for owning a house or a small garden, but larger property is subject to land-value tax. A simple criteria for this is the Kantian ‘imperative’: “If everyone owns this much of nature, will we suffer from scarcity?”
Money from natural resources and taxation goes mainly into an egalitarian periodically distributed basic income guarantee program. The rest may go to purely governmental operations and programs. Correspondingly, the resources are made available for purchase or rent. The basic income guarantee should be sufficient to cover shelter, food, education, computerization, health care, entertainment, and investment in private and public projects. Since money is fed into the system by the government, we get a ‘soft’ demurage effect which further discourages hoarding.
Large projects are driven by channeling individual resources. Lending and investment is done Peer2Peer and via Crowdfunding. This may be further augmented by graph propagation of lending to allow delegation of investment planning—as in the example of Ripplepay. This gives direct incentive for community building, since large resource pools are only possible through either channeling people’s trust or through democratic public programs.
Note that Panoply is modular due to the nature of the monetary system. Money is flowing both up and down in the institutional hierarchy since each level gets money from its mother institution equaling the sum of its total members. This modularity enables communities to subscribe to diverse economic parameters while still being part of a larger system. The diversity has several advantages.
Economic states are then free to choose the size of their public governments. Additionally, some economic states may choose to incorporate behavioral economics or, say, incentivize healthy behavior by higher taxes on unhealthy consumption, lower taxes on green energy, and so on. Modularity has the added advantage that Panoply can be implemented at relatively small scales.
Further augmentations to the system include reputation scoring and peer-review mechanisms to help facilitate crowdfunding. Controversially, the system may be made harsher by requiring the youth to earn their ‘right of passage to adulthood’ by passing certain requirements such as serving in the public good for a year, continuing education, or making a sum of money.
Panoply has several advantages:
* Civilized, gives people equal economic opportunity and basic income security.
* Massively parallel decision making and pricing based on a market (the best of capitalism).
* Environmentally conscious.
* Resilient to future changes in automation, robotics.
* P2P lending encourages community building, nurturing trust, and long term thinking.
* Resolves the tragedy of the commons in a mature way: P2P trust effectively limits the effects of free-loaders without ruining the entire playing field.
The idea is still in development. There may be flaws that we do not foresee or benefits we do not yet appreciate. This is why I would like to open up the debate to a larger audience. These are challenging times and we appropriately seek to be relentlessly self-critical in order to arrive closer to the truth. This much is required to insure a bright future.”
September 18th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Thank you for posting excerpts from the article. I welcome any questions, suggestions, or comments here.
There is also a P2P-F wiki page for Panoply p2pfoundation.net/Panoply
September 18th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
Good morning,
I like the idea very much, it is really very interesting. I am student and sometimes i philosophize about how to get out of this system sewer. But i would like to ask, if you can imagine it working on global scale.
I have some questions that maybe someone can clarify me. What would be with countries that dont have lot of resources, who would be evaluating the resources, wouldnt it lead again to discrimination of countries poor on resources?
I can imagine it to apply in new forming societies and regions, but i cannot imagine brightly the transformation of current EU, or US financial system (what would happend with a debt, current money,..). Thank you very much, i really appreciate your opinion.
September 19th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Since Panoply is still in develeopment, I believe it could profit from a study and perhaps integration of the work of Silvio Gesell, which he made publicly available in his book: The Natural Economic Order
Gesell was one of the first to advocate a basic citizens income.
wikilivres.info/wiki/The_Natural_Economic_Order