Getting back to the Bradbury Pound, though, which started this thread, there’s a couple of thoughts:
Clearly the ownership of ‘central’ banks needs to be brought back into live discussion again; and this seems to be one of those times when it happens. The basic argument being that they should be nationalised, publicly-owned institutions always, and fully under the control of properly democratic governments, which are strong enough - with popular backing - to prevent their own capture by the wunchies*; the situation as we have it now. where the private, self-elected, secretive and high-handed banking cartels control many - most? - governments.
A general multi-state movement of revolution away from this set up, towards popular democratic control of money is more likely to succeed; but it does appear possible that it can be done by individual sovereign states singly, so long as they have the power of popular support behind them; and then there can happen the contagion of a good example.
But beware! It’s precisely to prevent any such democracy that the cartels and their (rich-minority) owners will move as ruthlessly as they can to prevent it; and isolated single states are in a much dicier situation than a common front of many.
Moreover, for Britain, there’s a second problem with things like the Bradbury…
The underlying reality is that ANY fiat currency, Bradbury scrip as easily as any other, is at great risk of sliding - often with disastrous speed in Interesting Times - towards zero value; unless - as the guys in the above vid say - it’s backed by the economic power of the nation whose government issues it as sovereign, interest-free, debt-free money.
But unfortunately for us in Britain, our supposed, and often trumpeted, ‘economic strength’ is largely illusory.
In a nutshell, the current population-overshoot episode of humankind is now peaking on the whole planet and is poised to begin its automatic downslope again imminently.
But in the meantime, Britain, because of its long looting spree of its now-vanished empire, has grown - quite spontaneously - to be a place on the planet where the over-population pressure is particularly intense.
And this means that we have to have a huge ecological footprint, that extends very far beyond the bounds of these islands, just for the simplest basic sustenance of all the millions currently over-populating Britain, let alone for the luxury optional extras which we-all have come to regard as essentials for a tolerable life-style (hah!).
Once upon a time, we enforced that overseas ecological footprint by simple armed-robbery and extortion, and by the chronic subversion and cooptation - or simple outright killing if unbribable - of the native leaders of the abused and extorted periphery peoples.
And the one big stumbling-block, that’s never considered by the apostles of ‘Britain’s huge sovereign-wealth fund, if we just choose politically to unlock it it by money nationalisation’ idea, is simple;
Britain no longer has the imperial muscle to enforce incoming real-wealth flows by straight thuggery. And the successor empire to which it hitched its waggon after the Suez slap-down is also now on its last legs, and is faltering also in its power to extract cheap tribute from the world by militarily-backed economic extortion rackets (with Britain getting enough scraps from the table, of course; especially through its Washington-approved global money-laundering rackets run from the City; but what are the future prospects for those now?)
So - if Britain is to maintain any faint ghost of its current gross over-prosperity, vis a vis the majority of the world’s peoples, its only hope of doing so is to have world-beating, highly-desired goods and services to sell, which people will honour our currency - even nationalised Bradburys - in order to get.
And where are those British world-class g&s’s now? Lorst and gorn forever, in the main.
We are, in effect, living in a delusion, with no great staying power left now, that we can continue to earn an over-fat living from the world… by some unspecified means. Fiat currency, whether private or nationalised, simply isn’t going to cut it as that means; as the USD is also going to discover over the next few years for exactly the same reason: If you want something of value from a world self-liberated from imperial smash-and-grabbery then you have to have something, some g&s’s, to offer that the world wants sufficiently to treat your money as sound, and worth honouring in international trade…
Otherwise, as Dmitry Orlov puts it, the time comes when people say: ‘Sorry, your money is no good here!’
And it wouldn’t make a scrap of difference whether it was private fiat, or Bradburys.
- A word drawn from my favourite collective noun for financial people: a wunch of bankers…
