Big Money - Little Money

Dollars and Coins:

For all I write about money on this blog my ideas of money are based on an old idea of money.  At least my oldest ideas that were formed early.

First I learned about coins as a child.  Then what they could do.  Then I learned about dollar bills and what they could do.  It was a case of all I ever needed to know about money I learned in kindergarten.  That was enough for me and worked until a few years ago.  Then I learned about debt money, the Fed and realized money was not really what I thought it was.  It was far more complicated than that. 

I admire the complexity of things.  Cars, TV's, the internet.  Designed and produced by extremely intelligent people and sold to us serve our needs.  I like to examine them in a reverse engineering fashion.  Get down to the fundamental building blocks.  I get down to the fundamental building block of money in the current system and it really seems to be something that is owed to somebody else.  The best name for it is "debt money" operating in a fractional reserve banking system.  My conceptual hands really can't grasp that concept as a real thing even in a conceptual world.  It eludes me.  The idea must have been created by somebody smarter than me. 

Somebody smarter than me?  Who?  The answer to who is in the history of money.  People created the system.  When a subset of people called bankers created fractional reserve lending they created the system we have today.  It has served us by serving them.  Seems like it serves them much better.

My concept of real money is dollar bills and coins  A serialized dollar bill with a denomination amount in the corner.  Written on that bill is "United States of America"  and "In God We Trust".   Recently I realized that it is printed by the government but owned by a bank in New York that is no more federal than Federal Express.  It is just a business, doing business in money for their benefit but supposedly running the money system by manipulating interest rates to maintain the money supply for out benefit. 

To add insult to my injured sense of understanding money, I learned that what I think of as real money that at least has some substance in my mind because I can hold it in my hand is only a small fraction like 2 or 3, maybe 5 percent of all the money and half of that is probably circulating overseas!  The rest is debt money created out of thin air by the banks then loaned to somebody, including the US Government.

You mean we do not even own our own money supply?  No, we don't.  We should.  We must.  Money is a private system now.  It must become a public system.  In addition to who owns the system, the concept of what money is needs to change to facilitate what it does.  Concepts of what it does or can do at the private level as well as the common good level also have to be examined.  What we want it to be and what we want it to do.

Go back to basics and devise a system to serve ourselves.  Isn't that what we once did so successfully as an alternative to being a subjugated player in a system run by someone else for their benefit and enforced with an unjust power?

Dollar bills and coins.  We are in the dawning of a great information age.  Think dollar bills and coins in a computer system.  They all exist there now.  All we have to do is to give them substance as a medium of exchange to replace the fallacy of calling them debt.  That is something that is done with money.  It is not money.

Money is a Class containing all dollars denominated in unit amounts and coins.  Both dollars and coins exist as physical and virtual objects.  Dollars exist as paper notes and computer records.  Coins exist as metal tokens and computer records. 

An instance of the class Money is:

Paper Dollar:  A single uniquely serialized, denominated paper note.

Virtual Dollar:  A single uniquely serialized, denominated computer record.

Metal Coin:  A single metal token bearing an denomination amount that is an established division of a whole, single, one dollar denomination.

Virtual coin:  A single unit which is a denominated amount of a designated dollar denomination.

The break point for  physical paper dollars and metal coins is One Dollar, (with notable exceptions) mostly for physical convenience and utility.

In a virtual system of coins, factors of convenience and utility related strictly to physical factors do not exist.  Detatching them from these physical aspects of their use allows focus on improving functional benefits in a virtual monetary system.

What might be the optimal functional benefits of virtual coins in a virtual money system?

Glad you asked.

This might seem to be a strange reply but think about it: 

The solution to correct the problems with our dollar money system is to replace a private dollar debt money system with a public dollar real Sovereign Money system in accordance with the authority of the Constitution.  Private dollars become public dollars and their nature changes.

Coins are now in fact  a public Sovereign Money system of the United States of America.  The only Sovereign Money we have.  You might call us a two-bit nation.  Not funny but ironically amusing.  We have been reduced to that by the private money system.

I suggest that in a virtual system that coins, as previously defined, become the domain of private money systems.  Keep in mind the meaning of the key wording of the virtual coin system:  Its domain of operation is that of a denominated dollar amount.  In other words, money transactions below $1,000 or $100 dollars would be done with private money systems.  The only requirement is that the banker in this system have 100% dollar reserves against the virtual coins in their private system and that their coins are redeemable in dollars upon demand.  Private money virtual coin systems would be regulated by the public money system.

This suggestion would establish a free private enterprise money system applicable to the vast majority of transactions. 

The idea of reversing the domain of current private and public money systems has some interesting ramifications.  Ownership of the big and little money system reverses.  Perhaps both public and private interests would benefit.

In our daily lives we use both private (dollars) and public (coins) physical money without much user view distinction.  A combination of the two still buys a 6 pack.  In the reverse of the system a combination of the two would still buy a car.  In either case the buyer is not much concerned about the combination, only that the total amount gets them what they are paying for.