A TRUST FUND FOR EVERYONE: How to create a Monetary Commons that socialises money and funds a basic dividend without new taxes or debt [At a time Donald Trump, Big Tech and Wall Street deploy stablecoins to privatise the dollar, usurping the decentralising power of blockchain to enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense, here is an alternative use of blockchain that harnesses its decentralising powers to benefit everyone equally – to pay everyone a substantial, non-inflationary, basic dividend – without the need to tax or borrow. Read on and/or watch the video] Here is an idea that can make a real, urgently needed, difference to our awfully divided, exploitative societies. Imagine a trust fund for everyone paying a personal dividend to each. Now imagine a common, a public digital platform, let’s call it a Monetary Commons, that harnesses our collective capacity to create the money needed to fund this personal dividend for all. The idea of a personal or basic income is not new, of course. People have sung its praises for decades. But they were stifled. The majority doesn’t want to pay higher taxes, or the higher interest rates more public debt would bring, to deliver a personal payment to others, including to the already stinking rich. But what if it is now possible to pay a decent personal dividend without new taxes or new public debt. How? Not by magic or hocus pocus economics but by reclaiming from private bankers our society’s power to create money. Today, we have the digital tools to take back the power to create money, use that power to create a common trust fund, and pay each a personal dividend. These tools are here already. And if we do not use them for benefitting everyone, the bankers and Big Tech will use them to print more money for themselves. So, let’s get cracking! Let’s build a new Monetary Commons to pay a personal dividend to each! How would it work? Technically, it is ever so simple. You download an app, let’s call it Monetary Commons Pay (or MCPay). MCPay is provided by your central bank (the Fed in the US, the ECB in Europe, the Bank of England in Britain etc.). Essentially, the central bank has opened a digital account for you which you can use to receive and pay money, the way you use your normal bank account app. How is this MCPay app helpful? In three fabulous ways, which I shall present in ascending order of importance. First, because with MCPay you can send and receive money for free, avoiding the terrible, inexcusable, fees charged by private banks – even the ‘fuel fees’ of crypto. The second, even greater, benefit is that the money you keep in your MCPay grows at the central bank interest rate – which is always higher than the measly rate private banks pay for your savings. Free transactions and higher interest on your savings would be good enough reasons to have the MCPay app. But, the truly mesmerising, hugely exciting benefit is the third one: The new app makes it possible for the Central Bank to pay you, and everyone else, a substantial personal dividend. Pay attention to see where this money will come from, why it is not inflationary, why it requires no new taxes, no new debt and no magic: You have heard of how private banks create loans from thin air, right? How they can turn, on average, $3 of new deposits into a new $100 loan? [Yes, lest we forget, only 3% of the money in our advanced economies come from the central bank – the rest is conjured up by private banks.] But this works in reverse as well! If bankers turn $3 into $100, were you to transfer $3 from your normal bank to your MCPay, to take advantage of free transactions and the higher interest rate, you will have annulled your banker’s opportunity to create $100. In other words, as you transfer $3 from your bank to your new MCPay account, the total quantity of money in the economy would fall by, $100 minus $3, $97. Would this not be bad for the economy? It sure would be if nothing was done about it. But wait. Suppose the central bank were to create $97 for every $3 transferred to someone’s MCPay and credit that extra $97, equally, to everyone’s MCPay account. Bingo! Do you see now how a personal dividend was made possible without new taxes, new debt or potentially inflationary increases in the quantity of money? Now, please do not think that this a theoretical discussion. Yes, our governments, in the pockets of financiers as they are, are not interested in giving you the option of an MCPay app. But, with Donald Trump at the helm and his GENIUS Act on the statutes, they are busily handing over this incredible power to create money not to society, not to a Monetary Commons, but to Big Tech and Wall Street. How? By shunning the MCPay app that would benefit you, everyone, equally, and pushing instead for so-called stablecoins issued by privateers, mainly Big Tech and Wall Street, for their benefit. But how much money could we expect to receive as a personal dividend if we were to create a monetary commons? The answer is: a lot! The US Treasury recently predicted that around worth $6.6 trillion of US bank deposits will be transferred to stablecoins - the private version of MCPay from which you will benefit not at all. Yes, $6.6 trillion, that is more than six thousand billion dollars. If such a sum were to be transferred to the monetary commons, to our MCPay accounts, keeping the quantity of money in the US constant would require that the Fed credits $213 trillion to everyone’s MCPay accounts. That’s considerably more than $600 thousand for each woman, man and child resident in the US! And similarly in Britain, Europe, Japan etc. A sizeable trust fund for everyone. This is a remarkable opportunity for making a difference to our awfully divided societies. We must seize it. For the benefit of the many, not the few. Of course, the few – beginning with the bankers – will scream blue murder. They will do their utmost to stop this from happening. They will fearmonger like crazy, eager as they are to usurp the lion’s share of the money that society generates collectively. They will try to terrorise you with tales of calamities that will befall you if this Monetary Commons were to be created. They will prognosticate cataclysmic inflation – even though the whole point of the personal dividend is to keep the money supply constant. They will terrorise you with the prospect of new taxation and new public debt – even though they understand that there is no need for new taxes or new public debt to pay you a substantial personal dividend. To appeal to your social conscience, they will tell you that a Monetary Commons is Elon Musk’s and the libertarians’ way to dismantle social security – even though there is no reason to cut social security in any way to fund everyone’s personal dividend. They will bombard you with the spectre of Big Brother, likening the Monetary Commons to a Chinese Communist Party ploy to have the central bank follow your every transaction – even though they know that MCPay can easily be built on distributed ledger technology that guarantees privacy to each while preventing the authorities from manipulating the money supply without the public noticing. As they scream and shout and terrorise you, you will know: Bankers just hate the idea of going back to the role of intermediaries, of borrowing from Jack to lend to Jill. They are only interested in maintaining their monopoly over the money system – and to extend it now that digital money enhances society’s capacity to create even more new money, a capacity that they want to privatise when we should want to share equally. So, let us ignore the shrieks of the moneymen and let us use new tech to share better the benefits from our collective capacity to create money. Let’s make building a Monetary Commons our common goal. It won’t cure all of our deeply exploitative society’s ills. But it will go a long way to cure many and, perhaps more importantly, it will give the many a sense of their power. FOR MORE ON THE MONETARY COMMONS, VISIT monetarycommons.com @rarar @hiradsab @DiEM_25
