http://www.systemfehler.de/en/neo/

Gesell imagines and actually maps a way to a society where the economic system allows for all participants to receive a basic income that pays the expense of living. This would be the kind of “unconditional income” mentioned by Michel in his introduction to the article. People would be free, in a Gesell-inspired economy, to engage in p2p production. There would be no necessity to hold down a 9 to 5 job just to make ends meet.

The heart of Gesell’s monetary system is a currency that, through a demurrage charge, practically eliminates the need to charge interest. Money is being kept in circulation not because someone pays interest but because there is a built-in mechanism that makes spending money more profitable than keeping it in the bank. The demurrage on all outstanding money also permits the continuous re-distribution of buying power down to the people.

Such a Gesell-inspired system would allow for the emergence of a true p2p society, as all of a sudden, workers would become the real peers of entrepreneurs. Not having to work for survival, everyone could chose the activity they are best suited for.

Physical production would still be subject to economic interchange and direct payment, but there would no longer be the overriding profit motive that comes from a necessity to “service the debt”. This necessity is inherent in our present monetary system, because banks create money and we accept that money as a debt, implying we owe the banks and must pay interest for all the money we need, practically for all of our economic activities that necessitate money as a means of exchange.

Automation is the key to reduce the factor of labor drastically, to embed production in units of the right size to establish a circular exchange.

Fabbers may seem amazing, but they will not solve the problems we face. We have always had slow-motion, self-reproducing Fabbers that require only land (surface area), soil, water, sun and the rotting material of previous such Fabbers to produce the raw materials of food, cloth, soap, ointments, fuel and many building materials, yet so many on earth go without these necessities for other reasons.

One reason is that while collective ownership has great advantages over purely individual action, the organizations that are created for that complicated production tend to NOT distribute the ownership of the investments they make in more physical sources as that community grows. This causes democracy to become less and less direct.

It is good to treat profit as an investment in future production, but the ownership of that property should eventually come under the control of (should vest to) the very consumer who paid it. In other words, “price above cost” (profit) is a plea for growth, and must be respected as such for a system to scale.

Ownership of new investments is not currently distributed because to do so would hamper the (unfortunate) goal of Capitalist owners to keep consumer price above production costs in the name of profit, or (in the case of non-profit corps.), to retain ownership for the purpose of keeping the wage paid (say to the board-member of a non-profit hospital) artificially inflated – essentially absorbing what would otherwise have been labeled ‘profit’.

If all employment within an organization were truly available for reverse-bid on the open market, then the ‘overpaid’ CEO would never be safe. This can happen when each user of the product is also a partial joint owner of the land and capital (physical sources) needed in predicted amount required for the production of that specific user’s future demands (needs and wants).

All industry require material production already. Neither genetics nor software, nor mechanical design (such as of a car) can be utilized without space, time, mass and energy to *host* that information.

Videos from Google and spaces they call ‘My’ may *seem* free as in beer, but the arbitrary restrictions and requirements are already above the real costs.

Building washing machines (http://Second.Oekonux-Conference.org/documentation/texts/Seaman.html) is just as costly as social networking. The problem is not solved for products with infinite potential (software, genetics, mechanical design, music, video, etc.) because all of these require space, time, material and energy to use, modify, copy and share them.

But such a monetary system should be different from what we have today. It should have an anti-interest mechanism built in à la Silvio Gesell (he called it rusting money, that is, money that needs to be spent because with time it gradually loses value by virtue of a monthly charge on monetary mass). This way, there is little incentive to charge interest, and thus little incentive to continue the senseless exploitation of the environment that comes with the growth imperative inherent in the current monetary system.

That said, it’s true that a good part of the economy could also run on the idea of p2p or giving away what one can easily produce. A current example in my life is that I have various fruit trees that produce more than I can eat. Neighbors and friends are always happy for some of that fruit…