Economies based on metal tokens became more systematically unjust when issuing them became a state monopoly. Printing a banknote with a very large face value costs very little. The organization that prints it is enriched by the difference between its symbolic face value and its production cost. This organization then spends that difference into circulation in whatever ways it wants to. Ostensibly, this is always for the good of the people; essential for running the state... Initially, when the printing starts, newly created money often does serve to create internal order, pay for external conquests, organize public services, subsidize technical progress and much else that is beneficial for the community (#3.2).

That economy gangrenes as the effects of the injustice spread through it. Newly created money pays for the tax legislation and collection machinery to pump already created money back out of the economy into the coffers of government. The rich and powerful become hostages of their protection and espionage services - hence racketted themselves. Civil servants live off taxes - hence use their powers to raise taxes so as to earn more and increase their job security. Bureaucracies expand, become corruptible and useless (#3.3). Social cohesion is exhausted, society crumbles in civil war, fragments into provinces or is conquered externally by societies that are not as rotted by the lie that money has intrinsic value. This rise and fall of civilizations has been going on since state money was invented.

It thus seems important to ask if it is not possible to have the best of both worlds. The harmony which reigned before love gifts degenerated into money and the theoretical abundance and technical expertise that monetary civilizations created later. The answer is: 'yes'. As more accounts in an economy are balanced more continuously and completely, money's function as a bearer of value fades away (#4). What remains, is an economy that has prices but no money as pseudo-substance with pseudo-value which one can lend with, or without, interest, hide under one's mattress or invest in companies (#4.2). Such an Immediate Economy is a renewal of the customary order based on freely concluded agreements. Its unit measure of value is defined in terms of the prices all goods, rights or services for sale in the economy and prices are expressed in terms of that unit. The meaning of a word is similarly defined in the contexts in which it is used, and the meanings of sentences, chapters, books implied by the words they contain.